Some excellent commentary on the travails of  acclimating to a foreign educational climate from Ms. Lynn Chang.

The classroom culture here is totally different. People talk a lot in class, and they respond to the teachers’ questions quickly. Talking and sharing are encouraged. When I am still thinking, they are already talking. How amazing! When I finally get some ideas in my mind and I’m ready to talk, they have shifted to another topic. I am always left behind. A smart and patient lady in Taiwan becomes a slow learner at University of Missouri.

I have the utmost empathy for this, as I’ve experienced the same in reverse.  Click the link and note her questions.  Anyone who has experienced a study abroad will relate…

Bilingual education is supposed to be expanding to more languages – such as Vietnamese and Arabic – but many school districts can’t find the teachers to handle the two-language classes.

“The teacher shortage that was there for Spanish now translates to other languages,” said Shannon Terry, Garland ISD’s director of English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual education…

The state requires any school district that has at least 20 students in a grade level who speak a language other than English to provide a bilingual program in that language. 

Well, yeah…  This is the same school district that resorted to hiring “bilingual” Spanish teachers who don’t speak English a couple of years ago.  This has always been the problem with trying to mandate bilingual education as a means of promoting English acquisition with immigrant children.  Getting qualified teachers is problematic.  Beyond the scope of pedagogical problems, which are still being debated (this has been discussed at length on this site — scroll around, but suffice it to say that the issue pretty much comes down to the advantages of bilingual vs. immersion ed. come down to an evaluation of the learner population and the resource availability at the local level and any attempts to mandate instructional method at anything higher than the individual school level is likely to encounter cause real problems), getting qualified teachers can be a nightmare.  If they can’t find enough qualified Spanish speakers in Dallas to fill a district, how much of a chance does a place like Des Moines, Iowa have?  Then, beyond Spanish, when we follow bilingual ed. theory to its logical conclusion, we need to put into place bilingual programs for students of all languages represented in the population.  Most immigrant groups don’t happen to bring along trained bilingual ed. specialists with them on the trip to the U.S. — especially in the case of refugee groups.  Also, different ethnicities don’t enter all professions at the same rate proportional to their population in the U.S.  Put simply, some groups are more heavily represented in teacher training programs in universities than others.  For example, East Asian immigrants have a very low proportion of teachers in the first two generations (i.e., when they are likely to still speak the “mother tongue”) compared to the native populace (and even other immigrant groups).  This one stands out in direct contrast with the fact that they are more likely to go to university than other immigrant groups (and in certain locales, more likely than native-born Americans) — they simply choose (or, let’s face it, are pushed) to study other subjects like engineering and such (which usually pay better, anyway).  While I don’t have the numbers on it, I’d be willing to bet that Vietnamese and possibly Arabic immigrants follow these patterns, so schools are forced to search for an extremely limited teacher resource, and they are competing with all other schools which are forced by district policy to offer bilingual ed.  That’s why it apparently took Dallas 13 years to find any qualified Vietnamese-bilingual instructors.  While bilingual education advocates are usually loathe to admit it, these recruitment difficulties pretty much make the case as to why the bilingual vs. immersion education debate should take place at the invidual school level instead of at the district or state level…

Long time no post, for which I apologize.  I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work and various university-affiliated bureaucracy as I am trying to get my dissertation project off the ground this semester instead of waiting for next fall.  If all goes well (currently only about a 20% chance of that!), I’ll have all or most of my data before summer vacation kicks in, and I’ll be able to almost leisurely analyze it during the summer months.  Otherwise, it’ll be a frantic dash to run trials in the early fall and then write up my results.  Regardless, I’m shooting to have the dissertation ready to defend by Feb. 2010, so the clock is ticking.  Running the trials is going to require some travel, so when I do that, I’m going to be out of communication for awhile, but once done, you can well expect some online griping about running the statistics on the results (not my favorite part of running studies).  As for other things that are swirling around the FL Doctor household at the moment: both the wife and I have started looking for summer employment.  I’m tentatively looking at employ abroad (I’ve fired off applications for summer programs in Japan and Taiwan), but it’s quite likely that I’ll once again work at the summer ESL program at my university, as my son dog makes short-term international travel problematic.  My wife, who works in the public schools, and thus has no summer income, is also looking around town at summer options.  My pet fantasy is for her to get a job at Starbucks or a similar institution, because, frankly, the only thing sexier to the FL Doctor than his lovely wife is his lovely wife making a white chocolate mocha for him ;)  Amongst the other upcoming events in our household, my in-laws will be making a trip out here in late May (my father-in-law’s first trip outside Taiwan, in fact), and we’ll be taking them around the Western U.S.  As neither of them speak any more English than “thank you,” it should be an interesting trip.  You can pretty much expect a post about a week or so of driving cross-country while speaking/hearing only Taiwanese (a language that I speak imperfectly, at best) sometime in early June when I get back.

