April 22nd, 2008

The modern language teacher as a shouting deity

From Arts and Letters Daily, here’s a fascinating article from The New Yorker about the EFL teacher Li Yang and his school Crazy English in China. It’s an amazing story:

He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”…Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.

His boot camp, mass psychology approach has lead to accusations of demagoguery, racism, and “huckster nationalism”, and even worse it would appear that he doesn’t use the communicative approach. But instead of dismissing his approach out of hand, I think it’s actually worth thinking about, because the Crazy English phenomenon touches on many interesting questions for language teachers.

Teacher as motivator
In China, Li Yang is the “Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement”. Chinese newspapers describe him as a “demagogue,” and his classes “like cult meetings” and asked if he was “one of those cults where the leaders insist on being treated like deities.”

Li’s cosmology ties the ability to speak English to personal strength, and personal strength to national power….To his fans, Li is less a language teacher than a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, at age nineteen, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. Some fans travel for days to see him. The most ardent spring for a “diamond degree” ticket, which includes bonus small-group sessions with Li. The list price for those seats is two hundred and fifty dollars a day—more than a full month’s wages for the average Chinese worker. His students throng him for autographs. On occasion, they send love letters.

Students repeat “English is a piece of cake. I can totally conquer English. I will use English. I will learn English. I will live in English. I am no longer a slave to English. I am its master. I believe English will become my faithful servant and lifelong friend. . . .”

In his intensive courses, students run together at dawn and walk on burning coals after class.

Limits of traditional classroom approaches

He mocks China’s rigid classroom rules…He strives to be as unprofessorial as possible. On book covers, he wears a suit and tie, with his cuffs rolled up to the elbow, like a bond trader. It affirms his image as the anti-intellectual who has wrested English from the grip of test proctors and college-admissions committees.

Role of the affective filter

Li’s real power, though, derives from a genuinely inspiring axiom, one that he embodies: the gap between the English-speaking world and the non-English-speaking world is so profound that any act of hard work or sacrifice is worth the effort. He pleads with students “to love losing face.” In a video for middle- and high-school students, he said, “You have to make a lot of mistakes. You have to be laughed at by a lot of people. But that doesn’t matter, because your future is totally different from other people’s futures.”

ELF and the status of the native speaker

Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”

ELF, ESP and English language instrumentalism

His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”…A vast national appetite has elevated English to something more than a language: it is not simply a tool but a defining measure of life’s potential. China today is divided by class, opportunity, and power, but one of its few unifying beliefs—something shared by waiters, politicians, intellectuals, tycoons—is the power of English….English has become an ideology, a force strong enough to remake your résumé, attract a spouse, or catapult you out of a village.

What an amazing phenomenon - humans are endlessly fascinating.

Is it superficial and gimmicky? Yes.

Does much of it elicit the “yuck” response? To me, yes.

Do many students learn more English than they would have in a traditional classroom? My guess: absolutely.

And that’s what makes it interesting.

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