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

Schn'ftfatsch~iift: &says it1 Horwr of John &Francis
does one reward the effort? Or does one judge the proficiency? Students somehow
believe that hard work - whatever the results -- should be rewarded. My own
response as a teacher is to ate the reality prinaple: not all hard work is recognized,
nor does all hard work bear fruit. My responsibility is to encourage hard work, but
unfortunately hard work does not always produce the best results.
In this regard, I believe that standardized proficiency tests, either the written
tests or the ACTFL-sponsored oral tests, can free the classroom teacher to use the
grades more flexibly. I often considered the possibility of suggesting to Institute
instructors a grade based solely on effort, regardless of progress - or a combination of
effort and achievement as a basis for a grade. Doubtless, some of you explicitly or
implicitly employ some such criteria.
The culture of foreign language teaching involves due consideration of both
the student's culture and the teacher's; the culture of foreign language teaching
reminds us that native teachers are not, by the very nature of their nativity,
inevitably superior as teachers; the culture of foreign' language teaching requires a
distinction between the native language teacher offering himself as an example of
the culture and offering himself as the model of his native culture. The culture of
foreign language teaching regards teaching as an acquired skill, not as a natural
endowment: one's success as a teacher depends on instinct, skill, and sensitivity, not
on the place of one's birth.
The learning of culture does not always depend on the effort invested. I
how colleagues who know a great deal about Chinese history and Chinese
literature, who don't have any sense of what Chinese culture means. I can count
on the fingers of one hand the American scholars of Chinese who truly understand
the essence of Chinese culture. Clearly, the American teacher of Chinese in my
second story, the one who called at the office, knew nothing of the essence of
Chinese culture. The facts of culture - dates, history, names, texts, words - these
can be enumerated, which is why so many language courses measure levels by the
number of words "covered" in a semester - whatever that means. But does merely
memorizing a list of historical facts, and recognizing a number of cultural artifacts,
constitute functional command of a language or an authentic understanding of its
traditions?
As difficult as it is for students to learn these uncommonly taught languages,
I think we sometimes make it even more difficult. In the East Asian Summer
Language Institute one year, an instructor accustomed to teaching beginning
Chinese assumed control of an advanced Chinese course. All summer long, what
the students learned - to everyone's dismay - was what words and constructions
covered in First- and Second-year Chinese they should have learned. Over and over
again, the instructor in the Fourth-year Chinese class would tell her students in
dismay, ''This construction you should have learned in first- or second-year
Chinese!" By the end of the summer, those fourth-year students became experts at
identifying the words and phrases they had failed to learn in beginning Chinese.
I've often wondered about the perverse burden placed on foreign language students
- not only do they have to learn the language, but they have to remember which
words and which constructions were learned in which grades! Even a native
doesn't have to do that. What that particular fourth-year instructor was teaching