|
Lydia Lui
It has been a really busy week. I was in Taiwan to attend an academic conference. It is interesting to see how people around us thought who we were while we were not, no matter how close we are.
It was the Third International Conference on Gender Equity Education in the Asia-Pacific Region(第三屆亞太地區性別平等教育論壇). Academics came from Japan, Korea, Malaysia, India, Taiwan and Hong Kong. I was one of the presenters from Hong Kong. I started by talking about how Hong Kong students I interviewed found English boring and would not want to spend their free time on it. The Korean representative was puzzled. She thought English was the international language that Korean people were crazy about and it was not easy for her to understand why Hong Kong students would avoid learning it.
She reminded me of the Korean college girls who visited Hong Kong to do a research on women's status and interviewed a bunch of(一群)people including me. These girls spoke English well. And more impressively, they were not afraid of speaking English. They were enjoying using it to communicate with more people. They were enjoying being enabled to know the people around them. I am sure there are students like them in Hong Kong. It is just that not all Hong Kong students like English. It is not a shared common interest or phenomenon in town.
I told her that it was not that students were not crazy about English. They were. They were going to private tutorial schools and hiring private tutors. It is just that they were not learning it because they liked it. They were learning it because they had to. They were not learning a language. They were learning a school subject, a compulsory one.
After my presentation, someone from the audience came across to show his appreciation and we had a chat. He was from Taiwan. He complimented(讚美)my presentation content as well as my English. Of course I was pleased to hear that but I was also a little uncertain about the English part. Soon I realized how that compliment came.
When he asked me to elaborate on Hong Kong students' situation, he was surprised to know that Hong Kong people were not bilingual as were Singaporeans. I was surprised to know how Taiwanese might think about us as bilingual, assuming our situation to be similar to Singapore. We are not. I explained to him that though we had a colonial history, the majority of us speak one language─Cantonese. We do not speak English to each other until it is necessary. While in Singapore, they speak different languages, English becomes one of their common languages in daily life.
I did not understand. I gave the mistaken impression a second thought. This was an international conference. Except invited speakers, all local presenters used Mandarin. All Hong Kong presenters spoke in English(or for one of us, both). All English presentations were summarized in Mandarin except mine. It seemed people from Hong Kong were ready to use English and Taiwan people were less ready. These added up to say the impression that we were conversant in(精通的)English.
But the fact could be that most Hong Kong presenters learned English because we had to. We did the presentation in English because we had to. Not because we were ready. In a conference held in Taiwan where people speak Mandarin, I would like to present in Mandarin if I had learned it. I would like to present in Mandarin if it did not happen to be a topic on English learning and that the other presenters were from overseas. I would depend on the Mandarin summary like some Taiwanese participants. It was tiring to use a foreign language for a whole day.
But I had to. I am one of my students. ■lydialuieng@gmail.com
|
