Two articles summary

jircd (print) issn 1742–2906 jircd (online) issn 1743–1662

lhs vol 4.1 2008 67–89 ©2011, equinox publishing

doi : 10.1558/lhs.v4i1.67

Article

‘The foreign teacher is an idiot’: Symbolic interactionism, and assumptions about

language and language teaching in China Phiona Stanley

Abstract

This paper examines Western teachers’ and Chinese students’ assumptions about second language acquisition and the nature of language itself. It explores the interac- tion of outward classroom behaviours derived from these assumptions as symbols that may be misunderstood across cultures, using symbolic interactionism as a theo- retical framework. Said’s Orientalism, and its mirror image, Occidentalism, inform the intercultural (mis)communication in this context, which is a public university in Shanghai. The study found that the student participants conceptualized language as a set of discrete, quantifiable items. In this view, language is learned by acquiring more items rather than by developing discourse and other competences. Students’ beliefs are at odds with the theories of language and language learning implicit in the (weak) communicative methodology used by the Western participant teachers. However, students perceived their teachers’ classroom behaviours as indicative of their ineffectiveness rather than as indicative of differences in underpinning theo- retical models.

Keywords: theories of language, theories of language learning, oral English, Occidentalism, communicative language teaching

Affiliation

Monash University, Australia. email: [email protected]

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Introduction Much has been written about language theory and second language acquisi- tion (e.g. Ellis, 1985; 1994; 2002; Gardner, 1991; Richards and Rodgers, 2001; Tomasello, 2005; McLaughlin, 2006), and it is not my intention to add to these discussions. Instead, I am interested in what happens when Western teachers’ and Chinese students’ implicit theories in these areas differ, when this affects what they do in language classrooms, and when both sides neither realize that their expectations are different nor necessarily understand that these expec- tations might stem from different underpinning theories of language and learning. The framework I use to analyse this contact situation is symbolic interactionism. The research context is oral English teaching to non-English major students at a publicly funded university administered by Shanghai Municipality. It is considered a ‘second tier university’ as it is not administered directly by the national Ministry of Education, although it ranks in the top hundred of 1700 tertiary institutions nationally on the list compiled by the Chinese Academy of Management Science (2009). Its pseudonym here is People’s Square University (PSU). Western teachers teach oral English at PSU. This paper reports on findings from qualitative case study research (Stake, 2005) drawing upon data collected over two years (2007–2009) and three visits to Shanghai, totalling four months; its research methods and epistemo- logical tensions are described below. The teachers were Western university graduates from Australia, Belgium, Canada, the UK, and the USA, and all are qualified and/or experienced in English language teaching, with most having taught previously in Western and/or other Asian contexts. The teachers are aged 23–42, with a mean age of 29. The students are Chinese undergraduates in their early 20s; most were in their third year of study and all were from Shanghai. All participant names in this paper are pseudonyms and all quotes in this paper are taken from interviews and focus groups. As described above, the question discussed in this paper is not which theory of language or language learning is better. Instead, I will discuss inter- cultural miscommunication experienced by students and teachers whose underpinning theoretical constructions of learning and language are different from each other. This appears to result in students discursively misconstru- ing the underlying significance of the outward signifying behaviours of their teachers, and to interpret these through a framing discourse of Occidentalism. The question addressed in this paper, therefore, is ‘what do the students think about their Western teachers, and why?’ My focus in this paper is on the stu- dents’ constructions of their Western teachers, although some of the Western teachers in this study also misconstrued their students’ outward signifiers; this is a separate discussion. As oral English is, for many Chinese students, a first

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encounter with the Western Other, such miscommunications may have an impact beyond the classroom door, as they would serve to create and perpetu- ate negative stereotyping about Western Others more generally.

Locating the study Richards and Rodgers (2001: 20–22) identify three distinct theories of lan- guage; the structural, the functional, and the interpersonal. The structural view regards language as a system of elements including grammatical, lexical and phonological elements. The functional view sees language as a vehicle for communicating meanings. The third model is the interactional view, in which language is seen as a way of realizing social relations. A theory of language, then, describes what language is and what it does; it seeks to explain what language competence might entail rather than how it might be acquired. A theory of language learning, in contrast, refers to how languages are learned (Richards and Rodgers, 2001: 22–24). These theories may be process-oriented or condition oriented, with the former describing language acquisition models such as hypothesis testing and generalization or habit formation. Condition oriented theories stress surrounding factors, such as motivation or learner affect, as determiners of language acquisition. Thus theories of language and language learning underpin language classroom practices. Another key term that needs discussion is the notion of ‘Western’ teachers. The ‘West’ is an imagined place; no person carries a passport with ‘Western’ as his or her nationality. Nevertheless, the ‘West’ exists in the minds of those people in this study who refer to their ‘Western’ teachers of English or to themselves as ‘Westerners’ in China. Zheng writes:

[T]he West does not denote a geographic region but rather a field of meanings. Local and global media, such as pirated Western … DVDs, form the basis on which Chi- nese conceptions of the West are based. These raw cultural materials are refined into complex concepts. The final product is only tangentially related to the raw materials themselves. Thus, the process is better described as the creative use of foreign cultural products rather than the direct impact of Western culture on Chinese society. … In this sense, the West is ‘(re)made in China’. (Zheng, 2006: 170)

This is similar to the notion of the ‘Orient’ as an ‘experiential entity’ that exists as a figment of the Western imagination (Balagangadhara and Keppens, 2009). Clearly, places in the ‘West’ and the ‘Orient’ exist, but the West and the Orient are fictions constructed and used in identity work, often to create a coherent Other as a foil against whom to define the Self (Said, 1979; 1986; Gries, 2006; Suzuki, 2007).

