1. First Stage: the late 1800s to the 1920s - the Grammar - Translation Period

1.   Background

The first stage of Chinese language instruction in the United States is from 1871 to 1940, before the breakout of the Second World War.^[1]  It is the “beginning years”^[2] of Chinese language education in the United States. During this period,  non-intervention policy towards Chinese language learning was adopted by the United States government because, according to Yao and Zhang (2010), Americans “didn’t seem to be interested in learning Chinese.”^[3] In educational or research organizations, there was no policy orientation on Chinese language education. Whether to establish Chinese language courses and how to teach such courses were completely decided by individual organizations.^[4]

The lack of interest was in part, due to the attitude towards the speakers of the Chinese language in American society, which was clearly demonstrated in the policies of the United States government. On May 6, 1886, The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by the federal government and became the first legal act excluding the immigration of a certain ethnicity in the history of the United States. It banned immigration of Chinese laborers into the United States for 10 years.^[5] This act had both short-term and long-term effects on Chinese language education in the United States.

First, with the decrease of Chinese-speaking population in the United States, the presence and voice of the community using the language became weaker, which led to a diminishing awareness of the Chinese-speaking community.

Second, broad-based hostility towards and discrimination against the Chinese community in the United States made the status of the language used by the community inevitably low. Willingness and desire to understand the culture was thus not high. Resources allocation to support the development of a language that had already been not commonly learned in the United States was even more rare in this situation.

Not only did it affect the support from the United States government, the act also affected the primary source of support for Chinese language teaching in the United States - the Chinese immigrants and the Chinese community, who have traditionally been “the biggest support”^[6] for Chinese language education in the United States, without whom the Chinese language education wouldn’t be as developed as it is today. In fact, the first Chinese department and library in the United States was founded by a Dean Lung, a common Chinese immigrant who donated all his life savings earned through hard labor after he came to the United States to Columbia University.^[7] Therefore, the heavy blow to Chinese immigrants and the Chinese community is detrimental to the development of Chinese language education in the United States. Pedagogy, textbooks, and teachers would not progress with limited support from the government and the Chinese community, which means a limited number of programs, low number of enrollment, and no funding to develop new textbooks and pedagogy.

In fact, the lack of interest in second language learning was not unique to Chinese because linguistic isolationism prevailed in the United States in this period. The characteristics of the study of foreign languages during the 1920s to 1930s are as follows: the number of learners were small, the proficiency levels achieved by the students were relatively low, and the kinds of languages studied by the students were few. Back then, the class size in Chinese language courses was very small due to low enrollment. For example, when Samuel Williams, a missionary who achieved high proficiency of the Chinese language, was hired to teach Chinese language courses at Yale in 1877, “no one signed up.”^[8] The first Chinese language course at Harvard University taught on October 22nd, 1879 only had 5 students.  

Linguistic isolationism refers to the unwillingness of learning, using, embracing, and promoting languages other than the most commonly used language of a nation or region. It is attributed to political isolationism. Back in the 1920s, because of the tremendous gains after World War I, the United States took an isolationist turn.  During the terms of President Warren Harding and President Calvin Coolidge, the United States was attempting to reduce its involvement in Europe and Asia and raise tariffs to limit the imports of foreign goods. Domestic sentiment was to build prosperity in the United States. Due to the political isolationism in the United States,^[9] the United States government and the common people didn’t feel the need to learn languages other than English.  Public attention was not paid to Chinese language education either.

Despite the unpopularity and difficult situation, Chinese language education survived and developed in colleges and universities in the United States. In fact, Chinese language education in the United States centers around the universities and Chinese language teaching in the mainstream schools start from universities.^[10] According to Tsu (1970), “the first Chinese language class in the United States was instituted at Yale University in 1871” and it was called “introduction to the elements of Asian languages”,^[11] taught by a librarian named Addison Van Nam.^[12] Higher education institutions such as Yale University, Harvard University, Columbia University, Clark University, University of Wisconsin, University of California - Berkeley, the University of Chicago each started their own Chinese courses in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Until the 1930s, Chinese language education spread to non-elite higher education institutions too. Colleges and universities, along with few individuals taught there, were the main force propelling the development of Chinese language education.

(2)  Pedagogy: The Grammar - Translation Method

In this period, western countries, including the United States,  pressed China to open ports for commerce.  Business people and missionaries were sent to China to establish connections. They learned literary Chinese and the most common pedagogical method of this period in the United States was the “Grammar-Translation” Method, which was widely used to teach both ancient and modern second languages. This method has two goals: to grasp the grammar of a second language and to develop reading proficiency of the second language. Speaking and listening were generally not the focus of second language instruction under this model of instruction. Translation from English into the second language is the most important pedagogical approach in class.^[13] The belief behind this pedagogical approach is that meanings are universal for different languages and learning a new language is simply using a different linguistic system to express the same meaning^[14]. According to Ogden and Richards’s semiotic triangle, the meaning of a speaker’s speech consists of three parts: symbol, thought or reference, and referent. A symbol correctly symbolizes thought or reference, which adequately refers to the referent. A symbol also stands for the referent, or the object in real life. In the Grammar-Translation Method, thought or reference, the referent, and their semantic relationships are viewed as the same between two languages. The only difference is the symbol systems. Learning a new language is thus viewed as grasping a new symbol system to understand the same underlying references and referents. This simple and intuitive way of viewing language and language learning fit the purpose of language education in that time - to study literature and culture that the language represents.  

