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AT THE risk of being narrow in focus, it might be useful to describe how the Chinese language program at a single university has functioned over the past ten years. We at Portland State University would like to think that our university, whether by luck or intention, has become a leader in certain reforms that other institutions are also beginning to pursue and that it brings to these reforms many of the same weaknesses and strengths as others do.
The facts of PSU's daily existence and the basis for our dreams for the future are as follows:
Many of the above characteristics felt like liabilities until recently, when PSU tried to realign its mission and resources to turn those liabilities into strengths. We have a name for ourselves: an urban university. We intend to become essential to the city's life by teaching our undergraduates in innovative ways; we also intend to develop better graduate programs and cooperative projects in areas central to Portland's needs.
Areas of metropolitan cooperation obviously include the social sciences, but there are important ways in which foreign language faculty members fit into the mission: first, we provide expertise on the cultures with which Portland comes in contact; second, our department is the most affordable, convenient local source of academically rigorous language classes. Most PSU students and many outsiders come to us at some point: we have close to 130 sections each quarter. (Eight or nine of those sections are in Chinese.) The dozens or hundreds of students turned away from Spanish each fall indicate a high latent demand for our services.
We offer the MA in French, German, and Spanish; the BA in Japanese, Russian, and (soon) Chinese; and two or three years of Arabic, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, and Portuguese. We grant from thirty to fifty BA degrees and about ten MAs a year. We have twenty-four faculty members and varying numbers of TAs. Among less commonly taught languages, we now have three Japanese faculty members, two Chinese, two Russian, one Korean, and one Arabic and Hebrew, and we are hoping for a budget that could add more. Our Japanese and Chinese programs date back about twelve years, Korean about nine years.
Chinese enrollments at Portland State generally have been smaller than Japanese. Ten years ago it was common for over ninety people to sign up for Chinese 101; sometimes we turned people away. Those numbers dropped following the 1989 Tian'anmen massacre, but they are climbing again. Japanese recently has lost some enrollment but not enough to signal a trend.
The Chinese and Japanese programs differ in the students' backgrounds and motivations, in our teaching methods, and even in aspects of the two languages themselves. In fact, in important ways Chinese has more in common with Arabic than it has with Japanese. Japanese, after all, is used in only one country, and it has absorbed characteristics of other languages while influencing none. Chinese and Arabic have influenced other languages; their local versions are native tongues in many nations. Their literary forms have linked educated people worldwide. Students and teachers of both languages are highly diverse, practitioners disagree over what version of each language to promote, and teaching materials are plentiful but disorganized. Some of these points also apply to Spanish and French. Indeed Chinese has so much in common with so many languages that it can be as readily included in a foreign language department as in an East Asian department.
Of course Chinese has much in common with Japanese as well. Most obvious is that both languages take equally long for an English speaker to learn. Given a mildly rigorous program of five hours a week, an average eighteen-year-old American undergraduate with a monolingual background taking 101 in a class of other monolingual Americans can learn basic sentences structures in the first year and half, reach a halting Intermediate-Low or - Mid speaking level in the first two years, and perhaps speak at the Intermediate-High or Advanced level after four years. (A trip to China improves that situation.) As for reading, one must know three thousand characters to plow through most modern written material, more for classical. After two years students know only fifteen hundred characters, and their reading is effectively limited to prepared texts. After four years a student may have been exposed to three thousand characters but probably will not know them well enough to read with sure comprehension or comfort. Writing comprehensibly with a dictionary is in some ways easier than reading, but writing smooth, presentable Chinese takes a lifetime of practice. Also dismaying is that almost no Western learners ever develop the hand motions necessary for minimally decent Chinese penmanship, even if their speech sounds close to native.
Westerners learning to read Chinese have particular problems developing speed: to reach even the moderately slow pace of five minutes a page can take years of effort, as the eyes struggle to respond to the square symbols. Fluent students who have lived in China may not be good readers unless they too spend long hours at the books. In short, regardless of theories that claim all languages to be equally simple or complex, learning Chinese is arduous, frustrating and time-consuming for an adult American native, and it often necessitates lower expectations than learning many other languages does.
Japanese is almost as hard, especially considering that to become truly literate in Japanese one must learn much written Chinese as well. To ease the task, most Japanese programs not only provide well-crafted material on video and computer but also train students on romanized material for the first year, which allows the students to build fluency before tackling writing in the second year. In the third year, during which profuse vocabulary and cultural details begin to overwhelm learners, PSU offers an oral course alongside a written course and encourages students to take both at once.
Our Chinese program also has a wealth of third-year offerings, including newspaper and classical courses, but they all contain both oral and written aspects. Even more different from the Japanese course is our beginning sequence: we start with characters from the first day. Furthermore, Chinese is harder to pronounce, which makes oral vocabulary acquisition much slower and explains why, even by late fall, our Chinese 101 students can barely stammer out a sentence while their schoolmates from Japanese 101 are strutting through the hallways saying “Saa-anoo, boku-wa …” (“Well, that is to say, as for me …”).
