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 (continued)
Professor Teng: American CSL has been around for a while, but very rarely trains
its own teachers. For instance, AP
[Advanced Placement] Chinese needs over 2400 teachers a year. We go to Beijing looking for them. We go to Taipei looking for them. This is an example of how when America needs Chinese teachers, it goes to
mainland China or Taiwan.
This shows that American CLS is a failure. What you need to work hard at is training
your own Chinese teachers. Right now
there are a few places like University of Hawaii and Iowa State that has M.A.s
in CSL. But, that’s not enough. America needs so many teachers, but looks
for them in Taiwan and mainland China.
This isn’t right.
BKB: I’ve been studying for
several years. I’ve passed the
Advanced level of the Test of Proficiency Huayu. I know lots of chengyu. But listening to your lecture I realize I
still struggle with some very basic Chinese grammar.
Professor Teng: This is a point of failure of CSL and also our teaching
materials. [The vocabulary presented
in] our text books has been incorrectly marked for so long. So you’ll encounter these kinds of
problems in the study of Chinese.
You’ve tested a 6 [on the TOP], but when you leave the classroom you
can’t use it, or you often use it wrong.
So our text books aren’t good enough and our teachers aren’t trained
well enough. We need to go back to
the basics, retrain our teachers, and edit our teaching materials. That’s what we’re doing here today.
BKB: Am I a lost cause?
Professor Teng at IUP student
presentation, 1982
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