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In the case of Western Orientalism, this is a hegemonic discourse in which non-Western cultures are positioned as ‘pale (or erring) imitations of the great original [Western culture]’ (Balagangadhara and Keppens, 2009: 55). This is the basis of the modernist, (post)colonial, linear model that conceives a hierarchy of cultures and positions the West as more advanced along a single (Western) path of development. This is different from a postcolonial model in which there are myriad routes to ‘development’ (Escobar, 1995). Sojourning English teachers have been framed as agents of neo-colonial- ism (e.g. Phillipson, 1992; Kelly, 2008), and their presence in Shanghai echoes the city’s semi-colonial history. However, the presence of Western teachers can nowadays be attributed more to China’s scramble to implement a mas- sive English teaching programme (Graddol, 2006) beyond the capabilities of a home-grown teaching cadre whose own English may lack communicative competence (Hu, 2005) and in which communicatively competent, pedagogi- cally skilled local English teachers may be lured away from teaching by higher salaries in other industries (Jin and Cortazzi, 2003). But a mirror-image Occidentalism also exists. This serves both as resist- ance to foreign imperialisms and as a foil against which to depict the Self; in China, foreign Others are constructed as very different from the Chinese (Cai, 2003). Occidentalism has been variously defined (Conceison, 2004: 40–67) but its central tenets are the discursive construction, and reduction, of the West by the East. This occurs in various spheres, and the examples here come from both China and Japan. In the context of Westerners being ‘Othered’ in Japanese advertising, Creighton (1995: 155) explains: ‘they are often stripped of individual identity and their own personalities, encountered and experi- enced as representative gaijin [foreigners] rather than real individuals’. Simi- larly, H. Li (2008) and Conceison (2004), respectively, examine the ways in which Westerners are caricatured in Chinese advertising and Chinese theatre. Imagined ‘Western’ qualities may thus be attributed to those displaying char- acteristics constructed as prototypically Western:

In Japan there is a rigidity of attachment of ethnicities and nationalities to physiog- nomies; in Japanese popular culture foreignness, gaijinness, Whiteness and English ability are mapped in a one-to-one correspondence. In this environment, Whiteness cannot be apprehended without, for example, the expectation of a complete lack of skill in using chopsticks; nor can the identity of those with white skin be compre- hended if they do not speak English. (Bailey, 2007: 589)

The ‘Western’ teachers in this study are ‘Western’ to the extent that their iden- tities ‘fit’ the imagined construct. Not all are White, not all are native English speakers; but all are sufficiently ‘Western’ to be considered and constructed as such. For example, Mike, a teacher quoted in this paper, is from London and his

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parents are Chinese. While he is ethnically Chinese, he is considered ‘Western’ in that he has a London accent, speaks little Chinese, associates mainly with White people, and behaves in ways constructed in China as stereotypically ‘Western’, e.g. he portrays outward self-confidence. Another, comparable, term is ‘foreign’ or ‘foreigner’; these are translations of the Chinese terms waigu- oren, and laowai. These lack the negative connotations of ‘foreigner’ but do connote Western foreigner rather than merely ‘non-Chinese’. These are all terms the participant teachers and students use to describe themselves and their teachers. Orientalism and Occidentalism are important in this study because these are frameworks of representation in which intended meanings are altered by those interpreting outward signifiers across cultures. When we communicate, we encode meaning into signs (words, images, performed behaviours, etc.) so as to represent those meanings. Signs unite two concepts: the signifier (the sign) and the signified (the intended meaning). Such signs are arbitrary, and the same sign may have different meanings in different contexts (Barthes, 1967). This has important consequences for symbolic interactionism, the the- oretical framework used in this study. Blumer (1969) proposed three premises of symbolic interactionism. First, people act towards things on the basis of the meanings that those things have for them. Second, the meanings of things are derived from social interaction. Third, those meanings are negotiated and modified through individuals’ interpretive processes as they deal with the things they encounter. This means that, for example, the expected behaviours of a ‘teacher’, which are socially constructed, may differ across contexts. Jin and Cortazzi describe teachers’ and students’ cultures of learning, defining these as:

[T]aken-for-granted frameworks of expectations, attitudes, values and beliefs about how to teach or learn successfully.… A culture of learning frames what teachers and students expect to happen in classrooms. (Jin and Cortazzi, 2006: 9)

Thus the teacher role of a ‘teacher’ in a Chinese university may not be the same as the notion of a ‘teacher’ that Western teachers bring with them to China. Western teachers whose behaviour does not ‘fit’ the role as it is constructed may be deemed sub-standard. Similarly, students whose outward behaviours do not ‘fit’ the expected role of ‘student’, as it is constructed by foreign teachers, may be poorly evaluated. Symbolic interaction, then, investigates the interpretation of meaning through social interaction. This includes the extent to which our performed behaviours correspond with the expected behaviours of our role. Central is the idea that people respond to others’ outward performances (i.e. behav- iours and other signs) according to what those signs mean to them, and not

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necessarily the intended meanings. Herein lies one source of intercultural miscommunication.