The U.S. military is going to greater lengths to encourage servicemembers to become proficient in languages — including ones that would be handy where the country is at war.

Every branch is authorized to give bonus pay of up to $12,000 a year to servicemembers who demonstrate proficiency in certain languages. The Department of Defense does not release a list of those languages, but officials who were interviewed recently said the department is putting a premium on the languages that are valuable for combatting terrorists.

While enlisted pay is not exactly the road to riches, it’s unfortunately starting to compare favorably with universities, which are slashing salaries and cutting jobs at a rate which one could call “alarming” to your average dissertating PhD student….  (sigh!)

Considering the dramatic budget cuts that are currently being applied to universities across the country (and my own university is no exception), this Seattle Times editorial struck a chord..  Any administrators reading this blog?  One can only hope…

No one expects foreign-language study to escape the budget cuts hitting higher education. But making this area take a bigger hit is unwise. Globalization demands proficiency in foreign languages, international studies and understanding other cultures….

Cuts in foreign languages are counterintuitive in a post-9/11 world. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, colleges and universities saw a rise in the number of students interested in studying foreign languages and cultures. Enrollment has increased by 13 percent since 2002, according to The Modern Language Association of America, most dramatically in languages considered critical to America’s security and economic future, such as Arabic and Chinese. Spanish remains the most popular language studied.

China thinks so…

There has been a big rise in the number of foreigners learning Chinese, but still too few are studying the language, officials said on Thursday, worried this may affect efforts to soften China’s global image.

China began setting up Confucius Institutes in 2004 to teach Chinese and they are now in 81 countries, but efforts to expand them are being hampered by too few teachers and poor teaching materials.

However, by counterpoint, Chinese is already the fastest growing field of foreign language study in much of the world, such as in France...

These developmental hick-ups are inevitable for an emerging popular language of study.  Fortunately, demand for Chinese study is sky-high and rising across most countries, reflecting an accute global awareness of the growing Chinese economy.  Confucius Institutes are a good start — particularly considering the disconnect between Chinese teaching methods and Western learners (although note that the Chinese learning craze extends beyond the West).  When demand for any commodity rises, there is always a chance of demand outstripping supply, which is what has happened.  However, the laws of economics also fit this educational scenario, and what we are likely to see is a growing market for overseas recruitment of Chinese teachers (which the Confucius Institutes were, in part, formed to address) and many of the current crop of students of Chinese language may eventually gain careers in Chinese language teaching themselves.  While most Chinese language teachers are currently native speakers, that’s likely to be turned on its head within the next generation.  One of the interesting phenomenons we are likely to witness in the near future is a reversal of priorties in Chinese language teacher preparation.  When a language education field is relatively niche, it tends to be flooded with native speakers, and for any outsider to get a job, often there is a demand for a level of language fluency that is not often seen in other languages.  For example, in the (high) school where my wife works, there are several (part-time) Chinese teachers.  All but one are native speakers, and that one is extraordinarily fluent (some 20 years in China and an MA in Chinese Linguistics from a Chinese university).  By contrast, U.S. French and Spanish teachers often have little or no relevant experience in the countries where their languages are spoken, and previous to NCLB legislation, one could teach those languages with just a minor in the language.  As the Chinese language field expands, I would expect a shift in expectations from extreme language fluency to more teaching methods familiarity. The coming expansion of Chinese language will be accomplished, in large part, by non-natives with less command over the language, but with a higher degree of familiarity with the educational systems and methods of the countries where they teach.

We’ve looked at the Chinese dialect/language debate before.  Today, in my Chinese linguistics class (which I’m auditing this semester for fun), we had an interesting opportunity to evaluate the linguistic diversity that exists under the heading of “Chinese.”  The professor, in anticipation of today’s lecture, had invited several students from my university, all from different regions of China (and one Taiwanese) — and all speaking different dialects (in addition to Mandarin), to speak demonstrate the large differences between them*.  The students were each given a series of words and sentences in Mandarin, which they repeated in their individual dialects.  As one would predict, the class — mostly comprised of undergraduate students of Chinese (Mandarin — and many majoring in East Asian Studies) — were astounded by the fact that they could understand very little of what was said.  Of course, having studied both Taiwanese (Southern Min dialect) and Cantonese (Yue dialect), I could understand those two, but the exercise drove home two points.

