By Mandy Hsu Karen Chung, an associate professor in the DFLL, is here today to tell us about herself and her passion for Chinese language and culture, and for teaching. Her specialties include morphology, or how words are put together, and phonetics, the study of how speech is produced. Her phonetics course is widely popular among students, and it is also now available on NTU’s OpenCourseWare site. Prof. Chung discovered her interest in languages at an early age – her father started teaching her German at the breakfast table at about age four. She also began teaching quite early on. When she was in eleventh grade, she hoped to transfer to a new school, the St. Paul Open School, a place where students could study whatever they liked, without rules or restrictions. She helped to paint and fix up the old building that the school was to be set up in, hoping it would strengthen her chances of getting in. Her efforts were, however, in vain, since the school aimed to attract a diversified student population, and the number of white students from Prof. Chung’s school district had already exceeded the given quota. She then made an appointment with the principal and offered to teach German for free in exchange for admission. He took less than a minute to say “OK,” so she transferred to her new school and became a German teacher at the tender age of 15. “When you want something, you find a way to do it, whatever it takes,” she concluded.
While at the Open School, she joined a school trip to Puebla, Mexico, where she stayed with a host family for a month, learning Spanish and attending a local school. She discovered Chinese the next summer in a course at the Twin City Institute in St. Paul. She knew right away that this finally was “her language.” When she was a senior, she began auditing classes at the University of Minnesota, including first year Chinese. She pursued every opportunity she could to improve her Chinese, even while an exchange student in Hamburg, Germany, the year after she finished high school. Back in Minnesota, she became interested in Chinese cooking, music, philosophy…just about anything Chinese, and socialized regularly with students from Taiwan, who patiently helped her with her Mandarin learning. What made her so crazy about Chinese? Professor Chung says she had a conservative father who, even though he had only a passing acquaintance with things Chinese, was actually very Confucian in his thinking, so Chung found many things in traditional Chinese philosophy that fit in closely with her family culture. Most of all though, she simply loved the Chinese language itself, with its minimalist grammar. It felt like a kind of liberation to not have to bother with conjugations, gender, articles, and tense, as she had to do for the European languages she had previously studied. She compares Chinese grammar to the impeccable structure of a Bach fugue. Another reason she felt drawn to Chinese was because there were some aspects of her own culture that she was dissatisfied with. “The US is known as a ‘melting pot,’” she said, “but in fact the many different ethnic groups don’t tend to mix that much. Asians hang out with other Asians, black people with other black people, and white with white. Ideas of political correctness lead people to think that pretending the differences don’t exist is the best way to respond to them. Social success often seems measured by how well one learns to conform and blend in with the mainstream.” Prof. Chung believes, however, that we should strive to acknowledge, better understand and treasure diversity, actively cultivating an interest in our differences rather than shunning them, and building our interactions with others on a basis of mutual respect. Another issue she says has with her own culture is the high level of competitiveness in society, which can lead to cliquishness, excluding and disparaging others in order to elevate one’s own position, and even bullying, rather than reaching out to and cooperating with others. Taiwanese also compete hotly in academics, but they seem to more often choose cooperation over competition in social interactions. As Nelson Mandela put it, “"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.” Ms. Chung mentioned a book entitled You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, by Vivian Gussin Paley, which tackles this social issue head on. Even in kindergarten, certain children, termed “bosses,” tend to control the social order by excluding certain other children, thereby creating an in-crowd and a group of outcasts. The bosses will often say, “No, you can’t join our game,” “No, you can’t play dolls with us,” “No, you can’t be my friend.” But if there is a class rule that nobody may say “no” when somebody else wants to join a group to play, the students learn to include everybody. Competition does challenge people to improve, but we need to strike a healthy balance between competition and cooperation. While admiring the social cooperativeness and supportiveness of Taiwanese, Ms. Chung feels that we worry excessively about failure. Taiwan often takes the easier path of following others, the US in particular. “It is hard for Taiwan to surpass Western countries because people are too busy following,” remarked Professor Chung. “Taiwanese are often too afraid of striking out on their own and doing something new. What will distinguish Taiwan in the world if you have nothing unique of your own to offer?” Ms. Chung believes that textbook writing is one area that is ripe for innovation. Textbooks play a key role in educating the next generation. She believes universities could encourage more of their faculty to write high-quality, localized textbooks by counting them in applications for promotion. Prof. Chung also feels strongly that having a thorough mastery of one’s native language or languages and culture is even more important than learning good English. This needs to be actively cultivated through extensive and intensive reading. She feels that young people should take a greater interest in Chinese literature, history and philosophy. One way Ms. Chung keeps up her own Chinese, in addition to reading, is by listening to a radio program called 飛碟早餐‘The UFO Breakfast Show’ (broadcast every morning over 92.1FM at 7am), which she describes as a good model of articulate intellectual discourse in Mandarin. However, we do also need to cultivate the ability to clearly communicate with the rest of the world. Ms. Chung feels that the root problem with English teaching and learning in Taiwan not enough listening training. People would feel more comfortable speaking colloquial English if they practiced listening to large amounts of audio material, repeated over and over again until it is fully absorbed by the unconscious brain. She highly recommends Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which describes the importance of automatinglearning. Lack of enough audio input to form good internal audio models also leads to pronunciation problems – which can be a very real obstacle to communication – since you must first hear correctly in order to speak clearly. Prof. Chung believes that the easier it is for your listener to understand you, the more opportunities will open up to you. Over the past two years, she has written a series of articles in Chinese for Cave’s English Teaching magazine, HellO! E.T., about how to improve both listening and pronunciation. She now uses the articles in her classes, and feels they’ve helped students learn the material faster and better than in previous years. For more information, please visit Prof. Chung’s homepage at: http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/ a
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May 2024
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