The ABCs According to Zhang Sizhong--English Education on a Roll in China

In 1989, Hong Kong's Wenweipo reported, "Two classes at [Shanghai's] Hainan Middle School completed the three-year middle-school English curriculum in only two years without taking any extra classes. The students scored an average of 91.3 on Shanghai's unified high-school entrance exam, beating the average score of third-year middle-school students in their district."

In 1990, The People's Education magazine reported on an English teacher using a new approach in Anhui Province's Huaibei City. After just one semester, the number of failing students in the teacher's 41-student class had dropped from 15 to five, while the number of students with a 90-plus average had risen from six to 15.

How have mainland China's primary- and middle-school students improved their English so rapidly? One answer lies in the foreign-language pedagogy of Zhang Sizhong.

Spreading like wildfire

Who is Zhang Sizhong? What's so special about his approach to teaching English? Why is it now being used throughout China?

Zhang Sizhong was born in Fujian Province some 71 years ago. The young Zhang attended middle school in his hometown before going off to a church-affiliated high school in Fuzhou. But after only two years in Fuzhou, he quit school and joined the People's Liberation Army. Then, in 1955, Zhang tested into the Russian language department at Shanghai's East China Normal University (ECNU). In 1960, he was assigned to the First Subsidiary Secondary School of ECNU, where he taught until his retirement.

Zhang was originally a Russian teacher, and he derived his pedagogical approach to the English language from his experience teaching Russian.

Now white-haired and living in a three-room apartment given to him by the government for his contribution to education, Zhang says that when he first graduated from college, he taught Russian to middle-school students. After two years of this, the school principal broke with tradition by moving Zhang to the senior high school.

Zhang was enthusiastic about the promotion, but was surprised to find that, "Less than three weeks into the semester, I had lost control of my classes. The students were becoming raucous." He says that after taking a good look at the situation, he realized that the problem was that his students were of very different levels. Those who had been admitted to the high school from ECNU's middle school had strong backgrounds in Russian-enough to hold a conversation with a native speaker and read Soviet middle-school textbooks. On the other hand, most of the students who had tested into the school from outside had had only one or two years of Russian. Worse, there were still other students who had trouble even identifying the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.

The better students felt that they could learn far more on their own than they could in his class. Some even said, "Since it would be disrespectful to read other books in class, we meditate during Russian class to rest up for our other classes."

Moving at their own pace

To whom does the teacher target the class when students are of such diverse levels of ability? Zhang had no answer. "If you teach to the stronger students, the weaker ones can't follow. But if you teach to the weaker students, the stronger ones lose interest, nap, do work from their other classes, read fiction, and so on. And if you teach to the middle, you satisfy neither the strong nor the weak."

Finally, Zhang asked the students for their opinions. They all wanted the classes to be rearranged. That wasn't allowed, but it got Zhang thinking that perhaps he could sub-divide the classes into groups.

Zhang decided to put the more advanced students into a more demanding, fast-moving group. These students would largely teach themselves, with some guidance from Zhang. They would not be constrained by the syllabus, and Zhang wouldn't demand that they all move at the same pace. "Those who could fly were allowed to soar; those who needed to walk were allowed to walk." The weaker students were put into a slow-moving group that reviewed the textbook used by second-year students in middle school. Zhang provided the bulk of the teaching to this group, which used self-study only as a supplement. To Zhang, these students were making a strategic retreat, taking a few steps back so that they could advance again. Finally, students in the middle were allowed to choose between the two groups, but were not allowed to move back and forth for the tests.

"I had no idea that such a simple idea would resolve so many problems. It improved classroom discipline dramatically and ended the raucous behavior." The school's principal then introduced Zhang's method in other classes, with equally positive results. Eight students from Zhang's own class even went on to get master's degrees.

Li Zhenlei, another foreign language teacher at Zhang's school, noticed that Zhang's students' Russian was much better than that of students in other classes, and wrote an article on Zhang's method for The People's Education magazine. Following the article's publication, ECNU's secondary school became a whirlwind of activity for a time as a number of teachers from both within the school and without came to observe the method at first hand.

