unclemartin

As of late, I discovered one phenomenon when it comes to the use of spoken English in China.  Well, this is certainly nothing new or exciting.  However, it is just becoming more and more pressing as more people can now handle simple conversation already.  It is in the light of this that a better training method has to be introduced that I would like to talk about this here.

At English corners and from interaction with my own students or occasional chatters, I can safely conclude that there is a big shift in oral English requirements.  Let's leave behind those who are still struggling or stammering.  There are more and more English learners or users who can speak easily on simple things.  In short, they are not scared or ashamed to open their mouth and say something in English.  They can conduct a simple conversation rather effortlessly.

However, these people begin to feel the pain that they can't go deeper into a conversation.  They cannot express their feelings and emotions.  They can't easily talk about politics, science, philosophy, religion etc.  As a trainer, how can we help these learners?

Well, I have written a lot about how to make ourselves great English users from my experience as an advanced English user for 44 years and from my own observation and training.  Sometimes, I find it really boring myself having to repeat the same thing again and again.  I don't know about you if you are bored as well reading my blah blah blah again and again.  People like to read Chinese writings discussing how to learn English as if that act alone is studying English.  They never get started.

I am addressing English learners who have reached intermediate level or even higher.  So these people must have the ability to read the simple English I am using and if they can understand my writing, there is no reason why they can't start writing something.  I know you folks may not agree with me that writing is a pre-requisite to speaking.  I understand that the actual speaking is another skill or art in itself.  However, writing gives you the opportunity to sort out the English quietly in your mind first when no one is waiting there for an immediate response from you (in a conversation).  Use your imagination.  Create a dialogue as if you are talking to someone.  Write down the dialogue of both parties on a piece of paper.  If you are lazy, record it with your MP3.  Unless you are living in an entirely English environment, you have no choice but to drill yourself on paper or by recording.  In an entirely English environment, you just have to go out and talk to people.  By and by, you will pick up what you need to make yourself a great talker also, unless you are really dumb.

In view of this new development and strong demand on this kind of training, I decided to focus on this area.  I am going to prepare dialogues to show our English speakers to talk with subtlety.  Tonight at eight, I will talk to four students again.  The focus will be on creating such dialogues.  I will show you how to do it.  As there are 4 students in each training session, you have to book in advance.  If you miss the 8pm session, you can talk to me directly in the OP (Kou Yu Tong).  I will consider setting up one more session from 10pm to 11:30pm.  Certainly, you can book ahead as this will be a daily training session.  Well, I look forward to talking to you soon.

A note to those who join me in the English corner session.  We will chat in voice using Skype for its good conference call feature and sound quality.  However, the font size of text messages of Skype is small for my aging eyes.  I would request that you join my QQ 86139933 at the same time.  Then I will put you under one group under QQ to make use of the text messaging feature there as there in QQ the font size can be increased for easy reading.


Note:-
The following 3 paragraphs are for those who do not know much about my background.  If you already know me well, you can skip these.

Those who have a better understanding of my background know that I was dragged into the English language education business just out of curiosity.  After I quit my first career as an international business executive, I joined a language center back in Hong Kong and I was then heavily involved with the interviewing of foreign teachers by international calls placed to the five major English speaking countries like England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and North America.   These teachers were then placed with training centers, schools and universities all over China.

Before that point in time, I never bothered about what was going on in China as my career took me to a lot of countries other than China.  I began to wonder how the Chinese in mainland China were learning and using English then.  A friend then told me that there were English corners running regularly in Shenzhen City.  Some English corners are run in the weekday evenings.  In the main, these are run on the weekend when people are free to attend.  I went up with my friend to Shenzhen City from Hong Kong on a Wednesday late afternoon and also on Saturday evening to stay overnight to await the English corner which runs on Sunday.  Since then, I have met a lot of English learners and users from all parts of China as Shenzhen City is a melting pot of young college graduates from other provinces who flock into this young and energetic city for opportunities.

I really have no idea what it was like before 2003 before I became interested in the English language education in mainland China.  However, I found out that there were a lot of poorly written or compiled and cheaply printed books.  The voice tapes were dubbed by Chinese rather than native English speakers.  Errors could be picked up easily throughout the book.  There were errors of commission and typographical errors.  The Chinese spoke English with very ugly and inaccurate English sounds.  Yet China is really a dynamic place with rapid changes.  After a few years, this unwanted phenomenon was gone.  These days, all MP3 files are dubbed by westerns who speak native English.  Occasionally, you will find some recordings done by Europeans with funny European accent.  The printing of books are excellent.  The number of publications available has increased so much that one has a hard time deciding what to get at the bookshop.  In a country where law enforcement is not always exercised, you will find a goldmine of free English learning resources uploaded to hundreds of websites.  If you are smart and skilled in internet surfing, you don't spend a cent to get all you need to make you a great English speaker.  There are simply more than you can take.  In reality, you should just focus on one or two learning material if you are a beginner for your own benefit.

