Episode 138 - An English Lesson with my Chinese Students

This year I am teaching a group of Chinese students. From Asia I have only taught some Saudis before. Overall, I have to say that teaching the Chinese is an amazing experience. I thought you might be interested in having people from this country on the podcast, actually hearing their accent and relate to the struggle of learning a foreign language so I kindly asked them if they would be up for recording an episode with me as a part of our lesson and guess what? They gave me a go-ahead. Unfortunately this recording has been marred by a few negatives. First I speak too much in it. I am sure the Cambridge academics wouldn't approve of the way I teach as it undoubtedly doesn't correlate with the vastly recognised communicative approach of teaching. To justify this, the group is predominantly pre-intermediate thus for some of the students to produce a longer stretch of language poses a challenge. I tried to ask loads of questions to make up for this and keep the recording the pace and momentum of the recording. Second, for some reason, every time any of the Chinese students speaks, their voice is considerably quieter than mine. This is probably due to the fact I didn't put the recorder close enough to their mouths and also they are a bit shy and they somewhat behaved in a modest way as well. Despite this I am convinced that this episode is worth listening to as it offers a different outlook on learning English. It also gives you a chance to finally listen to a Chinese accent on my podcast. And last but not least, you can enjoy my struggle of trying to pronounce Chinese names, which I think is particularly hilarious.

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