A Modern Chinese Intellectual: An Interview with Wang Haixiao

by Lee Gek Ling

National University of Singapore (Singapore)

 

“If you want many hits, you have to have tricks.”

 

I had to meet Professor Wang the minute I read his biographical detail in the CELC SymposiumProgramme. He is currently Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Applied Foreign Language Studies, Nanjing University.  He is also in charge of the committee that advises the Ministry of Education in China on the teaching methods for foreign languages. He has been influential in the changing how English is taught in China and has published widely in syllabus design for college English.

I had a vested interest in meeting him having just completed with my colleague, Dara Richard, an 18-month intensive English pre-matriculation course for over 170 students from China on a Singapore government scholarship. Motivation was occasionally “challenging” – a catchword of our students and one we came to echo. “Challenging” means that it was a challenge for the students to be consistently motivated and it was a challenge for us to keep them motivated. I wanted to ask Professor Wang how he studied English, what motivated him to master the language and what advice might we follow in order to inspire our students to follow suit.

 

“A little pocket dictionary in junior middle school”

It was the gift of a school teacher and in its time, it was rare and therefore treasured, perhaps more so than the ubiquitous electronic dictionaries our students all seem to have these days. This was in the 1970s and English language material was hard to come by, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Since he did not have access to a wide range of exciting English texts, Professor Wang used the dictionary to actively engage with his school English reader, making sure he knew the meaning and use of the target words.

 

“Rote learning has been used for thousands of years and it still has a role”

He then memorized each reading passage from the reader and in so doing absorbed the syntax and grammar of English as though by osmosis. He also managed to memorize a broadsheet newspaper’s worth of poetry in one day. Modern theorists may deride the use of rote learning, but Professor Wang points out that it has had its uses for thousands of years and that it seems to suit the Chinese style of learning.

 

“Hook them in with something that really motivates them” 

Other methodologies that could work for Chinese learners of English include competitive group work. This seeming oxymoron is not simply pitting one group of students against another, but also making each group member solely responsible for the marks of the group. Hence, an oral presentation assignment may be divided into multiple solo presentations.

However, each individual’s work adds to the total points of the group. This would motivate the group members to help the presenter by sharing the ground work of the presentation, e.g. preparing the content, and in rehearsing delivery because they would all have a vested interest in ensuring a presentation worthy of the group as a whole.

We also discussed Angel Lins notion of using pop culture to hook students into the ELT classroom and how competitive group work could go online. What if all the presentations of each group were recorded and posted online? Professor Wang talked of how people nowadays tend to want their 15 minutes of fame, saying that he himself was no exception, hence his blog. Indeed he confessed to having ‘tricked” his readers into opening a gallery of flower photographs by naming the album “bei da xiao hua (duo tu)” – Peking University Flowers (many pictures). The title is a pun and also means Peking University Beauties (many pictures). He thinks the students may also welcome uploading their work and that English language teachers could push the competitive edge a bit further by basing the marks partly on the number of hits an uploaded video received as well as comments or evaluations of online classmates. However, in order to prevent a posting from winning by popularity alone, he felt that the popular vote should only be one component of the marks and the major component would still be the teacher’s evaluation. Students would have to wait for their final mark. Intuitively, it seems to me to be no bad thing as the wait teaches them about real life and how gratification is not usually instantaneous.

O -> O+1 = achievement = success?

We moved on to Stephen Krashen’s idea of measureable input and how it multiplied by a factor of one each time, which is input equals I and it would increase by +1 each time. Progress is therefore gradual rather than exponential. Professor Wang suggested that output (O) should also be measured gradually. Thus, students should be given a graduated set of tasks so they can track their progress.  In vocabulary building, for example, instead of giving the students an ambitious class reader and hoping they would pick up some of Coxhead’s academic word list by mere reading, an online vocabulary learning tool kit could be designed so that students could have a better idea of what to learn and see easily how much had been learned. This toolkit could accompany a class reader or a course syllabus. Therefore, an

English language teacher of Chinese students has to have some tricks to get a lot of ‘hits,” whether these hits are Internet hits or a hit idea or learning method for the students. Measureable progress leads to measurable achievement and that in turn translates as measureable success.

Conclusion

I will boldly coin a slogan for the likes of Professor Wang – here is someone who “looks outwards in order to apply within,” meaning that he has used his wide reading of English literature in his youth and of ELT theory in his professional career to apply the salient points to the English language learning situation in his country.

If you have ever wondered what the modern Chinese scholar looks like, have a close look at Professor Wang Haixiao. He is as modest and humble, learned and erudite as any traditional scholar of popular Chinese or Western literature. Yet, he is also urbane and widely read in English classics. Here is an example of the epitome of the new Chinese intellectual, someone who has learned English perfectly in China and who can change his accent to suit either

England or America, but whose heart is for China and who uses his deep knowledge of SLA to remodel the Chinese college syllabus. His influence will be far reaching in the coming years as China moves indubitably towards being the world’s largest population of EFL speakers.

 

About the Author

Lee Gek Ling teaches at the Centre for English Language Communication. She has been associated with the intensive English pre-matriculation program for Chinese students since its inception in 1991. She has been materials coordinator and is currently the administrative coordinator for January 2011 intake.

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