AAS Affiliation

Association for Asian Studies http://www.aasianst.org

As stated in CLTA's By-laws, Article IV, Section 4.01, CLTA Board of Directors is required to maintain liaison with organizations that serve common interests, among which is the Association for Asian Studies [AAS]. The Chinese Language Teachers Association is one of over thirty (non-dues-paying) AAS Affiliate Organizations. CLTA meets, and has maintained over the years, AAS' criterion for affiliated membership, in that, consistently, ten percent or more of CLTA members are concurrently AAS members.

As an affiliated organization, CLTA may host a membership event during the four-day AAS annual convention each spring for CLTA/AAS members, and it may also sponsor one CLTA-designated panel that is chaired by a Director, appointed by the incoming President at the annual CLTA Board of Directors meeting in November. The panel chair organizes a regular (or border-crossing) roundtable panel that brings together area studies and language faculty to discuss common issues and concerns.

CLTA has sponsored panels at AAS from time to time over the years. At the 2002 AAS annual meeting held in Washington, DC, for instance, the CLTA-designated, roundtable panel was a border-crossing session on "Asian Languages in the Area Studies Curriculum—Challenges Ahead", organized and chaired by Professor Jane Parish Yang (Board of Director, 1999-2001; Lawrence University). For further information on that panel, please see the abstract below.

2002 AAS Annual Meeting (4-7 April 2002). Border-Crossing Session.

Organizer and Chair: Jane Parish Yang (Lawrence University)
Discussants: Scott McGinnis (National Foreign Language Center), Heidi Byrnes (Georgetown University), Hiroko Kataoka (California State University, Long Beach), Vijay Gambhir (University of Pennsylvania), and Julian Wheatley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Over the past twenty years since the develpment of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL] Proficiency Guidelines, foreign language professionals have emphasized functional competency in listening, speaking, reading and writing along with general measures to assess student achievement in these four skill areas. With the introduction of National Standards three years ago, language professionals have further sought to place language learning in the larger, more holistic context of cultural practices and perspectives. The recent emphasis on culture is particularly important for us in less commonly taught Asian languages, for many of our students come to the study of language because of an interest in the target culture.

This roundtable will assess our progress over the past twenty years and look ahead to challenges in the field: shrinking tenure lines, relationships with heritage speakers, the need for more intellectual (content-based) instruction in language courses, the isolation of language programs from the disciplines, and the neglect of the use of target-language resources for research. We hope to discuss ways to integrate language courses with area studies so competency in the languages can serve the disciplines and background in the disciplines can aid understanding of the languages.