CLTA Newsletter September 2022

“The privilege of the nonnative speaker, revisited”
Dr. Scott McGinnis
Defense Language Institute-Washington Office
First off, my deepest thanks to Christine Liu, who in her role as Editor of
the Newsletter over the past several months, invited me to consider putting this
piece together.
And second, full disclosure: This is by no means a criticism of and/or
complaint about the current state of the field and art in Chinese language pedagogy,
circa 2022. It is, however, grounded in the nearly four decades that I have spent
either deeply invested (= 1985-2000), or on the periphery (= 2000-present) of the
Chinese language teaching profession – including a decade as the coordinator of the
Chinese language programs at the Universities of Oregon and Maryland, and lead
teacher for summer immersion programs at Indiana University and Middlebury
College. So while I have self-admittedly spent more of my professional life NOT
teaching Chinese than teaching it, my roots are deep, and my commitment towards
its emerging development remain unshakable.
Between 2005 and 2007, I had the good fortune of being asked to serve on
the Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages for the Modern Language Association
– the report from which many of you may be familiar with (see https://
www.mla.org/Resources/Guidelines-and-Data/Reports-and-Professional-
Guidelines/Teaching-Enrollments-and-Programs/Foreign-Languages-and-Higher-
Education-New-Structures-for-a-Changed-World). In the course of my service on
that committee, I had the equally great good fortune to serve as a fellow committee
member with Professor Claire Kramsch, then on the faculty of the University of
California-Berkeley, and through which I became acquainted with a truly seminal
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