Preamble
This paper attempts at taking a comprehensive view of the problem of Chinese Language teaching in Singapore schools by combining personal observations with findings of recent education research. It does not pretend to have identified all such problems and is able to offer definitely workable solutions. However, it is believed that things have changed (especially the students’ and the teachers’ profiles) and a fresh look and a different approach to the problem is needed. It is also believed that the effectiveness of Chinese Language teaching depends on a change in the approach to teaching. The discussion will focus on the following four aspects
1. Nature of Chinese Language
2. Chinese Language teaching
3. Chinese Language in the Curriculum
4. Assessment of and for Chinese Language
The problem of Chinese Language teaching has been with us ever since the introduction of the new unified curriculum in the late 1970’s. Periodic reviews with the aim to improve the situation have been undertaken. These led to modifications of Chinese Language syllabuses and examination formats (including changes in the expected achievement standards). Teaching methods, though not totally neglected, have taken the second seat. Notwithstanding these, the problem seems to refuse to go away.
There is no denial that modifications of syllabuses and examination formats are fundamental and essential as these prescribe what there is to be taught, learned, and assessed. They, metaphorically, map the terrain to be crossed and when it is to be crossed. In a sense, syllabuses and examination formats are concrete ‘hardware’ providing solid grounds for discussion and follow-up. As such, the modifications are visible and self-evident of action having been taken. Compared with this, teaching methods are more elusive and nebulous ‘software’ and hence are more difficult to be pinned down.
However, focusing on syllabuses and examination formats are paying attention to the input and output ends of the production model of teaching, while the throughput is not getting sufficient attention. Admittedly, this is not unique to the teaching of Chinese Language but to practically all subjects. This tendency to relegate teaching methods to secondary importance has been lamented by London University Institute of Education professors Black and Wiliam (1998). They call for more attention to be accorded to the black box (signifying the classroom with its mysterious nature) for which very little is known but in which the action of teaching and learning takes place.
Findings of Recent Educational research
In his professorship inaugural lecture, Wiliam (2007) emphatically emphasizes the importance of raising achievement of pupils. Citing unsuccessful attempts in the United States and the United Kingdom, he concludes that “…until recently, we have been looking in the wrong place for answers” (p. 3, emphasis added). Further, he presents cost-benefit analysis of three different approaches to raising student achievement, as summarized below:
Intervention Extra months of learning
per year Cost
per classroom per year Cost per classroom per extra month of learning
Class-size reduction
by 30% 4 £20k £5k
Increase teacher content knowledge from weak to strong 2 ? ?
Formative assessment or assessment for learning 8 £2k £0.25k
Note: Adapted from Wiliam (2007), Table 1.
The issue of reducing class size as a strategy for raising student achievement is a living controversy with no definite conclusion in sight. Even if it works in some cases, as shown by Wiliam above, the cost is extremely high, not to mention the need for and problems of additional school buildings and teachers. This is further supported by Hattie (cited in Soh, 2010) whose meta-analysis of studies on reduced class size produces a small effect size of 0.21 and on individualized instruction (which is an extreme form of reducing class size) has a trivial or negligible effect size of 0.14. [Incidentally, according to Cohen (1988), an effect size of below 0.2 is trivial, 0.2-0.5 small, 0.5-0.8 medium, and 0.8 or above large.]
Conventional wisdom has it that knowledgeable teachers teach better. Up to a point, this may be true. But, research supporting this assumption is needed. In fact, there are signs that it does not work. Hattie’s (2009) meta-analysis show that teacher training has an average effect size of 0.11 and teachers’ subject matter knowledge has one of 0.09, both fall into the trivial effect category.
Understandably, a teacher who is highly scholarly in a discipline (e.g., Chinese Language) may find her students difficult to teach because of their low level of understanding and lack of background knowledge and hence lack of interest. If she goes ahead to teach at a level commensurate to her scholarship, she will be teaching over the head of the students and thus causing frustration to them and disappointment to herself. As for the cost, it is not difficult to foresee that it is also extremely high, just think of a teacher’s one-year salary and the cost of another teacher to take her place while she studies full-time.
The third is to change the teacher’s approach to assessment. According to Wiliam (2007), as shown in the table above, the cost of raising student achievement by one month through changing teacher’s mode of assessment is only one-twentieth (1/20) of that to attain the same benefit by reducing class size. Note that a change in the approach of assessment is not a change in itself, it entails a change in the approach to teaching.
