Being a hybrid

I asked a Taiwanese/American friend to look at this blog, and to comment on it. I asked her to tell me about her Chinese/American identity, remarking that in Denmark I used to feel like I was 75% Danish and 75% American (since there was certainly some overlap in the two cultures.) Linda said she understood the concept but considers herself 65% American and 35% Chinese hybrid (as a mathematician, she wants it to add up!)

Linda has very kindly shared a couple of sections from her Ethnographic analysis of her own background, which was a major assignment for our summer classes.

Family Background

I was born and raised in a middle class family with traditional Chinese values. My father was an entrepreneur who was the primary financial provider for our family. My mother was the traditional loving wife and mom. She focused most of her attention on instilling good values in her children, doing everything she can in her power to ensure that everything was done to the utmost of her ability. The house was spotless in her presence, the children were never left unattended and the household ran smoothly.

Growing up as a young child, I was exposed to several languages. My first language was Taiwanese. It was the primary language that was spoken within our household, and among friends and relatives. As I entered into my school years, I learned Mandarin, which was the formally accepted written language in Taiwan at the time. My father spoke Japanese as part of his professional dealings, and as a result, I was exposed to the Japanese language as well. It was not until my college years [in the U.S] that I actually spent some time formally studying the Japanese language. Throughout my secondary school years, I spent five years studying the Spanish language as part of my foreign language requirements.

My first introduction to the English language and the western culture was at the age of eight when my family immigrated to the United States. For the most part, my western influences came from the world outside of home. As a child, my teachers and friends at school played essential roles for shaping my acceptance of the Western culture into my life. It did not take long for me to embrace the openness of the Western culture, as it closely connected to my personality. Confused about my true identity, I was living a Western life by day and an Eastern life by night throughout most of my school years. The two sides of me did not mesh until I began to look within myself as a young adult. It was not until my late twenties that I actually accept myself as sort of a hybrid, someone who embraces the freedom of the western culture while still upholding some traditional Chinese values from within.

Today, I feel extremely lucky to have been exposed to both the Eastern and Western style of education. As a teacher, I will pick and chose from both styles of education. Depending on the needs of each student in my class, I can shift between the Eastern and Western style of teaching.

Language Acquisition

My first encounter with the English language occurred on my first day of class in America as a third-grade student, at Yorbita Elementary School in La Puente, California. No one in my immediate family spoke English, and thus, my first day of school in the United States was complete immersion in the most unexpected way.

As I recall, the teacher pointed to me during my first day of class and said, “Linda”. She pointed to herself and said, “Ms. Dubra”. Not being aware of the English name that I was just given at that time, I remember thinking the English language was so complicated. In Chinese, the simple words of “you” and “me” were just “ni” and “wo”. I thought to myself, “Why are there so many syllables for such simple words of communication?” After a few days of having this misconception, I finally made the connection that “Linda” was actually my name, and therefore, “Ms. Dubra” was the name of my teacher.

My experience as an ELL student in 1978 was one that was nurturing and encouraging. My teacher and the class aide were both more than supportive of my inability to understand the English language. They were also pleasantly surprised at my mathematical capabilities, as I had no problems comprehending formulas and equations that were based on the Greek system of numeration.

Differentiated instruction was used to teach me the English language. Initially, a student aide who I met with for approximately one hour per day taught me some basic English vocabulary using body language and picture cards. As I began to understand some verbal English instructions, I joined first grade students during the English portion of their class. My day consisted of two separate instructional parts. It was through this method of differentiated instruction that I learned to read in English.

It took only a few months before I was able to communicate verbally using some basic day-to-day English vocabulary. However, it took many years of practice before I felt confident writing in the English language. It was not until I fully immersed myself into the American culture as an adult that I was able to comfortably write in English. That meant I had to stop translating from Chinese to English and actually, think and write directly in English. It took almost twenty years of work in progress for me to achieve a fluid level of written communication in the English language.

On schools in Taiwan and the U.S.

(from the email, not the ethnography) Generally, school in the US was a lot easier in terms of academic expectations, and much more at ease (more freedom) with respect to the daily school life. The teachers were all super nice and caring, and they never really punished anyone. In Taiwan in the late 70's, the teachers [could] physically hit students for talking, doing something incorrectly,... as a form of punishment. Middle school students actually [had] to have their hair cut a certain way, a very specific length - I remember always laughing at my sister's silly cut when we were young. Can you believe that?

[Linda added in a later email that] the education system today in Taiwan has changed quite a bit as well. Students are allowed to have their own preferred hairstyles now, unlike before where they even had someone at school reshaping your haircut if it did not meet the stated requirements. Coloring hair is still not accepted in most schools. Teachers are also not allowed to hit students anymore today. I would estimate the change to be in the 90s, maybe a gradual change began in the late 80s as Taiwan opened its market to the outside world, receiving more western influences as a result.
(Emails from Linda - My emphasis)

I think Linda describes very clearly the conflicts of two cultures, how she negotiated her identity between home and school, as well as her own awareness of her lack of Academic English, as discussed in the book and earlier in this blog.

