Hi everyone! I'm Madison. I grew up in Pasadena, California, but spent eight years living in Manila, Philippines, and one year in Spain. I'm planning to double major in Film and Media Studies and Sociology, with a minor in Human-Centered Design. I love spending quality time with people and having good conversations. I'm so excited to share my college journey with you!
Academic Program
Majors in Film and Media Studies and Sociology, Minor in Human Centered Design
An interview with my study abroad faculty director Professor Alan Li, who has been teaching Mandarin for over 35 years—including 20 years at Dartmouth.
Q: Can you share a bit about your story and your journey moving to the United States?
When I went to graduate school, I had a professor from the United States teaching American Literature; and after he finished his teaching job in China—like a year later—he let me know that the college that he worked in, which was Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, needed a visiting scholar from China teaching Chinese Literature, Culture, and Language. He checked with me to see if I was interested. That was the first opportunity for me to go to the United States. I said yes! So, eventually, I came to the United States in August of 1988 as a visiting scholar teaching some courses at Assumption College in Massachusetts. I taught there for two years, and then I had an opportunity to get kind of in a PhD program at Clark University in Worcester, too, so I started to work on that PhD degree in linguistics. At the same time, before I even finished my PhD program, I had a chance to teach Chinese at Harvard—the East Asian Language and Civilization department—before I even finished my degree. So I started teaching there in 1991; I taught at Harvard for 15 years, but of course, I got my PhD earlier than that, so I left Harvard in 2005 and started teaching at Dartmouth right after that. It's been 20 years teaching at Dartmouth.
Q: When did you start learning English?
The first letter I learned was not A, it was L; not because it was the first letter of my last name, which is Lee, but because it was the first letter of the phrase "Long live Chairman Mao." If you think about it, this sentence is actually very complicated in structure because normally a regular sentence would be "I will do something, you do something, he will do something," right? But in a sentence like "Long live Chairman Mao," what is the subject sentence? You don't know what the subject sentence is—actually, the subject is "Chairman Mao"; then how come "long live" goes before that, right? And if the subject is Chairman Mao, its "live" has to take an s—"Chairman Mao lives." But actually, that is an imperative sentence. "May Chairman Mao live long" or "I wish he could live long," but as a beginning student learning English, that sentence is a crazy sentence to start with. I think a probably easier sentence would be "I am a student" or "I have a book". These are more sensible sentences, or even "this is a book." "Long live Chairman Mao?" That's a weird sentence for a beginner, but that was the Cultural Revolution. People didn't give any thought about pedagogical reasons from easier ones to more complex ones; they just wanted you to learn political slogans. People at the time never thought about eventually what you are going to put what you learned into actual use. No! They had their goals. They had to report to their boss like "Oh, I taught them correct things," so that's a funny story.
When I went to college, I studied English at the college. I already knew some English there. When I say I learned the language, that was in middle school—that was really in the Cultural Revolution. When I went to college, it was after the Cultural Revolution, and the universities—and even high schools and middle schools—started to teach real subjects. I had to relearn everything from the very beginning from "I am a student" to "this is a book" at the college. But since you are already in college, you definitely had the background so the pace of class was very fast and we quickly started to learn more complex things or more evolved grammatical structures. I started from, almost like Chinese 4 [Advanced Beginner's Chinese] at Dartmouth College. People taking Chinese 4 already have some prior exposure to language. They already know Chinese. Some kids already learn Chinese in middle school and high school. Some kids spoke some version of Chinese at home with their parents, so Chinese 4 students already have some background. And then once they are in my course, Chinese 4, the pace of class is really fast because we assume you already know a lot of things. The way we learned English at that time was similar to that. You had to go through the college entrance exam, and our class was the first class after the Cultural Revolution that needed to go through the standardized entrance examination to get into college, so people definitely already had a background. And so we moved fast and learned English there. That is how I started learning English.
That was in the late 1970s, so my wish at the time was that if I was learning English, I hoped to really use it to talk to a native speaker of English. That was my dream. Instead of just doing the tests or doing the homework, I wanted actually to apply it. Whenever I saw a foreigner on the street, my first impulse was to approach and try to speak to that person in English. But you didn't see too many foreigners on the street those days so that was funny. I never imagined that someday I'd be teaching something in English in the United States. I could never imagine that that would be part of my life.
Q: What propelled you to study English?
My father was an English teacher in high school, but during the Cultural Revolution, many of the books were banned. Anything in a foreign language was banned at the time. I had a good friend from high school who was friends with some overseas Chinese in Malaysia and he got some English books in simplified English—simple stories adapted for English learners. So, from my father, I learned some basic things like "a cat", "a cow", "milk", those kind of basic vocabulary. And from my middle school time, I learned "Long live Chairman Mao," those kind of things, and got some exposure to English; not systematically, but some material for me in English.
After I graduated high school, I had this friend who had a lot of simplified English books from a friend in Malaysia. We started to read these books together and didn't know a lot, but it was fun reading something in English. But I started working in a factory after graduating from high school, but I didn't believe this was my lifelong career in the factory making files, the tool. So that friend and I often read English books together. We sometimes even tried to speak English together and that sparked my interest in doing this thing.
