School headmaster receives praise for using mahjong to teach students English
Learning a new language that's not your mother tongue can be real daunting. A school in Chengdu, China, has made national news headlines for its creative way of teaching its students English with mahjong tiles.
Mahjong is a traditional Chinese card game that's similar to the Western's world rummy. It is usually played with four players and involves 144 tiles based on Chinese characters and symbols.
Many Chinese children pick up on how to play mahjong from their parents from a young age, simply by observing the adults playing rounds of the game.
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But the mahjong sets used at Jitou Middle School are different and so is the objective.
The "English Mahjong" was modified by the school's headmaster Tian Jingyun who replaced the original characters with English letters and numbering of each alphabet.
As each student take their turn in a clockwise manner, students must make up words with the tiles they have on hand, writing them down in their notebooks. But that's where the similarity to Scrabble ends. The winner of the game is the student who gets the most words, makes a complete sentence with the words and then tells a story using those words. Not easy!
Besides mahjong, the school also has poker cards and checkers with English letters on them. All these Tian's way of making learning English a fun exercise for the students.
Since news broke, netizens have praised Tian for his dedication to teaching his students and his ability to think out of the box.
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