A Year at the Center of the World

My parents gave me many wonderful gifts, but among the top few--right up there with breastfeeding me, having a happy marriage, trusting me to make my own decisions, and putting me through the Canadian French immersion system--is the trip we took to Turkey as a family the year I turned fourteen.

We lived on the European side of Istanbul, not far from Taksim Square, and my younger sisters and I attended Lycee Pierre Loti, a school created to educate French children left behind in Turkey during the Second World War.  It was an ancient building, having been, before the Lycee was founded, a French Capuchin seminary in the business of training priests for the Greek, Syrian, Chaldean, and Armenian rites of the Catholic church.  My mother had had to fight to get us in, because, since we were mere Canadians--and Anglophone Canadians at that--our French surely wouldn't be good enough.  We were slightly worried they might be right when the application forms mysteriously demanded, "Do you sleep with your mouth open?"  We got in and I did have trouble--for about a week, after which I picked up the accent and eventually made it onto the honor roll.

That school did great things for my French and also seriously improved my German, which up to that point had been picked up from a year of Saturday school, another year of night classes, and a few months of tutoring.  My classmates took English as their third language (fourth for the 50% or so of the students who were Turkish), and a few spoke it well.  During English class I was allowed to sit and read my own English books; I had a reading list for ninth-grade English from my school at home and had added some titles related to our travels (we were reading The Iliad as a family, for instance).

Since we went to school in French, we didn't learn to speak Turkish fluently during our year in Istanbul. We did learn enough vocabulary and basic phrases to get along in Turkish at the markets, the banks, and the stores.  Some things we learned from the Foreign Service Institute Turkish Basic Course that my father had bought (I was mainly the one who sat with the heavy paperback book and listened to the tapes, and then I drilled my parents and sisters until they got the pronunciation right--I'd always had a good ear for languages), but most we picked up from reading the signs in the stores and bazaars and listening to the shopkeepers and vendors and the other customers.

I do regret that we didn't study Turkish more intensively and more formally when we had the chance to use it every day, but even the small amount that I picked up was valuable: for one thing, it was my second significant exposure to a non-Indo-European language and therefore expanded my understanding of how human languages work, which certainly made it easier for me to pick up other languages later.

The cultural education that I got during my year abroad was far more interesting and more important than  anything that I could have learned in school.  Seeing how people live in another country--but especially a country as different from Canada and the United States as Turkey--changed my life profoundly.  I can't possibly explain how in a short blog post, but some of the little things that stick in my mind, even eighteen years later, are the old men strolling along Istiklal Caddesi, the famous shopping street, with their friends, holding hands; the running water in our apartment being shut off twelve hours a day (we had to light the hot-water boiler with a match), my piano teacher's enormous Turkish rug and the servant who brought us tea before the lesson; the stray cats and dogs that haunted the streets and courtyards at night, and the people who fed them and cared for them; the way the poorest people smiled a lot more than the richer ones; the briefcases full of cash left casually on the sidewalk outside shops while their owners bought meat and bread on the way home from work; the stares that I elicited from walking around bare-headed in some of the provincial towns; the call to prayer broadcast from the minarets five times a day; the trucks painted in brilliant floral designs; the fruits and vegetables in the markets arranged with exquisite precision.  And of course our visits to Troy and Pergamon and Gallipoli and Hattusha were a history course unlike any other.

I learned that there no one culture has a monopoly on beauty, happiness, or knowledge and that a fresh perspective can improve any situation.  I learned that the way my Canadian classmates dressed was not the only way to dress, that their interests and prejudices should not limit my interests and understanding.  I learned that I should not judge other countries and cultures by what I heard on the news.  And I learned that the way I was perceived by the people I'd grown up with was not the only way I could see myself.

I hope that before my children grow up and leave home, I will be able to give them the gift of a year (or two or three) abroad and that it will have as positive an effect on their lives as it did on mine.

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This post is part of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism.  Learn more about the Carnival and how you can participate by visiting the Carnival founder's blog, Bilingual for Fun.  Check out the most recent Carnival posts by visiting the host blog, Bringing Up Baby Bilingual.