Research methods I began this project by problematizing the praxis of English language teach- ers who had been trained in communicative language teaching in Western contexts and who then found themselves working in teaching contexts where communicative methods are not widely used. I wondered whether they might experience ‘teaching shock’, akin to culture shock, and, if so, how they might respond. From this question grew a study of the roles, identities and training needs of transnational teachers in China. The present paper is part of that larger study, and it considers the causes and implications of methodological and language-theory misunderstandings between Chinese students and their Western teachers. In total, I interviewed 37 Western and Chinese teachers of English and 42 Chinese students, and I gathered and transcribed more than 200 hours of audio- and video-recorded data. The teachers cited in this paper were all ‘participants’ (as opposed to ‘informants’ who provided one-off interviews); they were the focus of my study and I charted their stories throughout two years. The students I interviewed volunteered to take part in group inter- views; they may be unrepresentative of the student body more generally but their interviews were triangulated against my own and the participants’ classroom experiences and so I am confident that the views they express in this paper are sufficiently typical of the context to be valid. However, this a qualitative study and the people I interviewed represent only themselves; this study is not a census of all Western teachers and Chinese students. My aim is to illuminate the field rather than to map the terrain, and I do not infer from sample to population. That said, when I have presented at confer- ences and research seminars my findings have often resonated strongly with Western and Chinese people familiar with comparable contexts. But this is a bounded case study (Stake, 2005) of individuals within a single university context in Shanghai. Admittedly, it is a rather large context: the foreign teachers in this study teach, between them, more than 6500 students per year, and the programme is now in its fifth year of operation. So for a large number of Chinese students the oral English programme described here is their first, and perhaps their only, contact with the foreign Other as represented by their oral English teacher. So, in itself, this is an important study. Additionally, this case study does not stand entirely alone; I have incorporated information from informants in other teaching contexts in Shanghai.

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As little is known about transnational teachers’ lives (e.g. Green, 2005), a hypothesis-testing approach would be impossible: there are few hypotheses to test. Instead, I used grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006), going into the field with the aim of constructing knowledge about what was happening in this context. Grounded theory is an inductive method in which emergent data informs the research direction. Thus, it was impossible to go into the field with pre-conceived ideas of how the research would progress. Instead, I allowed for a relatively long period in the field (four months, over three visits spread over two years) during which I could get a feel for what was going on and could cycle through my data gathering and initial analysis phases in order to inform subsequent data construction. Sampling in grounded theory is theoretical, meaning that cases are selected according to new insights that they permit. I used mixed data-gathering methods, of which Patton (2002: 248) writes:

[S]tudies that use only one method are more vulnerable to errors linked with that particular method than studies that use multiple methods in which different types of data provide cross-data validity checks.

My data collection included: audio-recorded, semi-structured individual and group interviews, video-recorded classroom observations, stimulated recall, document analysis, and participant research (i.e. working as a teacher among the participants so as to engage with their everyday experiences). I visited and revisited the research site three times over the two years, each time interviewing teachers and students and showing them their own previous data and my theorizing on it, asking them to comment further. This allowed for ‘thick’ description (Geertz, 1973), for the documenting of change over time, and the quoting of participants’ own words so as to remain truer to their own understandings. I showed teachers their own classroom videos so as to access their thinking about their rationale rather than relying on observations alone (Borg, 2003; 2006). This research process raises another question, however, of my own objectivity. Early ethnographical studies (e.g. Malinowski, 1922) assumed the neu- trality of the researcher, who was thought to be able to observe and record objectively the lives, beliefs, rituals, and practices of others. This type of ‘objec- tive’ research has since been discredited, as it has been recognized that these early ethnographies reflected as much about the writers’ own norms of life, beliefs, rituals, and practices as they did about the subjects’. I therefore do not claim objectivity. Modern ethnographic research admits to the researcher’s own cultural, social, and political positioning, and instead of pretending that a researcher can be all-seeing/all-knowing, or objective, ethnography has sought to recognize and manage the researcher’s own role in the social construction of knowledge (Bogdan and Taylor, 1998).

