Chinese School Association Speech
美国劳工部副部长莫天成
Title: “Strengthening Cooperation between Chinese Communities and the Mainstream in the U.S.; Together, Enhancing Chinese Language Education in North America”
Abstract: Mr. Mok will examine the importance of learning a foreign language to be globally competitive, as well as how Chinese schools in the United States address this challenge by playing such an important role in bringing the Chinese language and culture into the mainstream educational experience. He will also suggest new avenues and strategies to expand bilingual education, training, and outreach.
Date and Time: December 27, 2006 - 10:30-11:00 AM (30 minutes)
Introductions
Thank you to the conference organizers Jason Ma, President of CSAUS and Qingyuan Han, Vice President of CSAUS , I am sorry I could not be there in person, etc.
Diversity (Salad Bowl Story)
When I first came to the United States from Hong Kong as a young man, America considered itself a “melting pot,” a place where all people come together and conform to the traditional “American” man or woman. This meant learning English, trying to get rid of your accent, trying to blend in. This worked well for decades, when most new Americans were from Europe. BUT today things are much different—our society is drawing more new citizens from Asia, South America, and Africa. As a result, today America is more like a salad.
A salad has many different vegetables and fruits of different shapes, colors, and flavors. There are green peppers, red tomatoes, black olives, etc. All the ingredients of a salad retain their unique shape, color and flavor to contribute to a nutritious dish. This salad represents all the different people who are here in America that come here and who are proud of their heritage, their cultures, and their languages but consider themselves an American first. I am an example.
President Reagan once said, “You know, you can go to France but you won’t become French. You can go to China but you won’t be Chinese. But you can come to America and be an American.” This is what makes America unique. I am a living example of that and I am extremely proud to be an American by choice.
We can all be Americans and still be proud of our cultural heritage and our differences and learn to communicate effectively with others that might not share our cultural heritage or speak the same language at home.
Despite our diversity, our world continues to become smaller and smaller due to the increase in global trade, the Internet, and faster transportation, among other things. By becoming a more connected world, the importance of communicating across borders has never been more important. Language is the key to effective communication.
Language as a Tool to Be Globally Competitive
In a diverse country such as the United States, learning how to work effectively and be successful with the global community means successfully bridging cultural differences, especially in the global workplace. One of the most obvious cultural differences among people is language.
Particularly now, given the political, economic, and cultural ties between the U.S. and China, in order to work together effectively, we must be able to understand each other. The Department of Labor recognizes the importance of language as a foundation for the future of the American worker.
Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao has four strategic goals for the Department of Labor: a prepared workforce, a secure workforce, quality workplaces, and a competitive workforce. Language plays a major role in all of these areas. A Prepared Workforce. One of the ways we measure success in this goal is by eliminating significant barriers to employment, including those often caused by language differences.
A Secure Workforce - Language is the key to communication and ensuring that our workers do not face discrimination. Quality Workplaces. Language is crucial to ensuring safe workplaces. DOL has promoted providing workers who may not speak English with employment rights and safety guidelines in native languages.
Competitive Workforce - Our country’s future economic development and ability to be competitive in a global economy depend on the competitiveness of our workforce. Language skills are essential to building a competitive workforce due to increased competition from and interaction with the international community, both public and private.
However, we are still nowhere near where we want to be in terms of meeting these goals. A key example is the present ability of the FBI to meet its need for Arabic speakers. Five years after the September 11 attacks, statistics show only 33 FBI agents out of over 12,000 in the agency have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in areas that coordinate investigations of international terrorism. Only 129 agents know at least one Arabic word. Failure to recruit Arabic speakers not only hampers intelligence gathering efforts, but hurts relations between communities.
Recognition of China’s dramatic rise is fueling a new demand for Chinese language speakers. Yet schools throughout the United States are largely unprepared to meet this need, lacking qualified teachers, programs, or creative uses of modern educational technologies.
Role of Chinese Schools
The goals of the Chinese School Association are to promote the Chinese language and cultural education, help the younger generation to preserve and appreciate Chinese heritage, and bridge educational and cultural exchanges and friendship between USA and the People's Republic of China.
Language, Culture, and Heritage - Self-identity usually depends on culture to such a great extent that immersion in a very different culture—with which a person does not share common ways of life or beliefs—can cause a feeling of confusion and disorientation. This is an issue for many immigrants when they come to the United States, especially children. The efforts of Chinese schools to “connect” Chinese students to their language, culture, and heritage help eliminate these identity issues.
Immersion into the educational experience in a Chinese school helps students feel more comfortable about who they are, even when the people around them may have different ideals, values, and language.
Exchanges between the US and China - According to a study by the U.S. State Department, the number of American students studying in China has increased by 35 percent between 2004 and 2005. According to China’s Department of Education, there are 10,340 Americans studying in China, compared to 54,080 from Korea and 18,870 from Japan.
The benefits of exchanges include first hand knowledge of another culture, exploring differences between countries, understanding traditions and taboos, a better understanding of homeland, building connections between countries, and learning and practicing a foreign language. Chinese schools promote opportunities to attain these benefits.
