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

Sino-Plutonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1, 1991)
culture he is teaching, but he has the advantage of seeing the difficulty of acquiring
another language non-natively. Merely knowing what to teach is merely the
beginning of the culture of teaching. The native teacher of a foreign language must
never forget, tempted as she might be on occasion to forget it, that her job is not to t
create replicas of herself, for an authentic student of another language does not
pretend to be what he isn't; the non-native teacher must also realize that his job is
not to produce a pseudoslite of exotic language speakers, which has nothing to do
with education, and everything to do with pseudo-culture, like I-ching cultists and
Zen aficionadoes and Mandarin-mongering collectors of orientalia. (I like to
remind students who are smug about their command of Chinese that there are
more than a billion Chinese who speak the language more fluently. Perhaps you
encounter the same arrogance among successful learners of Japanese and Korean.)
Culture, after all, is neither content - as in history; nor skill - as in mathematics,
but a dynamic combination of both. Teaching culture is much more complex that
teaching either history or mathematics, because it disconcerts our very sense of
selfhood. It confuses what we know with what we are, which is why, in teaching as
well as learning another language and culture, there must be pride, not arrogance;
while one cannot afford an inferiority complex, still there must be a sense of
humility.
I started off with a verbal mirror image, a clausal palindrome: the teaching of
culture and the culture of teaching. That reflective doubling seems now symbolic of
the paradoxes of language instruction. A good language teacher requires a deep
personal commitment, yet that teacher must not confuse the personal with the
professional. A good language teacher must spur his student to his best efforts, yet
he must not hesitate to indicate the same student's deficienaes. A good language
teacher cannot be judgmental about her students, because each student has the same
right to quality instruction, yet at the same time she must be utterly fair and
professional in assessing the progress of each student.
What I have tried to suggest is that, when we consider the problems and
challenges of teaching culture, we might give some thought to the demands and the
complexities of the culture of teaching.
Eugene Eoyang
East Asian Summer Language Institute
Symposium on the Teaching of Culture
July 14,1990
Indiana University