ACCENT ON DUTCH, by guest blogger Francie Gow

My Dutch accent has progressed in fits and starts rather than gradually. The musical training surely helped here too, as did the early exposure to the sounds from hearing my mother speak with Dutch-speaking friends and relatives. However, there were a few sounds particular to Dutch that I could recognize but had trouble imitating for a long time, as I was not forced to try very often.

The first difficult sound I remember conquering was the rolled “r”. When I was eight years old, I spent a week or two with my great-aunt and great-uncle on the family farm in Netterden. Their four sons had learned English in school, so I generally communicated in English through them. They had a lovely dog named Bonnie who could do entertaining tricks, like rolling over or jumping up to push the door closed. I was eager to give her these commands myself, but she simply ignored me when I encouraged her to “rollen” with my wimpy English “r”. I practised and practised making motor noises with my tongue. A few days later, I knew I had finally succeeded when she heard me say “rrrrrrollen” and promptly did a little flip. I could not possibly have found a more exacting—or motivating—teacher.

When I finally decided in my early twenties to learn to speak Dutch, I set about conquering the last of the challenging sounds with the help of taped language lessons and by asking for help from my relatives every time I went to visit. While my Dutch accent today is not nearly as good as my French accent, the head start that I had acquired in childhood helps me sound much more advanced than the relative beginner I really am.

Basically, I can pass for a native speaker, or at least a proficient one, for the first thirty seconds of any conversation. The disadvantage is that whenever I ask for something in a store, I get a long, detailed answer in rapid-fire Dutch. I quickly learned the phrase, “Langzamer, alstublieft!” (More slowly, please!), and I use it constantly.

The advantage is that native speakers are less likely to switch into English to “help” me, thus giving me more opportunities to practise and improve. On a recent trip to The Hague, my partner and I wanted to reserve a guided tour at the Peace Palace. I dialled the number in the guidebook and began the conversation with “Goeden dag. Spreekt u Engels?” (Good day. Do you speak English?) The man at the other end answered, in Dutch, “Yes, of course I do, but I don’t think I will; your Dutch is much too good!” Totally caught off guard, I stammered my way clumsily through the rest of the conversation. However, it did the job, and he congratulated me warmly before hanging up.

Don’t despair if your child’s early exposure to a language is inconsistent at best; it may still facilitate future efforts!

ACCENT ON FRENCH, by guest blogger Francie Gow

I may not be able to fool everybody all the time, but my French accent is finally good enough to allow me to blend in with the Francophones around me. Actually, it would be more accurate to say my French accents, as I find myself adjusting to the environment depending on whether I am in Quebec or in France.

I don’t think I was born with a particular talent for accents; I simply had and found the right opportunities. When I was four years old, my parents signed me up for violin lessons, and my musical education continued through my early university years. I also taught some violin in my late teens and early twenties. The sense of pitch I developed while tuning all those tiny violins before each beginner fiddle class has helped me hear and imitate the nuances of spoken French. I have no doubt that Susan’s background in piano has contributed to her own ease in distinguishing the sounds of new languages.

I was also fortunate to have been taught in my early years by several native French speakers, mostly from Quebec, as well as by Anglophones who had previously spent a significant amount of time in French environments. When I later taught English conversation courses in France, I could hardly blame the students for speaking English with such thick French accents; most of their teachers did too!

After high school, I spent summers in French-language programs in Quebec, studied French at Memorial University (one of my most helpful courses there was in French phonetics—I highly recommend glancing through the guide to phonetic symbols that appears in the front of any good dictionary), lived and worked in France for a year, studied translation and worked as a French-to-English translator in Ottawa, and then studied law in a bilingual program in Montreal. As I mentioned in my first post, I also fell for a handsome Francophone while in Ottawa and am now fully integrated into his French-speaking family.

