True Story 1.04
Teacher misinterprets
Chinese students’ English comprehension
The setting for this story
Stuart, an experienced English teacher from Canada, relocated to China to teach English as a foreign language to university students there. Below, Stuart recalls one of his favorite memories from those days.
A story of misaligned minds5
I had heard about the reserve and formality of Chinese students. So on the first day of class I started things off in a way that signaled informality and engagement. I told – in English – a funny story. Shouldn’t be a problem for my “advanced” students, right?
I was relieved to find that, throughout my telling of the story, the students chuckled and laughed.
The first assignment I gave them was to keep journals written in English that they would share with me. During this first class, I asked them to make an initial entry. That evening, I read their journals. Student after student, with the best spelling and grammar they could muster, thanked me for being their teacher, declared how much they appreciated my easygoing manner, and as politely as possible told me that they had understood nothing during the entire first day.
Stuart’s question
Why did my Chinese students want me to believe they found my story funny?
Critique of story 1.04
To understand this story, one must first eliminate the commonly held assumption that, for all people everywhere, the act of laughing indicates that the person is reacting to a story, song, image, or situation that they find humorous. But in this case, the students didn’t “get” Stuart’s story at all.
So why were they laughing?
It’s likely that, as he began his story, Stuart indicated somehow that it would be amusing. The probable explanation of the students’ behavior is that, upon realizing that they were grasping nothing about Stuart’s story and couldn’t appreciate its amusement, they became nervous and embarrassed because not laughing would seem disrespectful to Stuart and cause him to lose “face.” Their laughter disguised their nervousness and embarrassment because they, supposedly the “advanced” students, couldn’t follow Stuart’s story, thus disappointing his expectations.
While I was teaching in Beijing, I came upon a fender-bender. The police were on the scene investigating – accompanied by the drivers’ uproarious laughter. It’s hard to fathom that both drivers found their predicament that humorous. Far more likely is that they were extremely nervous and embarrassed about the whole situation, especially with the police on the scene.
For thought
Try for a few days to consciously take note of every time you utter laughter-like sounds, then ask yourself, “Did those sounds indicate amusement?” If you cannot answer “Yes,” figure out what you actually were feeling or revealing to others in that moment. For example, some scholars say that laughter during conversations reveals our friendly feelings toward the other person.
Related stories
Story 4.08 describes students as laughing at an idea stated by their teacher, but questions whether their laughter signaled amusement. Story 1.17 concerns not laughter but another type of nonverbal behavior in the setting of a preschool classroom. In its case, however, the misalignment was extraordinarily subtle; its nature was discovered only because the class was being videotaped.
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Endnotes:
5 Squire, 531.
All full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.