The research findings cited above are obtained for raising student achievement in general in the American and British contexts and also not for any particular subjects. It stands to reason that they will be largely replicated had studies of the same kind be conducted for the teaching of Chinese Language.
Against such a research background, this paper attempts to reflect on various relevant aspects of teaching Chinese Language in Singapore schools and ventures to make suggestions that hopefully will help in the continuous effort to raise student achievement in Chinese Language. Thus, this paper will cover the following aspects of Chinese Language teaching:
1.Nature of Chinese Language: a visual-based language; the need to emphasize understanding;
2.Chinese Language in the curriculum: a stand-along subject; the need to apply and use culture-based CCA’s.
3.Chinese Language teaching: the need for interesting activities; the use of Hanyu Pinyin as an aid to pronunciations; the use of English to help; computer-assisted learning.
4.Assessment of and for Chinese Language: summative and formative assessment; item formats; number of subtests; combination of subtest score.
Nature of Chinese Language
It is a common belief that language learning has to go through the steps of listening, speaking, reading, and then writing, as these are thought to be the four skills with the later one building on the earlier ones. It is also a common belief that the teaching of Chinese Language has to follow this sequence. The validity of this assumption does not seem to have been questioned.
First, the label of language skills may be a misnomer and knowledge a more appropriate guiding concept. Strictly speaking, skills refers to the controlling and manipulating of muscles to achieve a goal, such as throwing a ball into a net or hitting the correct keys on the piano. While there are some such skills in learning a language like controlling lips to produce certain sounds and moving a pen to write certain words, even these involve more cognitive understanding than muscular control e.g., to differentiate between [r] and [l] which is difficult to Chinese Language speakers, especially adults. Recent neuroscience research shows that if such a sound differentiation is not developed in the very young age, it is difficult later, though not impossible (Blakemore & Frith, 2005). In other words, much of what is called skills in language learning is actually knowledge or understanding that needs be acquired, combined, and re-combined to produce a meaningful language output (such as a grammatically acceptable sentence) where muscular control actually play a minimal role.
Because of the belief that language is made up of four skills, teachers tend to place undue emphasis on practice as is needed in physical training, playing down the role of knowledge or understanding. This has led to the popularity of the audio-lingual or the so-called mother-tongue approach (in contrast with the cognitive-code approach) with its emphasis on oral-audio drills. This inadvertently creates a mismatch between instruction (emphasizing listen and speaking) and assessment (where reading and writing play a more critical role). The natural consequence of this is student’s low achievement in writing-based examinations.
At the same time, English Language is no doubt a sound-based language (as evidenced by its high ‘redundancy’, that is, presenting an idea with many bits of information, e.g., “Yesterday….bought” using two bits of information to signal past tense) where listening and speaking are critical building blocks of reading and writing because of the closer correspondence between its spoken and written forms. This cannot be found in Chinese Language which is vision-based largely. The fact that the same Chinese text can be read (pronounced and understood) in Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hainaness, Teochew, Hakka and many other “Chinese dialects” (a misnomer in itself) which sound very differently attests to this. This has been pointed out many years back by the renowned British linguist Michael A. K. Halliday who considers “writing the same language” (书同文) as the key factor that brings together the vast number of ethnic groups of China whose spoken languages are mutually unintelligible. Thus, oblivion to the distinctively different nature between English Language and Chinese Language has led to an adaptation of the audio-lingual language approach to the teaching of Chinese Language, resulting in the mismatch mentioned earlier.
To redress this misconception (which could well be the underlying cause of achievement problem of the Chinese Language), a re-orientation to understanding the nature of Chinese Language (vis-à-vis English Language) is indicated, and this implies the need to develop and try out a different teaching approach to its teaching. In other words, instead of seeing the learning of Chinese Language as training of skills with its over-emphasis on drills and practice, a re-orientation to place greater emphasis on the acquisition and understanding of knowledge(of Chinese Language) may prove beneficial in the long run.
