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

Sino-Plutonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 1 99 1 )
must be yes: we want them to become like natives of the language they are studying.
And, quite naturally, native language teachers hold themselves up as models to
emulate.
The trouble with this attitude is that some native teachers of a foreign
language regard themselves as a standard by which to find all their students
deficient. They acquire what I call the arrogance of the native. Do we really intend
that American students be mistaken for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? Do we want rn
them to give up their American identity in order to become - made over as it were -
- into Chinese, Japanese, or Korean? The answer is emphatically no, even if it were
possible. The most successful learners of language do not impersonate a native,
they are very much themselves; what they have done is to enlarge their identities
to include another personality; they have "naturalized" a foreign discourse.
I suspect that much of the resistance to the proficiency movement among
native teachers of language is that they view it as an assault by non-natives on the
authenticity of their own culture. The Enghshman in my third anecdote reminds
us how sensitive we are about our cultural identity. One would not be human if
one weren't in some sense offended at the prospect of a judgment by a non-native,
or by some other impersonal measure, as to how "authentic" one's own native
culture is. But the issue is not to measure whether one is or is not an authentic
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean: the issue is how effectively an instructor transmits to
a non-native what he knows about the language which he acquired natively. The
culture of teaching demands that he put aside his personal cultural identity to
assess the pedagogical results. Even so, it is difficult for a native teacher to
appreciate why a non-native might be more successful in transmitting the language A
and culture to non-native students. That proposition strikes a very tender nerve:
it's virtually like admitting that "only Englishmen can understand China." This is
where the confusion between the area of expertise and one's native background is
mischievous. No one has problems judging between a good or bad teacher of
physics: it is irrelevant what the native culture of the teacher is, whether Indian or
English or German. An Indian who is a good teacher of physics could be an
authentic or inauthentic exponent of Indian culture. The two concerns are totally
unrelated logically. Good Indians don't necessarily make good physidsts; and good
physidsts don't necessarily make good Indians. But, when we deal with instructors
of foreign languages in which he or she is native, there is an inevitable
psvcholoaical connection. My former colleague, Richard S. Y. Chi, who passed away
five years ago, was a linguist, a Buddhist scholar, a philosopher, a calligrapher: he
knew Chinese culture both analytically and intuitively. But, by his own admission,
he was a poor language teacher. He was secure enough as a Chinese, and as a
successful scholar, to recognize that fact. He did not confuse his identity as a
Chinese with his competence as a teacher of Chinese.
The human and personal response by any native teacher of a language to a
student who works very hard at learning the language must be encouragement:
what better encouragement and reward than conferring on that student the highest
grade? Yet professional responsibility requires that an impersonal judgment be
made on the student's command of the language. One of the most poignant
dilemmas for good language teachers is the hard-working but unsuccessful student;