The Oral English class that I taught began as a little bit of an experiment on the part of my supervisor and the honors college. Most class sizes in China are somewhere between 30 and 40 students. This seems to work out okay as most of the courses are lecture based. However, having 40 students (or in the case of one class, 45 students) in an Oral Speaking course is a bad idea. If you have taken a language course in college, you might recall that your class sizes were usually between 15-20 students. This is done on purpose, to ensure that all students have plenty of time and opportunity to practice speaking their foreign language and to have the help and attention of the teacher.
My supervisor, who had been teaching pre-service teachers in the States for the last 20 years decided to do something new with the students in the honors college. She asked both myself and another foreign teacher to split the class into thirds, so our class size would be groups of about 12 each, which is much more reasonable for a speaking class than groups of 40. We would have the same group for 5 weeks and then we would rotate and teach the same 5 week lesson to the new group.
This sounds really good in theory, of course, but was a little difficult our first semester, in terms of practice. Part of this is because we did not have a lot of direction and partly (due to various reasons) the three of us were unable to meet with each other to really discuss the course in depth. As a result, each of us went our own direction, which made the final assessment somewhat chaotic. One teacher stuck to the text book, which included a series of videos concerning the life one college aged girl and her experiences and speaking activities revolving around her life. I took the themes from this text book and worked with the creation of skits using vocabulary and concepts associated with the text book. The third teacher decided to toss the text and do debates. I can't even begin to imagine being a student in this course; I am sure it was chaotic.
Left pretty much to my own devices, I decided to choose a different theme each week. (I would learn with practice that a new theme each week, when we only had about 80 minutes together each week, was too much, and dropped it to 3 themes in the five week period). Our first theme was "Going on a First Date." So I spent the weekend reading through the textbook, researching like a mad-woman on the internet about teaching Oral English as a foreign language and researching about skits. And I came up with a first lesson plan and walked into my first solo-class as prepared as I knew how to be. So I explained to them what a skit was (but at this time, did not model it-I was new and didn't know any better!) and what I expected from them for each performance. That the skit must be 3 minutes long, that each person must speak and the speaking must be equitable, and that the skit must be pertinent to the theme discussed that week in class. This was met with the same varied reactions you would imagine in any classroom around the world; some were excited, most were accepting of the inevitable, and some were obviously terrified.
I began to discuss our theme and, utilizing my recent degrees in education, decided to activate their prior knowledge, by asking them who had been on a first date. As college students, I was expecting that at least a few of them had not only been on a date, but would be willing to share some details of their experience. Well, at that time I had been in China for all of 3 weeks and I had a lot to learn about Chinese culture. This was one of my early lessons: Chinese teens (at least the teens that wind up in universities) do NOT date. And if they did, they do not ever admit it. So there I was, standing in front of a group of students, watching my carefully planned lesson on First Dates unravel. But I rallied, and ask them if they had ever watched a movie or tv show where people went on dates, to which most of them said yes. Phew, back on track.
So I asked them some questions and we brainstormed: Where to go on dates, what we might be feeling on a date, and what we might do to get ready for a date. I then had prepared a short clip of a first date using a clip of That 70's Show when Donna and Eric finally go on a date. I explained a few dating vocabulary terms and I then broke them into groups. I explained that they had the remainder of class (about 30 minutes) to come up with a 3 minute skit featuring a first date. I explained that it could be serious or humorous, it must simply be on First Dates and cover the themes we discussed in class. I told them that they could use this time to brainstorm ideas (just like we did together) within their groups, to write down dialogue, get my help with said dialogue, and then begin practicing. They would perform at the beginning of our next class.
Their performances for our next class were surprisingly creative in terms of concept, and largely humorous, both intentionally and unintentionally. But what I realized from most of them, was that while their pronunciation was fine, many of them lacked intonation, inflection, and any connection to what they were saying to what they were doing with their bodies; they had absolutely no body language. And so my next mission became researching ways to improve those three areas of weakness. But first I had to figure out how.
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