Chinese Language in the Curriculum
There is no doubt that Singaporean students need to learn English Language to a reasonably high standard for social, political, and economic survival. The curriculum in which Chinese Language is learned as a stand-alone subject in the school curriculum is consistent with these imperative survival needs. Although there were repeated calls (basically from the Chinese Language teaching community) to increase the instructional time (e.g., by using Chinese Language to teach another subject), this is not viable in view of the many subjects competing for the limited curriculum time. In fact, between 15-20% curriculum time is devoted to the teaching of Chinese Language and this is not a small proportion. With such a proportion of curriculum time, students still do not do as well as desired in Chinese Language, obviously it is not a problem of insufficient language instruction time. The problem lies elsewhere. Three reasons may account for this situation: curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
First, the fact that Chinese Language is a stand-alone subject in the curriculum (with some slight deviations or variations in selected schools) means its learning is not supported or reinforced through other subjects. Thus, for instance, a Chinese character taught in one lesson will not appear in other subjects except that it may re-appear in another Chinese Language lesson. This creates the impression that Chinese Language has no other uses except learning it for its own sale or for assessment. This might have affected the students’ motivation to learn the language.
More problematic, from the perspective of psychology of learning, is that this form of learning depends very much on what psychologists call episodic memory in contrast to semantic memory which effective language learning needs. (This is further elaborated in the Appendix.) When learning depends almost totally on episodic memory, what is learned becomes so specific to the learning context that transfer (application to other contexts, e.g., reading and writing) will be difficult.
To address this problem of specificity, opportunities need be consciously created for the students to transfer, apply and use what they have learned in the Chinese Language lessons in some activities meaningful and interesting to them. Although culture-based CCA’s involving Chinese Language are in fact available, even abundantly in selected schools (i.e., the SAP Schools), but the purposes are usually not for language practice and reinforcement and not explicitly at that. This calls for a re-orientation of the culture-based CCA’s and explicit emphasis on reinforcing and applying the language learned.
Chinese Language Teaching
The need for interesting learning activities. Over the years, there has been outcry from the parents that Chinese Language is taught in a manner uninteresting to the students with undue emphasis on memorization and repetitive practice. This is partly caused by the traditional belief that route-learning is the best way to mastery of the skills. It is also partly due to the fact that, hitherto, no systematic empirical research has been conducted to find more effective methods of teaching it, let alone pedagogical principles based on research findings. The situation is aggravated by the fact that, in stark contrast, other subjects are taught with more varied learning activities and materials, including an abundance of computer-based learning packages and aids. In the recent years, efforts have been made at different levels to rectify this unhappy situation by introducing more variety of learning activities, materials, and aids. Evidence of the effect of these efforts is awaited.
Notwithstanding, the traditional emphasis on drills and practice has hardly changed and the teacher remains largely the central or authority figure in the Chinese Language classroom. This discourages students from active engagement in lessons which may be sugar-coated with superficial learning activities and materials presumed to make the lessons interesting while, in essence, the students’ minds may not be actively engaged to process the language input – a requisite for effective language learning.
A very common problem of Chinese Language learning is that students might have learned some Chinese characters in class, but they fail to remember them when needed for completing a test or examination paper and in composition writing. If route-learning is effective as traditionally assumed, this problem should not have arisen. Obviously, some strategies to help students effectively learn Chinese characters in the first place and effectively remembering them later when needed are necessary. This is one area where research findings of the psychology of memory could be explored and empirically tried in Chinese Language teaching in the Singapore context. (See Appendix for more on memory.)
It is quite natural to look toward China for help in the teaching of Chinese Language. Since it is her language, she would have developed effective pedagogy for its teaching. Ironically, this may not be the case as China does not need it because of her language environment, and PRC children cannot help but learning Chinese Language every day and everywhere. Most likely because of this, empirical research findings of this kind cannot be found in the pertinent literature of Chinese Language teaching there, simply because such research has not been done extensively. In this regard, because of our special language context, Singapore could well be the very first nation to do this scientifically and develop a Chinese Language Pedagogy which other nations in the world may be waiting for, if it is done. It is gratifying that, in recent years, some Chinese Language teachers explored this experimentally as their school-based curriculum innovation projects. This is to be encouraged and further supported while a sustained and comprehensive research programme can be considered, planned for, and instituted.
