The hardest part of teaching spoken English is that students have nothing to say

I don't know how much this applies in other countries

One of the things I do when teaching English is to read the quote on a quote of the day website, and then make sure my students understand it. It’s a great way to expand their knowledge, and start to develop their ability to move between the specific and the abstract.

And boy do they need practice on these things! I have a group of teenagers (about 14) at the moment, who need to improve their English very fast. I’m pretty confident about improving their reading and listening, but speaking tough. Part of the reason is that they just have nothing to say. Between Chinese schools that train you to speak only in officially approved Correctitudes, and TikTok that teaches all zingers, all the time, I’ve never heard these boys put together a coherent idea or even sentence.

Today our quote of the day was: “Put your heart, mind, and soul into even your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.” (This is a nice quote: anodyne enough that the conversation isn’t going to get too spicy for the classroom, but with plenty of room to dig out examples and discuss.) The boys’ reaction was particularly comical. I start off with: do you agree. Oh, yes, they all said. Can you give me an example? Boy A worked hard at his homework and got a high grade. (The student wasn’t as grammatical as that, but I’m focused on the content here.)

But, I put to them, is that really THE secret to success? (Blank faces) Like, the ONLY secret to success? Realising what answer I want, they quickly manage to blurt out, no! Talent! Boy B is talented at computer games. Cue a sidebar on what success means - I’m not really convinced that being good at a computer game counts as success. But OK, yes, you got the message and worked out that there was space for disagreement here… Anything else we could disagree with?

No.

Some people think, I desperately prompt, that actually you shouldn’t put your heart into everything; you should focus on the important things. Oh, yes! they reply. That’s definitely right…

This would count as a mid-level conversation in my experience. I’ve had students where I couldn’t get a single answer out of them, not what colour they like, not what food they like, not where they live (they often don’t know, because they live next to daddy’s chauffeured car, and the malls that they go to are also right outside the door of daddy’s chauffeured car), not anything. And of course, at the other end of the scale, you occasionally get a student who’s bursting with ideas and says genuinely interesting things. (But not many, because those kids don’t need extra classes.)

But most students are in the middle somewhere, and I find that for Chinese students in the middle, the vast majority of ESL speaking exercises in books simply don’t work. Those exercises expect students to hold opinions on things like whether having a sister is good or not; or whether they like a particular sport; or whether they like hot weather or cold weather. And most of my students don’t seem to have opinions of that type - at least not that they can form into a full sentence. It’s not a language problem - I ask them to think of an answer in Chinese, and they can’t put together a coherent thought in their own language, either.

So one of the difficulties - the Things They Don’t Teach You in Teacher College (though I never went to teacher college) - is that you have to first find ways to put ideas into their minds before you can ask them to express those ideas in the foreign language. It’s an interesting challenge.

(Of course, I do more mechanical exercises as well, where the students have a pre-prepared grammatical form and a limited range of different nouns or verbs to insert. Those are fine, and can serve a purpose.)