I entered HTA super excited to immerse myself in Chinese for another summer (last summer, I attended ICLP, which was a perfect fit for me and enabled me to make multiple years of progress in just one summer). The reason I selected HTA instead of going to ICLP again this summer was because 1) I had already attended ICLP, and wanted to expose myself to different pedagogies, 2) I had heard from some professors and students that HTA had a slightly more rigorous reputation, and 3) the language pledge! I was surprised to discover in the application process that until Middlebury in Taiwan (a very new program) began, HTA was the only language program that required a 24/7 language pledge in Taiwan. Even today, besides these two programs, I don’t think there others that hold students to a full-time language pledge in the entire country. Because I have non-verbal learning disorder (NVLD), which means I process and retain information much more efficiently through listening and speaking than through reading, I figured HTA’s language pledge meant I would learn even more than I did in ICLP. With these thoughts in mind, I was excited to head to 台大 for another summer. However, to be frank, I ended up having a very negative experience overall and cannot in good conscience recommend HTA for 4th-year students like me — doubly so if you have any learning differences or dis/abilities like I do. I will get more into why into later blogs, but for now, I’ll chronicle my first week.
Check-in went pretty smoothly, and the rooms that HTA provides are extremely large and comfortable — a single room about the size of my living room at home, with an attached private bathroom. The dorm is also right next to a large 7/11 that has plenty of ready-to-eat meal options, beverages, some cosmetics and toiletries, and even serves as a pick-up point for anyone purchasing items on Shoppee (me!)
On the very first day of orientation, I was nervous to realize that everyone in advanced Chinese besides me and 1 other student were native speakers, and that the other non-native speaker had been studying Chinese for over 7 years already. In contrast, I had been studying Chinese for about 1.5 years, so I was definitely intimidated at first. However, I soon learned it was because every other student was extremely strong and reading and hand-writing while I was one of the strongest speakers in class. (author’s note: I suspect I have dyslexia because it’s a co-morbidity for students with ADHD learning a new language, and because I’ve tried over and over to learn to read characters, but even after completing 4 years of Chinese, I can only recognize about 100 characters on a good day).
The first week of class went decently, but as with ICLP last year, I made sure to discuss homework expectations with my teacher on the second day because I was already spending over 5 hours on the first night just reading the textbook lesson. My teacher said the lessons would keep getting longer and longer, and suggested I just prepare the first two parts of each lesson (each lesson had 3 sections to it, each a few paragraphs to several pages long, depending on the day) to ensure I reviewed as much of the lesson as possible before class. While this helped cut down on time, I was pretty lost in class whenever the final part of the lesson was being discussed. At HTA, we focus on the same lesson from the same textbook for the entire school day, in contrast to ICLP, where we have distinct classes with multiple textbooks and lesson topics (like a more traditional school). As someone with ADHD, I really prefer ICLP’s curricular structure because even by the end of the first week at HTA, I was getting really bored of sitting through a 2-hour class focused on the same thing. At ICLP, I didn’t have this issue because the classes were shorter and offered far more variety.
For example, HTA’s structure was 2 2-hour classes broken up with a brief 10-minute break, and a 1-hour 1:1 class. In contrast, at ICLP, I had 3 1-hour classes and a 1-hour 1:1 class. I was surprised that despite having more class time, and far longer classes, at HTA, the students in 4th-year Chinese at HTA had almost no chance to speak during class (I’m not saying “the students at HTA had almost no chance to speak” because I had many friends in 2nd-year Chinese and they all said they had plenty of time to talk in class). At some point towards the end of the program, I started timing how long students would speak during our large (7 student) and small (3-4 student) advanced Chinese classes, and in a 2-hour class period, each student would speak for less than 3 minutes. That’s pretty baffling to me, given how much money and time students and their universities/funding sources invested into HTA, but in light of this knowledge, it makes sense that I ended up not learning much from the program. With my NVLD, unless I listen and repeat, listen and repeat, listen and repeat, I’m simply not learning. Even for my non-Chinese classes here at Williams, I have an accommodation that essentially allows me to turn PDFs into audiobooks using text-to-speech software. Before using this accommodation, it would take me over 30 minutes to read 1 page of a Political Science reading, but now, I can easily read enough material to write a 20-page paper in just days. Therefore, at a program like HTA, where advanced students have almost no chance to receive in-class corrections on their speech from teachers because they simply are not given the chance to speak in class, and where we were basically expected to memorize 3-7 pages of short stories, poetry, or literary critiques per night, I was at a monumental learning disadvantage. I wish I had known how lecture-heavy and textbook-based HTA was (at least, for the highest level), because if I had known, I truthfully probably would have chosen ICLP instead of HTA. However, the program was by no means all bad, and I did have some enjoyable moments and moments of learning, which I will elaborate on in my following blogs!