Mr Grindtooth again

I'm doing a business training course for a Chinese state-owned enterprise this month.

It's arranged through an 'English school' run by a Chinese university (god help me!).

Thus.... a course is thrown together in a headlong rush, by people who know nothing whatsoever about teaching or course planning, and without any consultation with the poor bloody trainers who will be delivering it... without any level testing or needs assessment of the intended students... and, as far as I can discern, without even any meaningful discussion about the course structure or purpose with the people responsible for booking it.

Still, I don't have to worry too much any of this headless chicken stuff because at least "all the course materials will be provided" for me.

They provide one book.

It's a self-study book rather than a classroom workbook.

Most of it is based on listening activities, which work particularly poorly in a classroom setting (and they've given me a very large group for this course; nearly twice as big as you'd hope for in an intensive business skills-focused course). Moreover, it's very high level listening material - content-rich, employing some sophisticated vocabulary, and delivered in a variety of non-standard English accents, many of them Eastern European. It's just too darned difficult for most of my students. 

[It has become something of an article of dogma in TESOL circles that foreign learners should be exposed to 'authentic English' in all its richness and variety. Cambridge Exams are particularly keen on this use of European non-native speaker accents for their Business English Certificate. I see the virtues of this in principle. Unfortunately, in practice, I've just about never met a Chinese English speaker who can cope with it at all. Their comprehension just falls apart if they're listening to audio only, and being confronted with a non-standard accent and idiomatic vocabulary.]

And even if I did make use of all this inappropriate listening material and adapted the other exercises in the book to classroom use, it's only about 12 to 15 hours' worth of material. I have 28 timetabled hours to fill.

So, the book is all but discarded, and I have to create most of the activities and materials myself.

But the school likes the feedback I'm getting so much, they're asking me to do a course for a different group of students on the same topic next month.

Oh dear: it is supposed to be exactly the same course, using exactly the same book.

But at least it's only 15 hours this time.

Just ONCE before I leave this country, I'd like to work with someone who actually gives a damn about course design. I fear it's never going to happen.

This is (one of the reasons) why I do not like working for Chinese universities.