Review

My review of Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue is in press with the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. I'm really happy to be publishing this!

Is the Answer in the Question?

Imagine the following two items on a survey.

A) Read this a text written by a Chinese person and published in China. Please identify any vocabulary, grammar, phrasing, sentence, word choice, etc. which strikes you as nonstandard, unusual, or unique in any way.

or

B) Read this text. Please identify any vocabulary, grammar, phrasing, sentence, word choice, etc. which strikes you as nonstandard, unusual, or unique in any way.

I'm beginning to think that you could do a study comparing the results of A and B. For my purposes, I may want to go with the wording for B...

I'm still thinking that Chinglish is in the eye of the beholder. A sign on the building I work in reads "WELCOME ANYTIME PARKING." In China, that would be Chinglish. In Vancouver, it's just a sign.

Employment

I got a job teaching a real live undergraduate course at UBC this summer - "Language Across the Curriculum in Multilingual Classrooms: Secondary." May 17-June 25. Yeah!

Remaking of Face

Ouyang, Huhua (2000) Remaking of face and community of practices: An ethnographic study of what ELT reform means to local and expatrate teachers in today's China. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong.

Read it here.

Hugely eye-opening to anyone who is or is considering becoming a foreign teacher in China. I read chapter 3, which is about the students' and administrators' complaints about foreign teachers and how they go about voicing them. Another major part (which I didn't read) is an explanation that Chinese universities are based on the danwei ("work unit") system, which is a kind of Maoist/communist community, which doesn't necessarily hold as much currency in the job market in today's China.

It's stuff I didn't really know at all -- definitely worth a read as an explication of why the "foreign expert" system is deeply flawed, and (in my view) why other emerging models of NEST/NNEST integration (I promise to stop citing Ningbo and Shantou as soon as I learn about others) may be better.

Apparently was published as a book in 2004, but maybe in Chinese - I can't find any references.

Thinking about my possible role in the future as a teacher-trainer / someone with etic/emic knowledge of ELT in China. Don't want it to define my career, but I think it could be a rewarding part of my future work.

Chinglish debate is about what, exactly?

I feel like a debate on terminology (we should call it X vs Y) or even preferred terms (X is bad English, Y is good English) obscures the fact that a) English in China does have its own characteristics, b) People who think it's bad also think anything other than inner circle Englishes are bad, and c) It needs to be described if there is any chance of changing b. Then again, that whole Ebonics debate didn't turn out so well.

Books on China/English - to be contd

Bolton - Chinese Englishes (2003)

Adamson - China's English: A History of English in Chinese Education (2004)

Liu - English Language Teaching in China: New Approaches, Perspectives, and Standards (2008)

Lo Bianco - China and English: Globalization and the Dilemmas of Identity (2009)

You - Writing in the Devil's Tongue: A History of English Composition in China (2010)

Feng - English Language in Education and Societies Across Greater China (in press)

Journals with short lead times

Selected ournals with an average time of less than one year (preferably closer to 6 months) from submission to publication, from "How to Get Published in ESOL and Applied Linguistics Serials" by TESOL, 2007

listed in months for review / months till publication / total average time from submission to publication

Obv. some are more prestigious than others; I haven't heard of some of these

Asian Journal of ELT - 2-3 / 6-9 / 8-12 (CUHK http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ajelt/)

Assessing Writing: 3 / 3 / 6

Canadian Modern Lg Review: 5 / 2/ 7

Essential Teacher: 2 / 3 / 5

Journal of Asia TEFL: 2 /3 / 5 (http://www.asiatefl.org/journal/journal1.html)

Journal of Basic Writing: 1 / 4/ 5

JLIE: 2 / 6 / 8

JSLW: 3 / 3 - 12 / 6 - 15 (mentioned bc I should aim for this one)

The Language Teacher: 2 / 2 / 4 (JALT http://jalt-publications.org/tlt/)

System: 2 / 10 / 12

TESL Canada: 4 / 4 / 8

TESL-EJ: 2 / 4 / 6

Reflections on ELT: 4 / 3 / 7 (Singapore http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/publications/reflections.htm)