20100905 Cram schools are bad for English

Cram schools are bad for English

By Jeremy Hammond
Sunday, Sep 05, 2010, Page 8

There are many problems with private English cram schools, insofar as the quality of education they offer is concerned. Among others, the fact is that many, if not most, teach their students to speak poor English. There are numerous ways in which this can occur, but there is one in particular that warrants special examination, and that is the common school policy of enforcing a “no Chinese” rule.

The conventional wisdom on this policy is that by not allowing kids from speaking Chinese, they will use English more, and if they use it more, their language ability will therefore improve. This logic is flawed because it assumes that students will improve their English by being forced to use what little vocabulary they have to create phrases or sentences. In practice, what this policy does is reinforce bad habits.

Kids are smart. So when you tell them to speak only English, they will use their limited vocabulary and apply those words to the language framework that is already firmly embedded in their minds — Chinese.

Thus, one hears kids making sentences like, “This is what,” “Here have a book” or “I don’t have go.”

In their ingenuity, they have used English words to speak Chinese (not to be confused with speaking English). And what else could they be expected to do?

By forcing kids to speak before they have established a foundational framework from which to properly invent their own phrases and sentences, constructions like these are repeated and reinforced, so that the “Chinglish” itself becomes the structural basis for their understanding of English.

Once such bad habits are developed — which happens very quickly and easily — it is extremely difficult to get students to “unlearn” what is firmly implanted in their brains. To compound the problem, teachers then waste valuable classroom time trying to fix the problems the school itself created in the first place — which often proves to be a futile task.

The way to avoid this problem is to provide students with a proper framework well before they are ever expected to invent their own conversational English.

This is not to say kids should be discouraged from using English. However, the distinction must be made between the expectation that students use specific sentence patterns they are taught in the classroom and the expectation that students create their own sentences in conversation.

The former expectation is reasonable and can reinforce good speaking habits; the latter is illogical and only reinforces bad English.

Students must first have a great many hours of active listening before they should be expected to speak in a creative capacity.

This should make sense if one thinks about how people learn their own mother tongue. Children learn to speak their native language at a very early age not because they are taught phonics and grammar, but because they are constantly exposed to it and figure it out on their own, for the most part, through contextual clues. This is the basic concept behind the principle of language immersion.

By the time children whose first word is “ball” actually manage to utter the word, they must have heard the word numerous times. Moreover, they must have heard the word in a meaningful context to have figured out the meaning on their own. They must have seen that round thing and heard that sound together enough times to be able to deduce that the sound is the name for the thing.

By such means, children build their vocabulary. Similarly, they do not start speaking in sentences because they have magically guessed how to correctly put words together using proper grammar, but because they have repeatedly heard those patterns used before in various contexts.

The only creating a child is doing at this stage is in swapping various vocabulary words to use that pattern in different contexts. Not until the child has firmly established a proper framework can the process of inventing original sentences truly begin.

In the classroom, it is better to allow students to answer properly in Chinese than to force them to answer improperly in English. At this point, what is important is that they heard the question in English, understood it and are able and willing to answer it.

Discarding the “no Chinese” rule — or at least scaling it back to a loose guideline applicable to only certain situations — would not only help prevent the formation of bad habits, but would also prevent students from becoming unnecessarily frustrated and discouraged.

The other reason some schools enforce this rule is that many foreign teachers themselves do not have enough knowledge of Chinese to be able to do their jobs effectively if the children speak in their own native tongue. However, this obstacle is probably not as difficult to overcome as it may seem.

First, it is often easy to comprehend what a child is trying to tell you even if you do not understand the words coming out of his/her mouth (teachers deduce meaning based on nonverbal and contextual clues just as their students do).

Second, teachers would, as a direct result, rapidly acquire enough language ability to be able to understand their students (which is to say that the teachers would also need to be students).

Third, in cases where a student’s English is not good enough and a teacher’s Chinese is not good enough for the two to effectively communicate, schools already have Taiwanese teachers or assistants available to help out — and teachers would probably discover that instances where they deem it necessary to employ translation help would be relatively few.

Jeremy Hammond is a journalist and editor of Foreign­PolicyJournal.com and has taught English as a second language in Taipei for nine years.