Long Time No Figure This Out

Sorry, wacky news network, I think you're wrong.

I'm pretty sure I'm inadvertently becoming the world authority on the origin of "long time no see," so I just want to clarify some points I've come across in my absurd, ongoing searches through Google Books and library databases.

1. The two main theories generally seem to be that it comes from a pidgin English, either Native American or Chinese.

2. The earliest written usages are all native English speakers "reporting" the speech of non-native speakers, from about 1840-1915. This really needs to be taken into account. You can't say that because a British navy man or an American explorer says that a Chinese prostitute or a Native American chief said it, they really said it. The literature of that era is rife with stylized English attributed to non-native speakers -- can we trust it?

3. The earliest written Chinese English usage -- that is, written in English by a Chinese writer for a Chinese audience --  I can find is from 1921, in an magazine for Chinese students studying in the USA.

4. The fact that 好久不见 can be translated as long time no see does not seem that convincing a case for a strictly Chinese origin -- there are other ways to literally translate that, and I have to assume that the 100+ year history of long time no see as an American English expression has influenced that translation.

5. Knowing Americans like I do, I'm inclined to lean much more toward the idea that LTNS is mainly a way to mock people for not speaking standard American English, but it also seems too tangled up with legitimate possibilities of pidgin usage to be only that.

6. However, LTNS seems to have been taken up by Chinese learners of English (and the current generation of English-using young people) as a kind of symbolic victory for Chinglish. It's often lumped together with Chinglish phrases that are only known in China and only used as jokes to show "ha ha, Chinglish is funny"(like "horse horse tiger tiger" and "I'll give you some color to see see"), but -- and this is key -- it's held up as an example of Chinglish that "made it" -- successfully joining the one big happy family that is English in the World.

7. So really, this goes back to something I touched on in the "driving the pigs to market" example -- an expression that previously had a relatively fixed local meaning in one variety of English, reappropriated and ideologically repurposed.

PS: I'd love to do a Google N-Gram search on this, but to search for a 4-word phrase you have to download something like 250 gigabytes worth of .csv files. No thanks.

World Englishes and Teaching Writing

I have mentioned in the past that there hasn't been much interplay between the worlds of L2 writing and world Englishes -- nor, I suppose, has the whole spirit of world Englishes (or sociolinguistics, or really applied linguistics writ large) had much impact on what we on this side of the biz call "L1 composition" -- those people who pal around at NCTE and CCCC. The reasons for this have more to do with traditional disciplinary boundaries than with willful ignorance, I think, but as I've moved toward this "acceptability" thing (that is, looking at the significance of readers' reactions to texts not in terms of how they treat "errors," but how they react to things the deem unacceptable/inappropriate for a variety of possible reasons) in my own study I've been interested to see that others are moving in a similar direction.


Three important scholars to keep an eye on in this regard are Aya Matsuda, Suresh Canagarajah, and Bruce Horner.


Canagarajah should come as no surprise; you could say that his well-known 2006 article "The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued" has jump-started the movement in this direction, and really he's been writing about this sort of thing off and on since at least his Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002).


Matsuda has been writing about world Englishes for the last decade, but she's done some work with her husband, who is an L2 writing scholar, on WEs and teaching writing in the last couple of years. I'm hoping to see more from her on this.


Horner is an interesting case. In recent years he's been working closely with Min-Zhan Lu (whose name I should perhaps have mentioned along with his, but she doesn't much of have a website), the originator of the anecdote (the "can able to" incident, all the way back in a 1994 article) that has animated a number of Canagarajah's arguments on the subject, and they published a kind of manifesto last year on what they call a "translingual approach" to teaching writing. There is much to commend in this article, though as a stodgy TESOL/applied linguistics person I find myself not able to identify with some of its more US-centric perspective and subsequent political positions.


I say "US-centric" simply because composition studies is about teaching writing to college students in America, and there's nothing wrong with that. But its politics are also influenced by its being rooted in American higher education (which again is not wrong! I'm a product of that system and I hope to eventually work in it!), and Horner's statement on how he found his way to a more world Englishes-influenced approach to comp is interesting: "I came to this concern through my work on immigrant rights and English-only legislation in Iowa. This has led me to argue against the English monolingualism dominating the teaching and study of writing in U.S. colleges and universities." 


Thus, the notion of "English-only" policies, which are pretty uniquely American, often comes up in his work (the little of it I've seen). Of course, the ideology of monolingualism (which does need to be looked into more deeply) is implicated in most contexts, and indeed this is a reason this 'new' approach to teaching writing is really worthwhile -- but many of us outside the US are simply not dealing with the same political questions. Also, this is where I'd throw in my usual caveat -- "we don't all have the same politics, so let's try to make this palatable to the widest amount of people possible" -- if I had more time. What can I say -- I'm the academic progeny of a "vulgar pragmatist."


In any case, what I like about this approach that is emerging is the way it seeks insights from rhetoric and composition studies, TESOL, sociolinguistics/world Englishes, foreign language teaching, and translation, to be applied to the question of teaching writing to diverse groups of students in different contexts. We could all benefit from more of that kind of thing -- or hopefully, students could benefit from it.

