HAOHSIANG LIAO: Our pedagogy here
is we would like to train our students to become
successful participants in Chinese culture
by using Mandarin as their primary language.
So this means we expect students to behave in a way
that whenever they have an opportunity
to interact with Chinese people, they will find
it comfortable from both sides.
So that's the general idea about our pedagogy here.
In order to do this, besides language proficiency,
we're talking about the grammar.
We're talking about the language forms.
We also extend our attention to their behavioral culture.
And we feel that this is an essential component
for a successful communication in a second culture.
The time in class, we'll usually use it, for the most part,
to provide students the opportunity to perform.
And by performance, we mean that performance
in the second culture based on what we
call the situational knowledge.
So we feel as an instructor, our role
is to provide a state for students to practice in class.
I think the example could be as simple as, how
do you create your teacher versus your friends
in Chinese culture?
When students ask me, so what am I
going to learn for Chinese 101, I always
tell them that after Chinese 101,
if you have friends who don't know any Chinese ask you,
so how do you speak "hi" in Chinese,
your answer can be more sophisticated than saying
"nihao," which is a general greeting in Chinese.
So for example, the way we greet our teachers on campus
is really different from the way that we greet our friends.
So we're trying to get students' attention to the environments
or the situation they're in, for example,
the people they are speaking with,
their role in the conversation, or the place.
So speaking with a teacher takes different strategies
compared to speaking with your friends in Chinese culture,
for example.
We learn to do things in foreign languages
so that's a very fundamental concept here that we're always
trying to convey to our students.
We try to encourage them that what you're doing here
is to accomplish things by using Mandarin
as your primary language.
I think for us, we consider culture
as common daily practices and social norms
that define an individual to function successfully
in a society.
So for us, we feel one of the priorities as a language
instructor, our responsibility is
to help students prioritize those daily practices
and then show them the patterns or the rules involved.
And once students have the opportunity
to be exposed to those rules and then in class,
they have their opportunities to practice them, to perform them
and as an instructor, you're providing feedback,
then they go through this what we call a "cycle."
So out of each class, they can get out
of each 50-minute class with a story.
Today's story might be, how do you decline an offer
from your employer?
Tomorrow's story might be, how do you deal with conflicts?
So this is what we call the stories here
and our experience shows us that a cross-cultural
miscommunication, for the most part,
they don't lie in language proficiency.
They lie in cultural competence.
And that's why we would like to bring the cultural competence
into the core components of our curriculum here.
We're not saying that language proficiency is not important.
We're just trying to point out that the way you behave
in a second culture is as important as your use
of the language.