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Reflexivity allows researchers to manage their influence on the text (Pillow, 2003). This is necessary as two different researchers viewing the same con- struct may record it in very different ways, a product not of construct differ- ences but of the different ‘lenses’ through which they view the world (Stronach and Maclure, 1993). Additionally, interviews involve the researcher much more than simple observation. The co-construction of data allows interview partici- pants, including the interviewer, to ‘discover, uncover or generate the rules by which they are playing this particular game’ (Blaxter et al., 2001: 171). This forms part of the larger discourses through which identities are constructed and maintained (Sarup, 1996: 17). But there is a tension here. In co-creating the data, might the interviewer’s own subjectivity guide participants to repro- duce the interviewer’s intended interpretations? I have tried to mitigate this by member checking, triangulating interview data against other data sources including further interviews with the same people, and by letting the partici- pants’ own voices tell their stories to preserve the how as well as the what. I also used group interviews as these allowed access to unarticulated normative assumptions (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005: 903). In addition, Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue that we must be aware of possible distortions to our own objectivity through awareness and vigilance as to our own paradigm and its likely effects. I thus reflected upon my own positioning, and before going starting my fieldwork I wrote extensively about my expectations so as to be able to check my findings against the ‘scratches’ on my own lens. Having gained access to the research site, I recruited study participants by being around at teachers’ meetings and in the staffroom, getting to know the students in my classes, and by talking about my desire to understand the situation better. Once I had become accepted, I sought out participants and informed them about my research. Teacher participants filled out consent forms and were interviewed, observed, and re-interviewed, as follows. I began with initial interviews, in which I interviewed each participant teacher and invited them to describe their own educational backgrounds, reflections on teaching in China, and their perceptions of the learning outcomes from their teacher training. These initial interviews lasted 80–120 minutes each and were semi-structured around a series of prompts and guiding ques- tions. This allowed for participants to describe their own circumstances and issues as they saw fit. The teachers were then observed teaching, and the lessons were videotaped. Then the teachers were interviewed again, as soon as possible after the lesson, with the follow-up interview consisting of the teacher and me watching the lesson together and discussing what had happened, and why, and how the teacher felt about classroom events and stages as they had taken place. The follow up interviews were longer than the initial interviews, averaging 120–180 minutes. Teachers were then given the

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opportunity, without obligation, to repeat the observation/video-watching cycle with another class or lesson and/or to be interviewed again. Most of the participants were thus observed and interviewed many times over the two-year period. The students were mostly interviewed in groups, although a few, including Xiaoli who appears in this paper, were interviewed individually at their own request. In these interviews I presented initial findings from my research among the teachers and findings from my own teaching with which to elicit participants’ reactions. For example, I put it to the students that the teach- ers felt they struggled to get the students to contribute in class, and asked them what they thought about it. I started these conversations by asking the students to talk about their own experiences of learning English and of Western English language teachers. I conducted the interviews mainly in English but the presence of a bilingual Chinese friend (who was neither a teacher nor student, but a former PSU student) also allowed the students to explain themselves in Chinese. All quotes in this paper were originally recorded in English. In addition, some participants provided additional data on e-mails, often in response to transcripts of their previous interviews or to inform me about events at the university in between my visits. I was also lucky enough to have access to about 5000 anonymous written student evaluations of their foreign teachers. And I gathered data about my own teaching, comprising lesson plans, classroom activities, and video recordings of my own lessons.

Theories of language In Chinese popular culture, Chinese language appears to be counted quan- tifiably; for example, it is an oft-quoted statistic that it takes a knowledge of about 2000 characters to read Chinese newspapers. In keeping with this quan- tifiable view of language, the Chinese College English Curriculum includes a 156-page list of the words and phrases a graduating student is expected to ‘know’ (Chinese Ministry of Education, 2007: 60–228). Language, including English, appears to be seen as a series of discrete items that can be measured and counted in curriculum documents, test preparation word lists, and in assessment. Implicit in this is a view of language in which ‘knowing’ a lan- guage means knowing its discrete parts, that is, a view of language as words and structures rather than as discourse in contexts. This may be explainable by the largely discrete-item testing encountered in the College Entrance Exam (CEE) and the College English Test (CET). As a result, students may struggle to speak and understand English because of insufficient skills development. Two PSU students give their views:

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The Chinese English teacher, he will stress on the grammar, the words, and not the accent, the speaking, so we learn English just to prepare our test, not practising our oral exercising. So this is why we are eager to meet a foreign teacher because we want to learn some native accent. (Huang, PSU student, 2009)

If you just learn from [a] book, or class you cannot understand the native speaker. English is changing quickly, for example the slang, you couldn’t understand the slang, and it is different from what you learn from book[s], so I think it is very important to study oral English. You need to learn from native speaker. (Lili, PSU student, 2009)

To Huang and Lili, the problem seems to be a lack of language items, whether a ‘native accent’ or ‘slang’ words. While the barrier to comprehension may be accent or slang, another explanation here might be the lack of recep- tive skills for making meaning from discourse. Metaphorically, Huang and Lili seem to assume that the jigsaw is missing vital pieces, rather than that they lack skill in putting together jigsaw puzzles. Both students here do say they perceive the need to learn from native speakers and not just from books and/ or to pass tests, and so it may be that a purely quantifiable view of language is an overly simplistic rendering of their viewpoints. However, in both cases, contact with native speakers is perceived to confer the missing pieces rather than more intangible skills development or language practice from which pro- ficiency might derive without further ‘pieces’ being added. The assumption of language as quantifiable also allows for a correct/incor- rect binary to inform teaching. As a result, Xiaoli complains:

English people don’t care too much about the words, don’t care the tense. Because you have to take written tests including the grammars and the words so you have to master the language from a second language teacher. … Native speakers, yes, they make mistakes, but it’s OK because I can understand them. (Xiaoli, PSU student, 2007)

Xiaoli appears to be assuming a Chomskyan model of underlying linguistic competence and observable language performance, equating the latter with native speakers’ use of language and the former to the language competence students may need to acquire in order to be successful at CET-type exams. In this model, language is a set of discrete, prescriptive variables that may be correct or incorrect; contextual differences are seemingly discounted in explaining language variance, including whether language is written or oral. As Xiaoli demonstrates, Chinese students and teachers may value this model of language not least because of exam backwash, but also perhaps because a learnable, correct/incorrect binary would allow teachers to ‘save face’. Language quantifiability contrasts with the view of language assumed by most of the teachers in this study, whose English teaching training was

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undertaken in contexts in which communicative language teaching (CLT) is the norm. CLT is defined by Hiep (2007), as comprising three tenets: first, an understanding of language competence as communicative competence (including discourse competence); second, a set of views about second lan- guage acquisition/learning, in which communicative competence develops through learners using the language meaningfully as opposed to learning about language or manipulating its form; and, third, a certain ‘communicative approach’ to classroom teaching, including, for example, pair work and group work activities in which students negotiate meaning and produce language output. Discussing error correction, Karen exposes her assumed model of lan- guage as a system for communicating:

If the students are telling me about their weekend or something and they’ll say some- thing and I’ll be like ‘sorry? I didn’t understand that’. … I mean if it’s only a small thing and they haven’t got very much confidence anyway then I won’t pick up on it. But, yeah, I focus on where it’s causing a breakdown of communication. (Karen, Brit- ish teacher, 2007)

While neither group is entirely uniform in its understanding, the Western teachers and Chinese students in this study appear to assume discernibly dif- ferent underlying theories of language, with the students taking a structural view and the teachers a functional/interpersonal view. These inform their language-classroom cultures of learning, to which I turn next.

Theories of language learning A quantifiable view of language appears to translate to classrooms as an expec- tation that students will learn more lexical and grammatical items as they progress through the years of English language teaching in school and univer- sity, with testing at each stage comprising testing of the items learned rather than testing of language proficiency across macro-skills. This culminates, in the third year at PSU, in oral English as a capstone course designed to ‘activate’ language already learned ‘in theory’. I asked some PSU students for metaphors of how they understand the language learning process, and two are particularly vivid in understanding students’ conceptualizations of the process. The first is that language is first downloaded through years of learning English ‘in Chinese’. It is then installed through the oral English course, which activates English. The second meta- phor is that of Frankenstein’s monster. English is gradually and lifelessly built before being sparked to life through oral English. These metaphors have in common the idea that English needs to be first learned, then used, rather than learned through use.

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This may be explainable as a fear of error fossilization, as Ping explains:

You have to know some grammars … because [if ] you doesn’t know any grammars and your English just poor, and you speak wrong English, [then, as a result] you speak like that again. And you form wrong ways, the wrong habit, not good habit, and after you have formed this habit you have, maybe you have to do a lot of things to rid of this habit. … First you have to learn from the book, then you use. (Ping, PSU student, 2009)

Ping’s repeated use of ‘habit’ to describe language acquisition is evocative of drill-based pedagogy aimed at the acquisition of language habits; this is the theory of learning behind language-teaching methodologies such as the audio-lingual method (Richards and Rodgers, 2001). This implicit theory of learning may explain Feng’s concern; Feng was one of my Chinese colleagues at PSU who observed me teach. She was worried that students in my class were making mistakes in oral fluency exercises. To Feng, this was problematic and unintended; she explained that students’ errors are evidence that learning has not succeeded. As someone who believes that languages are acquired through hypothesis testing and generalization, I think the opposite; for me, learners’ errors are evidence of interlanguage progres- sion. Dan, a PSU foreign teacher participant, described a similar discord with another Chinese colleague, in which she made use of some of the communica- tive activities he had suggested, but used them as controlled practice following a thorough explanation of the language items, so as to ‘prevent the students from making mistakes’. Dan described this situation as:

She seemed to think the activities … were some kind of break from learning … not that an activity can actually be the learning. … For her, the activity is the dispensable bit if she’s running out of time. For me, it’s the explaining bit that’s dispensable. (Dan, American teacher, 2009)

These discords indicate different views of oral English teaching. Dan and I conceive of our task as providing opportunities for students to use language meaningfully so as to ‘activate’ students’ latent knowledge and to improve stu- dents’ discourse skills so as to enable them to use language meaningfully. Feng and her colleague, in contrast, appear to teach rules and then provide practice exercises, so as to increase students’ accuracy and stock of language items. This is not to say that all Western teachers hold view X and that all Chinese teachers hold view Y; clearly this is an oversimplification. However, I found sufficient difference between my Chinese and Western interviewees to be able characterize their different implicit theories of language and language learn- ing. While Feng and Dan are not ambassadors for their cultures of learning, they represent the divide that I noticed in many other interviews.

