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 (continued)
The course, taught by the indefatigable Wei
PaoPei LaoShi, meets
for one hour each day Monday through Friday and has three students.
Each day Monday through Wednesday, one student must prepare a 15-20 minute
presentation that focuses on a particular aspect of the topic of the week.
Topics discussed thus far include Euthanasia, The Death Penalty, The
American Empire and Genetically Engineered Crops. As students present
their reports, the instructor passively observes, taking notes to be used
in preparation for an in depth review on Thursday. To facilitate such
review, each class is recorded and students are expected to listen to their
presentation later in order to learn to identify and correct their own
mistakes. On Thursday, Wei LaoShi leads students through a review of their most
common/egregious mistakes, frequently providing alternative means of
expression. The week culminates in a debate competition on Friday, during which two students square off while a
third student acts as moderator.
Although there
are still a few weeks remaining in the semester, it is already clear that
the burden this course places on the instructor is greater than that of a typical
group class at ICLP. It is my belief, however, that the astounding
effort that Wei LaoShi
has put into review and correction has provided amazingly tailored study
material, which students reference as they learn to correct their own
mistakes. Furthermore, the presentation part of the course, while
very time consuming, has achieved the original goal of increasing the speed
at which students research in Chinese and
preparing students to give short the type of short presentations that will
be required in a Chinese/Taiwanese graduate school. After spending
the first four days of the week familiarizing ourselves with relevant
vocabulary and concepts, we are armed with the tools necessary to make
Friday's debate an effective means of training not only one's ability to
express complete arguments in Chinese, but also one's ability to think on
one's feet. We hope that the experience that we all gain from this
course can be used in the future to integrate some version of this debate
course into the current ICLP curriculum. As for this year, the
practice we have taken part in during Wei LaoShi's debate class has been very worthwhile and we
are all excited to put our skills to the test in a more formal
debate!
Next Sunday (5/17), two ICLP teams of three
students each will square off with native Chinese speakers in the First
Annual ICLP Cross-School Debate Competition. The topic for this
year's debate is: When hiring and managing staff, should corporations place
more importance on talent or moral character? We are lucky enough to
have representatives from the debate teams of both National
Taiwan University
and National Cheng Chi
University, as well
as alumni of NTU's International Business
department coming to compete in next week's competition. While we
expect it will not be easy to compete with native speakers of Chinese, we
are confident that the training received at ICLP has prepared us for this
year-end test of our language ability. We're looking forward to the
challenge and hope that our readers will come out to support us next
Sunday!
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