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From my standpoint, L2 education is empowerment education for our
citizens; and L2 learning means a recognition, emancipation,
environmental interfacing, reinforcement, and maintenance of some innate powers
in our learners. As such, learning assumes a series of actions and a
lengthy process.
Such a philosophy of L2 learning is deeply rooted in Chomsky’s
(1965) Mentalist theory, Austin-Searle’s (1962; 1969) Speech Act theory,
and Sperber-Wilson’s (1986) Relevance
theory. Chomsky believed that human beings are born with a language
acquisition device with three elements: a universal grammar (UG),
a hypothesis-making device, and an evaluation and testing procedure.
To me, his UG is comparable to a Windows operating system (OS) in a
computer, the hypothesis-making device the CPU commanding the Windows OS,
and the evaluation procedure the input. Chomsky’s theory implies that L2
teaching should respect and recognize such genetic human traits, and consider
it its eventual goal to help adult learners to translate, via proper
input, such traits into power. Taking speech as a social act,
Austin-Searle implies that L2 teaching should wire learners to proper
social conducts. And for Sperber-Wilson,
language teaching should aim at helping learners develop
a relevance-oriented competence as a maintenance tool featuring
proper speech conduct as good citizens.
Accordingly empowerment-oriented L2 teaching should gear at an
objective of five modules: language knowledge, language skills, cultural
awareness, affect and attitude, and learning strategy. Language
knowledge, inclusive of sound, lexicon, structure, and meaning,
represents the base; language skills, ranging from listening, speaking,
reading, writing, translating, watching, and presenting, stands for
performance abilities to be sequentially trained; cultural awareness,
comprising L1, L2, and all previously acquired cultural knowledge, is
self-motivating source of learning; affect and attitude refer to changed
attitudes toward the target language, life and worldly affairs; learning
strategy, a tool for life-long learning, is phrased in Chinese as “rather
teach a fisherman ways of fishing than give him fish”. My objectives in
teaching then are to engage learners to interactions with and
acquisitions of these five modules.
Empowerment-oriented teaching is in fact student-centered
teaching, which is conditional to absolute teacher-centeredness, because
only with maximal and optimal teacher-centeredness, can student-ceteredness be ultimately actualized. Hence my role
in teaching is fourfold: being a good learner—knowledgeable about my
field as well as ways of student learning; being a good teacher—familiar
with methods and good at using them properly; being a good
researcher—with clearly defined research focus and active in publishing
research findings and communicating; and being a good community
servant—committed to community development, expectations, and research
issues. In one word, mine is a 3-in-1 role: a
researcher-and-community-servant professor.
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