Medium, Meaning,
Promoting Translingual
& Transcultural Competence
包圭漪, Author and Speaker
陈东东, Director,
叶宪, Principal/President, Homa & Sekey
Books
Cathy Bao Bean, Dongdong Chen & Shawn Xian Ye are all
submitting this proposal in order for each to discuss different aspects of the
title subjects such that, together, they constitute a single panel that, responding to both the “Student
Motivation” and “Pedagogy” conference themes, addresses the complex process of how to raise translingual and transcultural
competence.
While language
instruction generally uses the “medium” of textbooks as a source for “meaning”
or vocabulary, motivation to learn from those textbooks has many, often
intermittent, sometimes unreliable sources—from the ambitions of learners,
teachers, and their families to the requirements of schools, jobs, and travel.
Our panel will describe how we three collaborated to collectively, and
simultaneously, provide “medium, meaning, and motivation” to heritage and
non-heritage learners in form and format.
This
ground-breaking form and format has been developed by us such that the “medium” is not only a book with text,
vocabulary and exercises but also is a means to promote the cultural “medium”
through text consisting of thought-provoking yet humorous stories reinforced by
innovative exercises that motivate because they provide and promote proficiency
and understanding of the Chinese
language and culture while doing
the same for the English/American language and culture. In other words,
students can learn more about themselves and others by understanding their own,
their family’s, their community’s, their bosses’ (bi)cultural
identities. By revealing the
text and context in two languages and cultural settings, the impact of the “5 Cs”—Communication, Culture, Connections,
Comparisons and Communities—are at least doubled.
However, this doubling is not just to have one idea in
English and another in Chinese but to commingle the two. Insofar as Chen and Bao
Bean believe that one cannot teach what one does not know, they have derived an
approach to teaching language that is the basis for their
collaboration and pedagogy. By commingling, not just adjoining, resources, one not
only compensates for the other’s lack but also provides students with an
integrated means to learn from both in a way that increases their understanding
of a second language and culture by better understanding their first. And vice versa.
This kind of commingling is encouraged by a series of
exercises that encourage the thinker to “play” with words and ideas. For
example: