Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schriftes~schri!: <strong>Essays</strong> in Honor of John DeFrancis
sole1y.k his or her nativity. In the case of rarely taught languages, given the
shortage of available authentic natives, there was not a great deal of choice. The
consequences of this all too familiar scenario - for the individuals hired, for the
students taught, and for the institutions that engaged in these practices - was
frustration, misunderstanding, failed expectations. The individuals hired were
treated as "resident foreigners", not as professionals, and they were paid accordingly.
Subconsciously, institutions asked themselves: how much of an achievement can it
be to be native? It is not, after all, as difficult as learning to be a surgeon or becoming
a scientist. Everyone, after all, is native to some culture or other. Why should they
be paid very much for merely being native? The students taught suffered because,
even when many of them came to be fond of their often charmingly authentic
native teachers, most of them somehow failed to internalize the lessons of language
learning: A great deal of painstaking effort, on the part of student and teacher, was
wasted. And finally, the institutions that engaged in these practices are . .
disappointed when they discover they did not get what they were looking for:
students who could use these languages after their course of instruction.
The situation is now changing. Although the demand for instructors in
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean has increased dramatically in the last ten years, that
demand, in many cases if not all, has been exceeded by the supply of natives
available to teach these languages. This population is further augmented by the
sigruhcant numbers of non-native students of these languages who have completed
their training and who are vying with natives for teaching positions. It is dear that
merely being native is no longer sufficient - as it was years ago. Even so,
particularly at the high school level in less populated and less cosmopolitan areas,
the supply of natives available is not sufficient, and it is difficult for local boards of
education to attract non-resident, non-native teachers; having spent nearly a decade
to acquire command over the language, these recent graduates are, understandably,
reluctant to relocate in these sparsely populated areas, where the opportunity to use
and to practice their hard-earned language skills, to say nothing of enhancing their
professional dossier, is minimal.
It is time, I think, to take stock of the situation. And some of the major issues
raised by changes in the profession revolve around the question of culture, the
teaching of culture, and its obverse - a neglected subject that deserves more
attention: the culture of teaching.
What is it that is taught when we teach culture? Are we asking the students
to imitate the teacher? The answer is both yes and no - which is the source of the
confusion. All language is taught and learned imitatively, because infants have
neither the intellectual skills nor the memory to learn any other way. So, when we
teach students a foreign language, we ask them to imitate the way we speak, the way
we pronounce, the way we gesture. This quite natural dependency on imitation as
the method of teaching is indispensable, but in teaching culture, imitation can be a
pitfall: far from being the mode of learning, it can be a hugely inauthentic,
disconcerting charade. When we teach an American student Chinese, Japanese, or
Korean, are we asking them to become Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? In the sense
that we want them to think as if they were Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, our answer