<A>Useful-and Surprising! - Tourism:

Discovering Guangxi by ……Traning Teachers

For over two years I have had a weekly exchange near my Paris home at a café called L’Océan with ZhuZhu, an outgoing Chinese student of French and Anglo-American languages and civilizations. She helps me with my rather rudimentary Chinese, and I coach her on university lessons in English and French, at which she is becoming quite proficient.

One day last May she arrived at L’Océan with an even broader smile than usual, and gave me some good news. I was invited to China as an expenses-paid volunteer during July and August! My mission? To help provide in-service training to teachers at Ting Yi, a special foreign language school launched by ZhuZhu’s mother in the city of Nanning, capital of the south-western province of Guangxi.

This was an exciting prospect indeed. As a U.N. official, I had some years ago visited and appreciated Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi’an and other Chinese cities and sights towards the east, but…never Guangxi. ZhuZhu and her French financé, Max, were going to accompany me and as our July departure approached I plied them with questions- and surfed the Net-to find our mire about Naming and its surroundings.

It turned out that the trip was to offer me more than a few surprises, for China is one of the most surprising of the many countries where I have traveled and worked worldwide.

Well before ZhuZhu, Mac and I took off from Paris’s Roissy Airport for Guangzhou, a first startler was Nanning itself, first settled around 318 AD. I had assumed it was something of a small, lackadaisical provincial backwater, pleasantly isolated form the hurly-burly of China’s mainstream boom-boom development. Wrong! The city itself counts over 1.2 million inhabitants and its total urban area almost three times that number while Guangxi Province’s Population is some 40 million. “Small”? Perhaps by Chinese standards… And pictures on the Net showed me a bustling metropolis with many skyscrapers sprouting form its downtown area.

Incredible Hospitality

Arrival with ZhuZhu and Max by train form Guangzhou confirmed just how mistaken I had been. If urban traffic is any indicator, then Chicago and Manchester, for example, pale as “ lackadaisical provincial backwaters” compared with Nanning where cars, busses , trucks and scooters (not to forget motorbikes and bicycles, which often transport two people or even families of three) whiz hither and yon, and pedestrians scamper almost any which way, with however apparently quite few accidents.

Another surprise was the density of tress, parks and other vegetation, not featuring on the websites I’d visited before coming. Nanning is justifiably known as “China’s Green City” and strives visibly (billboards and other exhortations) to promote environmental awareness.

Next surprise? The incredible hospitality! Earlier trips to China and other Asian countries had taught me expect a warm welcome, but my Ting Yi Language School hosts overwhelmed me with gifts, help, facilities, accompaniment and free-time activities.

I was lodged in a small, single-occupancy apartment, had a car and driver at my disposal… When I discovered that the local cafés (sometimes mis-labelled “Coffees” in English) seldom serve my preferred morning brew, a jar of Nescafé was immediately provided. Had I mis-packed my bag for a climate that turned out to be much more sub-tropical than that I’d planned for, with daytime summer temperatures regularly soaring over 36℃. A pile of light short-sleeved shirts, shorts and a pair of open sandals were thrust into my unexpectant arms.
And as for food: there was no question of my lunching or supping alone. I was invited twice a day, every day, and urged to “eat more, eat more!”

Down To Work

O.K., down to work.

During term-time, Ting Yi Language School has some 4,000 pupils who come, after regular school hours, to one or another of its three centers in Nanning. The school follows the Cambridge TEFL (“teaching English as a foreign language”) format, for which it is examination centre. The Cambridge TEFL system offers three levels, each with specific vocabulary and content, graduated for “starters” (6> 9years), “movers” (10>13 years), and “flyers” (14 years). In the summer, vacation-time teaching is offered to about 400 youngsters, and the Ting Yi centre where I worked resounded with the gleeful cries of often quite young pupils.

The main training course I helped run was made up of some 30 teachers, aged about 22 to 32 years and most with a B.A. in English from the local university. About half were already working at Ting Yi and the others candidates for part-time slots there.

My motto is such a context: “learning is doing”. So, my Chinese assistant/accomplice (English name: Steven) and I devised a number of techniques to put the ball squarely in learners’ court; or should I say “mouth”? More lively and anxious to improve their skills than I had expected (yet another surprise), most took up the challenge eagerly.

Many of the trainees had a reasonably good level of written English, but- for lack of native-speaker presence - oral expression and even comprehension sometimes left to be desired. Indeed, after a couple of days, and despite our “English only’ rule, Steven and I noticed that some were not grasping certain concepts and ideas I was trying to present, although I spoke as slowly and enunciated as clearly as possible. So he thenceforth kept an eye peeled and, as necessary, provided summary interpretation.

Our training panoply included a number of techniques for “activating” trainees, making them artisans of their own learning. One was chanting certain difficult words, not necessarily pronounced precisely as spelled- such as “granddaughter”, ‘straight” and “thoughtful”-until pronunciation was near-perfect. Another was tongue-twisters. For learners who sometimes have difficulty differentiating between “I” and “r” this one was both hilarious and a godsend: “Round the rugged rocks the ragged rascals ran”. It also showed that fun can help one learn. The motto that emerged? “If you’re yawning, you’ll probably forget: if you’re laughing, you’ll most likely to remember.”

We combined individual and small-group exercises. The latter included (according to the principle that learning resources aren’t only found inside the classroom) sending our small teams to the nearby and lovely Nan HU. (The ensuing session was also fun!)

Proverbs also proved useful tools. Can you imagine the result when I asked successive trainees to say and explain “A stitch in time saves nine”?

" All Work and No Play"

Speaking of proverbs: “all work and no play make Jack a dull boy”, and a wonderful part of the generous hospitality I enjoyed was excursions with ZhuZhu and Max t such relatively near sites as: Guilin with its astonishing limestone pinnacle formations looking like animals (an elephant, a camel): the “ Smart Buddha” underground grotto(visited via electric-powered riverboat) at Xing An; and Yang Mei Ancient Village, dating from the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279A.D.), where the cuisine was… well, I’ll just let you imagine.

Would I return to Nanning and Guangxi? You can also imagine the answer to that question!

﹡Arthur is a former official of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, where he worked in fields as varied as adult literacy and cultural heritage.