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

Sino-Phronic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 199 1)
was not Chinese culture, but the culture of teaching Chinese. Now, while this may
be useful knowledge for the teacher, it is totally extraneous knowledge for the
student.
In reading the students' evaluation of instruction at EASLI over the years, I
have been struck - particularly in the early years - by how many students
complained about the textbooks: it was dear that the time they did not devote to
learning the language was spent on discovering the deficiencies in the textbooks.
Indubitably, knowing the faults of each textbook is useful information for the
teacher, but I cannot see how it can benefit the student. It may be naive, but
wouldn't the time be better spent learning the language than struggling against. this
or that textbook or against the teacher who assigned the textbook? Students learning
a language are presumably not enrolled in a school of education: they want to learn
the language, not, presumably, how to teach the language. Yet, I daresay that most if
not all of you have encountered students who are expert in how they should be
taught languages. Students have wasted more time and concentration critiquing
the ways of learning the language than in actually learning the language. Ask
yourself how often you encounter this phenomenon: years after they have taken a
language course students are voluble about the trials of learning that language; no
one, however, is eager to use that hard-earned language in functional speech.
Preposterous and familiar as these occurrences are , they nevertheless point to a
lacuna in the language-teaching and language-learning process. These expressions
of frustration, these evidences of failure, reflect a lack of attention on the part of
instructors to "the culture of teaching."
What do I mean by "the culture of teaching"? First of all, although there are A
different traditions and approaches to teaching, I believe that teaching has its own
culture appropriate to the enterprise - depending on the subject, the setting, the
environment. The American approach to teaching tends toward the egalitarian;
the Asian approach to teaching tends toward the authoritarian. The American
approach to teaching stresses analysis, discrimination, and discursive skills; the
Asian approach to teaching tends toward rote memory, intuition, and emulation as
modes of learning. Language teachers must employ both approaches. In the initial
stages, rote memory, intuition, and emulation are stressed, but the teaching of
grammar emphasizes analysis, discrimination, and discursive skills. The culture of
teaching demands that the appropriate approach be used for the subject matter and
for the student. American students are accustomed to ask why something is before
they can internalize it; students brought up in Asian educational traditions are
more emulative and less skeptical. Above all, for the foreign language teacher, the
culture of teaching distinguishes dearly between one's responsibilities as a teacher
from one's allegiances as a native. It is no longer enough for a person to be native
in the foreign language being taught: if it were, there would be over a billion
quwied teachers of Chinese, at least 120 million qualified teachers of Japanese, and
more than 45 million qualified teachers of Korean. We must discard the myth that
the native is the ultimate authority where foreign language teaching is concerned.
The native & an authentic authority on the culture; he or she is not necessarily an
authority on the teaching of that culture. Two years ago, the Hokkaido
International Foundation recognized this distinction when aey sent 17 native
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