Expanding Bilingual Opportunities
The U.S. government recognizes the importance of promoting better Chinese educational opportunities. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has said that it is in American students’ interest to understand China and Chinese. Recent data shows that of about 11.5 million American high school students, only 24,000 study Chinese, a language spoken by 1.3 billion people, whereas about 3.5 million students study Spanish, a language spoken by about 400 million people.
Given Chinese’s position as one of the most spoken languages in the world, and the general lack of infrastructure in the American educational system to teach it, Chinese is a “critical need” language according to the government. Chinese is a focus of the National Security Language Initiative (led by Departments of State, Education, Defense, Director of National Intelligence). The National Security Language Initiative has three broad goals: expand the number of Americans mastering critical need languages and start at a younger age bycreating incentives to teach and study critical need languages in K-12 by re-focusing the Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistance Program (FLAP) grants.
Building continuous programs of study of critical need languages from kindergarten to university.
Providing State Department scholarships for summer, academic year/semester study abroad, and short-term opportunities for high school students studying critical need languages to up to 3,000 high school students by summer 2009.
Expanding the State Department Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant Program, to allow 300 native speakers of critical need languages to come to the U.S. to teach in U.S. universities and schools in 2006-07.
Establishing a new component in State’s Teacher Exchange Programs to annually assist 100 U.S. teachers of critical need languages to study abroad.
Establishing language study "feeder" programs, grants, and initiatives with K-16 educational institutions to provide summer student and teacher immersion experiences, academic courses and curricula, and other resources for foreign language education in less commonly taught languages targeting 400 students and 400 teachers in 5 states in 2007 and up to 3,000 students and 3,000 teachers by 2011 in additional states.
Examples of current programs include between 1998 and 2002, the number of college students studying Chinese rose 20 percent to just over 34,000. In a fall 2004 College Board survey of high schools, 2,400 schools expressed interest in offering the Advanced Placement courses in Chinese language (Mandarin) and culture when it becomes available in 2006. The first AP test in Chinese will be offered in May 2007.
Besides the new AP course, CHENGO, an online games-based program for beginning Chinese, was developed by the U.S. Department of Education and the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China and available free of charge to pilot schools.
Increase the number of advanced-level speakers of foreign languages, with an emphasis on critical needs languages by expanding the National Flagship Language Initiative to produce 2,000 advanced speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Persian, Hindi, and Central Asian languages by 2009.
Increasing scholarships for financially-needy undergraduates to study critical need languages abroad. Adding overseas language study to 150 U.S. Fulbright student scholarships annually. Increasing support for immersion language study centers abroad.
Increase the number of foreign language teachers and the resources for them by establishing a National Language Service Corps for Americans with proficiencies in critical languages to serve the nation by working for the federal government; and/or serving in a Civilian Linguist Reserve Corps (CLRC); and/or joining a newly created Language Teacher Corps to teach languages in our nation’s elementary, middle, and high schools.
Establishing a new nation-wide distance-education E-Learning Clearinghouse through the Department of Education to deliver foreign language education resources to teachers and students across the country.
The Department of Education will establish a clearinghouse to pair schools and prospective teachers. If you have a school that needs a Chinese teacher and you have somebody that has studied Chinese and wishes to become a teacher, this program will commit funding and assistance to help that individual obtain a teacher’s certificate and connect with the requesting school. Expand teacher-to-teacher seminars and training to reach thousands of foreign language teachers in 2007.
Conclusion
China and understanding the Chinese language will continue to be important in the years ahead as we continue to address global political, economic, and cultural issues.
As such, it is essential that we continue to support our Chinese schools in the United States to maintain connections with our culture, language, and heritage. We must also continue to develop our ability to teach Chinese language and culture in the mainstream educational system by introducing programs to younger students, continuing to provide learning opportunities and exchanges through adulthood, and developing better educated and prepared teachers.
Cooperation between the U.S. and China helps to promote these ideals and make exchanges between our countries possible to enable us to educate each other and bridge the cultural divides.
America is still a “melting pot” and students encounter cultural and lingual diversity in their schools on a daily basis, and if not in their schools, in their communities. Whether our students are native speakers of English, Chinese, or something else altogether, educators must provide thoughtful, substantive, and meaningful exposure to different cultures and languages as part of the educational experience.
Educators must focus on developing “multicultural” citizens. Multicultural citizens will be better prepared than their “mono-cultural” counterparts for living in our diverse world because they understand what makes our cultures unique and can communicate across cultural and lingual lines, helping society find commonalities when beliefs, languages, and cultural norms seem different. Such a vision will create a safe and secure world in which our children and grandchildren can thrive.
The Chinese schools across the country can and should play a critical role in strengthening the security of America through the NSLI (National Security Language Initiative), furthering the understanding between the Chinese and American people, and help Americans gain a better appreciation of the rich Chinese cultural heritage and values.
As a vertically, chronologically, and follicly challenged American, or as Archie Bunker says in plain English, a short, old, bald immigrant—I can tell you this will in turn lead to a more positive, productive, and stable relationship between the two countries.
Children of Chinese Americans in this country – that is your children and my children – will benefit from your efforts. A stable and positive Sino-American relationship through better understanding among the two peoples will lead to greater world prosperity and world peace.
I applaud you for your past efforts and your future commitment in this very important endeavor.
Let me be the first person to wish you a Happy New Year.