In 1997, I also taught at the National University of Singapore, and in June, I flew to Taipei to attend the International Symposium on Ming and Qing Opera organized by the Institute of Culture and Philosophy of the Academia Sinica. That was my first time in Taiwan. After the meeting, a Taiwanese scholar wondered why I was from the department of Chinese, but I had published several English papers before. Is it true that the Chinese departments in mainland China attach great importance to English teaching?
Special emphasis on teaching English?! I was dumbfounded. For a while, I didn't know how to explain to her the miracles of our generation when they learned English...
In the fall of 1968, the middle school finally resumed. Grades were renamed "Lian", classes were renamed "Platoons", and groups were renamed "Classes".
At that time, there were also English classes, and I also learned 26 letters, but I taught a few letters with the text at a time, and then summarized them after the teaching was completed. One day I taught U, V, W, and suddenly, a troublemaker in the class shouted loudly: "Oh ~ hey ~ beat me", the students listened to the laughter, the teacher was crying and laughing, there was nothing to do with him. There are such wizards under the heavens, who can't even read books half a trick, but funny is talented. One day, the teacher taught the word Saturday (Saturday), and the guy's inspiration came again, shouting, "Kill the head!" (Yangzhou dialect does not have a tongue-twisting sound, "kill" is also a sound word, short and urgent collection, so the pronunciation of "killing head" is very similar to Saturday) This time, the class was a burst of laughter...
After a while, there was a situation on the northern border, and the whole country dug deep holes to prepare for war, and teaching must also cooperate with combat readiness. In English class, the teacher changed our military language: don't move! Hands up! Shoot and don't kill! Cloud. More than twenty years later, I was doing my PhD at the University of Hawaii. Once I had a small talk with an American classmate and talked about it. Lao Mei heard this, laughed, and said, if they really entered China, can they understand your English?! They don't speak English yeah...
In 1977, the college entrance examination was resumed. Fortunately, I didn't take the foreign language exam that year, otherwise I don't know how many of today's national pillars (except in the next) would have been blocked from the university at that time.
In my first English class after being admitted to the Chinese Department of Nanjing University, I scored 5 points on the thorough test - I could only write 26 letters. Some of the students in the class had excellent English and could be exempted as a result. The English teachers who taught us at that time came from the Public English Teaching and Research Department. She told us that her original major was Russian and English was her second foreign. At that time, there was no such thing as electronic teaching equipment, and some were high-pitched loudspeakers in schools every day, playing "English 900 Sentences". No matter whether it is spring, summer, autumn or winter, no matter whether it is windy or rainy, there are always groups of young college students standing outside and reading English sentence by sentence with loudspeakers.
At that time, the English class was a large class of more than forty people. The textbook uses public English textbooks compiled by NTU before the end of the Cultural Revolution. There are also several mimeographed supplementary textbooks, including "Engels's Speech at Marx's Tomb", "Lenin in London", and so on.
At that time, I could say that I attached great importance to learning English, and I had to squeeze two or three hours of time out of the very precious study time every day to serve/tinker with it. Not wanting to go abroad! At that time, I couldn't dream that I would have the opportunity to study in the United Kingdom and then the United States later. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, only a very small number of publicly-funded students studied abroad — the vast majority of them studied science and engineering, and the liberal arts students were basically foreign language majors. For an ordinary Chinese student like me, studying abroad is like ascending to the moon, and I don't even have to think about it.
At that time, the reason why I worked hard to learn English was actually to enter graduate school. There are two public courses to be taken, one is politics and the other is a foreign language. To learn a foreign language, you must spend water grinding kung fu, long flowing water, continuous line, and protracted war. Later, in my senior year, some of my classmates really failed to be admitted to Mr. Cheng Qianfan's graduate school because of a two-point difference in English. Mr. Cheng sighed. However, although this benevolent brother failed to enter the academic world, he was already thriving.
Although I didn't want to go abroad, I paid great attention to the pronunciation of English reading aloud. Because I got the impression from the "Introduction to Linguistics" class in my freshman year: speech is the foundation of language, and inaccurate speech can cause obstacles to learning foreign languages. In addition, it also benefits from a little understanding of myself. One of my classmates in our dormitory had a heavy accent in English, which prevented him from memorizing words. For this, he was distressed; And I also specifically perceive that inaccurate pronunciation is not conducive to the memory of English words.
Kung Fu does not live up to the painstaking people, when I was studying for graduate school, English finally did not drag me back; However, when I first arrived in Beijing, I was still a "dumb" who could not speak English. How can I open my mouth? As a graduate student at the China Academy of Arts, my major was the history and theory of opera performance directors, which required me to often go to the theater to observe various performances. Watching Peking Opera from time to time will see some foreigners. Most of the tourists who come and go are tourists arranged by travel agencies, who often skip the show and draw lots (leave) at halftime. However, there are also some foreigners who are scattered and brave, and this kind of person does not only look at the liveliness when watching the drama, but also goes to the stage to walk around and look east and west when they rest. Seeing this situation, I took the initiative to go forward to talk, and when I caught the opportunity, I poured the common sense of the opera and the plot synopsis that I memorized in English in advance to him/her. The other party also knows that I want to practice English, but I am not disgusted, because he/she is still somewhat interested in what I am saying. So, it was by relying on this cheekiness that the "dumb" began to speak, and the iron tree blossomed (there was a song in the mid-1970s that sang about acupuncture therapy that made the deaf and dumb people speak, "The iron tree of a thousand years bloomed"), Ha.
By the mid-1980s, the momentum of reform and opening up had exceeded the imagination of ordinary people, and the tide of studying abroad also surged up. In the winter of 1986, I was given the opportunity to be selected as a visiting scholar in the first China-UK Friendship Scholarship, went to Chengdu to participate in English training according to the regulations, and then took the IELTS exam on the spot (before I only knew toeFL). Although it is intensive training, teachers, teaching materials and teaching methods do not dare to compliment. Exams are imminent, and the pressure is great. People are often dizzy and miserable by the variety of multiple choice questions.
One day, the mock exam ended and we got together to make small talk. Some people lamented that when We have developed in China, foreigners are competing to study in China, they must learn Chinese, let them taste multiple choice questions with Chinese characteristics!
Between the pain and laughter, one of them came up with a question first. Although he studied science and engineering, the foundation of Tang poetry is really good:
Want to be poor, go up to the ____ floor.
(A) One (B) Two (C) Three (D) N
Another immediate follow-up, also a student of science and engineering:
Persuade the jun to make a glass of wine, and the west out of the Yang Guan no ____.
(A) Loved one (B) Lover (C) Friend (D) Deceased
Another casually continued: "The international students from France will choose (B) in all likelihood." The crowd laughed...
Sun Mei, a native of Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. When he was a teenager, he studied Peking Opera. Ph.D. in Drama, University of Hawaii, where he taught at the National University of Singapore.