Practice English Listening B1 Exercises – Live and learn

7:00 a.m.   They start the day at 7:00 a.m., much earlier than usual.

30 minutes a day   They do 30 minutes of physical exercises every day instead of two hours a week.

50   There are 50 students in one class instead of 30.

11:30 a.m.   They have lunch, and it’s early for them.

5:00 p.m.   Lessons end at 5:00, but they can’t go home.

7:00 p.m.   They clean the classroom before they go home.

12 hours   The school day is 12 hours long, which is very tiring for British students.

Week 1

On the first day of week one, students change their normal school uniforms for Chinese-style tracksuits. They start the day much earlier than usual, at seven in the morning, with thirty minutes of physical exercise. In Britain, PE is usually fun, and students only have two hours a week, but in the Chinese system, students do PE every day. Then lessons begin, and students get another shock – all fifty of them are together in one class. In Britain, the maximum is normally thirty, but in China it’s common to have fifty kids in one room. They stop for lunch early, at eleven thirty. Classes finish at five o’clock, but they’re not allowed to go home. They have dinner at school, and after dinner they still have a lot of homework and self-study. When they finish, at seven o’clock, they have to clean the classroom. The school day is twelve hours long. British students find this exhausting!

Sts should check: 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10

Weeks 2 and 3

There are big differences between Chinese and British teaching styles. The Chinese teachers teach very fast. Everything is done in books and on paper, and there is a lot of copying from the board. In Britain, for example in science, the approach is to let students do experiments and discover things by themselves, with less help from the teacher.

Discipline is also very different in British and Chinese schools. In China, the teachers have complete authority, but in Britain, the same teachers are having problems. They’re surprised that the students don’t take school seriously. When her students don’t pay attention, Miss Yang, the science teacher, makes them stand and look at the wall, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. As Rosie, one of the students, says, ‘It probably works in China, because everybody does what their teacher says. But here we don’t care. We think it’s funny.’

By week three there is a serious problem with discipline. Some students like the Chinese system, but a lot of others are behaving badly in class, and some students stop coming to class completely. The Chinese teachers are losing control, and realize they need to change the way they are teaching or their students will fail the tests in week four. They start to teach the children about Chinese culture and food, and they add Chinese face-massage to their daily lessons. They also try to teach patience and concentration using traditional Chinese games.

During a meeting with the parents, the Chinese teachers try to get them to help and to encourage their children to work hard. The parents are impressed, and the Chinese teachers are filled with new energy and confidence.

Week 4

During the last week of the experiment, the children in the Chinese class are behaving better. At the end of the week, all the students from the classes with Chinese teachers and the classes with British ones take tests in maths, science, and Mandarin. These tests will decide which style of teaching has worked better. So what do the results show?

In the maths test, the children taught by British teachers get an average of fifty-four per cent, and the class taught by Chinese teachers gets… sixty-eight per cent. In science, British-taught students get fifty per cent and Chinese-taught students get… fifty-eight per cent. And in Mandarin, British-taught students get thirty-seven per cent, and Chinese-taught students get…forty-six per cent. The Chinese teachers are delighted and their students are really grateful and happy.

So the Chinese teachers get better results, but does that mean their teaching methods are better? Neil Strowger, the head teacher at the school, says, ‘It clearly gets good results, but the discipline is too strict for some students.’ The Chinese teachers agree that their method doesn’t help to develop personality or creativity. Perhaps the last word should go to Miss Li, the Mandarin teacher. As she says, ‘It’s very hard to say which system is better…but I think we both learned from each other.’