Teach English in Zhaokang Zhen - Linfen Shi

I have a pen pal in France who is a native of Vietnam. She has been learning English as a second language for years. Her English is fairly adept, but she struggles with some of the more esoteric vocabulary. Therefore, to help her learning process, and for my teaching practice, we decided to read Joseph Heller's classic satirical novel, and one of my favorite books, Catch 22 over the phone. Catch 22 is riddled with humor which relies on a firm understanding of the English language. The vocabulary Heller employs is often purposefully verbose and challenging as part of the humor, and so, the novel is a challenging endeavor for a English as a second language student to tackle. I have, therefore, attempted to be as methodical as possible in teaching the book. A typical session goes as follows. First, my pen pal will read through a chapter of the book on her own to get a feeling for the language she has trouble with. Then we will begin to read each paragraph, alternating between who reads in order for her to have my reading as a model and also get experience reading the material herself. Then, after each paragraph, she will tell me each word she had trouble with and I will give her a definition in simpler words (or even in sounds for words like "sputter"). Then we will talk about the plot in each paragraph: what is being described, what is going on etc. Finally, we will talk about the humor in each paragraph. We will discuss which words are odd or funny and the juxtaposition between certain vocabulary and the rest of the passage. For instance take the following paragraph from chapter one: "The colonel dwelt in a vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was troubling him. They hurled lights in his eyes to see if he could see, rammed needles into nerves to hear if he could feel. There was a urologist for his urine, a lymphologist for his lymph, an endocrinologist for his endocrines, a psychologist for his psyche, a dermatologist for his derma; there was a pathologist for his pathos, a cystologist for his cysts, and a bald and pedantic cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard who had been shanghaied ruthlessly into the Medical Corps by a faulty anode in an I.B.M. machine and spent his sessions with the dying colonel trying to discuss Moby Dick with him" (Heller, 8) First, she read this paragraph on her own the night before. Then I read it to her over the phone. Next, we talked about the vocabulary she had difficulty with. She wanted to know what the -ologist words meant, what shangheid means, what an IBM machine is, and what the definitions of a few other words were. I then gave her the definitions of these words, and explained how the -ologist suffix denoted someone that studies something. Then, with her better understanding of the vocabulary, we talked about the plot of the section: a important and very sick man in the army is being treated by many different specialists. Finally, we discussed what about this paragraph is funny. She was able to get some of the humor from her first read, such as the fact that the image of this important man being surrounded by people all doing different things is funny. We then went into the specifics of what is funny about these different specialists. It starts innocuously enough with the urologist, lymphologist, and ectocrinologist, all of which are real medical professions which could plausibly be treating this colonel. Then we come to the psychologist, who is out of place because this colonel is physically sick not mentally, the pathologist, who would study the cause of diseases not his pathos, the cystologist, which is not a real profession, and finally the cetologist, which is obviously ridiculous because a cetologist studies whales not humans. We then discussed how the cetologist got into this position by looking at the words shanghied (to be tricked into a position) and IBM machine (a computer). A computer bug has forced a Harvard whale scientist to travel to Italy to look at a dying colonel, which when broken down into simple language like so was obviously ridiculous to my pen pal. She then got the joke and learned some new vocabulary at the same time. I believe that this methodology is a good one for teaching vocabulary out of any authentic material, especially challenging and humorous ones like Catch 22.