I never imagined I would have a chance to go to college because—at that time—you just didn't go to college through the entrance examination. If you wanted to go to college, you had to have somebody recommending you to go to college based on your family background, based on your political stance, based on whether your boss liked you or not, or something; that was before 1977. In 1977, the government started to change their policy about college entrance exams. They changed the conceptualization of college education. In 1977, the Chinese government started to implement a totally new policy for college entrance. Everybody had to go through this standardized college entrance examination, regardless of your family background, political status, whatever. It was purely based on your grade. That's when I got the chance to go to college, purely based on my own merits if you could score well. Our class was the first class going to college through (gao kao) after the Cultural Revolution. Only less than 5% of people got admitted. I did some studying, but the good thing for me was that during the Cultural Revolution, nobody studied. Very few people really studied anything at the time. I happened to have this friend with an interest in English; we could read English books together, we could even try and speak English together—not many people did that at that time. We became friends only after we both graduated from different high schools; we were not classmates or schoolmates. We were the same age, I guess. But somebody found he was interested in English, and I was interested in English. They hooked [us] up together. "You guys are stupid people learning this useless thing, why not talk to each other?" Nobody thought learning English was useful at the time. It was just a hobby, just an interest. I had a job. I worked at a factory. [I] never thought it would change the second half of my life.
Q: What influenced you to become a teacher?
The four-year college was a teacher's university, Nanjing Normal University, which provided career-oriented training. My major there was English. I didn't know then that I would come to the United States to teach Chinese; I thought I would be teaching English in China. I did teach English in China for some years, and then I entered a graduate program at Nanjing University for postgraduate studies, where I pursued general linguistics as my master's degree. That got me into this field. I started as an English teacher and studied linguistics in China. When I came to the U.S., I also got my PhD in linguistics, so my entire educational training process led me to language teaching.
Q: Have your teaching methods evolved over time?
Yes, I believe in the intellectual value of language teaching. Many teachers and parents think language learning is just acquiring a tool. Once you have it, you can communicate with people in a foreign language. For me, that's definitely a major part—learning a foreign language means learning how to use a communication tool. However, I think there's educational value beyond just acquiring a tool; it's also about intellectual development. Language learning isn't just about learning, it's part of your intellectual growth, allowing you to think about the world through a different semantic and linguistic system. It's not just learning a different set of labels for the same reality. You're actually learning underlying perspectives and different realities. I find that intellectually interesting and useful for my students. Many of my students, especially at Harvard and Dartmouth, are elite. They aren't satisfied with just learning Chinese to ask where the bathroom is or how to order food. They want to learn about Chinese culture and how people think in a different language, and what kind of different conceptual system is embodied in the new language that allows you to look at the world from a fresh, different angle. The intrinsic value of language learning is that, to some extent, the language you speak can influence how you think and behave.
Q: What do you emphasize to your students after they learn Chinese?
First of all, put it into use. But if you're academically oriented, you'll want to think about more theoretical things. If you're academically interested in history, philosophy, literature, cultures, society, people, and those kinds of things, doing it only through translation will limit the depth of your research. But if you have access to primary sources in your target culture, literature, history, or whatever, you can gain a deeper understanding of what you're doing. Translation is, at best, an approximation of the real stuff in that target culture or country. But if you know the language of the native speakers, you have more direct access to their innermost thoughts and culture.
Q: You've been teaching for quite a while now. What draws you most to teaching?
First of all, my training is in linguistics, the study of language. Teaching language allows you to apply what you've learned in practical ways. That's one thing. Another thing I've found especially interesting about teaching college students is that you get to interact with young people constantly. While earlier classes graduate, you're always teaching a fresh class. This keeps you young! At least, your mentality is always engaged with these students—I enjoy that. And you learn more on the job, not just about linguistics itself but also about how to teach language, so you can grow intellectually while doing your job. That's interesting too.
Q: Are there any more interesting parts of your story you'd like to share?
I've experienced a lot of things, been to a lot of places, and even attempted to learn quite a few languages. I've never learned to speak all of these languages, but I've learned the basic linguistic facts of several. I tried to learn Russian, Japanese, German, French, and took some courses here and there. I did not end up being able to really speak these languages, but I gained some rudimentary knowledge about how the grammar works in these languages, or some basic vocabulary and things like that. That kind of expanded my vision and extended my realm of knowledge about how different languages work, as it is related to the culture and speakers of the language. But I am still struggling with English, even these days, but still, you are learning along the way. You can always discover new things, learn from them, and then improve as a result.
While the Hanover community is always strong and thriving, it's hard to imagine what it's like when you are thousands of miles away from The Green. Read on to learn about my Dartmouth life in Rome, and the community within Dartmouth while abroad.
During my sophomore spring quarter, I took on the challenge of four STEM courses, and while it has been intense, the unexpected connections across subjects and the joy of learning have made it one of my most rewarding academic experiences yet.
On the Beijing LSA+, we have real-world Chinese practice every Friday. Last week we went to two neighborhoods, Houhai and Shichahai, and wrote a photo log about our experience. Read along to see what immersive language learning here looks like!
With so many undergraduates hoping to participate in the exceptional atmosphere of the Tuck School of Business, Tuck created programs specifically designed for us. I was fortunate enough to take part in one of them: TuckLAB Entrepreneurship.
