Chinese: Thank god (some of) it’s over
In this last day of the year blog-rush, I’ll take a stab at describing the ‘road crash’ of university Chinese language instruction. This is probably going to come across as a bit of a moan but then if you can’t moan on your own blog, where can you moan? Therefore this is almost more of a diary entry to tie up a thread of the last two years, you can read more after the break if you are inclined.
This year I was enrolled in Chinese 3A in the first semester 3B in the semester just gone. I had quite enjoyed the previous year of Chinese and, to be fair, I also really enjoyed a subject called Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester. The problem I had was strictly limited to the pure language instruction and a great deal of this stemmed from the baffling choice of a textbook. At lower levels the textbooks used were modern textbooks that also focused on fairly practical uses of language. This year the text book was basically an 80s-era traditional Chinese approach (rote learning) textbook that was firmly focused on the geopolitical situation of China. I happen to know that that the desire to teach history and culture of China played a large part in the choice of the textbook. I know that because late in 2010 I hassled the head of school about what textbook would be using.
My approach to learning Chinese is to make light of things. It’s easier to remember the absurd, than the boring. Modern Chinese Literature in the first semester was very challenging, with vast amounts of vocab to learn. I was hammering the flashcards, reading Chinese heavily and being highly experimental with my written and spoken Chinese. I learned vastly more Chinese than I had ever before. I was making progress. I was friendly with the teacher, but quite critical of the horrific textbook, the chaotic teaching system and the terrible use of our very limited classroom time. I had, I think, a rapport with the teacher. That’s not hard when most of the class is bored shitless by the horrific coursework.
The net result was I learned vast amounts of Chinese. I played fast and loose with assignments, exams and so on because my Chinese was a LOT better than anyone else, I would rather make it a challenge and get it wrong. Tactically, this was disaster because they weren’t interested in anyone learning like that. I was marked wrong many many times for providing a perfectly acceptable answer, but a different one than was in the book. The exam was ridiculously easy, but the same thing again – unless you wrote what was in the textbook, you lost marks.
The net result was something of a shock to say the least. I got a pass. I think it was 64 or something. The lowest mark I had ever got in any subject by a very long way. An absurd mark when you consider my level of Chinese compared to my classmates. I also had put staggering amounts of work in. I learned every word in the text book, the whole year’s worth, not just the first semester. I learned to write everything. I was actually interested in the historical back stories and read further, and tried to (badly) put that in written essays beyond my current level of Chinese. I tried hard, I damn near failed.
On reflection, what was going on was that they didn’t appreciate my approach and I was being punished in a way. I don’t think that’s the whole story, it’s much more a case of the fact that they were teaching the same way as how teaching is done in China. However looking back there were a lot of cues I missed, easier than you might think given how indirect the Chinese can be. Incidentally I got a H1, the highest possible, in Modern Chinese Literature despite the fact that half the class are background speakers of Chinese. I mention that to tell you that this isn’t overconfidence, I was genuinely fucked over.
After the initial wave of shock and anger, this triggered some soul searching. I mean I’m paying a lot to be at university. Not just the thousands it costs in HECS fees I’ll have to pay back (much more than private tuition would cost for the same hours) but also the whole giving up my job thing. Fortunately I had already decided that linguistics was a better fit for me but one does not simply drop a pursuit you love just because of some bad grades. “They can get fucked!”, I thought. It was important that I thought that way, I had to maintain my motivation.
One of my earlier blog posts was talking about motivation and the L2 self. That came out of my studies in second language learning and teaching in the second semester. You see in the break when I had to decide my next subjects, Eg. continuing on to Chinese 3B which I could have have dropped and replaced with something much better and at zero penalty to me. In the end I decided to get analytical about it because some small part of my journey, and this blog I suppose, is to experience the hardship of learning Chinese as a Westerner and try figure out how to do it better, ultimately so I can help others. So I enrolled in Chinese 3B and Second Language Learning and Teaching with the goal to write about and reflect on my experience in this other subject. So that’s what I did.
I also did something else. I stopped trying to learn Chinese. I had a lot of other things going on, I wasn’t doing a hard Chinese subject this semester, so I just put it on the backburner. Instead I just did the minimum. I essentially just read and re-read each chapter of the textbook from hell (which at this point was turning into a communist propaganda organ, you would not believe the stuff in it…) and I practised the exact questions in the textbook. I only turned up to half of the big two-hour lecture too, since I had a clash. I just turned up and did my stuff like the other students. I learned almost no new Chinese, certainly nothing that would help you communicate.
At the end of it I ended up with a H2A, the highest mark in the Chinese 2A through 3B stream I had ever obtained. What an absolute joke. How utterly shameful. It was, perhaps, a lesson worth learning. I think people can intellectually grasp that there’s a difference in teaching between the traditional rote learning methods in China versus the West but even knowing that, I had no idea how one was basically broken when misapplied across culture gaps.
The problem, as I see it, is this. A university will want to have PhD qualified staff teaching their university courses in a language. It is overwhelmingly the case that staff of that sort are native Chinese who did most of their studies, including university, in China. They’ve probably published some research on something in China, which a university cares about more than they care about their ability to teach undergraduates for all sorts of reasons, mostly to do with university rankings. The net result is that most Chinese native PhD calibre university staff are hopeless teachers of Chinese. There are some potent exceptions, and maybe another university is different. However out of all the teachers I had, only one seemed to actually design courses based on sound pedagogy and taught to the same standard and seemed to understand how important it was to use class time efficiently.
To this point I have been talking about the teachers that are going to actually teach you Chinese directly from a textbook on Chinese. An altogether different thread are the courses based on literature. At my university, and many others, these are taught by Westerners. They’re fluent in Chinese, but they’re not really teaching you Chinese. It’s typical to get an element of language instruction in tutorials from native speakers. The notion of native speakers being the only good people to teach Chinese is very powerful. I think it comes from the idea of pronunciation which is, to my mind a total red herring because it’s an established fact that non-native speakers can understand non-native speakers speaking an L2 more easily than a native speaker and this is extremely valuable. There’s no real prospect of giving people native accents anyway, so the whole concept is flawed but nevertheless it endures.
Also, to a large degree, teaching of a language is not considered to be top shelf work at a university. There are few enough English native speakers that have mastered Chinese as it is. Those such that there are, having obtained their PhD in research in something to do with China and Chinese, are not going to now teach freshmen how to say ni hao ma. Which is to some degree fair enough but I do believe there are some vestiges of… I wont say racism, let’s call it institutional bias. It seems to me it’s much harder to get ahead as a native Chinese academic. Of course that could be due to the quality of work, ability to manage departments and so on… I don’t really know. At any rate, the native Chinese people are terrible teachers and they are the ones that have the job.
Anyway, I’ve finished the stream. I am one of relatively few that could actually go to Chinese 4A (which is sort of ‘next’ but is actually an entry point for native background speakers so it’s a LOT harder, particularly with spoken competence) but one quick check and sure enough, it’s an ancient Chinese style text book. Thank you but no. Instead I have Great Chinese Classics (in introduction to classical Chinese) and Chinese News Analysis. The former will be challenging but right up my alley, the latter will probably be easy. At some point I’m going to have to work out what to do as a replacement for proper Chinese instruction. I might look again to a private tutor.
