The Chinese Language Field in the 21st Century:

Lessons (Not) Learned from Japanese in the 20th Century

Prof. Scott McGinnis  马思凯

Defense Language Institute

Abstract: In a series of articles beginning in 1994, Richard Brecht and the late A. Ronald Walton  identified five sectors in the United States as sources for providing national capacity in the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs): (1) academic; (2) government; (3) domestic ethnic language preservation (aka “heritage”); (4) overseas; and, (5) private providers.  This presentation will provide a comparative analysis based upon that sector analysis of two LCTL fields in two different time frames – Japanese in the late 20th century, and Chinese in the early 21st century. It will be argued that for the Chinese language field, the lessons of the past have not been sufficiently considered and incorporated as part of the process of the phenomenal quantitative growth of Chinese language instruction over the past decade in particular.