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Different implicit theories of language learning were also evident in other lessons ostensibly aimed at macro skills development (listening, speaking, reading and writing skills). Although College English is organized around macro skills, which are taught separately, examination backwash may create the pressure for quantifiable, discrete-item teaching. As a result, the ‘reading skills’ lessons I observed at PSU, for example, featured texts on clickable PowerPoint presentations. The (Chinese) teachers explained the texts word- by-word, clicking through from each word or phrase to a different slide in which examples and (Chinese and English) definitions were given. Each par- agraph took half an hour to ‘read’ in this way. This type of ‘reading’ teaching is entirely different from that assumed by communicative language teach- ing, in which reading micro-skills (scanning, skimming, deducing unknown meaning from context, etc.) are developed. Thus, although Chinese teach- ers may ‘teach reading’ their classroom practices may be entirely different from ‘teaching reading’ in communicative classrooms, where the object is to engage with the text to extract meaning. These very different views of classroom practice appear to indicate very dif- ferent models of language acquisition. Xiaoli, a PSU student, summarizes her expectation about language learning; ‘the teacher is teaching to the students, the students are receiving information from the teacher’ (2007). Although Beth notes that ‘content subjects’ are often taught via lectures in Western edu- cation, she describes languages at her university in the USA as taught in small tutorials focused on meaningful student output. These are:

More holistic, so you did get up some level of fluency. …[At PSU], students give back only the same output they‘ve received, so they don’t need to manipulate the language. (Beth, American teacher, 2007)

The sequential learning of tangible facts contrasts with skills develop- ment inherent to communicative language teaching, which assumes that languages are learned through use and that errors are evidence of learn- ing (Richards and Rodgers, 2001). Zoe, the manager of language teaching programmes at a multinational company, explains that she often deals with complaints about Western teachers whose teaching is too ‘nebulous’ for Chinese students:

There’s pressure on teachers to make it explicit and measurable, to build in reviews. The students want to be tested, they want to have lists, and they want to count the number of things they’ve learned. (Zoe, American educational manager, 2007)

This contrasts with the aim of oral skills development in which the objective is not the acquisition of new language items but instead the use of students’ existing store of language. However, those students whose culture of learning

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assumes a knowledge acquisition model of language learning may struggle to see the purpose of skills development. This may result in the type of complaint that Zoe describes.

Crossing cultures of learning Oral English is ostensibly a capstone course to ‘activate’ students’ existing English, but it may feel redundant to the students. Mike identifies listening and speaking macro skills development aims of oral English:

For me, being effective is to have them speak English and to have to use something they’ve learned rather than to walk out with this new grammar structure, or ‘I’ve learned this new word today’ … I don’t want to teach, like, a new dance move, I just want them to get better at what they’re doing already. … These guys have been taught English for, like, ten years, and they’ve got loads of vocab, [but] they haven’t had to use it. (Mike, British teacher, 2007)

However, skills development may appear intangible to students, and this may be problematic in an environment where students expect quantifiable learn- ing outcomes. Phil and Ryan describe the problem of trying to get students to practise existing language items that they may perceive they already ‘know’.

[Oral English] turns the students off because [the students] they think they know it, they feel like they’ve already ticked that box, they’ve closed that page in the book … they haven’t necessarily internalized it but they’ve seen it, so they perceive they’ve learned it. (Phil, British teacher, 2009)

[The students] look at the book and see ‘maybe you could plus verb’, and they think ‘I know those words, that’s not new, I already know that’, and even though there’s no possible way that person would ever use that in a conversation they’ll dismiss it and go ‘boring’, [and put their] head down on the desk. And then you ask them, like, ‘what would you say: you just killed a friend and you don’t know what to do with the body?’ And they’ll be like ‘uhhh, I say go to police’. … So they’re not using it at all. You’ve just taught it, you’ve just reviewed it … and you know that person’s just com- pletely tuned out … they don’t get it, like, you’re supposed to be practising it. We’re not teaching you anything new. (Ryan, Canadian teacher, 2009)

One origin of students’ resistance may therefore be a perception that, in practising ostensibly ‘known’ language items through communicative activi- ties, the teachers appear to be pitching the level of the material too low, as students may perceive they have already learned the language items contained in texts. This may cause the students to resist. But students’ resistance, that Ryan describes as students’ putting their heads down on the desk and ‘tuning out’ may cause the teachers to reduce the level

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of challenge further so as to elicit a response, as their own cultures of learning would lead them to expect this. Claire explains:

It’s so hard to get them to talk. You know when you sort of say ‘what did anyone think? Can anyone tell me what this means?’ and, you know, you’ll have people sit- ting there looking away. … It could be that maybe I’m speaking too quickly or maybe they don’t understand the question. So I try to make it easier and I ask again. (Claire, British teacher, 2008)

This problem seems to be caused by the inert knowledge problem, where students have a large passive knowledge that oral English is supposed to ‘activate’. Teachers may erroneously interpret students’ silence as incompre- hension, and, as their own cultures of learning expect students’ participation in class, may pitch their lessons too low. This problem is then cyclical, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Conceptual model of a source of misunderstanding in oral English

