摘要
Introduction Spoken instructions are often surprisingly ineffective, especially when in a foreign language and across cultures. With any course, and particularly on ATT courses, there always seems to be a daunting amount of information for trainees to absorb. This paper will outline how Chongqing University attempted to address the procedures and problems of organising a teacher-training course by using what we, rather inaccurately, called "memos". Memos were written by the project team and given to each trainee. They borrowed the style of a newsletter, but in content they resembled, what are called in China, "open letters". They were printed about three times a semester, and usually contained five or six points of information. We intended them to be both informal and businesslike. The word ’memo’ seemed to embody all this so ’memos’ they became. In practice they were longer and more structured than the kind of memo you would leave on somebody’s desk. To illustrate this paper we use both excerpts from memos and statistics and quotations from trainees.