The role of Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu Pinyin as an aid to learning pronunciation of Chinese characters was introduced years ago. Now, the teaching of Hanyu Pinyin takes up the first term of Primary One. The assumption seems to be that if the younger pupils have learned this Chinese phonic system, the problem of learning Chinese characters is solved. Again, this is another example of emphasizing skills. In the teaching of English Language, knowledge of phonics (in contrast to the whole-word approach) has shown to be helpful but not in all cases. It, by analogy, will be an over-expectation for Hanyu Pinyin to solve the pronunciation problem for Chinese Language totally for at least two reasons.
First, for Hanyu Pinyin to function effectively as an aid, it has to be learned to a level of automaticity. To what extent automaticity has been attained by Primary One students by the middle of their first school year is a question of empirical evidence. Granted that the majority have learned sufficiently well the system of sound-symbols, it still needs continuous and conscious application to consolidate the relations between symbols and the sounds they encode. Fortunately, younger children at that age are generally good at imitating abstract sounds which may not have meanings to them, as evidenced by young children reciting nursery rhymes and “counting up to 100”. However, such attainment is an attainment in itself but may not have practical application beyond it (which is the purpose of learning Hanyu Pinyin).
Secondly, Chinese characters have many homophones which all sound almost the same. For example, the sound [da] (for 大) denotes the approximate pronunciations of not less than 22 Chinese characters and the sound [xiao] (for 小) has even more, 32！Of course, many of such Chinese characters will not be encountered by the young students until much latter, the possible confusion is there, nevertheless. Unless Hanyu Pinyin symbols are attached to Chinese characters the meanings of which the young children know, the sound-symbol system could well function just like another ‘language’ to them. (See Appendix for more on Hanyu Pinyin.)
Using English to help. The change in the language profile of the school-going children poses a new problem for Chinese Language teaching or rather accentuates the existing one. In learning, any learning, it makes sense to go from the known to the unknown. Psychologically speaking, this is a form of transfer of training.
Students whose main home language is English would have learned many of the word meanings in lessons of English Language and other subjects and through life experience in English Language. When they have to learn Chinese Language, much of the meanings thus acquired can be transferred without learning them anew, if the teachers know how to appropriately make use of the known (in English) to teach the unknown (in Chinese). For instance, if a Chinese Language teacher explains the concept of fairness using only Chinese Language, she would have to speak in Mandarin something like “fairness means equality and justice” (公平的意思是平等和公正)。In this case, she makes the difficult task even more difficult as such words like equality and justice in Chinese characters or Mandarin are unfamiliar to the students. On the contrary, if the teacher helps her students to recall experiences of playing games where fairness is supposed to be omnipresent, the problem of understand 公平 is immediately solved. This short-cut approach to word meanings bilingually has been discussed and represented in the diagram below (Soh, 1981, Figure 4, p. 29):
When two languages are learned separately, as when using the audio-lingual approach, a symbol (word) in the first language is learned through the triangle A-B-C. Likewise, a symbol in the second language is learned through the triangle A-B-D. In short, the learner has to go through the same process of learning twice, once for each language. However, when using the cognitive-code approach with its emphasis on knowledge (emphasizing understanding), after the L1 symbol has been learned, the learner has to go through only a stage of transfer represented by the line C-D. From the psychological viewpoint, this latter approach is more economical in terms of learning time, more efficient in terms of meaning acquisition, and less frustrating to the learner.
To some extent, even knowledge of English Language’s sentence structures can be transferred to the learning of Chinese Language as the two languages share some common ones. As a matter of fact, learning sentence structures of Chinese Language should pose little problems for English-speaking students because, where sentence structures are concerned, English Language is more flexible with more variations to learn than Chinese Language. For instance, the word yesterday can appear in any one of four different places in the sentence ”I bought a new lap-top” but it can appear only as the first word in a Chinese sentence.
However, Chinese Language teachers (and even Chinese Language scholars) did (or still do) not seem to welcome this approach, especially by the older generation of Chinese Language teachers who were not proficient in English Language enough to the extent that they could use it to help their students and who, psychologically, might feel somewhat threatened. This should not be the case with the younger generation of Chinese Language teachers who found this natural to do without being conscious of it or advised to do it. [Interestingly, on some occasions, younger Chinese Language teachers were found to discuss problems of teaching and action research using English Language!]