Students may use the seeming intangibility of oral English and their percep- tion of its low-level objectives as evidence for their foreign teachers’ incom- petence. As discussed above, symbolic interactionism theorizes that people respond to things on the basis of the meanings those things hold for them. As a result, PSU students may, quite naturally, judge foreign teachers from within their own symbolic paradigm, in which the foreign teachers do not appear to ‘fit’ the students’ constructed notion of a ‘teacher’. From this, it may be that the students judge foreign teachers negatively, or as less than ‘teachers’. Three students explain:

82 ‘The foreign teacher is an idiot’

[Foreign teachers] sit on the tables, and you never see a Chinese teacher sit on the tables, never. So maybe the Western teachers give us the impression they are fun and we have highly expectation of them, be the foreign friends. A different expectation for the foreign teachers. (Chao, PSU Student, 2009)

We see the TV dramas, we see Western teachers always willing [to] communicate with students. … But I don’t understand. In the Western education is talk, talk, talk, and so how someone will learning? (Lili, PSU Student, 2009)

The foreign teachers, they don’t bring books to class and the students think the teacher don’t bring books and seems doesn’t have a lot of plans, they just pick a topic and write on the board and say ‘this class we just talk a topic’. This is not a way Chi- nese teacher do a class, so this is not a good teacher. … We think the foreign teacher is an idiot. (Huang, PSU Student, 2009)

It may be that teachers’ intended meanings are being (mis)understood through (mis)interpretations of their outward signifiers and what these mean to the students. To Chinese students, a teacher who sits on the tables may be seen as less than a ‘proper’ teacher. But the teacher’s purpose may be to reduce negative affect by appearing approachable. This is an example of how the same outward signi- fier (sitting on a table) may be intended one way and interpreted in another. Similarly, the learning outcome of students acquiring language by using it may not be clear in the setting up of group-based oral fluency activities. Instead, to students, it may look like the teacher cannot, or is too lazy, to teach ‘properly’ (at the front of the class, with the teacher doing most of the talking, as Xiaoli described above). The same may be true for seemingly intangible discussion activities perhaps based on textbook topics, in which the students’ language output may not be systematically corrected for accuracy and in which there are no ‘correct’ answers. To the teacher, this may be a good way to adapt text- book material to practise oral fluency, whose products (the ‘answers’) are less important than the process, and whose aim is not accuracy. But to the students this may seem to be an avoidance of teaching the grammar in the textbook (because the teacher cannot? Or does not realize s/he is supposed to? Or is too lazy?) In this interpretative paradigm, not correcting and apparently not knowing the ‘correct’ answers may add fuel to the fire: as Huang says, ‘the foreign teacher is an idiot’.

Making fun of foreign teachers These misunderstandings of teachers’ intended meanings may lead students to the conclusion that foreign teachers are incompetent, and to therefore expect little of them. Beth reports:

Phiona Stanley 83

My engineering students have the opportunity to go to America at the end of their junior year. … They didn’t tell me at first, I found out a little over half way through. And I asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier? This class would have been completely different if I’d have known. I would have structured it to make it more useful for you going abroad.’ And they’re ‘oh, well, you know, it’s just our English class’. … It just hadn’t occurred to them … they have all of their real classes and then they just get to come to our class and goof around and have fun. (Beth, American teacher, 2008)

This conception of foreign teachers as less competent and more ‘fun’ than Chinese teachers may be triangulated, for students, by the Occidentalist con- structions of foreign ‘Others’ that they bring to the situation. Leo, a Chinese-Canadian teacher whose Chinese is fluent and who has lived in Shanghai for seven years explains his understanding of the students’ construction of Westerners, framed by an Occidentalism in which the ‘West’ is contrasted to the Chinese Self:

[The students] perceive Westerners as ‘open’. … Open means open-minded, it also means warmth, it also means friendly. But I think the reason why they use the word ‘open’ is ... because they’re seeking, they’re identifying any foreigners as someone opposite from them, doing everything that is opposite from what they are allowed to do. It’s almost a rebellious thing, for a lot of our students, they sort of look up to a Westerner because they feel a Westerner is allowed to do a lot of things that they’re not allowed to do. … I think they [the students] already came in with a perception of what Westerners are like. … [They think] we’re lively, warm, optimis- tic, energetic, fun … not as serious as Chinese teachers. (Leo, Chinese-Canadian teacher, 2009)

Some PSU students triangulate this view:

[Western] foreign teacher you respect from your heart because you have the happy time. Chinese teacher you respect, maybe, from head … they treat me like [they’re a] teacher. (Ping, PSU Student, 2009)

If the teacher will be cheerful I will pay more attention … I like foreign teacher to be fun, like actor, could told you about anything. … I want to see he is very nice. Easy going, funny, can share the different ideas, don’t have the distant … humorous, arouse our interest in learning English, you feel flexible. … In the foreign teacher class you can do whatever you like, you can do more communication with him. … He must be fun, yes, and vividly. (Guo, PSU Student, 2009)

Students’ view that Western teachers are, or should be, ‘fun’ may thus be because of stereotyping about Western foreigners more generally. Leo con- nects this to the American television series ubiquitous on DVD in China, saying that for students lessons with a foreign teacher seem ‘as if they’re

