Interviews

Clubs greet and recruit new students upon their arrival.

One by one they squirmed.

For many I was the first American they’d met. Most were older than me. Hearts in throats, one by one they sat in the plush chair and told me their names, followed by an explanation of where they were from: Taiyuan in Shanxi province, Hefei in Anhui province.

I in turn pretended to recognize these places – equivalent to a visitor to America pretending to recognize place names like Missouri or Detroit.

As I assessed each student’s English proficiency I’d smile and nod, they’d smile and nod, and sometimes that was the gist. One woman with particularly low English skills and nervous hands mentioned that her hobby was origami. Desperate to escape our verbal awkwardness, I asked her to demonstrate. Little did I guess how difficult origami would be with quivering hands (and, considering the flapping sound of the paper in the otherwise silent room, how noisy).

Some students pointed at a wall map to indicate the distance they’d traveled for this English program – in some cases over twenty-four hours by train. They spoke different dialects, laughed at each other’s accents, and admired their classmates who were Beijing natives for the clarity of their “standard” speech. Many had left spouse and child to live for a semester in a cramped dormitory with bad heating, no air conditioning and an uncarpeted cement floor. Assigned three or four to a room, they ate dull cafeteria food and shared one phone in the dorm lobby. Such sacrifices inspired me to do my utmost to help them learn.

I didn’t enjoy putting them on the spot with a one-on-one interview, but I needed to assess their conversational fluency. They’d taken English since grade school, but converting head knowledge into practical speaking ability wasn’t automatic. Despite their nerves, a few were eager to exhibit and did well. Others, baffled by my questions, shook their heads, grinned sheepishly and said nothing. Many interchanges occurred along these lines:

“How are you?”
“Twenty-six.”

“Where do you work?”
“Yes.”

My favorite was the woman who kept repeating, “I’m sorry, I can’t stand you” (instead of understand).

I used these interviews and a multiple-choice test to split the students into three sections. Those in the lower two took their placement as a loss of face, but their responses couldn’t have differed more. The lowest approached class with a sense of humor – since their English was poorest they had nothing to lose, which contributed to a fun and healthy learning dynamic. But the middle group soured. Expecting a higher placement, they had trouble swallowing their disappointment. No one in this class owned up to having an English name (a standard practice for English learners in China), and none would accept one. Few participated actively; often they skipped homework. While the upper and lower sections warmed up quickly, this middle group seemed to want to learn to speak English by sitting quietly in their seats.

No wonder, then, that by the end of the semester most of those in the lowest section had surpassed those in the middle. With nowhere to go but up, they’d participated freely for the sheer silly joy of learning a language – consequently growing leaps and bounds.

One of my best students was Tracy, a nineteen-year-old girl who’d been hired as a secretary yet had made it through school with practically no English whatsoever. During the first weeks of our immersion class she was hopelessly lost, needing to be carried along with extra tutoring. About a month into the semester, however, I caught Tracy repeating a tricky vocab word with a clean American accent.

“There!” I said, pointing her out to the class. “Please say that again, Tracy. You see? Say it like she does.” Her language skills, derived from actual conversations, in some ways surpassed those of her book-learned classmates. By the end of the semester her vocabulary still lagged, but she passed herself off with the most natural-sounding speech of them all.

Front gate at Beijing Forestry University.

Clubs recruit new students.

Read next ->