However, just as the ECNU secondary school was preparing to implement Zhang's method throughout its Russian program, the Cultural Revolution broke out, throwing China into turmoil and bringing an end to formal education. It was a full 10 years before Zhang was able to pick up his pedagogical researches once again.

Memorizing vocabulary

But Zhang's skills-based grouping of his students was just his first insight. He next realized that the biggest obstacle to foreign language learning was memorizing vocabulary.

"Students don't understand what they hear, can't speak or read aloud, and test poorly, because they don't remember the vocabulary." Zhang believes that the key is inundating students with vocabulary. He himself taught 60 to 70 frequently used new words per class. At that pace, students learned more than 300 words per week and had a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words by the end of three weeks.

Zhang used a similarly focused approach to presenting grammar, always a headache for students. Zhang noted that students following the Russian textbook wouldn't complete their study of basic grammar until they had nearly finished high school. Feeling that this was not a good way to raise the standard of students' Russian, Zhang isolated important and regular structures-things like changing the part of speech of words, the use of verbs, sentence structure and compound sentences-and taught them early on.

"This gives students an overview of the grammar." But Zhang also says teachers shouldn't spend too much time explaining the inner workings of grammar. He feels that students gradually come to a natural understanding of the language as they acquire more knowledge of it.

Zhang also believes that for foreign-language pedagogy to be considered successful, students must actually be able to use the language. To this end, Zhang had his students read as many Russian works as they could get their hands on, encouraging them to read, study and translate the texts together.

In the early 1980s, in preparation for a planned and systematic dissemination, Zhang distilled his 10-plus years of teaching experience into four principles: appropriate focus, repetition, readings from Russian-language works and teaching each student according to ability. But just when the outlook for his methodology was looking brightest, the mainland government announced that from 1984, Russian would no longer be taught in Shanghai's secondary schools. Zhang's methodology was put on ice.

Fundamentals

Having hit what seemed to be a dead end, Zhang was approached by Tang Bochang, an English teacher at Shanghai's Hainan Middle School who hoped that Zhang could show him how to apply his four principles to English-language pedagogy.

The two men pored over the vocabulary presented in the six middle-school English texts, reorganizing it in terms of phonetics. They then designed and printed flashcards, and had students practice English conversation in pairs.

After a few short years, not only were the English teachers at ECNU's secondary school using the method, but English teachers in the suburban Shanghai counties of Jiading and Nanhui were also coming to the ECNU secondary school to observe. The method was also making inroads into other provinces, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Henan, Fujian and Sichuan. To date, more than 200 national teacher-training seminars have been held, training more than 60,000 teachers in the method.

Where then did Zhang's inspiration to focus on vocabulary and grammar come from?

"I got the idea from someone else." Zhang says that when he was in the army 50 years ago, he met a government official assigned to the Southwest Military District named Qi Jianhua. Qi's job was to teach illiterate members of the People's Liberation Army to read. On a good day, he would teach his students as many as 200 words. In contrast, other teachers were teaching only a dozen-odd words which many of their students had forgotten by the next day.

Qi's principle for learning vocabulary was to lead students from the simple to the complex. He would teach students characters such as those for person (§H), mountain (§s), cow (§?), horse (∞(r)) and sheep (??) at the outset, then move them on to characters in which these original characters were the radical. He also made small flashcards to aid them in remembering the characters. Using this approach, some of Qi's students learned as many as 2,000 characters in a month.

"It was always everyday words because we all already knew how to speak; we just couldn't read the characters. After his students had acquired enough vocabulary, Qi would have them write what they wanted to say. Three to five sentences made a short essay. A little more and you had a letter." Zhang says that under Qi's tutelage, many soldiers who had been illiterate their whole lives were soon able to write to their families. This earned Qi an award for outstanding achievement.

