Organizer and Chair: Cynthia Y. Ning, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Discussant: Victor Mair, University of Pennsylvania
This two-part panel is a celebration of the 1996 publication of the long-awaited Alphabetically-based Computerized Chinese-English Dictionary, containing over 70,000 entries based on contemporary Chinese usage in single-sort alphabetic order. Ten years in the making and the recipient of major funding from the US Department of Education, this new dictionary will be a real boon to the next generation of China-experts: students who are currently engaged in gaining fluency in Chinese. The panel discusses the underlying issues that gave rise to the decision to produce the dictionary, that shaped the dictionary, and that continue to consume China and China-scholars in the struggle to reconcile the needs and characteristics of China's historic civilization with the challenges and opportunities of the information age.
The panel will also facilitate significant dialog between some of the most outspoken and innovative proponents of language reformers in the US: John DeFrancis, John Rohsenow, James Dew, J. Marshall Unger, Victor Mair and Michael Carr, and the two most influential language planners in China today: the Director and Associate Director of the State Education Commission's State Language Commission. Both of the Chinese individuals have personally agreed to attend the conference: Xu Jialu, the director and a member of the standing committee of the People's Congress, specializes in language planning and the associate director (whose name-card unfortunately we misplaced during our long trek through China) specializes in the computerization of Chinese. Funding for their trips will be provided from PRC state sources.
Chinese Lexicography at the Crossroads
John DeFrancis, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
Chinese lexicography is at a crossroads marked by the need to decide how to advance along the new information highway.
One road is simply a continuation of the current approach to dictionary compilation based either entirely on a shape-based ordering of characters or on a two-sort alphabetical ordering that involves looking up first the head character and then the compounds under it. This is a dead-end street that so far has produced a chaos of schemes involving 186, 189, 191, 225, 226, 242, and 250 radicals and only marginal improvements in efficiency of dictionary lookup.
The other road is to heed the criticism of the distinguished linguist Lyu Shuxiang at the failure of Chinese lexicographers to produce a one-sort or strictly alphabetically ordered dictionary. It means joining the rest of the world in making full use of the alphabetic principle, based on the excellent indigenous pinyin system, in a way that maximizes the efficiency of both dictionary lookup and computer programming.
The "Z. T." Experiment in the PRC
John S. Rohsenow, University of Illinois, Chicago
The Zhu Yin Shi Zi, Ti Qian Du Xie experiment is an experimental educational program carried out in a small number of primary schools throughout mainland China under the auspices of the State Language Commission of the PRC. Under this innovative pedagogical program, Chinese children are taught to read and write standard Mandarin Chinese using Hanyu pinyin romanization for the first two years of their primary education. In contrast to the standard curriculum, under which children are only taught Hanyu pinyin romanization for the first two months purely as a phonetic notational device for the pronunciation of Chinese characters, under this "Zhu-Ti" experimental curriculum, children are encouraged to develop their reading and writing skills in standard Mandarin Chinese using Hanyu pinyin romanization for the first two years. The children are thus not hampered in their reading and writing development by knowing only a limited number of Chinese characters; within a few weeks they are able to read and write (phonetically) anything they can say. After more than eight years, results show that the majority of students taught using this method learn to read and write using Chinese characters faster and at a higher level than most students who are taught by more traditional methods.
The present paper will report on the history and present status of this revolutionary experiment in teaching Chinese children to read using Hanyu pinyin romanization. The success of this experiment is examined in terms of western pedagogical theories of reading.
Issues in Languagc Planning in the PRC
Jialu Xu, PRC State Education Commission
This paper (presented in Chinese with English tanslation) will detail concerns of state language planners, current language-relatcd research and training projects underway in thc PRC, challengcs of the future, and potentially useful avenues of US-China collaboration.