1-1 Semantic Triangle from The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards^[15]

Chinese language instruction in colleges and universities during this period deployed this teaching methodology as well because it fit the purpose of Chinese language education at that time, which was to train sinologists familiar with the “high culture”^[16] of China. It is “sinology-oriented” and what was appreciated in this period was the “cultural value” of sinology.^[17] The main purpose of Chinese language instruction back then, on the contrary to the motivation of the learners mentioned above, was to cultivate sinologists to study classical Chinese culture. Language was the medium to the study of Chinese culture and was not given Chou (2015)^[18] contends that the sinologist-oriented pedagogical objective and practice from this period even persisted until 1965 and one of the consequences of this methodology is that scholars of Chinese studies who do not speak a word of the Chinese language but have a profound reading knowledge of classical Chinese are prevalent in East Asian Studies departments in the United States.

However, choosing to focus on reading or speaking is especially important for the Chinese language teaching and learning as there had been a large gap between written and spoken Chinese language. In history, there had been two parallel systems of the Chinese language. One was Classical Chinese, or “Wen yan wen (文言文)”^[19], which was based on the spoken language of early ancient times in China. It was the official written language used by educated people, scholars, and social elites in China. Refined after several thousand years by literary figures, scholars, and generations of educated people in China, it had become pure written language used only in formal contexts, such as government reports, literary works, academic papers, and so on. By the dawn of the “Vernacular Chinese”^[20] movement in 1910, it had become a dead language that no one spoke. However, the spoken language of the Chinese people, which was lively because they had been continuously used by the speakers, was considered an inferior variant which was only spoken by the uneducated and mostly illiterate masses. This was one of the reasons for which the first few people who taught Chinese in the United States. started with the classical Chinese language, which leads to the study of Sinology.  Because its purpose is to read classical books written in a second language, reading and writing are the emphasis of the method. Listening and speaking are not emphasized under the framework of this methodology.

In addition, learning to read and write means to learn classical Chinese rather than the spoken vernacular Chinese because in a highly hierarchical society, education means studying the elite traditional culture stipulated by the government as the orthodox thoughts of the country. Confucian classics had reigned Chinese culture for several thousand years and it was what scholars like Ko K'un-hua was educated with. Through learning these classics, scholars join the Imperial Examination (科举考试) and the winners of the exams will become powerful political leaders of the country. Until the time of Ko K'un-hua, the late Qing Dynasty, the current spoken language back then had already become drastically different from the written classical Chinese, which was used in formal genres like governmental writings, academic works, poems, and so on. The vernacular language, although used daily, was considered informal and spoken by uneducated people. Therefore, possessing the knowledge of classical Chinese, which was considered to constitute the very essence of five thousand years of Chinese culture, and the reading and writing skills of such a language, is a symbol of education, social status, power, and culture.

(3)  Important Figures

1-2 Ko Kun-hua ^[21]

Influential individuals played a pivotal role in the development of the field. Yung Wing, the first Chinese overseas student who graduated from a higher education institution in the United States, pushed Yale University to hire Chinese language instructors to teach Chinese language courses. Samuel Williams, an American missionary and businessman, was a pioneer of Sinology in the United States. He was said to be the only American who spoke fluent Chinese at that time. In 1877, when he just came back from China, he was hired to be a professor of Chinese language and literature to offer the first Chinese language course in the United States.

One of the representative figures of this era of Chinese language teaching is Ko K'un-hua, the instructor of the first Chinese language course at Harvard University from 1879 to 1882^[22]. He is considered the first Chinese person to have taught Chinese language classes in the United States. He was wearing long gowns for officials of the Qing Dynasty of China when he taught at Harvard. His appearance clearly showed that he still represented the traditional elite class in ancient China while playing the role of a cross cultural communicator in the U.S, although he had worked at the British embassy and the American consulate in China for several years and was influenced by modern western culture. The loyalty to his cultural identity is reflected in the content of the textbook he compiled for his very few American university students: it is about poetry written in classical Chinese, which was only used as a written language by the educated and privileged class in China. When he died of pneumonia in his third year of teaching at Harvard, Chinese was not taught again at Harvard for another 40 years.^[23] 

1-2  Samuel Well Williams^[24] 

According to Sun and Shouse (2016), one of the main goals of Chinese language education in this period is to prepare Christian missionaries to work in China.^[25] During this period, a large number of missionaries were sent to China, particularly for religious and business activities. Among them was Samuel Well Williams, who was a businessman, missionary,  and linguist in China. A pioneer of Sinology in the United States, he was alleged to be one of the few Americans who could speak excellent Chinese back then. It is difficult to find out about his classroom instruction but his Chinese language education later at Yale University is sinology-oriented.