The first is that “languages” really are just “dialects” with an army and a navy.  This joke, oft-repeated in linguistics circles, does underscore the political nature of the language/dialect distinction.  The differences in Chinese “dialects” are often much more pronounced than the differences between, say, Spanish and Italian, yet they are classified as dialects solely because China’s history as a singular political unit.  Even the oft-bandied-about argument that Chinese is a single language because of its unified writing system is disingenuous, as most dialects are unwritten, and those that are (like Cantonese), require multiple character additions and substitutions in order to correctly transcribe oral language.  While I can’t speak for dialects I don’t know, such as Hakka, Xiang, and Wu, I can confidently assert that Min and Yue both differ significantly in grammar from standard Mandarin, so the differences are not restricted to phonology.

The second take-away point from today’s lecture was the highly skewed view of dialects that most Americans possess.  While I don’t mean to dismiss the variety of American accents, most of the regional differences in the U.S. are of phonology.  There is a bit of specialized vocabulary (”y’all”) and differences of regional usage (i.e., the soda/pop/coke debate, or the fact that pizza in the northeast is oft referred to as a “pie”), but the vast majority of these differences are quickly resolvable with a bit of fine-tuning, and we rarely if ever enter an area of the U.S. where all attempts at communication simply break down.  The idea of mutually incomprehensible dialects is quite foreign to us, but in much of the rest of the world, dialectical differences are indeed profound. Even in Europe (especially pre-WWII), a journey of 5km could completely change what one overheard in the local tavern.  Such high variation in language is something which is quite alien to Americans (and, by and large, much less common in the Americas, in general).

*I narrowly averted being the model Cantonese speaker — which, having only studied the language for about 6 months now, would have been somewhat disingenuous.   The professor had had some trouble locating a Cantonese speaker, and had asked if I’d fill the role.  The prof had given me the heads-up last night, and I dutifully went through the sentences and determined that I could do it, but I shuddered to think what my accent would sound like to a native speaker.  Fortunately, a native speaker of Cantonese showed up at the last moment, averting the strange prospects of presenting a blond-haired, blue-eyed Cantonese model…

Oh my, Hillary!

Sigh…  Unfortunately, the new Secretary of State proved to the world last week that the State Department is incompetent in translation tasks.  This must send a thrill up the spines of all strategic and economic competitors of the U.S.!

In a gesture intended to symbolically “reset” U.S.-Russian relations, Sec. of State Clinton presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button emblazoned with the word “peregruzka.”  Unfortunately, as Minister Lavrov points out (see video at the above link), “peregruzka” means “overcharge.”  The word that they were looking for is “perezagruzka.”

Besides the flubbed translation (which, mind you, can happen to anyone from time to time, but given the body of translators available, how could this have possibly gone through?), I was a bit incensed at the transparent swipe at the previous administration implicit in the gift.  While making nice-nice with Russia after the considerable frostiness of the last couple of years is certainly within her job description, gratuitous jabs at preceding administrations is really quite crass, and does nothing but expose internal divisions to foreign scrutiny.  Internal politics really should end at the waters’ edge, whic, I’ll grant, is a rule which has been steadily eroding in recent years.  I’ll let Ed sum up:

Some will say, Come on, it’s just a light moment, but let’s think about what Hillary was doing here.  She was making fun of the previous administration’s diplomacy with her “reset” button, a rather nasty piece of work.  I’ll bet the Bush administration and Condi Rice would have gotten the translation correct before making that joke — and I’d bet even more money they wouldn’t have thought to make fun of Hillary’s husband in that fashion in the first place.

CNN revives the age-old discussion on English lack of gender-neutral pronouns….  Oh, the horror!

While Iwas relatively sympathetic to the position back in the early 80’s, when it was a matter of recognizing that women had entered into new professional fields, and the English language, still burdened with antiquated terminology such as “police man,” was struggling to give currency to gender neutral forms such as the now common “police officer,” personally, I feel that an attack on pronouns is a bridge too far.  First of all, a preemptive victory speech: being a “closed class” item, the likely hood of a successful change in that regard is extraordinarily low. Essentially, those who try to add pronouns like “ip” and “sie” are just tilting at windmills.  Ultimately, English does have ways of expressing gender neutrality, but we all labor under the delusions of prescriptivist grammarian English teachers (sorry, Mom!) who have tried for years to stamp out the common parlance means.  Even in the article linked above, the author writes:

Consider the sentence “Everyone loves his mother.” The word “his” may be seen as both sexist and inaccurate, but replacing it with “his or her” seems cumbersome, and “their” is grammatically incorrect.

