简述 ：来自中国北部边疆内蒙古的Susan，有着和大草原一样宽广的心胸，有着放歌大西北般的豪爽性格。自加入平和任教后，课上课下你总能见到她活跃的身影，何时何地都讲一口完美英语的她是不会轻易和你讲中文的。也许你会不禁一问，为什么她能讲一口近乎完美的英语？
How I Improved My English GLV English Teacher - Susan Bai 7/6/2007 Flourishing grasslands stretching out as far as the eye can see. Under the clear blue sky, yurts, cattle and horses leisurely blend into the landscape. This is my hometown – Inner Mongolia. I am Chinese but some native English speakers say I don’t sound like a Chinese speaker, I sound like a native speaker. When I was teaching in GLV Zhuhai two students happily offered to teach me Chinese because they thought I must have grown up in a foreign country. I take it as a huge compliment to my level of English. The fact is my parents don’t speak a word of English and I do speak very good Chinese as well. 
| 远自大草原的父母来看我 |
Like most Chinese people of my age, I started to learn English when I was in middle school. Being one of the top students in my class all I did was to remember what I needed to do the exams well. I got interested in English because my teacher was nice and occasionally she would tell us a little about the western culture which was so different, yet fascinating, to a young, inquiring, mind. First things first. Because of my interest in the language I went to Teacher’s College and became an English major student. The very first thing I did was to work on my pronunciation. We all know that there is no “th” sound or “l” sound in Chinese and that is where I started from – the phonetics. I can still remember how my Chinese teacher sat so close to me to show me where exactly she put her tongue when saying “school”,”cool”,”stool”and ”thanks”,”thirty-three”,”thousand”. Today I say to all my students that the first thing, or the most important thing ,in learning English is to be able to pronounce words correctly for that ensures understanding and communication. Imagine how others feel if you say “I sink alzough shui is shuai, shui is still an interesting person.” instead of “I think although she is shy, she is still an interesting person.” Just listen. It is probably true that I didn’t know how to talk in English after all my education at school. After graduation I started to work as an English teacher in 1999. Apparently 
| 我说你听同进步 |
when people meet each other, nobody is going to hand you a piece of paper and ask you to fill in the blanks, they will say “Hi” and start to talk to you. Bear in mind it is not a matter of being able to do the exams well but the ability to use the language to communicate effectively that counts in the real world. I was working full time and I was just too tired to do any serious study after I came home from work. What I did was to turn on the TV and watch CCTV-4 for an hour. (The single hour English programme I could watch on TV because CCTV-9 wasn’t, and isn’t, on cable in my hometown.) The first half was “World Wide Watch” and the second was “Dialogue”. To be perfectly honest, when I started with “World Wide Watch” I could not understand much of what was said because everybody spoke really fast. With pictures and videos on the screen and some knowledge of what’s going on in the world I was able to catch some of the simple words and sentences to figure out the general idea of the news. I just sat there without worrying if I could understand it or not. I listened for what I did understand. To me, the idea was to train my ears to be familiar with the English sound. It was a reinforcement of words I did know and things I could understand. It was how I relaxed myself after work. Five steps to learn a new word. 
| 好奇-What's this in English? |
The more I listened, the more confident I became, then I realized I needed to enlarge my vocabulary. Being too lazy to read, my philosophy was to listen for what I didn’t understand. With “World Wide Watch” if I heard a word I didn’t know, I had five steps to learn it. a) Listen and remember the pronunciation. b) Guess what it means by referring to how it was used in the context. c) Try to spell it first. d) Look it up in a dictionary. If I can find it there I obviously got it right the first time and congratulations. e) Correct myself. If not, I try a different spelling and look it up again. I could therefore correct myself and this helped me to even remember it better. Self-dictation. “Dialogue” is a talk show where the host interviews different people on various domestic and international topics. It was one of the two things available for me so I decided to put our huge tape-recorder in front of the TV and tape the half-hour programme onto a cassette so that I could do self-dictation. Play – pause – write down 
| 台上台下，游刃有余 |
every single word – this is what I did. I had to rewind numerous times simply because I needed to write down every word of what each person said in the interview. I then read it as a whole and tried to correct any of my own grammatical errors. Listening and writing those interviews down helped me to not only understand how people talk in a conversational manner, but also pay attention to the subtle changes in spoken language when people run words together. Chinese friends and the telephone. After all these years of learning and self-study it was time to speak in English. Some complain that there is no language environment available. This is not a problem for me because whenever I meet with my Chinese friends who truly love the language as I do, we talk to each other in English. As a beginner I felt much more comfortable talking to them in English rather than speaking to a foreigner. No doubt all of us needed some time to think about how to express what’s on our mind in English and there were times when we had to use “Chinglish” to make ourselves understood. Practice makes perfect. I gained confidence and developed my speaking skills through continuous practice and learning from others. Today we’re so used to talking to each other in English no matter where we are and what we do. Thanks to my Chinese friends. Thanks for your dedicated efforts in encouraging and inspiring me along the journey of language learning. 
