Cui Xiliang, the president of BLCU, pens an article in the China Daily today, ‘Chinese language learning booms as world enters new era’. It doesn’t actually say that much new, but it’s revealing of the attitudes amongst the leaders in the field.
My take: the infrastructure that is supposed to enable the global rise of Mandarin is not equipped to do it. Professor Cui is just one individual, of course, but he is reprentative of many in the field. I think they lack a clear assessment of the situation. Every article I read cites different numbers about the scope and size of the market. Cui claims there are 160,000 foreigners studying Mandarin in China, for example, but almost every other report that I’ve seen offered significantly different numbers. (The number of worldwide learners of Mandarin is constantly cited as 30 million – a number I find absurdly inflated.)
Secondly, Cui claims that the discipline of TCSL (Teaching Chinese as a Second Language) has developed dramatically in the last 50 years. I doubt it. As Cyndy Ning pointed out in an interview this week, there are cases of US schools fighting for years to institute Mandarin programs, only to see them collapse within months when partents withdraw their kids. The reason: Chinese teachers are often wholly unsuited to teaching in American schools. The fact is that there is a need to properly train tens of thousands of teachers to work outside China, but it’s not yet happening. (On a cultural note, it’s also interesting how polite Chinese people are about all of this – no-one wants to point fingers or publicly criticize existing efforts.)
It’s not surprising, therefore, that the professor doesn’t have a clear solution to the problem. He makes no mention of how technology should be deployed for the task, or how teaching methodologies should conform to the needs of the target markets. He’s still talking in terms of ‘thinking carefully’ and ‘rationally’, but without any concrete solutions. (Saying that we need more/better teachers isn’t a solution – it’s a vague objective.)
What do you chaps think?
Ken Carroll
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
I for one enjoyed having a 中國人 as a Chinese teacher at the college I attended in the US.
First Year Chinese (100 level Chinese courses): My professor was a 老外 with a PHD from an Ivy League school. He was demanding and a master at identifying and embarrassing those students that didn’t put in the effort outside of class. I grinded out two Bs. Each course was 6 credit hours. Thanks to this prof I was able to build that solid foundation that is so critical.
Second Year Chinese (200 level courses): I had a visiting professor from Shanghai. He spent half the class telling stories in English. He liked to joke about how his Shanghai colleagues would open each others office doors in the morning in order to fool the Department Head into thinking they were all in. For the Second Year courses, I put in half as much effort compared to the First Year courses and received two As – both courses were 6 credit hours. What a GPA saver!!
As for 160,000 students studying Mandarin in China. That’s the equivalent of 16 different universities with 10,000 students studying Mandarin. I bet there isn’t even 100,000 students in the US studying English as a second language.
How exactly do you define a “Mandarin Learner”? Does this mean people who study on a daily basis? Does it include someone who took courses or lived in China/Taiwan 20 years ago, but since then has studied on and off, sometimes going a couple of years with having no exposure to the language?
Hmm…its really very vague..
He doesnt really say much…and as you said, Ken, he offers no real ideas to the problems.
What is worrying is that this is what the ‘supposed’ leaders in the field are thinking. He doesn’t seem to have clear insight into the problem nor into a solution.
I would be surprised if they changed any time soon…
As far as most of us think (and i think most would agree), ChinesePod is the leader in this field.
one number the Chinese authorities should know (but not necessarily communicate) is how many students take the HSK tests. they may be extrapolating from there.
Yv
Here is a study funded by the US Department of Education saying 5,000 Americans were studying in China in 2004.
http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=69735
My guess:
5,000(美国人) + 5,000(欧洲人) + 8,000(韩国人) + 5,000(日本人)+ 2,000(other) = 25,000 people studying Mandarin in China.
“We need to train more teachers, publish MORE UP-TO-DATE teaching materials and books, and introduce A MORE MODERN teaching method.”
