Crazy English

From Evan Osnos' "Letter from China", The New Yorker, April 28 2008 on Li Yang's "Crazy English" teaching camps. I actually laughed for three straight minutes at the following passage.

"Li peered at the students and called them to their feet. They were doctors in their thirties and forties, handpicked by the city’s hospitals to work at the Games. If foreign fans and coaches get sick, these are the doctors they will see. But, like millions of English learners in China, the doctors have little confidence speaking this language that they have spent years studying by textbook. Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.

Li stood before the students, his right arm raised in the manner of a tent revivalist, and launched them into English at the top of their lungs. “I!” he thundered. “I!” they thundered back.

“Would!”

“Would!”

“Like!”

“Like!”

“To!”

“To!”

“Take!”

“Take!”

“Your!”

“Your!”

“Tem! Per! Ture!”

“Tem! Per! Ture!”

One by one, the doctors tried it out. “I would like to take your temperature!” a woman in stylish black glasses yelled, followed by a man in a military uniform. As Li went around the room, each voice sounded a bit more confident than the one before. (How a patient might react to such bluster was anyone’s guess.)"

Read the whole article here.