84 ‘The foreign teacher is an idiot’

watching Friends and one of the characters pops out of the TV and they get to talk to them’ (Leo, 2007). This is the view of the West as ‘(re)made in China’, based on Hollywood and other sources, that Zheng (2006) described above. Xiaoli explains her perception:

[Western] foreigners are kind of very hot and very friendly. … Hot is kind of, they’re always laughing [and] even [though] they don’t know you they will smile at you, you will feel, when you are with them, you won’t feel cold. Your mind is always running. (Xiaoli, PSU Student, 2007)

However, while this may describe students’ constructions of foreign teachers, it also puts pressure on the teachers to live up to these constructed identities by being ‘fun’. Beth explains:

They expected me to get up there and be the funny, foreign monkey. Let them play fun games, tell funny jokes, clown a bit, and then they’d get to go home … it’s so easy at this university to let yourself slip … To just go into class, get through the 80 min- utes, and move on. And there’s definitely been weeks where I’ve done that … because, [there’s] the pressure from the students, and the pressure from management to amuse the students so they don’t complain. … It’s absolutely just like pulling teeth otherwise. It’s just so slow, if you don’t do something to force the students to engage, if you don’t make it fun, then it’s just absolutely horrible. You have 80 minutes of ‘say this, say this’. (Beth, American teacher, 2008)

This is a circular problem, and a conceptual model of this appears in Figure 2. Students pressure teachers to be fun, using resistance in class as Beth described. Another way in which students at PSU pressure their foreign teachers to conform to ‘fun’ expectations is through their post-course evalu- ations. These post-course evaluations are the only measure of foreign teacher work at PSU, and several teachers described them as a ‘popularity contest’. Phil expands on this point:

I’ve done three or four semesters’ worth of feedback and this word pops up all the time for the students, ‘fun, fun, more interesting, more fun, we want more fun’ … it is quite sobering. I sincerely believe that I delivered probably some of the better classes last semester but I was probably one of the lower-scoring teachers because I didn’t make it a game show. (Phil, British teacher, 2007)

Because Westerners are constructed as fun there is pressure on Western teach- ers to be fun. This then reinforces students’ perceptions. While there is nothing wrong with ‘fun’, the teachers in this study experienced pressure to be fun rather than effective as teachers. This meant that many of the participant teach- ers felt disinvested professionally, and perceived that they de-skilled because their working lives consisted of providing ‘fun’.

Phiona Stanley 85

Figure 2: A conceptual model of the cycle of Occidentalist constructions of ‘Western- ers’, pressure to conform, and subsequent evidence supporting these constructions.

Conclusion The situation in oral English teaching at PSU is erecting barriers to intercul- tural communication rather than allowing for cross-cultural understanding. This problem derives from Chinese students’ and their Western teachers’ dis- tinct, although largely implicit, theories of language and of language learn- ing. While Western teachers’ and Chinese students’ views may not always be as starkly differentiated as I have described, there is still a tangible schism between the two sides’ understandings in the context under examination. The teachers’ practices and underpinning methodological paradigms are based on assumptions about language and language learning in which lan- guage is a holistic system that can be acquired through use as well as some ‘learning-about’. The students, in contrast, are experienced in a Confucian- heritage educational system in which discrete-item language assessment is of vital importance as an educational and societal gatekeeper, and in which local English teachers’ practices may be constrained by class sizes, the teach- ers’ own apprenticeships of observation and resultant cultures of learning, and the pressure they experience to cover a very full curriculum. This results in a system where language learning comprises learning ever more, and more complex, ‘pieces’ of language. When the students experience difficulty in using the English they have ‘learned’, some conclude that they must be missing some of the ‘pieces’ of the puzzle rather than questioning whether there is also a need for macro-skills development and discourse competence.

86 ‘The foreign teacher is an idiot’

Oral English is therefore a peculiar orphan of a course. Sidelined by backwash from discrete-item examining, it appears to the students to be a rehashing of already ‘known’ language items; understandably, they may fail to engage. Into this context come Western teachers, like bulls in a china shop. They bring with them their own ways of teaching, and in some cases what Bax (2003) describes as the ‘CLT attitude’. They may be unable and/or unwilling to modify their praxis in the face of a quite different culture of learning. Addi- tionally, they may struggle to understand the purpose of oral English, whose existence is attributable to a highly questionable ‘download and install’ model of language learning. Within this confusion, the teachers gamely try to engage students in communicative-style teaching. To attract students’ attention they make it more ‘fun’. However, the students are also operating within their own set of understandings, interpreting their experiences of oral English as indicative of Western teachers being ‘fun but ineffective’. This ties neatly into an Occiden- talist view of Westerners more generally, and the ‘evidence’ of foreign teachers’ behaviours at PSU may compound some students’ previously held stereotypes about Western foreign Others. So a notion of ‘fun but ineffective’ Westerners may be reified into an experience of ‘fun but ineffective’ Westerners. This does not bode well for cross-cultural understanding.

About the author Dr Phiona Stanley is a TESOL teacher educator who has taught in six countries including China. She has just completed a PhD in Education at Monash University, Australia. Her thesis was on transnational teachers’ roles, identities, and training needs at a Chinese university, and her research interests include higher education teaching, identity, and transnationalism.

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