Since there were most likely very few Chinese students in her school, she learned entirely through immersion in English, with caring teachers. Since she had learned not only her family language Taiwanese, but the Academic Chinese of Mandarin in school and was adept at mathematics, she was able to pick up the language quite quickly and was encouraged in her studies. She was given maximum exposure to English by being placed in a regular classroom (albeit a couple of grades back) so that she could learn to read along with the first graders. Since her language was not European, she had to learn an entirely different code and had very little other than underlying language universals to help her learn English.

Learning L2 in the L1 context

Most of us had to learn a second language in school, while still in our L1 setting. I had 2 years of Latin and 2 of French in high school, then more French, a year and a half of Russian and started German in college. German became my major when I felt like I couldn't excel in math and physics, so I attended German summer school 3 times, did my graduate study in Germanic linguistics, took a Danish MA in it, and taught it in Danish high schools for about 12 years.

And this doesn't account for all the other languages I "learned" in an academic setting: Gothic and Old High German, Frisian, English, & Norse; Greek, Sanskrit, & Lithuanian; Finnish & Greenlandic Eskimo. All of these languages were taught primarily in the "learn grammar, read and translate" method.

I have met numerous foreigners who learned English that way in their home country. They have no problem reading and writing, and thought that they were fluent, but they discover that spoken English is very different from classroom English.

I had a friend in Denmark, who was studying English at the university and later became a HS English teacher like me. She was so afraid that I would discover that she made errors in English that she would never speak English with me. I sometimes thought she preferred that I made a fool of myself in Danish rather than she in English. Her husband, on the other hand, was studying economics, and had no need to have perfect English. We often talked English together. Later, he lead tours to Berlin, so I assume he also spoke a fluent, but imperfect German, which got him wherever he wanted to go.

My son's wife studied English for many years in Panama, but was completely tongue-tied when she moved here, because the teachers had punished the students with ridicule and bad grades if they made mistakes. She has had to work hard to shake off her feelings of inferior English.

My high school French teacher did try to get us conversing in French, and my German summer schools (including a college-run summer school in Vienna) were attempts at immersion, so we did do a lot of "conversing" of sorts in German there and at German House in college.

But I always say that I really learned German when I arrived in Germany after 2 years of German and had to go to a drug-store to buy a tooth-brush, as well as our first experiences ordering meals in restaurants, which produced some interesting results. (Later I had a similar experience trying to buy disposable diapers for my son. I ended up putting him on the counter and pointing - entirely "context embedded!")

But I learned particularly German (and later, Danish) another way. I read. I read many German novels above and beyond what we were assigned in our courses. In this way I absorbed an enormous amount of passive vocabulary and grammatical structures. That summer in Vienna and another 2 weeks in Eastern Germany many years later were my only extended visits in German-speaking countries. Everything else I learned from books and movies. Several of my college assignments also had to be written in German, my only writing experience except for an occasional letter. In all those first books I read, the first 20 pages are well annotated with glosses. After that I quit using the dictionary, because I had acquired enough of the context to figure out the rest of the words. I could at least figure out that a word was a poitive adjective, the name of a yellow flower, some sort of activity. If I encountered a word several times without guessing its meaning, I might look it up, because I knew that it would help my understanding to know it.

As a teacher of German in Denmark, I finally got the "discrete language skills" of German down, because I had to correct numerous translations and essays, where the students were expected to write correctly. My students had had German since 7th grade, so I got them 3-4 years later. We had to work a lot on their "discrete language skills" of grammar. since their primary school classes had emphasized conversation. Since Germany was our closest neighbor, most students had traveled in Germany, and some even watched German TV. Besides grammar and essay-writing, classes were based on large amounts of reading, and classroom discussions of what they'd read. My students had a much better chance of learning a usable German (and English, which they started in 5th grade) than we ever did with 2 years of HS French. Their exams were also very different from here: Final exams consisted of an individual oral exam, where a student discussed a half a page of one of the texts we had read, as well as a written exam, where students answered short questions, translated some text and wrote an essay based on a given 2-page text. Multiple-choice is unknown in Denmark.

My experience of learning Danish (my L3) in Denmark was mostly the natural method, with a couple of classes in Danish for foreigners and then an evening HS class in Danish intended for Danes. My experience was thus somewhat like that of our students - except that I was an adult, knew a similar language (German) fluently, understood the concept of grammar, and had a great need to learn Danish quickly, so that I could get a job. I was also married to a Dane, so I spoke Danish at home and with his family, and I had children who were becoming fluent in day care and in school.

Chapter 3: The Three Faces of Language Proficiency

How long does it take to learn a new language? Or maybe we should ask: what does it mean to "know" a language?

