9/15

After reading a lot about how the Chinese view education, I can see why CLT might not have worked out for them. The beliefs about education in the U.S. and the education in China are very different, which is probably why this approach wasn't as successful for this group. The article explained how the Chinese love textbooks and are always reading and getting all of their information from different textbooks. The CLT method differs a lot in this aspect. We try to stay away from textbooks when teaching communicative language because it doesn't give us hands-on, real life experiences that we can practice from. We can read all about them, but we don't get to interact with other learners. Role-plays, interviews, and skits are a lot more common than the textbook is in this case. Another area that is very different from education in the U.S. is the fact that in China, the learners are not supposed to question or challenge the material. They expect them to keep their own ideas to themselves until the material is mastered. This is completely opposite from what we encourage our students to do here. We are always wanting the learners to "think critically" and ask any questions that they have. According to Piaget, without doing this the student would never make it to the formal operational cognitive stage of development, which is crucial to have for higher-order thinking.
The differences among the educational beliefs within these two countries made me think a lot. The majority of the teachers in our classrooms in the U.S. probably have no idea about this cultural difference. If a student from China transfered into our classroom we would expect them to go about learning as we do here, never explaining to them that it's ok to ask questions and participate in class. We would assume that they would already know this, but this is completely wrong and almost scary. It's the teacher's job and obligation to make themselves knowledgeable about the background of their students and  research how things might be different for them here. This is also a clear sign of how a certain method doesn't automatically work for everyone in any context. Different methods need to be used for different settings. It's not a "one size fits all" situation.  Clearly, this situation shows that the CLT method might not be best for this group of learners. In my opinion, the Chinese culture sounds like it would fit best with a direct grammar-based approach.