Zhang applied the method to his "self-study" of Russian.

Zhang, who knew not one word of Russian before he started college, was admitted to college without foreign-language skills because he had been a soldier. His classmates, on the other hand, had all had three years of Russian in high school. Recalling Qi Jianhua, Zhang thought, "If you can cram Chinese this way, you should be able to cram Russian." So Zhang applied Qi's method to Russian, bringing himself up to the level of high-school Russian texts in six months.

Getting everyone speaking

Asked if there were any difficulties transplanting this method from Russian to English, Zhang says, "Russian language teachers didn't argue with my method at all; everyone accepted it. However, many English teachers resisted the idea. They had the pride of intellectuals, and were distrustful of a Russian teacher invading their field." Zhang smiles and says that later, the method's effectiveness and its vigorous promotion by school principals and department heads prompted these reluctant teachers to ask him for demonstrations. In this way, Zhang's method slowly spread throughout China.

Zhang's principles of language pedagogy, which have been transplanted from Chinese literacy training to Russian language training to English pedagogy, are simple: that one begins with the simple and moves to the complex, and that familiarity engenders fluency. Zhang also believes that rapid progress naturally results from constant review and the use of spelling to memorize large amounts of vocabulary.

Zhang's "constant review" is simply having the teacher review previously covered material at regular intervals, perhaps every week, every month, shortly after the beginning of term, or before tests, to establish it firmly in students' memories.

To Bi Qiuhong, an English teacher at ECNU's secondary school for 18 years, it is Zhang's focus on key grammatical points that makes his approach unique. Bi says that grammar used to be taught a little at a time, often resulting in one grammatical concept being taught over five or six classes. "But by distributing the presentation of a difficult point over several classes, everything becomes a difficult point." Bi says that now their approach is to offer a simple explanation and to review as they reach related points.

Another aspect of the approach is its use of pair-work among students and one-minute speeches to improve students' command of the spoken language.

In the English classes at ECNU's secondary school, the teacher will ask a student to make a short speech in English on the day's topic. On the day we visited, a boy came to the lectern and described his experience with swimming. The class was then split into groups to discuss the speech, with each group then taking turns to present their own experience of swimming.

Next, the students watched a 10-minute English-language videotape on the joys and health benefits of swimming. The first two times the tape was shown, it was played without Chinese or English subtitles. Students were expected to remember everything they could by relying on their ears alone. The teacher, who conducted the entire class in English, then checked their comprehension with questions. The next time through, the students were allowed to write down a few key words. On the final viewing, English subtitles were shown. Students also had several opportunities to discuss what they were seeing between viewings.

Bi contrasts this with her own experience, recalling that when she studied English, most students could read and write with some facility, but had great difficulty understanding spoken English and speaking it themselves. She says that, as they couldn't carry on the simplest of conversations, many were effectively mute in English. Bi notes that now priority is given to speaking and understanding the spoken language over reading and writing.

According to Bi, the ECNU secondary school began asking their teachers to conduct English classes entirely in English many years ago in order to improve students' listening comprehension and their spoken English. However, with an average of 50 students to a class and only one teacher, only a few students got a chance to speak. The pair-work utilized by Zhang gives all 50 students the opportunity to practice speaking at the same time, resolving one of the problems of large language classes.

Teach your children

In 1996, at a mainland Chinese foreign language education conference, Vice Premier Li Lanqing praised Zhang Sizhong's method as one appropriate for China. In 1997, Shanghai's Hongkou District established a leadership committee aimed at promoting the use of Zhang's method. In the same year, the Shanghai Board of Education also approved the establishment of a graduate institute for the study of Zhang's method of foreign language pedagogy. Zhang's four principles are now the foundation of a school of thought in foreign language studies.

As China has opened up its economy to the rest of the world over the last few years, it has, like Taiwan, attempted to increase its global competitiveness by moving the start of its students' English-language studies from middle school to primary school. And this September, Shanghai's students will begin studying English in the first grade.