(4)  Textbooks

1-3 Chinese Verse and Prose (華質英文), the Chinese textbook written by Ko Kun-hua^[26] 

This is an excerpt from the preface of Ko K'un-hua’s textbook Chinese Verse and Prose. Part of it says:  “[...] I picked four poems from Ren Shou Tang Shi Chao, and eleven poems that I wrote after I came to the United States, to show my students. I also attached translation of the poems after each poem.  [...]”

From this preface, it is obvious that what was taught at Harvard University in their Chinese language classes in the late 1800s was Chinese literature written in classical Chinese. Ko Kunhua used poems, a genre that was most representative of the classical Chinese, to teach the Chinese language. It is unimaginable that such a genre would become the materials for beginners of Chinese or any second language learners nowadays. If one opens a Chinese textbook today, it is almost always the “good morning” “how are you” “my name is” type of vernacular Chinese for daily communication. College students at Harvard today would have to take advanced level Chinese courses before they can learn poems in their specialized literature classes.

When teaching his first student, a professor from Harvard, Ko used poems he wrote himself as teaching materials and his teenage son translated them into English. The content of one of the poems was all about admiration for political authority and the language was so formal and luxurious that it was even beyond the comprehension of a lot of educated native speakers of the Chinese language.

The background of the Chinese instructor also influenced what kind of Chinese the students learned. As a “locally prominent scholar”, Ko was both “classically educated and erudite.”^[27]  Back when he was teaching Chinese at Harvard, education was not prevalent in China and only those who were educated knew how to read and write Chinese characters. It is no wonder that Ko K'un-hua would choose to teach such a language and use the Grammar-Translation Method, which focused on the reading knowledge of a second language, to teach it at Harvard, an elite higher education institution in colonial America.

It is interesting that although the purpose of inviting Ko to teach Chinese in Harvard was to train businessmen who traded with China, the learning content was all about training sinologists. Although many of his classes taught classical Chinese, the learning outcome seemed contrary to the teaching methodology and the content. His obituary said: “…he has had only four or five pupils; but…the results obtained have been most satisfactory...[O]ne who has studied with him…has acquired the ability to converse easily with Mandarins, and is nearly ready to establish himself in some business in China.”^[28]It is a mystery how he taught spoken Chinese but with his death, the dominance of grammar-translation era of Chinese language teaching in the United States was also coming to an end.

1-3 Yuen Ren Chao (1892-1982) ^[29]

However, in this period, some individuals started to experiment with new pedagogy that focused on listening and speaking. For example, Yuen Ren Chao, a renowned Chinese-American linguist taught Chinese language courses at Harvard in the spring of 1922 and was the first one who offered Chinese language courses at Harvard since the death of Ko Kunhua in 1882.  Unlike Ko Kunhua, who refused to assimilate into the modern American culture, Yuen Ren Chao was studied mathematics and physics at Cornell University and earned his PhD in Philosophy at Harvard University. A fundamental figure in the history of Chinese linguistics and Chinese language education, he was fluent in German, French and spoke some Japanese and 34 Chinese dialects. He also had a reading knowledge of Latin and Greek. He conducted linguistic research of several Chinese dialects and served as president of the Linguistic Society of America. His teaching methodology of the Chinese language and the content he taught was completely different from those of Ko Kunhua. His experiment with new pedagogy contributed to the transformation of Chinese language pedagogy in the next period.  He is considered the first one who applied “modern Chinese linguistic theory and methods to Chinese education.”^[30]

Above all, in this era, due to the isolationism of the United States government and the discriminatory policies against the Chinese community in the United States, Chinese language education in colleges and universities lacked support, was very limited and had not yet been professionalized. The United States government adopted a “non-intervening”^[31] policy in Chinese language instruction in this period, which demonstrated the ignored status of the Chinese language at that time. The teaching methodology was very intuitive and basic, and based on a very simple understanding of languages and language instruction. Textbooks in this period were very limited and were written in Classical Chinese. The Chinese language was studied indirectly through the second language learners’ native language. People were generally not very interested in learning Chinese and teachers, let alone qualified ones, were very few. Above all, Chinese language instruction in colleges and universities in the United States in this era was off to an organic and intuitive start. However, it would change drastically during the next decades.    

However, even in modern day Chinese language education, when the direct method and minimum use of students’ first language in classroom instruction have become a rule for many Chinese language instructors in colleges and universities in the United States, translation is still an indispensable part of textbooks and classroom instruction. For example, a vocabulary list with English translation is in every major Chinese textbook in the United States, and even those designed with the pedagogical principle of minimum use of the students’ native language in mind. Translation of texts and translation exercises are also still an important part of some major Chinese textbooks for colleges and universities in the United States. The reason is that the acquisition of meaning is essential for language learning and translation is very effective and efficient for understanding meanings of the second language, although there are always nuanced differences between translated equivalents. Therefore, the Grammar - Translation Method was an essential start for Chinese language education in colleges and universities in the United States.