2/02 Interview with Professor Gang Liu

As an undergrad, I took a few Chinese classes and a few Spanish classes, so I reached out to my professors for expert interviews. My first Chinese professor was the first interview we had for our exploratory research. We prepared a short protocol to guide our conversation, but we let the interview flow pretty freely to understand his experience, goals, and perspective on technology in language learning. Our major takeaways are below:

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

• Language and culture are deeply intertwined. You can’t separate language and culture.
• Culture serves as motivation for language learning.

SPEAKING THE LANGUAGE

• There’s no shortcut to effectively learn a language. You have to practice.
• Studying abroad is important because they’re “signing an invisible language pledge” — there’s no way to not use the language.
• When you learn a language, you can’t just learn it from a book. You have to use it.
• Grammar and pronunciation are secondary to being able to communicate what you want to say in this language. It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes.

A TEACHER’S ROLE

• You can’t really teach a language. You can only encourage, motivate, and teach skills and habits.
• Positive teacher-student interactions are rewarding.
• The way a teacher presents the material is key to keeping the class exciting and motivating.
• Teacher-student and student-student interactions are essential to keeping a class engaged
• The most important thing to gain from these classes are learning skills and habits.

TECHNOLOGIES

• Online and distance learning lack interaction. But they could benefit from MR — to the point where a real class might not be necessary.
• Translators work well for translating conversational writing → natural sounding speech.