The final, noticeable difference between Chinese and Japanese instruction—everywhere, not just in Portland—is that Japanese programs tend to have detailed sequences taught by several teachers in daily rotation, while often in Chinese programs one teacher—even a mere TA—has sole charge of a section: Chinese teachers are their own bosses and their superiors regulate them, as often as not, by the Taoist principle of governing best by governing least. Japanese teachers evaluate colleagues' teaching sessions with clipboards in hand, while some Chinese professors coexist in a department for decades without ever visiting one another's classes. These patterns persists regardless of whether the teachers are native speakers and how well they get along with one another. The two approaches have deep cultural origins, and there is little reason to disturb them.
The beginning-level textbook situation is depressing, despite the many books available. We have three sources: mainland China, Taiwan, and the English-speaking countries. Textbooks from those three areas differ not just pedagogically but even in the style of language taught. There are surprising disagreements on which words constitute a minimum vocabulary. Few editors show evidence of having carefully examined grammar and structure, which is a crucial consideration because Chinese grammar is a new, relatively unexplored field and there is little consensus on its rules. A textbook editor cannot simply plug lesson ideas into a ready-made grammatical matrix the way one might while compiling a French book. Lack of understanding of grammatical issues, as well as thoughtless use of vocabulary, often makes Chinese textbooks verbose and sloppy. Books from the mainland, especially, exhibit dull, disjointed contents and incomprehensible explanations; most new ones tiresomely mimic the older ones. Taiwan, which one would assume enjoys greater pedagogical freedom and which has a good record as a language-training site, has never produced a truly usable, original Chinese language text. Recent offerings from United States source tend to be garrulous, sardonic, arch, or poorly organized.
Our first-year course uses Elementary Chinese Readers, a 1980 Beijing text that is now out of print; parts of it have a dull communist feel, but it is based on a rigorous understanding of Chinese structure and features pithy lessons, many of which are compact enough to memorize. This approach contrast with most teaching materials since World War II, which have leaned toward building fluency in informal conversation with long sentences modeled (often disingenuously) on unplanned speech. Such material holds two dangers: first the excess of text can take a long time to teach in proportion to the amount of new skills learned; second that style of material encourages students to speak—and, worse, to write—in a “hey you” tone that goes over well in a Shandong pool hall but can sound arrogant, insulting, or just plain moronic in the diplomatic or other professional worlds to which many of our graduates gain access. It is partly to counteract that trend that we still use a fifteen-year-old book. Our second-year course uses experimental material being developed by Stella Norman at the University of Washington. Our third- and fourth-year courses mostly use “authentic” writings, supplemented by vocabulary lists and explanatory notes: there is no shortage of good material at those levels.
Still unresolved is the issue of when to introduce characters. Starting with Yale's air-force training program in World War II, most Chinese texts began the way Japanese texts still do, by using only romanized material for the first year. This method produced students who could say with confidence, “Junggwo gangbi pyanyi, Meigwo gangbi gwei” (“Chinese fountain pens cost less than American”); if they stayed with the course more than a few months, they also learned to read. There is much to be said for the romanization method: many of us learned that way. But textbooks from China over the past twenty years have favored teaching characters from the beginning, on the theory that students who learn characters early will visualize characters rather than Roman letters when they utter Chinese and may develop purer accents. It is considered wise sa well to harness students' eagerness to learn characters while it is still fresh. Presumably this character-heavy method has worked well with Third World students in China, who learn enough in a year to attend regular college classes. We use this method at PSU, partly because we have little choice: textbooks that use the romanized approach are out of date or seriously flawed. (Some newer mainland textbooks use characters with romanization underneath them, a method that seems to combine the disadvantages of both approaches.) One would like to think that the character-intensive method discourages somewhat the glib, rough-and-tumble speaking style that too-early fluency in Chinese might foster, but there is no proof that it does.
As for supplementary materials, in our first two years we use audiotapes, but no videos or software. We would use good language videos if they were available; we show movies and other advanced material at the upper levels. But I am wary of computer software for Chinese instruction at any level because it is useful for students to write the characters physically, hundreds of times, in order to remember them better, to say nothing of practicing penmanship, which is so important in China. It is also essential that students learn to read handwriting, even on quizzes and tests. In fact it would be good if the whole textbook were written out by hand, as several were in the days when Chinese typesetting was expensive in this country. Computers can save students time at first, but ultimately they destroy more opportunities for learning Chinese than they create. This view may be extreme and obsolete, but there are those who share it.
The most exciting aspect of our Chinese program, even though it complicates the teaching, is our students' diversity. This diversity has influenced how and what we teach more than any other factor. If PSU were a liberal-arts college in the countryside, we would shepherd the students through first and second year at age eighteen, escort them to China for the indispensable semester abroad, then have them read newspaper and short stories until they graduated. If PSU were a huge research university, we might be able to schedule a special class for Cantonese speakers who could already read or for children of engineers from Taiwan who could speak Mandarin (Standard Chinese) but not read characters. Either a small college or a huge university could group some of its students on the basis of common needs.
