Pimmsler's work on language learning is popular.  The Internet come-on is the by-line of learning a new language in ten days without a book or CDs, though I suspect, the winsome smile of the lady promoting the website probably got our attention; I clicked more than once!  I was only methodologically curious, of course, only to find out what I already knew in my more than 30-years of pedagogy; one relies on the way students naturally learned their native tongue as a child: listen and repeat.

 

In the three years I taught oral English to students at the Shenyang Aerospace U and tutor children at the Shou Wang weekend school, two of the only Chinese words I used were ting (listen) and chungfu (repeat).

 

I used the classic character ting, not the simplified one currently used to denote paying attention with one's ears.  The earlier version began with a radical that set the meaning of the word.  In this case, there were three major groups of strokes.  The first one on the left was the "ear" with an emphasis on it being huge (open wide) written below it.  The second was the "eyes" so that listening also involved viewing and watching with intensity.  This occupied the top right quadrant.  The third written just below the "eyes" was the "heart", thoroughly engaged.  I called it the hooker.  The one word was equivalent to "active listening" in English.

 

Just this one word had enormous implication in the conduct of the classroom.   It required my students to be at full attention all the time.  Normal classes have teachers equipped with a mini-microphones and portable speakers so that ze voice was amplified throughout the room.  In lecture halls, the room was equipped with a sounds system and given the popularity of Power Point presentations, lectures were conducted with the lights dimmed save the one by the board; the front row listened in earnest while the rest of the class behind them did something else, or caught up with their z-z-z-s.

 

Thus, my class architecture was designed so there was no escape from the gaze of the neighbor.  Class numbers varied in size from 30 to 60 students.  When it was over 30, they had two sessions per week so I split them into two, no more than 30 per, each attending a session and skipping the other.  I assigned them seats, my way of learning to identify each person by their birth names rather than the "English" ones they chose or acquired in other English classes, usually for the convenience of the foreign teacher.

 

Not only did assigned seats break roommates who tended to stick together (there are four in a room in the dorm) but it also broadened student's circle of co-learners.  I had them work in small groups with people they did not normally associate with.  It also worked to their advantage since they were assigned work outside the class, each one encouraged to teach two as learning is best accomplished when one taught what one learned, in this case, learning how to learn.

 

Seating arrangements silenced the loquacious, and engaged the shy, in two rows of semi-circles if the class numbered 30.  Smaller groups were in tight but cozy one row around the room.

 

On the center of the room was a table covered with a kerchief (mine was a simple black and white ala Palestinian head gear) with a hankie centerpiece laden with a broken cup and spilled uncooked rice, local stones from the schoolyard and one or two gems from my collection.  I walked around the center table so there was no defined front of the room.  When someone was called to speak, ze spoke to the whole class, and discovered "public" voice.

 

And talked, they did, though not at first.  They had to overcome "face" so they were asked to leave their "faces" outside the door of the room.  This was hard for many trained to be backbench warmers.  They were in a speaking class and if they had to worry about "face", they would not open their mouths.  Read and write, they did not hesitate, but speaking from experience, of personal feelings, thoughts and deeds was "private", not in the normal comfort zone.

 

They listened to the teacher, their classmates, and to one's self.  It was on the last that we asked them to speak, first, to repeat what they heard so that they can hear their voice, and get comfortable with their own sound in English.  We get them to repeat familiar ads and public signage, but mostly, sang along popular English songs.  Then I got them to talk about themselves by identifying parts of their bodies that included words they were not too familiar with like forehead, cheeks, chin, chest, hip, thigh, calf, shin, etc.  I designed varied games to do this and they had fun learning.

 

Listen and repeat begin the learning of languages.  In class, I described what I saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched over the weekend, and asked the class to do the same individually in their assigned groups.  There were no right or wrong answers.  There was only the courage to speak. 

 

Everyone worked doubly hard on the courage!