Well, I’d be curious to hear a Chinese bureaucrat’s take on the article. This was published in the People’s Daily, where it’s not uncommon to see veiled language that, while seemingly quite fangless on the surface, is actually making a sharp point behind the bureaucratese. Who knows? Maybe there’s nothing to it and he really is that clueless and anodyne. Or maybe the last sentence quoted above [emphasis mine) is meant to be the telling detail…
I’m guessing that part of the problems at Universities abroad isn’t that they can’t find teachers (Heck, you can create a good teacher in 6 months, an excellent one in 18 months given the right people) but that they need people with Masters and Doctorates in the subject area.
I’m reminded of a TESOl professor I studied with in 1978 (the approximate general state of art of TSCL today?) that was half the trainer my teacher trainer was at the Bushiban I taught at in Taiwan. Academic language teachers (university professors) have an inflated sense of their own ability because they are able to hand out grades. Take the grades away and then you really get a sense of a teacher’s ability to teach, motivate and help learners learn.
I took a intro level class at a community college so maybe it is not representative. We started the class with around 25 kids and ended the quarter with 3. I have never in my life witnessed a dropout rate that high. The text the instructor picked was pretty bad–no English or even Pinyin. I must admit I have had my share of mediocre teachers. I finally found a truly good one and have stayed with him for 4 years. He has a Ph.D. and is an amazing guy. Using technology to help? I think everyone is still pretty clueless about that and when that happens it will make a huge difference. I have the Wenlin program on my Mac computer–that by far gets the most use. I have heard that a lot of University students also use this program. Pimsleur gets another really high rating but loses points because after the 3rd level when your just getting started, all support ends. Cpod needs to make its lessons interactive and transportable but wins points for putting out lots of very practical and immediately applicable dialogues at so many levels.
ChinesePod fills a void for me. I am studying at a community college (and I can get Cantonese at home) but the materials are limited to what in the New Practical Chinese Reader volume that we are working from and the teacher as the only native speaker, albeit usually from Taiwan.
With the ChinesePod material I get:
1. Several more native speakers. Of course, usually the wonderful Jenny (after listening to her voice so much one starts thinking that she must be beautiful
and a few others and sometimes some male native speakers.
2. Some 外國人 who help me appreciate the difference between a native speaker and a learner.
I listen to the ChinesePod material on my way to and from work (I ride my bike most days) and sometimes before I go to sleep.
Because I listen to them over and over again I start to pick up small useful pieces and can understand bits and pieces … in some ways just like I learned English as a young tacker.
Expanding on point 2, for years I wondered why Singaporeans spoke English in such a funny manner. I have finally figured it out. It is because the pronunciation and intonation rules are different beween Chinese and English.
For example, in listening to John on the intermediate lessons, it is clear that like most other foreigners he thinks that the distinguishing factor in 第四聲 is that it is spoken quickly. However, that is not what I hear from the native speakers. Similarly, most foreigners hang on to their finals while native speakers clearly delineate the end of the finals and do not, it seems to me, allow them to run onto the next sylable (and Singaporeans when speaking English place a small pause between every sylable as if they were using Chinese speaking rules).
They all have one fundamental error:
Bold ignorance of who their audience is.
That blunder morphs and festers in everything they try to do or say.
“In 2000 when the number of foreign students studying in the United States exceeded 500,000, many more people opted to study English as a foreign language rather than Chinese.”
Wow! Really? Um… I mean, 真的吗？
@M-Phil — the Chinese stats on total worldwide Chinese learners are going to be heavily inflated by a tendency to include every poor 4th generation kid sweating his way through a weekend buxiban.
As far as the 160,000 figure goes, did anyone else catch that this includes students “studying in China”. They aren’t making any claims about language students, so I take it they are just counting up all of the X, F and L visas issued for “study in China”. Anyone who ticks that bo xon the visa application probably gets counted here.
Even disregarding the people here on independent study or those who do month-long courses, when I was at Qinghua there were a lot of students on exchanges (especially in the sciences) who were not studying Chinese or had very minimal Chinese. There are also a growing number of schools running English-language programs in things like business management and Chinese medicine. So serious language students would probably be a fraction of this figure.