[Oe List ...] Fwd: Jaime's March Sym report

[Jaime R Vergara]

Sharing with the OE listserv a March report to colleagues with the Symposium of Realistic Living; 


j'aime la vie




*****
 
All of my oral English classes at Shenyang AerospaceUniversity surprisingly were assigned to the same room so I did not wait untilI took over the space.  All theclassrooms follow Russian Spartan minimalism (nothing but chairs, desks and agreen board with a large podium in a lecture hall format), and ours is noexception.
 
The earth poster was the first to get raised on the backwall, with a map of China immediately below, flanked by a world and a US map,tapering into a Roman empire nat/geo spread on the right, a China nat/geo 7,000 yrhistorical timeline on the left.  
 
Stage right are large windows looking into thecourtyard, and stage left wall is the other side of the hallway so it got the local regional, provincial and citymaps.  Chairs parted like the Red Sea,with a center table graced by a broken cup and spilled rice along an old unseathedMing knife on the side.
 
Students walked into a room where they are seated facing each other rather than look up to a Lao Shi (teacher)by the green board.
 
The focus on space and historical timeline in the decorpoints out a difference between the Chinese (Putunghua,common language) and English languages (strict dichotomies are never trustworthy, but this one holds in general).  TheChinese focuses on space, on the “where” and the “who”, while the Englishlanguage, rooted on its Greco-Roman lineage’s historical conscious of time, defines its verbs on “when”.  (E.g., Chinese hasno tense on the verb, “go” to the market yesterday, today, and tomorrow, while in English, one “went, goes, and will go.”)
 
First context of the first day of class in March is thejourney of the folks from the Mongolian steppes that peopled the Americas longbefore the Europeans, and if one listened to the chants and songs of theso-called Native Americans (from the Inuits to the Incas), they are not dissimilar from the songs and dancesheard in the mountains of Sichuan, Guangxi and Yunnan, the highlands and barren expanses of Xizang (Tibet), Xinjiang/Qinghai/Gansu, around the Yurts of Nei Menggu (Inner Mongolia) , and theice lights of Yanbian (Korea inChina) in Dong Bei (northeast).
 
Comes the explanation of the iterative cyclical series of natural "listen-repeat-speak-write-read" method in language learning, indicating thatChina formally teaches its students to read and write first, and now were are justgetting around to listening, repeating and speaking.  


Our first exercise is mimicking Denean' "As One" from Joyce's bioregional sounds, amplified slowly followed by passing out a printed copy of thelyrics.  
 
We introduce ourself as a "global" citizen.  Thus, began the 16-week journey of university imaginaleducation on learning to speak English while their consciousness of life gets asecular Sinocized RS-1 assault.  I suppose, it is my metaphorical translation of a religiously expressed process!
 
We are having pedagogical fun!


 Jaime R Vergara


All of yesterday, thanks; all of tomorrow, yes; all of today, let it be!




 
 
 
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