Description: In this video, Haohsiang Liao shares a strategy for motivating students to put significant effort into their study of Chinese.
Instructor: Haohsiang Liao
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.
