As someone who grows up in China, I hate to speak anything negatively about my homeland. But the energy and time spent on learning English before I went to overseas make it hard not to talk anything out. Learning English is not easy at all in a country where almost nobody really uses it on a regular basis. Before reaching to the core of the sore, I’d like to brief you about the English language training industry a little bit.

There are over 3000 language training schools and the market is fragmented with players that vary dramatically in size. Most of the language education firms are exam-oriented. Among them, the biggest and most well-known is called New Oriental School, which is a NASDAQ listed company. Funny thing is I once went there for their 1-month training program in order to do well in the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) exam. Did it help? Honestly, the answer is no! I guess the reason why it fell short of my expectation is the school routinely emphasized on teaching students skills of gaining higher scores in exams by taking shortcuts only and neglecting the contents and contexts whatsoever. It did nothing more than familiarized me with the components and process of the GMAT exam. That’s the only value it provided to a customer like me back then. The New Oriental School is the biggest training organization that provides training on exams such as TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), GRE, GMAT, LSAT, SAT, etc. In terms of IELTS training, Global Education Group (a franchise group) is the largest in the Chinese market. I would put companies like the New Oriental School, Global Education Group, and Chinese educational systems under traditional training organization category since they all apply a “teach” methodology as this is the case right from the inception of history of English training industry in China. In the past 15 years, however, other types of English training firms started to emerge in the market. Some of these companies employed varied numbers of foreign teachers and trained on more pragmatic contents than exams. But the primary methodology adopted is still “teach”. These firms include companies like Wall Street English, English First, Web English (not web-based), VIPABC, etc.

Traditional training firms such as those mentioned above have contributed some valuable things (I must be honest), but not enough because they put up efforts primarily on adopting traditional approaches and teach students/customers everything, which is somehow okay to some English learners. But the reality is, 50 percent (to say the least) of English learners in China already have some foundation in English and most of these 50 percent lack the ability to speak the language. What these learners urgently need is strengthen their spoken English capability, which hasn’t been well taken care of. I believe spoken English is the bottleneck and priority for many Chinese English learners. There is an old cliché about the performance of Chinese student in learning English: they are strong in reading, but lame in speaking and listening comprehension. Many young Chinese may feel the stigma becomes increasingly hard to stand as the Chinese economy advances. From my experience and experiences of many others, the solution to the stigma like this would never be “teach”, which has been done a million years. You see, spoken English is a capability, not knowledge. Knowledge can be learned. But capability must be achieved through appropriate practice. In my opinion, after one lays a foundation in English, the best way to improve spoken English is through practice in the form of interaction with native English speakers.

Speaking of improving spoken English, I know the traditional methodology is deeply flawed from my own experience of learning the language for so many years. These flaws are highly correlated with the ubiquitous lacking of practicing among English learners in China. Like I said, spoken English is a capability and it’s hard to achieve that capability by merely stacking knowledge which can’t be turned into ability unless practice is iterated. Before I talk about my own experience, let me give you a couple of examples to demonstrate why the traditional “teach” methodology has failed to work on effectively improving spoken English capability. First, a survey says that 95 percent of Chinese college graduates could not communicate with a foreigner using simple English in spite of the fact that they’ve been learning the language for so many years. Another example would be interesting. This is about my Chinese classmates when I was pursuing my MBA in Canada. While all of my local Canadian peers participate in class participation, aside of me, only one Chinese asks questions for once or twice. The rest of my Chinese classmates never speak up in any class! You may think they may be too shy to speak English publicly. But from my observation, it is due to the fact that they often feel it’s overwhelmingly challenging for them to effectively express themselves. And that guy who did speak up for a couple of times expressed himself awkwardly compared with me despite having way higher scores on both TOEFL and GMAT. These examples showcase why “teach” methodology has done a bad job in terms of cultivating verbal communication ability because all the subjects in these examples are the exact products of the traditional methodology.

