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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 11. 1963.

Kiwi Teaches English In Peking

page 5

Kiwi Teaches English In Peking

The Peking Institute of Foreign Languages is just one of the many higher educational institutions that teach foreign languages in Peking, and the other great cities of China. Like others it engages in research as well as teaching and prints its own textbooks. All the students and most of the teachers live in, so the Institute is quite a large self-contained community set among the tree-lined commune fields and roads of a Peking suburb.

IT has its own orchards, and piggeries, its fields of wheat and vegetables surrounding the playing-fields, and the three-or four-storeyed blocks of classrooms, and residential buildings, library, dining rooms, clinic, barber's shop, baths, boiler rooms, and repair shops. On the road that runs between the East and West Compounds is the co-operative store that serves the rest of the local community as well as the Institute, and the centre of Peking is only threequarters of an hour away by bus—less by car.

The Institute is only as old as new China. Its library of half a million books looked impressive to me, but cannot compare, as one of he students put it, with the big library of old old-established Peking University. Nevertheless, in fourteen years, the Institute has grown till it now takes several thousand students studying a score of different languages. The English Department is the biggest, with more than a quarter of the total students and a teaching staff to match—one teacher to every ten students. The teachers include Chinese graduates and postgraduate scholars from Peking and Tsing Hua as well as many famous overseas universities (Oxford, London, Columbia, Berkeley, Chicago . . .): half a dozen English-speaking foreigners; and already many young graduates of the Institute itself.

The students at the Institute have all finished "middle" or secondary school and so, since primary schooling starts at 7, those whom I teach in their fourth year are in their early twenties. But most of them have not studied English before coming to the Institute, for China's network of secondary schools is still very new, and foreign languages are only beginning to be widely taught.

While the Chinese students concentrate mainly on their chosen language, they also study three or four other subjects; modern history, theory of language. Chinese and English literature, and from the fourth year (in most cases), a second foreign language. So on some days, like our pupils, they have only one English class. But they do a great deal of independent study, and reading like University students. Their reading covers 20th century authors particularly, but their literature courses include lectures in English by a Chinese Oxford scholar, the Dean of the Department, on earlier writers, such as Bacon, Shakespeare. Milton, Johnson, Swift, Pope, Addison, Sheridan, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake, Burns, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde. Simplified texts of great 19th century novelists are read in the earlier grades. The senior grades have background lectures in English on aspects of American and British history, and are beginning to have lectures also on great European writers, especially those who influenced, or were influenced by English literature.

Ruth Lake is a graduate (in Modern Languages of Auckland University. She has had a career in the External Affairs Department, including posts in Europe and the Soviet Union. She had also been a teacher of languages in Wellington, and at present teaches English at Peking Foreign Languages Institute.

Her brother-in-law is the Minister of Finance.

To teach foreign languages. China must first train teachers! And that requires time, for before 1949, (the year of "the liberation." as they call it here) more than 90% of the population had never been to school; less than 5% had secondary or University education. General elementary schooling was introduced in 1953, and by 1958 90% of the children were at primary schools; now the secondary school network is growing rapidly, and expanding its teaching of foreign languages, so that in a few years the Institute expects to be enrolling students who have already had five or six years' grounding in English. But at present, although the Institute is of University standard, the students' experience of English may compare in some ways with our secondary school students.

The English course covers five years of study. Classes are held six days a week, and the school year has two terms only—from September to mid-January, and from February to mid-July, with half-term tests and end-of-term examinations. I find it interesting to compare their examinations with ours, and with our French orals. For at the Institute emphasis is placed on the living, spoken language and students are encouraged, from the very beginning, to practise reading, and reciting aloud, and talking English to each other. They use tape-recorders widely, to improve pronunciation in the early grades and listening comprehension in the later grades; the tape-recorder section has scores of machines (with a permanent staff of technicians to keep them in constant use!) and the students can have them issued with tapes like library books.

To a New Zealander, it is surprising to hear so much standard English in what we think of as rather BBC or Oxford accents— and to hear it in the most unexpected places! In the corridors and on the stairways trousered Chinese girls and boys turn their faces to the wall, and declaim, with deep concentration, and no self-consciousness at all, the texts they will study in their next classes.

It is no wonder, then, that at the end of their fourth year they take quite a stiff oral examination conducted entirely in English. First they have half an hour to study a couple of pages (say, 1000 words) of unseen text on which they must then, without further reference to it, answer half a dozen searching comprehension questions. Next they answer approximately the same number of questions on material they have studied in their oral course. Then they are presented with a "situation" in which they must carry on a conversation with the examiner: perhaps he is sick, and they must persuade him to see a doctor, perhaps he wishes to have some aspect of Chinese life or history explained to him, perhaps he wishes to visit one of the famous old markets or a commune.

A Winter's Day near the Ming tombs. Ruth Lake enjoys the sun but feels the cold.

A Winter's Day near the Ming tombs. Ruth Lake enjoys the sun but feels the cold.

Finally, they must discuss with him their own views and opinions on books they have read or subjects they nave studied; this section is designed to give them plenty of scope for free expression. Only in the junior grades do they read a passage aloud, as in our French orals, and they do not have dictation.

About once a week throughout the term the students have a film or talk in English, and they also put on their own plays, and English Evenings towards the end of term. The Fifth Grade students produced The Importance of Being Earnest, last term, and School for Scandal this term; and these were followed by a full-scale performance of Othello by the young teaching staff, which will be repeated at the Shakespeare Festival next April (when other institutes will also put on their productions to commemorate the 400th Anniversary of his birth).

The English Evenings presented by each grade included all kinds of items, from Heartbreak House scenes and dramatized passages from Jane Eyre to one-act plays such as The Price of Coal (familiar to our Third Forms), and Tell it not in Gath, students' original English dramatisations of Chinese themes and English versions of Chekhov and Moliere. (The French Department's final Evening, by the way, also included scenes from L'Avare and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, as well as a whole Berthold Brecht play: L'Exception et La Regle).

So, all in all, the familiar far outweighs the strange in the teaching of English at a Chinese Institute. In fact it is the really familiar, rather than the strange, which makes me pinch myself sometimes. Even among all the other well-known songs, I little expected to hear Chinese boys and girls singing that old favourite from our end of the world, Click Go The Shears!