Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: Character Issue and Other Considerations
Department
Modern Languages & Literatures Department
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2012-2013
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Abstract
In one of his Lingua Franca posts entitled More on How to Argue for Foreign-Language Instruction (March 2, 2012) in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Geoffrey Pullum argues that the academic institutions do not make a good case for foreign-language instruction in the current financial stringency. To support his own view about writing system instruction, Pullum quotes Victor Mairs anti-conventional stance about learning Chinese characters. Victor Mair (U. Penn) is quoted as saying: It’s a tragedy that so many young Americans spend years stuffing their heads with hundreds of Chinese characters, gaining no usable proficiency, and then forgetting them all by the time they’re 25.
Conference Name
2012 Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs
Conference Location
Kalamazoo, Michigan
ScholarWorks Citation
Smith, Curtis; Lai, Sufen; Mou, Sherry; Robinson, Jeremy; and Day, Steven, "Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language: Character Issue and Other Considerations" (2013). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 1056.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/1056