But PSU is urban, and it does not have such options. Portland's Asian community, reflected in our students, is large but not dominated by one group. In any first-year Chinese course we can expect the following language backgrounds, none numbering much more than seven or eight students out of a total enrollment of ninety:
The foregoing list is only a rough sketch of our students' language backgrounds. Equally diverse are their motivations. Apparently fewer students without Asian backgrounds take Chinese purely for business careers than take Japanese. Some are studying Oriental medicine; others are Asian studies majors, have personal connections with China, or are curious. Some students with Asian backgrounds choose Chinese because it is easy or because they already know it half-well and can learn it thoroughly with little extra effort. Many take Chinese because they see it as a key to their Asian heritage or because Mandarin is an international medium for business and technology and has become a widespread American minority language, useful even for people who never leave the United States.
This diversity makes first- and second-year classes lively and helps students learn from one another's strengths and weaknesses. It also means that fewer students take the whole four-year sequence: lower- and upper-division classes consist of rather different people. A Hong Kong native, for instance, can skip from first-year directly into fourth-year literature or even ignore the first year completely if he or she does not mind speaking broken, Cantonese-style Mandarin in class. Asian-background students with a more minimal Chinese foundation often take the first two years, perhaps fulfilling their language requirements, then stop. Non-Asian-background students may progress so slowly through the program that they leave PSU before they are ready for many upper-level classes. Or they may go to China for intermediate training and take only the beginning and advanced levels at PSU.
As a result, our upper levels are dominated by students who come to us with previous knowledge and enroll in a wide variety of offerings; we have another core of students who have little or no previous knowledge and who eagerly struggle through the first two years but do not continue. Extremely few of our students ever study in China: some do go there, but usually for business or travel. Whatever language training they get comes from us or their families.
All these factors effect our staffing. We tend to place faculty members at the lowest and highest levels and TAs in the middle. That is, we faculty members do almost all of the first-and second-year teaching ourselves, using every pedagogical theory imaginable; we also teach the literature or linguistics-oriented courses. TAs cover the third and often the fourth year. Our TAs always come from other departments. Only rarely do we find one who knows even minimal language pedagogy and Chinese grammar—again, not even textbook editors usually know the grammar well—so we cannot relinquish control of our complicated, crucial beginning classes to TAs. As a result, our faculty course load is heavy and weighted away from intermediate and advanced classes in which the teacher learns things along with the students. Our TAs have the responsibility of stimulating the intermediate students—helping build their vocabulary and exposing them to interesting writers and ideas. All in all, it unquestionable takes more skill and knowledge to each Chinese in our school than in the Ivy League. That is why we have turned down some potential Ivy League material for TA and faculty positions; instead we look carefully for qualities in addition to knowledge: a sense of fairness, a willingness to pitch in, and a knack for encouraging students to cooperate rather than compete. These ideals may sound wishy-washy and nonacademic, but by ignoring them one invites the treachery and turf wars that have nearly destroyed Chinese departments at some universities that have far more advantages than we do.
Our diverse students have inspired a teaching philosophy that emphasizes proficiency in the foreign-language curriculum. But proficiency, at least in the shallow sense, does not apply exactly to us. Most of our students achieve proficiency rather easily: if proficiency means the ability to survive in real-life Chinese contexts, then as many as one-fifth of our beginning students and a third of our second-year students are proficient almost from the first day.
We have to teach them more than this kind of proficiency, but not so much more that we lose those other students for whom even minimum proficiency requires blood, sweat, and tears. Therefore we hope to shape our program based on a related ideal: quality. No matter how long or short each student's Chinese education at PSU is, we want it to be rigorous and broadening. At all levels we emphasize writing skills, which even in modern mainland China are one mark of a well-developed human being. We try to lay a grammatical foundation thorough enough to last into the most advanced work. Throughout our offering we include high culture—even many literate Asian-background students who have spent their lives among Chinese speakers would never have read from the Book of Changes or learned the names of the dynasties had they not taken our course. Such training prepares them to deal with educated people, not just the good old boys at the noodle stands. It is relatively easy to fit in with less-educated people by pretending that you have not read from the classics; it is harder to pretend that you have. We want our students not to need pretend. Our literature-in-translation course make all readings available in Chinese as well as English and avoid overlapping with the literature-in-Chinese offerings so students of all backgrounds and linguistic proficiencies can become acquainted with as many seminal works as possible.
In other words, we define our role within PSU's urban mission as that of making a solid Chinese education, however brief, available to any person in the city who desires one. Even if we only half succeed, one hopes that we can indirectly improve understanding and respect between China and Oregon, especially as it affects those Portlanders who deal with Chinese affairs but seldom if ever go to China. And we hope, through all our efforts, to help maintain this urban community as a civilized place—a place where high culture thrives. After all, if cities cannot be civilized, why we have them?
The author is Associate Professor of Chinese at Portland State University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Corvallis, Oregon.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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