HAOHSIANG LIAO: In a second culture,
you have a couple roles to play.
I'll give like five levels.
You can be a tourist and you can be an observer.
And you can be a participant, and you can be a contributor,
and you can be a shareholder.
And I always ask my students, ask yourself, what kind of role
you want to play in a second culture.
And that will also guide you through when
you are learning how to do these kind of things with a language.
And our goal here for Chinese 1 and Chinese 2 until Chinese 4,
we really-- we really push our students
hard to the level at least to be participants.
What is a tourist?
I mean, being a tourist is totally OK.
So, for example, when you go to China,
you see so many cars and the air is really bad.
And so you say, as a tourist, that the air is so bad.
An utterance like that would not get you too far
in communications.
But if you can start to be observer,
for example, so you observe what are the reasons
involved and start to give you some time and absorb them.
Then the next-- then the next level
is you can start to participate in the discussions
so that the words coming from your mouth,
they're much more sophisticated-- they're
much more sophisticated, so that the native speakers would have
the interest to speak with you.
So those are the five roles that I always
encourage students to think about what kind of role
you want to play in the second culture.
And that would, for the most part,
determine your efforts when you-- when
you're learning a language.
It can be applied in many, many aspects.
If today, the issue is really about a [INAUDIBLE],
for example, the structure's not right.
I always-- I always-- I always ask
my students, what if, what would you
react if a native-- if a foreigner speaks
to you with English like, "I go to the park yesterday."
What would you react?
Think about a sentence like this.
His beat-- his beat is not-- it's not fluency.
And he has some grammatical errors.
How would you react?
You can still react without any difficulties,
because you understand.
But think about that if you have to interact
with this person for 30 minutes.
What is your [? maximum? ?] And that would also
become the motivation to work on your language forms,
that's for sure.
Second thing is, there would also--
there was-- that will also give us
the opportunity to think about what kind of level.
And the level we're talking about
includes cultural competence and language proficiency that when
you push yourself to be.
But I will state that as long as you put in the efforts,
it's always rewarding.
It's always rewarding.
And I'm very happy to state that our students,
they are usually-- they're usually
very good at this regard.
They usually find a lot of resources
either on campus or the greater Boston community,
to interact with the-- to interact
with the speakers of Chinese.