“I grew up in a small town where it is the case that even English teachers always have a heavy accent.” Nate, the founder of Flicker, shared his original intention to run his project. Flicker is a public welfare project completely operated by a group of students from Wuhan University, aimed at improving the articulateness of front-line middle school teachers.

Nate, named Wang Hongtao in Chinese, is a sophomore majoring in international finance at Wuhan University’s School of Economics and Management. He had been self-abased ever since a transfer student from a capital city came to his middle school in a small town. Being accustomed to English teachers’ unauthentic accent phenomenon, the transfer student’s fluent and authentic oral English completely reversed Nate’s stereotype towards spoken English and deeply touched him. Thus, he began to practice pronunciation himself, relying on tutorials online.

During the process, Nate excavated his true love for articulation skills and began to run his own pedagogical channel on Bilibili. After entering university, with the thought of helping more kids in small towns like him, Nate decided to start a public welfare project to correct middle school teachers’ pronunciation. He began to look for schoolmates who shared his passion for spoken English, and hence Flicker was built. By contacting middle school teachers in their hometown, Flicker had their first group of learners. They conceived to help those teachers to develop a systematic knowledge of phonetic symbols, liaison and oral English. In this way, their teaching ability would naturally progress, having a positive effect on the English study environment in middle schools.

Nate sharing his study experience

“I want to make every effort to improve middle school teachers’ pronunciation, even correct it one by one.” Nate and his team members have encountered many difficulties during this process. First is the difficulty of finding companions. A team member, Li Xuan thought it was an advertisement for an English training institution when he saw Nate’s propaganda. However, after communicating with Nate, Li was deeply moved by his enthusiasm and selflessness and chose to join the project. However, there are many people who don’t have the patience to hear Nate’s story, so they try to write attractive articles on their WeChat official account to explain what they are doing. A good tendency is that several students doing entrepreneurial projects noticed their articles and joined the team, which helped business a lot. The number of views of their official account is rising steadily under rational management, and their name recognition is expanding among middle school English teachers across different cities.

Li Xuan telling his story of joining Flicker

Training front-line teachers also requires strategy. Although these middle school teachers aim to enhance their pronunciation, it’s hard for them to adhere to regular and chronological online study despite their awareness of its benefits. Team members thus changed their strategy: arranging study assignments on learning apps, and turning voluntary learning into compulsory tasks (if a learner hadn’t completed compulsory tasks within the required time, he/she would be removed from the project). Considering teachers’ psychological acceptance, Nate established a WeChat group with all teachers to communicate with them. He was very careful with his relationship with these teachers and said in the group, “The relationship between us is not that I guide you. Instead, we all communicate and share knowledge with each other.” The WeChat group provides them with a platform to share experience and solve problems. With Nate’s sincerity, teachers are now willing to watch course videos and finish assignments.

Although everything is gradually on track, it still requires a lot of time and effort to turn the idea of Flicker into practice. Nate spent much time writing and printing a textbook on his own, even all the course videos were made by him, and even the microphone used in their conference was bought by Nate using his own money. Nate’s parents also showed strong objection to this project at first, for they thought it wasted too much time without any payoff; after all, as a non-English major student, operating an individual tutorial account on Bilibili already consumed much of his time and energy. But Nate said he firmed a belief in Flicker when hearing the word “faith” on the course, Summary of Mao Zedong’s Theories. Flicker is the faith in his mind, and changing the English education environment is his original intention which he will stick to throughout his lifetime.

The textbook written by Nate

“Whatever their initial aspiration was, most English teachers choose to stay in our class once they listen to Nate’s lesson,” Li Xuan said. When he saw a video uploaded by an English teacher in third grade showing the moment of students singing Dream it Possible together, Li’s heart was struck by a sensation. This teacher actively participated in the sound correction course and shared her study achievements in the WeChat group. Such feedback made Li feel that they were really doing a meaningful thing.

Now that more and more teachers have joined from all around the country and of different grades, Flicker is gradually growing in scale. “Our common goal is to enhance spoken English and create a better learning environment for children.” Li says, “We hope more teachers as well as more student volunteers will join us, adding more matchsticks to the conflagration of Flicker.”

Volunteer training at Flicker

Photo by Wang Jiayu

Edited by Chen Jiaqi, Qin Zehao, Qin Shihan, Zou Xiaohan, Sylvia, Xi Bingqing