Advice on Texts for Teaching World Englishes

(especially if your university has a stentorian copyright policy):

Use David Graddol's stuff from the British Council. They give his books away for free in PDF form!

The Future of English

English Next

English Next India

"Hegemony Takes No Prisoners"

Probably the most genius thing about the concept of hegemony is how you're not allowed to think it's not a thing...because that's what it wants you to think!!

"We disagree about the choices people make about their language use. For

RP such choices are typically imposed externally. For me they are typically

decisions made by individuals. I prefer to view people as independent

beings, capable of acting in their own best interests with regard to language

use. RP sees that as hegemonic, to which, of course, I have no reply since

hegemony takes no prisoners." - Alan Davies

Theory, Sexuality, Politics, etc (a much shorter post than you'd expect)

This is the only place I can think of engaging this issue, and I'll try to be brief in outlining what I see as a tension/dilemma which is rooted in theory/philosophy but which plays out in academic and popular debates. Super brief.

Cynthia Nelson, in a 2010 TESOL Quarterly article on gay students in language classrooms, writes: "The widespread collective ignorance about gay students may have many reasons, including...[a] tendency to

view (homo)sexualities as a private matter involving physical sex, rather than a public matter involving community, identity, knowledge, and discourse..."

Aside from totally co-signing on her implication (sexuality as social -- that's some Wendell Berry stuff if ever I saw some), the other issue I thought of was "can this kind of theory 'go both ways,' as it were?" Not to crudely oppose gayness and straightness, or 'conservative' and 'liberal' ideology -- because I don't think that's necessary -- but I just wonder whether people on traditionally "opposing sides" whose political convictions demand of them (again, no intent to be simplistic here) certain orthodoxies  are both able to deploy the above bit of critical theory sincerely without pushback from the other. One rarely hears, for example, proponents of "traditional" sexuality using the language Nelson uses, yet it seems to me eminently usable by those who, like Gabriel Torretta, argue that "marriage is a mode of being." In fact, I suspect it might meet resistance from those who most often use critical theory. Am I wrong? This is relatively uncharted territory for me.

2012 Planner

Notes from meeting with advisor.

Data:

1. Do final stage of data collection (Canadian participants)

2. Establish coding system (involve second coder; she suggests doing a kind of 'work-swap' with another grad student, wherein we work on each other's projects) for AJT data.

3. Transcribe and begin coding interview data. (Note: may not need to be transcribed per se -- can work with audio files in NVivo. Will eventually need to transcribe relevant bits, at least.)

Goal: be ready by the end of the term (April) to meet w committee about what direction I plan to go with data analysis. (This means having all of the above done, basically. Which is a very tall order, really. It would be nice to do a committee meeting before the baby is born, though. I guess mid-April is a good goal to put something together.)

Writing projects:

1. Rejected "English for real use" paper: abandon for now. It was really just a haphazard thing I did on a whim and time would be better used focusing on dissertation.

2. Methodology comp as a journal article: submit to World Englishes ASAP. The hope is to get some good feedback on it (never really thought about this, but yeah). If it gets a revise and resubmit, perhaps add in some data analysis from what I'll be working on (above). Needs: continue to trim parts and revise. Not sure how long the MS can be. For some reason can't find it on their website. Goal: submit this by the end of January.

3. English Today special issue: really want to do something good for this. She says I need data. Deadline is March 30. Limit is 4,000 words, though they also accept 1500 word short pieces. Thinking of framing it as a 'post-variety' sociolx approach?

Conferences:

Not planning to attend or present at any this year, with the exception of a submission to the CSLD conference held at UBC in mid-May. No word on that yet. 

For 2013, it would be nice to try for SSLW (in China, date TBA) and possibly TESOL/AAAL, despite their being in Texas. ACLA (the big Canadian applied linguistics conference) will be in Victoria in Spring 2013, so that is a goal, too.

Work:

Again stressed that I shouldn't work too much. I think I can find a balance this year. I taught 3 classes (4 sections) in 2010 -- too much. I taught zero classes in 2011 -- not enough. So far this year I am doing 2 sections of one class at Rits and I'm doing a copyediting project (that I really need to get moving on) for another professor. Beyond this I should probably only do one course this summer (either LLED 301, LLED 489, or Sociolx at TWU) and maybe one in the fall. There needs to be a period where I'm only doing data analysis. In fact, it might be best not to teach in the fall, and to teach next spring or summer instead.

Idea for a Corpus-Like Assignment investigating variations in English(es)

1. Start with Paul Brians' classic website "Common Errors in English."

2. Identify some potential "semantic minimal pairs"(a term I thought I just invented but apparently did not) that seem interesting, like "good-by / good-bye" or "gray/grey" or some more obscure and/or clearly "errory" ones like "easedrop" vs "eavesdrop".

(Note: this is pretty subjective and you have to already know a lot about English to really choose interesting ones.)

3. Find a corpus courtesy of Brian Lee's list of "Freely Accessible Online Corpora of English"

4. Learn how to search it, use it, etc.

5. search for the stuff you found in #2.

6. Somehow do some kind of cool analysis of what you find.

(#6 needs some work.)