Beginner Level oral test (London)

 

The oral test for the Beginners class was about three minutes.  

    That is a long time for someone who’d started learning Chinese from zero level, doing under two hours a week (a 10-minute break means it’s not the full two hours that’s advertised) for 25 weeks or so.

    I primed them by doing a chart with a bubble in the middle, and satellite bubbles around that.

    The middle bubble is Self: their surname, personal name, age, nationality, where they live, marital status, have children or not. 

    The satellite bubbles are: 

Family born into (parents, siblings); 

Family created (partner, children); 

Occupation: student (subject, their teachers and fellow students).

    For Occupation, I told them to be students, as it’s harder for them to say what kind of work they do at that level (one is an IP law expert, e.g.).

    For the Family bubbles, I told them all to have lots of siblings, and to be married with lots of children.  

    This means that time would be taken up describing all these people in their lives.  Three minutes easily filled up.

    Dennis, who didn’t even have a girlfriend at the time, said during the oral test that he had a wife (and he giggled at this point about the lie), with two children (giggling again).

    Englishman Tom, single like Dennis, came up with Gubo for his son’s name and Palanka for his daughter’s.  Gubo and Palanka are the names of the two Westerners in the textbook used for the course — they’re not standard English names.  My eyebrows shot up, and I said, “Gubo and Palanka!??”  Tom said impatiently, “Oh, you know what I mean!” but his face actually said, “Well, it was YOU who told us to play this silly game in the first place!”

    The taiji group, who always went to the pub after the lessons, said, “We wore only the colours we could describe, and you didn’t even ask us anything that involves colours!”

(London, 1986?)