Actually, from a (descriptive) linguistic standpoint, “their” is perfectly acceptable, thus circumventing the whole debate, and correctly denoting “everyone” in the sense of referring to more than one person.  However, the English grammarians have argued for years that such is incorrect as everyone takes a (3rd person) singular verb conjugation, and thus its possessive pronoun should also be a 3rd person singular.  I’m not going to bother with a full explanation of the phenomenon* (which is, more or less, a subject of open warfare between linguistics and English departments), but instead, I’ll point you to John McWhorter and Pinker, who have already made and (in my opinion) won the argument.

* Suffice it to say that English has been forced into following the rules of Latin — which it was neither intended to do, nor can do so without much difficulty — which has been the source for most of our pronoun misery.

Daniel Tammet is at it again.  The British linguistic savant who is most famed for learning Icelandic in a week (capped by an appearance on an Icelandic television talk show, wherein he conversed in the language with the host) has repeated the feat with German:

“It’s a Thursday in Hamburg’s Hotel Wedina, and 30-year-old Tammet has four more days. By Monday, he plans to have learned enough German — after only a week’s training — to appear on the German television talk show “Beckmann” and speak fluently about brain research, autism and his new book.”

…last week, Tammet took a linguistic stroll through German’s convoluted sentences, had picnics in the genitive case and roamed through the language’s myriad plural forms. He did bring some rudimentary school German along for the journey. Nonetheless, his coaches were stunned.

“It’s fascinating how he learns, especially because it’s almost impossible to comprehend,” said language coach Christiane Spies, who assisted Tammet the entire week. “I’ve never experienced anything like it.”

While a language a week is a completely unrealistic goal for most of us — Tammet, who had epileptic seizures as a child and has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, is a certified language savant, who learns quite differently from most people — the article linked above contains some nuggets of how Mr. Tammet manages to absorb vocabulary and structures at such a lightning-fast pace.  While no one expects the average learner to duplicate his results, still his study methods merit attention, because many actually relate directly to the advice of most language-education professionals.  When he begins studying a new language he:

1) “Tammet first begins learning a language by reading for hours, especially children’s books. He murmurs the words quietly to himself, appearing calm and highly concentrated.”  — Immersion in literature, while this presupposes knowledge of script (which is not always the case for learners — especially in studying non-European languages), is one of the best possible vocabulary building exercises one can engage in.  The volume of vocabulary, even in children’s literature, often far exceeds that which one would encounter in L2 conversation.

2) “In the afternoon, Tammet and Spies stroll through Hamburg, chatting about the history of the Hanseatic League, visiting museums and galleries. “He needs an incredible amount of fodder,” says Spies, “otherwise he gets bored quickly.” Tammet immediately links new words with ones he already knows: What is that called in other languages? Which expressions are similar?”  — Cultural literacy is actually one of the biggest divides between those who “study” a language, and those who actually “speak” it.  A grounding of culture, history, etc. actually gives one something to talk about, and exposes one to higher vocabulary and some of the critical thought processes behind the language.  Also, where possible, linking new vocabulary to pre-existing knowledge is, of course, a boon to learning (e.g., hence why people who speak Spanish would necesarily pick up Italian much more quickly than a monolingual English speaker).

3) He looks “for patterns in the mess of sentences he hears, tying words together into related groups. “Small, round things often start with ‘Kn’ in German,” he says, pointing out Knoblauch (garlic), Knopf (button) and Knospe (bud). Then there are the long, thin things that often begin with “Str,” like Strand (beach), Strasse (street) and Strahlen (rays).” — This type of associative learning doesn’t work for everyone, and despite the prevalence of books and instructional tapes that are marketed on this premise, I’ve always been wary of trying to teach such thinking, as it varies a lot individually.  People bring their own thoughts, experiences, and personalities into these associations, and it can actually be counterproductive to superimpose others’ associations.  Still, if one can come up with patterns, it certainly helps.  I, for instance, have always been a staunch proponent of verb conjugation charts.  The visual medium helps me to memorize, by picking out patterns in conjugations.  However, at the same time, I fully recognize that many of my former students (of French) and classmates (of various languages that conjugate verbs) simply got not tangible benefit out of charts, and some even would reorganize the information into ways that better helped them individually….