As a "Conversational English" Teacher in China I consider that it is my job to teach students how to acquire English language skills so that when they speak, they will do so effectively.

This semester I am in a new school, and my job entails teaching my classes two lessons of 'Oral English' and two lessons of 'Writing English'.

While I have always taught the principles of writing in my conversational classes (since both speaking and writing rely on the same ability to think in the language), now I found that I have copious amounts of written work to check. It is tedious! But at least I am seeing some progress being made by the students.

Google, wonderful people that they are, have given me access to create some new websites that sort of tag onto my kingscalendar domain name, and I am currently using this new technology to provide further assistance to my students. I have for example, created the English Lessons  home page so that students can 'read' what has been covered in class.

I also created the Principles of business homepage so that they might take their studies a little more seriously.

I even created an advice page  where former students can let current students know what the workplace is really like. I even posted one of those articles here at Magic City.

It is really quite difficult when supplied with just a classroom and a chalk board to adequately 'get the point across' when trying to explain to the students some of their written errors. The other day I was sitting around wishing that I had a 'multi-media' room in which to teach, when it suddenly occurred to me that I could use the new google sites feature, to interact with the students, and so I created a new site called: Class Notes 

The purpose of that particular site is to allow me to explain my meaning in writing so that students may take their time to digest the teaching points. Although not currently interactive, I have today left a message there asking the students if they would like me to make it so.  Hopefully they will choose that option.

Now I must point out here that I am not a grammar teacher, so I don't use technical grammar language to explain my meaning, but I think what I am doing is going to be of some advantage to the students.

So having just finished a particular file today, with a specific section on 'Ambiguities', I sat back to read my hometown local news, and came across a story originating in the USA.

After reading it, I firstly had to wonder why it is that I am even bothering to try and teach the students correct English, and secondly, if one day, the Chinese will speak and write English with skill, superior to our own.

As the three "R's" fall by the wayside while we teach 'politically correct' educational agendas, the standard of English is falling. That this is so was quite evident in the article entitled: Hunt on for son of dead lesbian fugitive. The article is about United States police being on the hunt for the son of a lesbian who suicided. I quote:

• However, it was not until last month that an murder warrant for the lesbian lovers was issued.

OK! So it was just a typo right? Well what about this from the same article:

• "We would still like to make sure that [Kristopher] is OK, get a chance to talk to him and just verify that he did not end up becoming injured or killed because of this case," Captain Scot Haug was quoted as saying.

These types of errors frequently appear in the media. For instance, there was the headline which read: "Only one third of men wash their hands in the toilet."  Or the one which read: "Man shoots dead wife and lawyer in Court"

When I read such things I begin to fear that the Chinese will one day put us to shame. Don't laugh! Try arguing with a Chinese student about a particular sentence construction and just listen as they start using technical language to dissect the grammar.

Some of them can even tell you that the sentence: "The standard of living has increased" is grammatically incorrect. And it is!

Wouldn't it be funny if one day we had to import Chinese to teach our kids correct English?