How to Teach a Child to Read: Lessons from Chinese Cultural History

This will be a fully remote event. Please click the link below if you wish to join the webinar:
https://williams.zoom.us/j/96924583424?pwd=RlN2RDErVUxmRXRQK0V5RFFVVnJ5QT09

What should you do if you need to teach a young child to read? What if the language is written in a logographic writing system such as Chinese? If you are a learner of a language with a complicated writing system, what would be your best strategies to learn to read in that language? What role does sound play in the process of learning to read? Professor Yu’s talk weaves the answers to these questions through an examination of the history of reading and reading pedagogy in late imperial China. From the centuries-old technique of “recitation” to a modern turn toward philological investigation of the etymological origin of Chinese characters, Chinese teachers and scholars from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century explored various ways to teach reading. Some of these teaching techniques are well and alive today and have even influenced how Chinese is taught as a second language. 

Li Yu, Professor of Chinese and inaugural chair of the Department of Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Williams College, specializes in Chinese language pedagogy and cultural history. She is committed to helping learners achieve proficiency in Chinese and function successfully in Chinese culture. Beyond the Chinese language classroom, she is an experienced teacher trainer and conducts research on the history of reading and reading pedagogy in late imperial China. She served as Director of Chinese at the ALLEX Summer Teacher Training Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, and visiting faculty and teacher trainer at the Training Program for Teachers of Chinese at the Ohio State University SPEAC program. She has been published in more than a dozen book chapters and peer-reviewed journals. Her most recent publication is an edited volume titled New Trends in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, Volume IV of the Palgrave Handbook of Chinese Language Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She manages a resource website for the Performed Culture Approach, an innovative teaching framework developed in the field of East Asian language pedagogy. She holds a B.A. in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language from East China Normal University (Shanghai, China), an M.A. in Chinese language pedagogy and a Ph.D. in Chinese language pedagogy and cultural history from the Ohio State University.

The Faculty Lecture Series aims to present big ideas beyond disciplinary boundaries. Organized by the faculty members of the Lecture Committee, the Faculty Lecture Series was founded in 1911 by Catherine Mariotti Pratt, the spouse of a faculty member who wanted to “relieve the tedium of long New England winters with an opportunity to hear Williams professors talk about issues that really mattered to them.” From these humble and lighthearted beginnings, the Faculty Lecture Series has grown to become an important forum for tenured professors to share their latest research with the larger intellectual community of the college.

The upcoming talks are listed below:

Mar 10: Tim Lebestky, “Lessons Learned from Flies”

Mar 17: Lama Nassif, “What does Your Noticing say about Your language Learning? Insights from Second Language Acquisition Research“