No magic potion for English perfection

"What can I do to improve my English?" - this has to be one of the questions I am asked most often.

I usually stop what I'm doing, look at the person asking it, and try and think of a polite thing to say to them. Something that will allow me to go back to doing whatever it was, without making them terribly angry.

Why?

Because there is no single, simple, hard and fast answer to that question.

Please, foreign English teachers across China are not the keepers of some magic potion, which they will only dispense to willing acolytes under secret circumstances. We can't mysteriously help people speak English.

Of course, when I first set out to teach English to a classroom of middle school pupils, I didn't know that, either.

I thought I really did have a solution to the English learning problem, and that the kids would be miraculously able to instantly understand everything I said.

That mindset lasted for about 5 minutes into my first lesson, when it dawned on me that my students didn't have a clue as to what I was saying.

So I went away, and thought about the problem. I discussed it with other foreign English teachers at the school, who seemed, for the most, to be equally in the dark about why we weren't really making any headway into actually improving the students' English skills.

Then I tried a different tactic - I went to see one of the school's Chinese English teachers. I sat down with her, and discovered that I was not alone in my problems, she couldn't cram the English language into the kids, either.

Where were we going wrong? What made it so hard for us to get these kids to learn?

Exasperated, I rang my Dad, who had almost four decades of teaching experience behind him.

It was an epiphany moment when he said: "You can't teach anyone something. They have to want to learn it."

I nearly dropped the phone in shock.

Since then, I've seen that he's right.

That old adage, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" applies to teaching just as much as it does to equestrian handling.

After that, I gave up trying to pound home English principles, and focused on trying activities that would be not only fun, but might also make learning some English almost possible. No more Power Point presentations, or endless lecturing from behind a desk - things that can make any subject boring.

If you study any subject without a real reason to do so, you're probably not going to excel at it. You're only making work for yourself, and keeping a teacher in a job - not a great motivation.

The students I see making the most progress are the ones who never look for that "magic potion". It's the ones that just knuckle down and try their hardest - the ones that aren't afraid to make mistakes, because they know that I can correct their errors as they go along.

If a student won't talk for fear of being less than perfect, how do they know if they're doing it right or not?

Students need to look back on how difficult it was, and how long it took, to learn Chinese, before they ask for a "magic potion" solution.

All I can say is that it took me a long time to learn English, and that process is still on going!