Rhetoric at Tunghai--the early years

Among the interesting (and challenging) things about studying what I'm (still) calling "rhetorical education" at Tunghai University during the 1950s-to-whenever are the following:

1. At least at its beginning, Tunghai had a reputation of being an almost bilingual school. Not only were students learning English in their required and elective English classes, many of them also had to take courses in subjects like physics and chemistry where the instructors were teaching in English.

2. Although there was a strong emphasis on language education (both in Chinese and English), there wasn't, to my knowledge, any explicit recognition of language education as rhetorical education (the word "rhetoric" hardly shows up in any of the archival documents I've seen, and as I've mentioned before, gets a bad rap in one of the important documents that lays out the school's philosophy of general education). And (as I also mentioned) this same document seems to equate the teaching of language with training to use a tool--language courses exist for the sake of other areas of study.

This kind of perspective is also found in other writings by other Tunghai people, such as Anne ("Nancy") Cochran, first chair of the Foreign Language department. In her book Modern Methods of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Cochran argued that in East Asia, most students study English in order to learn about and translate Western scientific discoveries and technical information. She placed expression pretty low on the scale of what such students wanted or needed from their language training. She made a distinction between students who wanted to learn English in order to become part of an English-speaking society and those who wanted to learn enough to be able to share Western knowledge with their compatriots:

A good many students ... are not interested in producing English themselves, either in the spoken or written forms. But even such students realize that in technical fields a reading knowledge of English is very useful and sometimes almost a necessity. ... A few scholars also might conceivably wish to be able not only to read English but also to write it so as to be able to communicate with Western scholars. ... Still others wish only to translate. This emphasis has become very strong in the Far East, and may also be growing in other countries. ... (3)

This belief, to some degree, influenced Cochran's work with the teaching of English to non-English majors at Tunghai. While students were given opportunities to express themselves, Cochran also appeared to emphasize correctness of pronunciation and grammar over (but not to the exclusion of) training in the production of more extended discourse.

3. On the other hand, expressive speaking and writing were practiced extracurricularly in the form of student-written publications and student participation in speech contests. (In fact, students often did quite well in national-level English speech contests. One of Tunghai's alumni, Tu Weiming, came in first in a national contest sponsored by the Rotary Club of the R.O.C.) Tunghai Wind (東海風), a magazine to which students and faculty contributed articles in both English and Chinese, enjoyed a long publication history (but was, from some accounts, cancelled by Tunghai president Mei Kewang in the late 1970s or early 80s). The Foreign Language department also produced an English newspaper for a long time (under the direction of Louise Crawford, a teacher who originally came to Taiwan under the Syracuse-in-Asia program). Both English majors and non-English majors contributed to the English newspaper (the aforementioned Tu was a Chinese major, for instance, and wrote at least one article about the proposed honor system). Chinese and English discussion and debate--within limits--were quite present on Tunghai's campus. (It just wasn't called "rhetoric," evidently.)

Work Cited

Cochran, Anne. Modern Methods of Teaching English as a Foreign Language: A Guide to Modern Materials with Particular Reference to the Far East. 1952. 2nd ed. Washington, D.C.: Educational Services, 1958.

[Updated 03/10/05, 1:46 p.m.]