Another counter-argument for using English Language to help learning is that the Chinese Language lessons might inadvertently be turned into English Language lessons or English-Chinese translation lesson. Again, this has much to do with the belief in the supremacy of the audio-lingual approach (as against the cognitive-code approach), the supremacy of the Chinese Language, and the teachers’ bilingual proficiency. Again, with the younger generation of the Chinese Language teachers, these should not be a problem as they are more balanced in the two languages (Soh, 1981, p. 101) and have little or no historical baggage. Psychologically, as discussed more thoroughly in the Appendix, it is almost impossible to expect learners of two languages to switch off one language while learning the other, not until he is almost equally proficient in both languages when such shut-down is automatic (again automaticity). In other words, overt or covert translation is inevitable and an interim or transitional process of becoming balanced bilingual. Thus, when the Chinese Language teachers judiciously use English Language in Chinese Language lessons exercising sound professional judgments, the problem of inadvertently turning one into the other should not arise but makes Chinese Language learning more effective and less painful to English-speaking students.
In this regard, a small side-issue needs be considered – Chinese Language teachers from the PRC. As they are not proficient in English Language, it is predictable that they will find the bilingual approach difficult. This, however, can be prevented through administrative measures (e.g., not posting them to schools where the great majority of students lack home support for learning Chinese Language) and, better, training in English Language with the emphasis on listening comprehension and simple conversation. (Incidentally, this might help them to better adjust to the Singapore communities and schools with the added possible outcome that they will stay longer here and wanting to stay.)
Computer-assisted learning. The computer has permeated all aspects of daily life nowadays, and learning and teaching are no exception. Although the benefit of using the computer for effective learning has not been as glorious as it was originally predicted by its proponents, it nevertheless has produce effects which are worthy of note. For a meta-analysis of 566 studies on computer-assisted instruction, carried out mainly in the USA, Hattie (2009) reports an effect size of 0.31, with a SD of 0.14. This suggests that a new project of computer-assisted instruction is likely to obtain an effect size of 0.04 to 0.58, with 95% confidence (Soh, 2010).
A local project involving six groups of primary school students in using the computer to expand their reading returned an effect size close to the average reported by Hattie. This means the obtained effect may not be as great as hoped for but it is on par with a very large number of similar studies in other nations. Although a cost-benefit analysis has not been analyzed for this project, the outcome in terms of students’ performance is encouraging. Using the computer to expand scope of reading is, however, only one of many possible strategies where the computer is put into good use to raise students’ achievement standards in Chinese Language. It is readily appreciated that the potential strategies are limited only by the imagination and hence deserves to be more vigorously pursued.
Assessment for and of Chinese Language Learning
Assessment for learning. Assessment plays a critical role in Singapore schools especially in the form of ‘major’ examinations in the middle and at the end of each school year. Teaching and learning are almost totally ‘guided’ by such examinations as the results of these are used for accountability and selection purposes. The results may also be used for making some adjustments to the curriculum and teaching in the following year at the school level. Absence of timeliness of such long-cycle assessment of learning plays no role in helping students in their learning as the relevant information comes too late for any corrective or remedial actions to be taken to benefit students who have been assessed. This is true of assessment in Chinese Language as in other subjects.
In recent years, there have been calls for teachers to focus on assessment for learning (AfL, or formative assessment) as a strategy to raise students’ achievement standards. Evidence of the efficacy of AfL have been procured by Black & Wiliam (1998) and Heidi, Du, & Wang (2008). For example, Heidi et al. (2008) reported that Grades Three and Four students involved in an AfL project scored much higher in a composition assessment than their comparison counterparts, with a large effect size of 0.88. Such is only a specific example, while Wiliam’s (2007) extensive review of a large number of studies leads him to conclude that “across all these reviews, the use of formative assessment is shown to have a consistent, substantial effect” (p. 8). This corroborates with Hattie’s (2009) meta-analysis which shows that teachers providing formative evaluation information has a large effect size of 0.90.
It is safe to say that none of the studies reviewed by the researchers cited above could have been done for teaching Chinese Language. It is also safe to say that had this been done, the same results will obtain. In view of this, while keeping assessment of learning (summative evaluation) for necessary traditional administrative purposes, Chinese Language teachers need be trained to develop and use rubrics effectively for AfL so that they can help students learn better to raise their achievement standards through short0cycle assessment.