[ 本帖最后由 unclemartin 于 2009-10-19 11:51 编辑 ]

administrator

welcome to join unclemartin'English corner .
you will find what a good teacher he is .

caitlin0325

he is great ~~

xiaoyuyu

yes

martinpeng

Uncle Martin, I really dig the way you write.
From now on, I'll get in to the habit of writing everyday, put all things around me and all the thoughts in my mind in English, be it trivial or cosmic, emotional or logical. To make English really my own language, associate it closely to my real life, is exactly what it takes to develop an English thinking.
This is my new year resolution, and I will post most of my writing to your space.

administrator

martinpeng,可以把你的文章写在我们的原创板块哦，说不定老师会给建议呦！

unclemartin

Hi Administrator,

I think Martin Peng deserves a dedicated forum of his own.  I strongly recommend that you set it up for him even before I have a chance to talk to him about this.  He may not have read your message at the time of my writing.

Honestly, this younger Martin is stronger than me when it comes to writing.  I can see his ability to introduce some vocab which fit neatly into the writing.   I personally do not dig too much into vocab because I am so used to putting words together for the purpose of showing to English users here that you don't need much vocab if you can pin together sentences that make sense.  In other words, younger Martin can churn out more tasteful and colorful writings than me due to the additional vocab.

Please set this up so we have two Martin's blogging to encourage our English learners to wake up to the fact that if they try hard and smart enough, they too can freely express themselves in English even though we are not native speakers.  The most important thing is that we can speak out our mind smoothly in readily understood English.  As I have told you folks before, you can never be native.  We are aiming at NATURAL English which is clear of Chinese way of thinking.  That will make us understood by non-Chinese English speakers easily.

administrator

他写的东西是真的很棒哦，专版这块聚集的主要是网站教师。
我们的原创版块在上面，其实更好。只要加标签就能聚集到一起。
真的期待martinpeng的文章。

martinpeng

Dear Uncle Martin,
You know, I have spent the best and most of my work-time doing written translation, an occupation which requires little, if any, creativity, originality or independent thinking. During translation, we have time to look up words in dictionary, to google, to rack our nerves for best suitable words, and revise for sequence and sentence structure, etc. This is justifiable with translation. So long as it turns out reasonably smooth and clear, nobody would bother to know how you did it. Writing is a different story. First it comes from your own thinking, there is no such thing as original text to resort to. Second, keeping on googling and revising spoils the fun and affect the final result because our mind should work as a flow to work properly and efficiently which is critical to make the writing natural and unaffeted. I've always believed that we translators should first learn to be good writer in the target language before take translation as an occupation. Now I hvae put the cart before the horse. What a shame!  Better later than never. I will make up for it and try to be good writer and to deserve the compliment of uncle Martin someday in the future.

unclemartin

It is a well known fact that some great translators did not start off as translators, but they ended up as translators by accident.

The have a  good understanding of a certain subject area and like what Younger Martin has said above, they are accomplished English users first.  That explains why they can do a better job than the average professional translator.

In China, there are simply too many so called trained or certified translators.  They are actually doing a lousy job due to their far from perfect English.

xiaokaikai

i offen read unclemartin's articel
but i seldom write back
sometimes i don't know how to express myself,qq47]

martinpeng

A piece of translation work I did this afternoon.
Auditing and polishing seem to be sorely needed.

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xiaokaikai

martinpeng翻译的东西好专业啊。

martinpeng

It's about a specialized field. we translators often do this kind of stuff. actually it's no fun at all, or has much less fun than speaking or writing out our own mind. but this is how we can earn a living with this small amount of knowledge in Engilsh. translation as an occupation is standing in my way toward better English, for the bad habit I have developed from years of work, focusing on the dead cold words rather than the person behind.
I am trying to make my writing more natural as if it is a irreversible talking, by typing very fast, without worrying about too much details as is needed in translation. I am trying to train myself by changing my habit and shifting the focus.

zhuzhu521

Nowadays,most of chinese young guys know a little about english
when it comes to  specialized field, good translators are needed