Freshman Chinese
About half of the students at my college are Taiwanese Aborigines. Many of them are able to apply to the school directly, rather than going through the national examination system. This effectively a form of affirmative action, one which I fully endorse. In fact, it is one of the reasons I wanted to come here to teach. However, it is important to recognize that as bright and talented as many of these students are, they often don’t have the same level of training as those students who come in via the examination system. Those students may have gone to some of the best schools in Taiwan, had tutoring in English, etc. while many of the Aborigine students may have gone to rural schools where they did not have access to such training. This wouldn’t be a problem if the school did the right thing and offered some of these students remedial training to bring them up to the level of the rest of the class. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any programs in place to offer such remedial classes.
Until now.
This semester we just learned of some funds that would be made available for just this purpose. Not nearly as much as is needed, but something nonetheless. Now the discussion is starting about how to best spend these funds. I made the argument that these funds should not be spent on English lessons, as someone had suggested, but on Chinese lessons. A funny argument to be made by someone who can’t tell the difference between his wife and a fish, but based on my experience grading papers last semester I think it is the right one to make.
The Taiwanese school system is focused on the national examinations, and as such essay writing gets short shrift. Research writing seems not to be taught at all. This isn’t much different from the situation in America, where most high school students still don’t know how to write a research paper, but many of the best American universities deal with this through courses known as “Freshman English.” Such courses are not just literature courses, but teach basic writing skills for the humanities. At my university, however, the equivalent “Freshman Chinese” seems to be focused on learning classical Chinese. I don’t disagree that student’s should be familiar with the classics, but it doesn’t help them much when it comes time to write a research paper.
Because it is so hard, some teachers have abandoned assigning papers in their classes, relying on written and oral exams instead. I’m sympathetic. I’m doing this as well in my lower level classes. If it is hard work for native speakers, it is a Herculean task for me! But what does that say about the quality of education our students are getting? In all likelihood they might graduate college still not knowing how to properly write a research paper in Chinese! [Note: The better students understand they need these skills and take classes where they are taught, but this is not true of everyone.]
It is also connected with plagiarism, a big problem everywhere. While some students are simply lazy, I think a lot of students cheat because they don’t know how to properly use citations. Incorporating someone else’s speech into your own while keeping your own voice isn’t an easy task. Just ask the Pope! Students need to be taught these skills so that they can properly quote and cite secondary sources in an appropriate manner.
Unfortunately, remedial writing classes would require small classes and more teachers than we have. Nor can we reasonably rely on our graduate students to teach these skills. So the small amount of money we have been given will probably not be enough to turn things around. What is required is for the university and the Ministry of Education to take its commitment to teaching these students seriously.
UPDATE: More from Jonathan Benda.
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Parts three and four of Dueling Laowai, on pinyin tone marks, are up: Mark responds to Prince Roy in part 3 and Prince Roy responds to Mark. Jon Benda comments on Freshman Chinese, in response to Kerim’s remarking on the problems his students have in Chinese writing. David blogs on Taiwan’s amazing temples MEDIA: this article by Bradsher on the madness in Taipei notes that Shih admits his supporters are mostly nationalists. I hope it lays to rest any stupid ideas that something really amazing is going on here.
It seems to me that Michael and Jonathan are talking about something different from Kerim. Kerim’s post addresses the issue of basic literacy skills. I think his point is that the aboriginal students in his class could not write a message that anyone could understand, perhaps even themselves. As a result, it is impossible for them to grasp the nuances of script necessary for academic writing. The students in Jonathan’s post and particularly the students in the comment from the public school teacher are all perfectly literate in Chinese script. None of their peers would have trouble understanding their meaning no matter how idiomatic or informal their expression. The problem is their ability to write in a style deemed ‘correct’ by judges of formal expression, and the goal of the Tunghai freshman Chinese classes is to address this. The ‘problem’ is not one of literacy skills but rather one of conserving language values.
[…] For you WWII buffs out there, this week saw the passing of Tokyo Rose…and plenty going on around the blogs…Global Voices Online has a collection of Chinese-language bloggers writing on the pan-Blue marches around the country (today Shih Ming-teh brings his made for media show to Taichung). Good stuffMutantfrog fantasizes about the Beast of Ketegalen.Parts three and four of Dueling Laowai, on pinyin tone marks, are up: Mark responds to Prince Roy in part 3 and Prince Roy responds to Mark.Jon Benda comments on Freshman Chinese, in response to Kerim’s remarking on the problems his students have in Chinese writing.David blogs on Taiwan’s amazing templesMEDIA: this article by Bradsher on the madness in Taipei notes that Shih admits his supporters are mostly nationalists. I hope it lays to rest any stupid ideas that something really amazing is going on here. I’ll be blogging on it in more detail soon.Got students who want to study overseas? Jen reports on the recent foreign MBA fair.[Taiwan] […]
“I think his point is that the aboriginal students in his class could not write a message that anyone could understand, perhaps even themselves.”
Basic literacy is not a problem. I was saying that they don’t understand the norms of writing a college essay or a research paper. (And yes, many of the Han students share this problem, but the current funds are allocated for the Aborigine students only - I would really like to see a school wide program similar to what Jonathan discussed.)
So I was wrong…
I have many friends who teach in Canada. Some of them teach at schools that train students who will end up working as low-level clerical workers. These schools are now called universities and employ faculty who are in some sense involved in the research process and in reproducing researchers from among their students. Their impressions of their students are strikingly similar to the description I hear from foreign and local teachers at low ranking Taiwan universities. And foremost among their complaints is that student’s writing is terrible.
One of the things this makes me think is that research PhDs are the best people to be teaching at these schools. Nor am I convinced that formal research skills are what will benefit these students most. In fact, I’m not even sure that they should be in university, per say - but that is beyond my ability to decide.
I am also still not sure that this is what’s being addressed at Tunghai. Ever since I came to Taiwan (1996), I have been hearing complaints that children’s Chinese is poor. What was generally explained to me was that calligraphy is no longer beautiful, or something along those lines. Indeed, the school teacher who posted on Jonathan’s site complained about the idiomatic fashion in which students write their school work. Is this related to the issue of freshman research writing classes? The teacher on Jonathan’s site seemed to think so. She also seemed to perceive more Chinese classes as part of the solution to this problem.
I’ve seen the same lack of skill building among students, but I’ve noticed the problem accelerate for university/college students as the MOE reforms took place in the 90s. Class size has always been an issue, but the bigger problem is that the basic writing classes are often “dumped” on instructors, who increasingly find their security under threat. With teacher reviews by students, and students that don’t hesitate to call up their friends at TVBS to put a “mean” teacher on TV (I’m not kidding), most teachers doing any basic classes not only avoid grading assignments but often don’t even require book purchases. THU is well known for having one of the most sane systems around. But it is difficult to implement these days when schools are looking to give such classes to language centers where teachers will be on temp. contracts, meaning they will be even more sensitive to not offend any students.
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
Yeah, many of my students have never had even the most basic training in organizing writing in any language. Thus when you teach a format or a structure they are often quite confused.
Michael