Now let’s get to my experience. My spoken English was a lot better than most Chinese (who have learned the language from Junior High School up till the end of the university) even before going to overseas to pursue my master degree. But it was not the result of teaching. As memory recalls itself, I started learning alphabets from the second half of the beginning year of my Junior High. By the third year of my junior high, I’ve improved a lot by reading out the boring textbooks repeatedly in my spare time and iterating the process. By the time I entered Senior High (which is a different school from my Junior High), I was honored to be appointed the Representative for English class. My Senior High experience was filled with exams and exam preparation aiming at a good score on the national university entrance exam (so that we can be accepted by a targeted university). Nobody learns a class because of interest and English is no exception. But I thought differently because I was attracted by it as I became better at it. I even asked my parents to buy a transistor radio for me so that I can listen to Voice of America. I remember the radio’s got a long antenna and each time when I tuned in to Voice of America, I had to do the combination of turning the antenna and moving the wheel on the radio in order to get good access to the channel. This habit of listening to Voice of America followed me right to the university. As a result of listening to the special English programs of Voice of America, my English strengthened quickly. By the time I was in the university, I was the only student in the class that our English teacher (a charming Chinese young lady) always asked to read out the text we were learning in the class (although I hated to be called up to do this all the time as I was quite shy back then). And her “hobby” of ordering me to do that prevailed in most of her classes for two years. It was almost impossible to see any foreigner when I was in Junior High. So I didn’t have a chance to use English during that period of time. I did team up with my friends to find several opportunities to converse with some foreigners while studying in the university. But I can’t recall any details by now. One anecdote I still remember now is I was the only student who not only understood most of the contents of a workshop on high-tech ceramics given by an invited Swedish professor to all students from the non-metallurgical materials major, but also asked him an array of questions after the presentation. All other students were just sitting quietly during the entire process.

I thought about what I did right that makes me remarkably better than most students in terms of learning English (particularly spoken English). Was it the teaching that boosted my performance in spoken English by the time I graduated from the university? Absolutely not! Rather, it was all the practice (which my peers didn’t do any) I took time on that helped me move ahead of the other guys. Is that simple! Look, reading aloud repeatedly and listening to Voice of America at earlier stages and interacting with native English speakers at later stages (home and abroad) are all practice and they truly helped me to build an advantage! By now, you could’ve seen the point why the “teach” methodology has worked poorly on the problem of feeble spoken English capability that most young Chinese face and practice is highly likely to significantly better the performance in spoken English. So, we got to do things differently to resolve the problem that learners face and here is my secret sauces to help Chinese young adults do better in spoken English.

Basically, I do two major overhauls to the old traditional approach. First, I change the class format to an absolutely 1-on-1 private training mode to give customers full attention they deserve (30 minutes for a typical session) and the following step possible. Second, instead of “teach”, I adopt a “practice” philosophy/methodology and focus on maximizing trainee participation in interaction with the trainer. For this purpose, I specifically developed a reasonably-designed unique Topic Based Training System (TBTS) that will be applied to all of the training programs. This system is a well-structured interactive training system based on the philosophy of strengthening client spoken English capability by maximizing client engagement in practice in the form of discussion and not focusing on “teach” the contents (all topics and questions needed for training programs are carefully developed and built in the system; different from anything that are available in the market). Now, you may wonder if TBTS can be used on just anyone. You’re right, TBTS is only suitable for those who’s already laid a foundation in English. Although I will have an auxiliary short bridging program in place for customers whose spoken English does not meet minimum requirement towards using our training service that applies TBTS, I don’t plan to attract customers who need to build from scratch. This spoken English training service will be solely based on the Internet via either Skype or a proprietary web conferencing tool (prefer audio chatting to video chatting to avoid distraction at the client side).

To assist with the operation, I’ve created a Trainer’s Manual as the training system for our future foreign trainers/teachers (only native English speaker trainers will be hired on programs that apply TBTS to ensure native English thinking and shun Chinglish). I also crafted an App demo. Aside from these, I’ve connected to a pool of good teachers with qualifications. Now the launch day hasn’t come and I’m currently preparing for setting up the website before everything else gets done (except the Business Plan and the PPT presentation, which have been completed). As my goal is to help with customers’ spoken English capability so that that they can use it in the real world, the TBTS has been designed in a way to mimic real world situations/scenarios instead of faking it like what some other competitors have done. Hopefully, this project will pave the way for young Chinese to pursue their personal goals or dreams!