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 Solving the
Mystery of Chinese Word Types: Professor Shou-hsin
Teng Offers Rigorous Classification System
Bryan K. Beaudoin
 It is a misconception as ubiquitous
as it is false: Chinese has no grammar. It may lack the elaborate
conjugations of Japanese, or numerous tenses of European languages. But as every student of Chinese knows,
the language presents its own grammatical challenges. What aspects of Chinese and Chinese
teaching today trouble students the most?
Professor Shou-hsin Teng
would cite the poor classification of parts of speech found in most text
books.
On April
3 and 22, Professor Shou-hsin Teng
delivered a two-part lecture about his classification of Chinese parts of
speech and its pedagogical applications to an audience of ICLP instructors
and students of the Chinese Teacher Training Program at National Taiwan
University. He discussed the ongoing project of
creating a learners glossary of Chinese.
Professor
Teng is renowned as a linguist and teacher of
modern Chinese. He has made great
contributions to Chinese as a Second Language Teaching (CSL), Chinese
pedagogical grammar, teacher training, course
material design, and testing and evaluation methods. He has a doctorate in linguistics from UC
Berkeley, and has studied under Chao Yuan Ren, Wang Shi Yuan, George Lakoff,
Charles Fillmore and Wallace Chafe.
Professor Teng established the Graduate
Institute of Teaching Chinese as a Second Language at National Taiwan
Normal University
and was its first director. He has
previously served as director of ICLP (then IUP), chair of the Department
of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University
of Massachusetts, Amherst, director of ACTFL-CLTA, and
editor of JCLTA. He has advised
nearly 100 master’s degree students, holds numerous guest lectureships, and
has won the CLTA Lifetime Achievement Award.
An
appropriately classified system of Chinese word types and effective
teaching go hand in hand. ICLP is
actively encouraging all teachers, students and teacher trainees to
familiarize themselves with Professor Teng’s new
classification system. In addition,
the summer session 2009 will be ICLP’s largest
ever. Many new teachers will be
recruited from the current class of the Chinese Teacher Training Program,
making this an ideal chance for trainees to improve their understanding of
Chinese word types.
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