Taiwan native Kuan-Yi Rose Chang is on a mission to broaden the cultural awareness and foreign language skills of University of Colorado students and Coloradans.
An adjunct professor of Spanish and Chinese and director of CU-Boulder's Anderson Language Technology Center (ALTEC), Chang believes that globalization and the rapid growth of minority populations in the United States increasingly demands that Americans broaden their understanding of other cultures. Part of the broadening process also should include expanding Americans' foreign language skills, she says.
"Colorado is still a very homogenous place, in spite of the fact the new census shows we have rapidly growing Latino and Asian populations," said Chang. "Some of the outreach programs we are developing at CU-Boulder are beginning to address the need for more cross-cultural awareness in Colorado."
Chang believes greater cultural awareness "is particularly important in the West because, outside of California, many people still have very little experience with other cultures. But we know that this is changing fast as the West grows," she said.
For Chang, foreign language fluency has opened doors and changed her career path in ways she would never have anticipated when she first came to the United States in 1979 as an undergraduate student planning to major in English.
Chang arrived at Wesleyan College in Georgia to study English, but changed her major to Spanish "because they wouldn't accept my English credits from Taiwan if I was an English major," she recalled. "But if I was a Spanish major, all of my English credits could be transferred.
"I just wanted to come to the United States to study English, get my degree and go home," Chang said. "I only had enough money to stay for two years and get my degree."
But switching her major to Spanish changed her financial outlook by opening up the possibility of teaching Spanish in graduate school as a teaching assistant. And during the course of her undergraduate work, Chang realized that American universities offered more opportunities for students interested in non-science fields, better matching her interests than Taiwanese schools.
"When I was in Taiwan 20 years ago, one virtually had to be good at every subject to score high on the college entrance exams, and my math and science scores were not high enough for the schools I wanted to attend," she said. "But here there's much more flexibility to study what you're interested in, which for me are the humanities and education.
"Here, if you have the ability and you put in the effort, you can be successful. It's not the same there," she said.
By the time she completed her bachelor's degree, Chang had decided to get her Ph.D. in the United States and teach at a university.
"It worked out well because all through graduate school I was able to work as a teaching assistant in Spanish earning money for school, which I would not have been able to do if I had majored in English."
She received her Ph.D. in foreign language education with two minors in education technology and education administration. Chang taught Spanish, Chinese and English as a Second Language as an assistant professor at West Virginia University from 1989 to 1996.
While at West Virginia University she also worked for the Federal Language Training Lab in Arlington, Va., as an instructional designer and as a consultant in foreign language education and curriculum development at the Taipai American School.
Chang now supervises a lab with 28 employees representing several ethnic backgrounds including Caucasian, Hispanic, African American and Asian. ALTEC received a diversity Service Recognition award this semester from Chancellor Richard Byyny for its promotion of multiculturalism and inclusion of many cultures among its staff members.
As director of the ALTEC Lab at CU-Boulder, Chang is able to devote some of her time to foreign language outreach around the state in addition to the lab's main focus of providing audio, video and Web technology support for CU-Boulder's foreign language programs.
"I really want to be involved in promoting cultural awareness, especially in the Rocky Mountain region," she said. "Through ALTEC and other campus programs our faculty and students can help to improve intercultural understanding and bring language diversity to the CU campus, to Colorado and to this region," said Chang.
The Asian Studies Program, for example, has received a U.S. Department of Education grant to begin directed self-instructional language programs at CU-Boulder in order to offer less commonly taught languages, such as Hindi and Indonesian. The end goal is to be able to offer more languages, Chang said, and ALTEC will assist in the process.
The ALTEC Lab also sponsors several other programs. ALTEC provides support to about 2,000 CU-Boulder students who take English as a Second Language through the University Writing Program.
As part of its foreign language outreach in Colorado, the lab coordinates classes in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian and Latin to schoolchildren in Montrose County, Chaffee County and at Whittier Elementary School in Boulder.
Upon request, ALTEC provides foreign language faculty and student translators for school districts, senior centers and welfare offices.
ALTEC also has been coordinating Web-based instructional materials to supplement university language classes and has made use of this new resource for Japanese, Spanish and Italian classes.
"I feel stronger every day that being Asian and female, I want to serve as a role model for students and let them know that there are lots of opportunities for them here," said Chang. "There are many assumptions about Asian females in this country -- that they are subservient and dependent and so on.
"I do not fit that image and I want to help change those kinds of negative stereotypes," Chang said. "If you work hard and dream high there's so much that you can do."
Chang knows because she's been there.