In other words, with some help from those early advantages I mentioned, I have developed my accent through a slow and steady evolution, and through thousands of hours of listening and speaking. My only regret is that I have no memory of how I sounded at various stages of my French-language development. I wish I had recordings of myself speaking French in primary school, at the end of high school, after my French degree, and again just after my return from France. If your child is learning a language that he or she does not already speak natively, you may want to squirrel away some samples now to play back at a later date.

Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography

The goal of this bibliography is to present a core of scholarly articles detailing some of the basic issues relevant to Chinese librarianship in North America, with a focus on service to families and children. 

The nineteen articles in this bibliography have been chosen to provide North American librarians new to Chinese librarianship a broad overview of the main problems and controversies that they are likely to face in working with Chinese collections and attempting to provide the best possible service to children and families in that context. 

Since this is a rapidly developing field of inquiry, only articles written in the 1990s or later have been included; six of the nineteen articles were written in the last two years, and most (fifteen out of nineteen) were published in the year 2000 or later.

The authors discuss representations of Chinese people and Chinese culture in literature for children, the appropriation of Chinese narratives in mainstream American fiction, the current status of the Chinese publishing industry, service to Chinese-speaking children and families, cataloging and retrieval issues, and the role of new technologies in improving access to online and print resources.

In 2000, nearly 3,000,000 people in the United States identified their ethnic background as being wholly or partly Chinese.  After India, China provides more graduate students to U.S. universities than any other foreign country (Werling, 2009).  It is therefore crucial for North American librarians to pay more systematic attention to serving Chinese and Chinese-American patrons and communities in their institutions.

Recent Chinese immigrants may be unfamiliar with North American school and library conventions.  In China and other Asian countries, for instance, school lessons consist mostly of rote learning (Ho, 1990), and Chinese students may be accustomed to more structured lessons and may be less comfortable than American students with asking for help or expressing their needs and opinions (Werling, 2009).  Libraries also tend to be very different from their American counterparts (Werling, 2009) and to be used mostly for studying for tests, working on homework, and socializing rather than for pleasure reading or borrowing books (Ho, 1990).  Therefore, providing the best possible service to Chinese immigrants and their children in North American libraries may involve working to understand and sometimes modify different perspectives on the role of the library in families’ lives.  Orientation programming may help to acclimatize families to the way that North American libraries work.  “If the parents are better oriented to a new culture,” Werling (2009) points out, “they will be able to help their children adapt and cope better (p. 45).

Criteria for judging the “quality” of resources for child and adult audiences may be somewhat different for those who are limited by a language handicap (Ho, 1990), whether as Chinese immigrants looking for information in an English-speaking library environment or as Anglophone learners of Chinese as a second or foreign language.  And those who are not proficient in English may have difficulty understanding what is said during library tours and other library events (Werling, 2009).

Asian Studies departments in academic libraries have recently become important sources of information and pleasure reading for recent immigrants, and some big-city public library branches have recently been developing extensive Chinese collections.   For example, the Chinese Heritage Collection and Chinese language materials held by the Chinatown Branch of the Chicago Public Library form about one-half of the branch’s adult collection and about one-tenth of its children’s collection (Werling, 2009); the Queens Borough Public Library in New York City a 93,000-item collection of Chinese resources, WorldLinQ software that provides Web access and native-language searching capabilities to patrons speaking Asian (and other) languages, as well as services that include cultural arts events and coping skills programs for new Americans and a commitment to recruiting staff with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Strong, 1998).  But overall there is a need for academic, public, and school libraries to focus more systematically on providing Chinese resources and services for families and children and on improving access to those resources and services.

Recent immigrants are not the only user groups for Chinese collections in North American libraries, of course.  The diverse populations served by these collections also include scholars in Asian-studies programs and other academic departments such as linguistics, economics, business, comparative literature, history, library and information science, and education; second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Americans and people of mixed ethnic/racial background with widely varying levels of Chinese-language proficiency and connection to Chinese culture; adoptees whose families may know little about Chinese language or culture but want to give their children a connection to their ancestral homeland; and non-Chinese children and adults studying Chinese as a world language or simply wishing to learn a little about Chinese or Chinese-American culture as part of a general multicultural education. 

