Speak English Any Way You Want

07 Mar Speak English Any Way You Want

I’m so delighted by a project initiated by friends in Taiwan that I decided to share it with readers. What follows is a guest post written by Pei and Joe Spirito. Enjoy!

For the last year or so, we’ve been teaching a class in English at Taitung Community University (TCU) in the city of Taitung, Taiwan.

However, to be honest, what we’re doing really isn’t teaching in any traditional sense of that word and what our students are attending aren’t really classes.  They’re play sessions for adults and what we’re playing with is the English language. The process has been both scary and delightful; the outcomes (which are still evolving, of course) are students developing new, much more friendly relationships with English, and with learning in general.

Before we go any further, we should tell you who “we” are.  We’re Pei and Joe Spirito. One of us, Pei, is an artist and graphic designer who grew up in Taiwan and has spent most of her adult life in France, Italy and United States. The other of us, Joe, is an American theatrical set designer and life long progressive political activist who worked with the Castillo Theatre in New York City for almost 30 years. How we wound up living and working together in Taiwan is a complex love story involving Pei needing to renew her citizenship and Joe missing her and fleeing the COVID pandemic in New York.  What’s important here is that we’re both artists who have been profoundly influenced by the performatory approach to development practiced by the East Side Institute, the All Stars Project and its sister organizations around the world.  We’re convinced that individuals and groups develop—and creativity flourishes—in an environment of play and performance.  And we were determined to find a way to bring that discovery to Taiwan.

It wasn’t easy. Traditional Chinese culture, like most cultures around the world, emphasizes one way (monologic) learning in which the teacher teaches and the students passively absorb the teacher’s “wisdom.”  Over and over we met with educators with proposals to bring our playful approach to learning into their institutions.  We said we would use games and skits to help people improve their performances as English speakers.  We can’t tell you how many times we were told, “Taiwanese people will not do that!”  Finally, we got a foot in the door after Pei organized a group of TCU students to walk into the administration office and lobby for a class led by us. The administration agreed to an eight-week summer course, as a try out.

We called it “Speak English Any Way You Want—The Teacher Is Off Today!” It consisted of weekly two-hour workshops. The students that summer ranged in age from 32 to 68. (TCU is the equivalent of a “community college” in the U.S.; most of its students are older and working class.)  We functioned as “play leaders” (as distinct from “teachers”) and led the group in playing improv games, performing skits, doing readings of English texts with open discussion and questions throughout. We encouraged everyone to talk a lot, to make mistakes and to celebrate them. We gave each student a “Permission to Make Mistakes” voucher which, upon redeeming, would be automatically renewed! We discouraged note-taking and memorization. We avoided translating English words into Chinese; instead the group would say what they thought a word meant or how it was to be used. And it worked. Everyone played together and together we created an environment in which all the participants grew—including growing as performers of English.

At the final session, we asked the students to speak about the progress of their classmates. This led to an outpouring of enthusiastic and perceptive appreciation of each other’s growth. Among their comments: “Sylvia was so quiet that you could not hear her. Now she speaks (English) really loud!” and “Ding Qian (who was the least capable of speaking English at the start of the workshop series) is so creative. He really led the role-playing scenes that we did. That was so unexpected.” As the conversation continued, all the students agreed that they spoke more English in these eight workshops than they had in all the classes they had taken in and outside of school over many decades.

We did the course again in the fall. One difference the second time around was that we started performing a play from the Castillo Theatre repertory, The Donut Play by Dan Friedman. The play follows a group of working-class young people in New York City who are struggling to earn a living and, at the same time, build supportive social relationships.  It consists of 24 short, mostly two-character scenes.  The language is simple, and very specific to New York.  We went slowly with this, one scene per week, because within each scene there is much to unpack, many questions to answer. The students really enjoyed performing the characters and it helped them to perform in English with more emotion and more varied emphasis and tone.

Our first workshop last summer had eight students, twenty are registered for this spring.  So our experiment is growing.  It’s a tiny toehold in higher education here in Taiwan.  But we do think it’s an example of what can be achieved if you’re willing to be bold, do the hard work of organizing and be playful on every step of the journey.

You can meet some of our students on this video Hello New York 230220