When I've looked back at my experience learning Danish as a 25-year old, I was thinking 3-4 months. But then I remember the embarrassment of misunderstandings, my husband's writing job applications, my relief that I could submit my American dissertation draft (in English) as my Danish MA thesis, and that most exams were orals. Even many years later when I was trying to earn a living between real jobs, when I was told by a temp agency that I couldn't do a receptionist's job because of my (minimal) accent.

Most texts about learning a second language divide language competency into two categories: BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills, and CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency.) Most kids pick up BICS pretty quickly. I remember meeting a little 4-year-old American boy in our apartment complex in Denmark, very miserable because he couldn't communicate with the other kids. It seems like it didn't take him more than a month before he was playing happily with them. My daughter at age 2 1/2 was having trouble separating the English of her mother and children's books, and the Danish of her father and day care until we spent a couple of weeks in England with no Danish around. After that there was not problem keeping them separated.

So our bilingual children started school with the monolingual Danes and appeared to do as well as them, since they were learning CALP along with their Danish classmates in school...as well as, it appears, at home. Because we read to them in both languages, and discussed things with them, they were getting kid-sized CALP from us. It apparently doesn't matter which language you start doing cognitively stimulating things, as long as you do it. But even so, studies have shown that kids often need 4-7 years to catch up with their classmates when it come to CALP, the stuff that's measured for grades and standardized tests. Small children probably a little less, if they get good support at home, kids 8-14 best, it seems, and over 14 never has a chance to catch up. (Cummins, p. 73) .

Somehow it seems to me that there are parameters not being considered here:

• How much cognitive stimulation is the child getting from home (no matter in what language?)
• How old is the child - or person?
  
• What is his L1 (a language that is similar in vocabulary to English (i.e. with all the Greek and Latin academic words) or one that is very different?
• How challenging was the child's schooling in L1 before coming here?

Cummins adds a third dimension to BICS (which he calls "conversational fluency") and CALP "academic language proficiency"):

Discrete language skills reflect specific phonological, literacy and grammatical knowledge that students acquire as a result of direct instruction and both formal and informal practive (e.g. reading). Some of these ... skills are acquired early ... [including] knowledge of the letters of the alphabet, the sounds represented by the ... letters,,,, and the ability to decode written words into appropriate sounds. [Later] they will also acquire conventions about spelling, capitalization, and punctuation as well as ...grammatical rules...
(Cummins, p. 65)

Evidently some students are able to acquire convincing conversational and discrete language skills without being able to use them in academic situations. Thus both the teachers and counselors don't consider the possibility that the student is still a language learner when it comes to cognitive learning skills. Cummins argues for longer protected bilingual training, so that students can develop more of the CALP skills before being transferred to regular classes.

Language presents demands across both contextual and cognitive continua to receive and produce language. If there is sufficient external context, just as gestures and appropriate objects, language learners can understand quite well with minimal language skills. As the student learns vocabulary and cultural background, she internalizes more and more context, so that more can be understood without the external context. Similarly, the language may be cognitively undemanding, as in a conversation or an easy book, while it can become progressively more demanding, as in high school and college classes. Cummins presents a framework to show these two continua.

(Cummins, p. 67)

	Cognitively Undemanding
Context	A	C	Context
Embedded	B	D	Reduced
	Cognitively Demanding

The area A defines normal conversation (BICS), while D is the most academically challenging (CALP). According to Cummins,

the progression of academic tasks should ideally go from quadrant A ... to quadrant B ... and then to quadrant D... Cognitive challenge is essential for academic growth but the internal and external contextual support necessary for bilingual students to meet that challenge must also be built into the activities. ...Quadrant C activities ... can be useful for reinforcement or practice of particular points and for teaching discrete language skills. However, if instruction stays at the level of quadrant C ..., it risks focusing only on out-of-context drills and worksheets, ...[failing] to supply ...elements to facilitate learning: for example, cognitive challenge, affirmation of identity,and extensive comprehensible input in the target language.
(Cummins, p. 71)

Of course all students, not just English Learners, can benefit from this progression. It is very interesting to see where Cummins places worksheets as context-reduced, cognitively undemanding.

Getting back to the question of how long it takes to acquire proficiency, Cummins reports on research on students in several different countries. He concludes that students can gain "peer-appropriate" (BICS) language skills quite quickly, since the cognitive level is relatively undemanding. However, it takes students a longer time to catch up with their classmates on the more demanding classroom skills, because their classmates are "a moving target;" they are also moving on. So a language learner has to learn at a faster pace in order to catch up with her classmates, which puts enormous pressure on the students. Even though they are apparently fluent, they still need a lot of support in the classroom. It is no wonder that many of these students give up when they have to work harder than their classmates. We teachers must be aware that even seemingly well-adjusted language learners may be struggling, and provide them with the support that they need.