| 我和学生成为了朋友 |
Practicing English over the phone may sound strange to someone, but I believe telephone conversation is the real testimony of someone’s level of English, especially their listening and speaking ability. Without being at the same place, without seeing the person and looking at his body language or facial expressions you have to really work hard to make sure misunderstandings don’t occur when you communicate. That’s why a lot of companies nowadays have different rounds of telephone interviews with their potential employees before they offer them a face-to-face interview. If you have no problem talking to people in English over the phone you’ll impress your employer right from the start. Once again I started to telephone my Chinese friends in English first. In those days I would recite what I wanted to say even before I picked up the phone and dialed the number. Of course it didn’t work out well because you never know what people might say at the other end. It was my way to reassure myself that I could do it and perhaps this shows you where I started from. Just write. 
| 专注而后一击 |
I talked about “just listen” at the beginning of my story. What I mean is to listen without worrying how much you can understand. Here “just write” means writing without worrying about your mistakes. I started to write my diary in English when I was in high school. At that time all I had was three years of English study in middle school. I knew some basic grammar and I had very limited vocabulary, but this didn’t stop me from writing about what I thought and what had happened in my life. Nobody reads or corrects my diary – I just write. Today I have several notebooks full of my diaries and I have saved all the English emails I wrote to my friends around the world. When I go back and read them I can easily find my own mistakes there, but at that time they were perfectly all right in expressing what I wanted to say since it’s something I wrote freely and confidently to myself. The purpose of writing like this is to help you to be more fluent in English and start to think in English. I’m glad each GLV student is required to write journals every day. Teachers make sure that students are doing it but we don’t read or correct students’ journals. I think this will be a great help to all students. Hopefully students will keep writing it even when they leave GLV because from my years of experience this is what worked for me. Benefit of the “TIE”. One of the reasons that I decided to work at GLV is because we offer the English “Total Immersion Experience” programme. I know it’s going to help Chinese students to improve their English because I myself was so lucky to have had such an experience with my Australian “mum”. 
| 如今我也桃李满天下 |
We started as colleagues. I worked as her teaching assistant so we got to know each other quite well. We both like travelling. Every year for the one-month Chinese summer and winter holiday we would set out to enjoy our holidays. Over the years the two of us have travelled widely throughout China: north to Harbin, and through Changchun, Shenyang, Siping, Shan Hai Guan, Tianjin, Beijing and other towns and cities along the way; south to Guilin, Yangshuo and Longsheng. We have travelled to Chengdu, Chongqing, along The Three Gorges to Yichang and then through Wuhan, Jingdezhen and other cities. We have been west to Xi'an, Urumqi, Kashgar and Tashkurgan and have travelled back through Turpan to Golmud before heading up to Lhasa. Another trip took us to Guangzhou, and then north along the coastal areas of Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai, through Nanjing, and Ji’nan to Qingdao. We have climbed Lu Shan, Huang Shan and Tai Shan. We have travelled through the heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter, because each season brings its own beauty. What an unforgettable and unique experience for me! I still remember how I learned the word “floss” by asking her “What do you call the thing that you use to clean your teeth? It looks like thread or string and this is what you do (demonstrating how to use it).” Using only English to communicate with her gave me the opportunity to improve my English speaking skills to a greater level of fluency. What’s more important is that it broadened my horizons of western culture and the world. Thank you to those foreign friends of mine! 编辑：江筱汝 Ruby
本文中文版链接：提高英语学习之我见
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