Ken Carroll

Most traditonal language teaching focused on grammar, tests, and structures - the forms, in other words - often to the exclusion of the way that people actually spoke the target language.  This practice remains very much the focus of language teaching in China.

The structural approach contrasts with communicative language teaching (CLT). CLT goes beyond structures to look at how language functions:  as a tool for communication in real-world situations. CLT is therefore empirical and concerned with function as well as form.

Knowing the structures alone will not afford you a natural communicative ability in a new language. You have to know how people actually speak. There are endless grammatical ways you could express even the simplest thing in English, but just because a sentence is grammatically correct, it doesn’t mean it is something that native speakers would ever say. In fact, using grammar to generate odd sentences can create odd effects.  Native speakers of English tend to draw from  set phrases and lexical chunks throughout communication. Word choice depends on your social purpose, and subtle changes in word choice can make a big difference the social meaning you convey. The subtlety works because these phrases have acquired cultural connotations that native speakers can read.

[Poor, or inappropriate word choice is actually a greater barrier to communication than grammar, and the best communicators are not necessarily those who construct the best sentences. I’ve seen this time after time at my language schools here in Shanghai.]

Another apect of the problem is using over-formalized English i.e. the type of English that is taught in schools in China.  This tends to create a social distance, even where both parties are seeking to bond. The process is unconscious, but failure to adopt the conventions of a given social group can suggest an unwillingness to enter into it. I’ve observed this in the way that Chinese speakers of English sometimes use the language, particularly at the early stages of fluency. Having studied only the structures of English (and often through a process of memorization) many of them adopt the overly formal idiom of the textbook (written by Chinese professors who may never have spoken the language). I’ve even seen people memorize phrases to use at informal social events. This strategy tends to send all sorts of formality signals and creates an atmosphere that is a block to closer contact. This phenomenon is more acute amongst men and I beleive  is the reason why bonding between Chinese and western men tends to end at the workplace. (Most of the wesntern men I know here do not to socialize much with Chinese men outside the work context.)

Ken Carroll

In this New York Times article, David Brooks describes the relationship between China’s ruling elite and its school system. The ‘phenomenal feats of memorization to learn the Chinese characters’ are symptomatic of the ends and means of Chinese education - churning out a class of like-minded wonks to run its bureaucracy. This, he says, is a process that has evloved over 1,000 years. (I would argue that it is  more like 2,000 years.)

These practices, combined with its cultural values, shape the Chinese technocratic state. Brooks continues:

The exams don’t reward all mental skills. They reward the ability to work hard and memorize things. Your adolescence is oriented around those exams — the cram seminars, the hours of preparation.

 This description is accurate. (If anything, he understates it.) It is not uncommon for 3rd graders to work late into the night on homework assignments. Parents and teachers push kids relentlessly, particularly in math and in memorizing information, up to and including  the university level. I actually doubt that parents generally think in terms of the Communist Party as the goal for their kids, but there are after all 50 million members in the CPC and it is a real career possibility. No parent would balk at the opportunity to see their kids in a position of power there.

You don’t get very far in the Communist Party without a PhD these days. This affords the universities, the political recruiting grounds, a level of influence unlike in other countries. The payoff is that the Party has demonstrated an incredible level of efficiency in going about its tasks. It can claim, with some plausibility, to have helped hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in recent years, despite (or is that because of) the widescale corruption within its ranks. In this snese the bureaucracy works.

Nonetheless, the educational system is stunted, and profoundly irrelevant to the needs of the vast majority of its students.  It evaluates talent and ability in an absurdly narrow, stultifying way. If memorization is the most highly prized ability, then creativity, innovativeness, and other things are necessarily suppressed, a potentially huge problem for China’s competitiveness in the post industrial era. But perhaps even wsorse is the fact that, most Chinese children have a nightmarish time in the system. They leave it, for the most part, with few practical or intellectual skills to equip them for the realities of the 21st century.

As Brooks observes: 

 Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.

 Again, he understates the scale of the problem, if anything.

I understand that the article is reductionistic - describe anyone’s life in this way and it will sound kafkaesque. But the problems of Chinese education are real and Brooks has put them into context in a compelling way. From where I sit Chinese education looks pretty stunted.

Ken Carroll