With the growing popularity of English-language studies, Zhang Sizhong's method has also extended its domain. In addition to being used in primary and secondary schools throughout China, private language schools employing Zhang's method began opening in 1992.

One would hardly expect to find children going to school on a typical Saturday morning, yet, here in Shanghai, a number of parents are taking their children to a primary school down an alley off Sichuan Road, 10 minutes away from the train station.

Inside the classroom are dozens of children in their first years of primary school, their small mouths forming English words. The blue-suited teacher, Sun Xiaochao, asks the children questions in English: "What grade are you in?" "Which class are you in?" "How many days are there in a week?" "Are you busy right now?" "Do you watch TV every day?" He then has the students use these questions to hold a short conversation with their neighbors.

The class includes practice with sentence forms, but little time is spent explaining grammar. Instead, the teacher asks a question such as, "Whose book is this?" He then has the students make three similar questions, such as: "Whose pencil is that?" Or, "Whose room is this?"

Just before class ends, Sun assigns homework-the students are to write down their new vocabulary and memorize a dialogue. The three-hour class ends with the students practicing their sentence forms and dialogues.

The McDonald's of education

The Sizhong School of Foreign Languages, which borrows primary school classrooms to hold classes, resembles Taiwan's English-language cram schools. The school has grown rapidly. It opened for business in 1992 with only four classes, but was running 97 classes by 1997. The school expects to administer more than 100 classes of 40 students each this summer. Tuition, meanwhile, is RMB120 for primary-school students, RMB160 for middle-school students and RMB180 for high-school students.

With more and more schools opening in China over the last 10 or so years, and the job market becoming more competitive, cram schools teaching anything and everything are popping up all over. Says Qu Fangyu, assistant director of education at the Sizhong School, "We want to be the McDonald's of education." According to Qu, the school plans to begin signing up students in Beijing this year.

Meanwhile, though retired, the elderly Zhang Sizhong is keeping busy. In addition to traveling throughout China training teachers, he has been working on primary school textbooks for the last three years. Zhang says he has completed the first volume, which is already in use at the Sizhong School.

According to Zhang, "China spends RMB640 million each year on English-language teaching materials published in Britain. Shouldn't local publishers earn that money? Besides, foreign language education is not very effective when it doesn't offer some connection to your home country."

A mother whose child has studied English at the Sizhong School for four years says, "My child has an easier time with his English classes than his classmates because the textbook is better."

In addition to lively pictures and vivid colors, Zhang's textbooks adhere to his principle of starting simply. Early units focus on the pronunciation of the letters of the alphabet, saying words and spelling them, supplemented by simple dialogues. Later units focus on dialogue and basic sentence forms, supplemented by speaking and spelling vocabulary. Later, the students also write vocabulary to better remember it.

Sun Xiaochao, who teaches English at both the Sizhong School and a primary school, says that the textbooks used by most primary schools are undemanding and contain few situational dialogues. For this reason, many parents feel they must send their children to private language schools to improve their English.

Having seen the progress made by students of the Sizhong School, Zhang Sizhong confidently states that his method would benefit other Asian nations where English is taught as a foreign language. It seems the now-open China is ready to export a homegrown foreign-language pedagogy to the world.

p.077

After 20 years of economic reform, English is catching on fast in China. Zhang Sizhong's "Chinese" methods of teaching English-including his own phonetic symbols and the grouping of words by pronunciation-have been getting attention-grabbing results.

p.078

Zhang Sizhong, who holds a degree in Russian, has distilled his 50 years of teaching experience into four principles-appropriate focus, repetition, readings from works in the target language and teaching each student according to his or her abilities.

p.081

One of Zhang's innovations is having children chant rhymes accompanied by gestures in the few minutes before class ends. The rhymes are a fun and effective memory aid for the kids.

p.083

With tourists from around the world packing the Bund, and even the Shanghai Stadium bearing a greeting in English, China's appetite for English-language classes seems destined to grow still stronger.