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A Bicultural Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mark Williams
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Extract

In 1995 I Taught a Course in New Zealand Literature at Tokyo University. The Students Were Attentive, and Curious About New Zealand, but they found my Kiwi English hard to follow, being accustomed to American or British varieties. I wondered about their seeming tolerance recently while teaching a similar course to undergraduates back home, at Victoria University, in Wellington, when one of the Maori students complimented a Pākehā (New Zealand European) colleague for her Maori pronunciation. Like most Pākehā, I have a rudimentary grasp of Māori, enough to be familiar with the words and phrases that have entered everyday speech and those in the poetry and fiction I teach. But I cannot conduct a conversation in Māori or read a Māori text, and I am as embarrassed by the irritation that my pronunciation of te reo (the Māori language) causes Māori speakers as I was by the difficulty my rising terminals and strange accent posed for competent English speakers in Japan.

Information

Type
correspondents at large
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Literature in the World , October 2016 , pp. 1552 - 1556
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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References

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