Teaching, I'm learning, is as experimental a process as research science. For the 2+ weeks that I've been teaching the Intermediate English class, I've been trying different approaches to generate substantial conversations in English among my students. Encouraging the students to talk when they don't yet feel confident of their English skills has been the hardest part of my job. On most days, my methods have prompted only a little conversation, and once or twice, my efforts have fallen flat.

Today, though, something went wonderfully right. At the beginning of the hour, I asked students to arrange themselves in pairs, and then to practice with the present perfect continuous tense by taking turns asking and answering the following Q/A pair (which I wrote on the board):

Q. How long have you been studying English?
A. I have been studying English for ___ months/years.

The students efficiently divided into pairs, asked and answered the questions, and then, to my surprise--since I expected this exercise to take 5 minutes at most--they continued to talk animatedly for the entire hour, moving on to compare notes on studying English, living in Mcleodganj, traveling elsewhere in India, and a variety of other subjects. They were careful to continue to speak English for the whole hour, which the exception of only a few very brief forays into Tibetan to explain something.

I could have stopped them to move on to the verb tense exercises I'd prepared, but that didn't feel right. Instead, I circulated among the student pairs, answering questions and cheering on several people who felt least confident about their English skills. During the course of the hour, faces gradually brightened and the energy in the room remained high. None of the conversations flagged. By the end of the hour, I could tell that most of the students were truly excited to discover that they could converse for so long in English.

I remained at Lha for the daily conversation class (in which a monk, two young Tibetan women, and I explored the potential for starting a new restaurant here featuring chocolate momos--I would be the first customer, I pledged). Afterwards, I encountered one of my least confident students in the hallway. He had a serious question to ask a fellow teacher and me: Did we think he was ready to read a Sidney Sheldon novel? Go ahead and try, we encouraged him. If you don't like it, you could try an easier book from the Lha library first (the library contains many good books for learners). As it turns out, he'd already bought his Sidney Sheldon book. So we're crossing our fingers--tightly--that he'll enjoy this new adventure.