Assessment of learning. As alluded to above, summative assessment of learning has its roles to play although not in teaching (because the information comes too late to loop back to the assessed students), although it has been used as a way to motivate students to learn. The information gathered from traditional examinations is useful for syllabus revisions and curriculum development. However, the qualities of such information deserve attention, and there are two points worthy of mention where Chinese Language examination is concerned. First is the examination structure which is critically related to the reliability (and hence validity) of the examination results. There are two related aspects of this, namely the number of sub-tests and the nature of test items.
Number of subtests. The number of subtests constituting an examination paper has an effect on the reliability of examination results (i.e., scores or marks which are to index students’ learning outcomes). Given the same amount of time for a paper, more sub-tests means less items within each sub-test. Less items in a subtest renders its scores less reliable. Thus, combining more sub-test scores to arrive at total scores for the paper as a whole will make the total scores less reliable because error scores (the unreliable portions of the subtests) are accumulated. Chinese Language examination papers have many sub-tests perhaps with the good intention to cover more adequately different kinds of language skills (or knowledge and understanding), but the end-result is just contrary to this objective. To enhance the sore reliability, a smaller set of sub-tests will do.
Nature of test items. For summative assessment of language, it may be prudent to limit to one sub-test for each of the four important aspects of language learning, namely word meanings, sentence structures, reading comprehension, and composition. For instance, reading comprehension is tested in two ways: multiple choice items and open-ended questions. To assess reading comprehension of Chinese Language text, the multiple choice items suffice. Moreover, the open-ended questions are less pure as the performance is confounded with written expression (which would have been covered in the composition subtest). There are other items formats which are in fact minor variants of items already exist in one or the other subtests. It appears that there is confusion in assessment of learning with assessment for learning. The variants may be reserved for diagnostic purposes to yield detailed information of learning difficulties during instruction, as assessment for learning.
Reliability of examination scores. Students are examined in both written and oral Chinese. This is normal for language examinations. The inclusion of an oral component has a motivating effect on teaching and learning of the spoken language and their relative weights reflect the relative importance placed on them. However, the combination of the scores for the two components needed be weighted and not a simple sum of the two.
The reason is simple. Statistically, when the raw scores for two sub-tests with different means and standard deviations (SD’s) are combined, the scores are automatically weighted by the standard SD’s. The end result is that the total scores thus derived are more reflective of the sub-test with the greater SD. In practical terms, the ranking of the students based on the total scores are determined more by the sub-test with the greater SD, thus rendering the sub-test with the smaller SD less powerful or even non-functioning. In Chinese Language examinations, the written component usually has a much greater SD (because of the mark range allowed) than the oral component (with its smaller mark range allowed and more conservative marking). In the end, students’ total scores are largely or even totally determined by their performance in the written component, and the oral component has much less determining power than assigned.
The solution to this (unheeded) statistical problem is simply to transform the two sets of written and oral scores to the same mean and SD, i.e., to convert the raw scores to T-scores and then weigh them according to the desired weights (percentages) before they are summed. This, in fact, has been done to combine the four sets of subject scores for the T-Aggregates of the Primary School Leaving Examination for the past three decades. With the computer so available nowadays, score transforming is a simple operation by using a pre-designed Excel or SPSS template.
Conclusion
While trying to solve the problem of Chinese Language learning, we need to realize that the problem is not of Chinese Language but of teaching and assessment. Modification of syllabuses and examination formats deal mainly (if not exclusively) with Chinese Language (as content to be learned) and dictates what need be taught and how learning will be assessed. It does not deal with teaching. Recent research (though not on Chinese Language learning) indicates abundantly clear that paying attention to what takes place in the black box (the throughput or what teachers do in their classrooms) is critical to raising students’ achievement standards, much more than attending to the input at one end and output at the other.
To raise Singaporean students’ achievement standards in Chinese Language is an arduous but necessary undertaking. In addition to the modifications to the syllabuses and examination formats, more attention could beneficially be accorded to changing the way the language is taught through re-orientation with regard to the nature of Chinese Language, its function in the curriculum, its teaching and assessment.
Changing syllabuses and examination formats is analogous to changing the recipe and price list of a Chinese restaurant and teaching is the cooking and service. Revising the recipe and price list may not attract patrons as much as is desired unless the cooking and service are also improved. It may be apt to end this paper with the parable below:
A man realized he had lost his car key inside a theatre.
So, he went to search for it under the nearest street light.
When asked why he did not go inside the theatre,
He replied, “I can see clearer here.”
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