This brief bibliography is in no way comprehensive but serves as a brief introduction to the problems of Chinese librarianship for those new to the field and particularly for those serving children and families.  Chinese is now the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world and the third most commonly spoken tongue in both the United States (after English and Spanish) and Canada (after English and French), and it is hoped that this situation will be reflected in the collections of more North American libraries in the near future.  Collection-development librarians in public, school, and university libraries will need to familiarize themselves with the problems involved as well as with the growing number of books and other resources that are available.  

PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.

CITATION INFORMATION:

Siu, Susan C. H.  (2009).  Issues in Chinese Librarianship: Collection Development and Access for Children and Families: An Annotated Bibliography.  Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/issuesinchineselibrarianship.

Article on Less-Commonly-Taught Languages Featured in Language Lizard Newsletter

Please check out my article on less-commonly-taught languages (a modified version of an earlier blog post) in the June 2010 issue of the Language Lizard newsletter!

A TALE OF TWO KINDERGARTENS, by guest blogger Francie Gow

About a month after I began French-immersion Kindergarten, my Dutch grandmother died, and my mother brought me and my sister Emily to the Netherlands to spend two months with Opa. While we were there, the grownups decided to send me for part of that time (two or three weeks, perhaps) to the local school. The teacher graciously accepted me as a guest in her classroom and asked the other students to make me feel welcome. 

I have no memory whatsoever of my first month in the French Kindergarten. I presume that we were all taught the phrase “Puis-je aller aux toilettes?” (May I go to the bathroom?) on day one. We were all Anglophones, so although the teacher never used any English with us, I know that she would have used very simple sentences, lots of repetition, and plenty of contextual clues to help us along.

I do, however, have a vivid first-person recollection of parts of my Dutch experience, perhaps because it was so overwhelming. I remember an enormous sense of frustration at not understanding what was going on around me. The adults spoke to me in English and to each other in Dutch. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole in a Dutch that I could not hope to follow, as of course she was aiming it at native speakers, and then she would give me a brief explanation in English so that I could join in the activity. My classmates spoke to each other in Dutch, and to me in slower Dutch accompanied by gestures.

Had I stayed longer, I would have eventually cracked the code and become quite fluent, progressing much faster than I later did in French. I did acquire a large stock of vocabulary words over those two months, mostly related to food, a topic that came up several times a day. However, with the exception of “Ik ben Francie” (I am Francie), which was printed on one of my t-shirts, I never learned to produce a single sentence.

Because the adults were continuing to speak to me in English, no doubt at my insistence and because it was easier, I had no way to pick up verbs, an essential building block for meaningful communication. Therefore, even as my vocabulary grew, I never felt any closer to being able to speak when the time came to return home.

Of course, we all knew that the trip was temporary, so while the grownups no doubt hoped that I would benefit from the exposure to an extent, learning the language was not the primary purpose of my time there. It may have been different if we knew that I would be staying. I imagine that simple story books, read to me repeatedly by patient adults, would have granted me the entry into sentences that I so badly needed to be able to burst through the wall of incomprehension. A strong desire to make friends with my non-English-speaking classmates would have pushed me from there.

While I don’t remember my first days of Kindergarten, I do remember the first days of my return to the French-language classroom in December. In theory, French should have been even less comprehensible to me than Dutch, as there had been no previous exposure to French in my home. However, my only memories of the rest of Kindergarten relate to my classmates and the things we did. I remember learning that I could use the black crayon to make grey by pressing lightly instead of hard. I remember tossing beanbags through holes in a wooden board with a clown painted on it. I remember counting to one hundred. I remember building structures with blocks and pasting macaroni to construction paper. I remember singing songs. I do not remember the fact that I was doing all of this in French.

I recently asked my mother what she remembered from my Kindergarten experience. She told me that a friend of hers had once asked me whether I had learned any French at school that day and was surprised when I replied, “No.” But wasn’t I in French immersion? I looked at her as though she had just said something nonsensical. “We don’t learn French at school,” I explained, “we just speak it.”