Notes on China English

Just got done with a productive meeting with the student who's been helping me with this "State of China English Research" project. Interesting to note he is a NNS and I am an NS, yet he supports NS-based pedagogy and I support NNS-based pedagogy. Irony!

Nearing the end, or really the beginning, of this project, which will be presented in Ningbo in a couple of days, a few observations:

1. Almost every author writes about the distinction between China English (中国英语) and Chinese English aka Chinglish (中式英语) -- but there is little empirical evidence given toward actually describing/defining these two things. I'm inclined to agree with Hu (2004), who says that China English - Chinglish is a continuum, and one which is not (yet) well-defined. Of course, she doesn't actually give a concrete description based on empirical evidence either.

2. And really, no one has. Nearly every article (with the exception of maybe 5%) contains only anecdotal examples of CE, very often quoted from Ge (1980), the first person to propose the idea. These are terms like "the four modernizations" and "Mr. Science." Most articles say CE has unique vocabulary, syntax, grammar, pronunciation, discource, etc, but almost no one even comes close to defining how it is unique in any of these areas.

3. Overall, the percentage of articles based on empirical research is higher in international journals than in Chinese journals, but not much higher.

4. There is not much overlap between which scholars publish in international journals and which publish in Chinese journals, although with very few exceptions, all researchers are Chinese. The significant exceptions are Hu Xiaoqiong and Jiang Yajun. The most prolific authors on CE in Chinese journals (Jin Huikang, 5 articles, Liu Xiangqing, 3 articles and Qiu Lizhong, 3 articles) do not publish in international journals.

5. Overwhelmingly, articles on CE are not published in "key" or "core" Chinese journals. I haven't done the final tally, but I think there are  at most 5 out of 105 articles.

6. On a related note, I count only 3-5 authors from key universities in China. This means essentially that those who have some degree of power and influence in the field are not, by and large, pursuing this work. This suggests that there is not much interest in promoting China English for pedagogical (or other) purposes at the national level. (This jives with Li (2007), who says that essentially only researchers support a China English - based pedagogy, while most teachers, administrators, testing bodies, government officials, and parents don't).

7. Most authors seem to argue for the benefits CE will bring to two fields: English teaching in China and translation of Chinese to English. I haven't done a count but I think pedagogy is quite a bit higher than translation in terms of numbers. A lot of the articles also seem to have no clear goals or implications apart from arguing that "China English is an objective reality" (a title of one of the articles) and that it is in some vague way a good thing.

Those are the observations for today. Tomorrow is day to write...a whole lot.

Looking ahead

Next week: finish preparing for presentation about the state of China English research

in 2 weeks: design questionnaire for my SSLW presentation (just accepted! 1st week of Nov at Arizona State)

July & August: read some books and write reviews (mentioned earlier); follow-up interviews for SSLW project

September: Start classes! So far signed up for doctoral seminar, theory & research in ESL, theory & research in second language writing, and interviews in education research (may need to drop that one).

 

Notes to self:

* You still have to file a bunch of paperwork in order to legally live in Canada.

* 2 conferences a year is p l e n t y. Try to rotate between SSLW, AAAL, TESOL, and IAWE. (Although tentatively, I'd like to go to AILIA 2011 if possible.)

* 1 book review a year is probably enough, too.

* It would be nice to not do much next summer. Isn't that the whole point of working in education?

Doing What You Do and Being Who You Are

Is there a need for non-Chinese people to do research on China English?

Most of the academic writing (that gets publshed in respected international journals) about China English is done (quite naturally, I'd say) by people from mainland China. (Though most of them do not live and work here.)

What is personally at stake when somebody does academic research? One might say that Chinese TESOL professionals / scholars/teachers have a vested interest in understanding China English because it is somehow a "part of them" -- it gets at important personal, national, international and professional issues that are important to them.

But, since I'm gearing up to do a PhD that is focused on China English and ESL writing, what is at stake for me when I do research about China English? Many of the same things. I am an American English teacher/researcher/whatever, and I (currently) am a part of this bizarre "foreign expert" system here in China -- my experience, too, is a part of what makes China English. This research also gets at personal, international, and professional issues that are important to me.

I've been thinking lately about the huge importance of monolingualism, specifically English monolingualism, in shaping the way English has been taught around the world for years. If knowledge is personal, like I read in that Michael Polanyi book they made me read at SPU, then I think I have some compelling reasons to look into China English from my (American) ("native-speaker") (monolingual) (etc) perspective. Inasmuch as English is "my" language, any variety of the language is interesting to me. As a monolingual speaker of English who is at least dimly aware of the way the language has changed and is changing globally, I now feel a greater urgency to help people -- not only my students in China, but "my people," "back home" -- understand how the language works, or maybe even how Language works.

When I see the sheer number of Chinese surnames on the articles I'm reading these days, I get a little intimidated*, and worried that maybe I am getting into the wrong gig. But I think I have some reasons to be doing this. I also think that if I am pursuing knowledge for the right reasons (let me know what they are if you know...some that I can come up with are a. it's interesting b. it can potentially help people c. it might make the world a better place) it's maybe not something I really need to worry about too much.

(* I realize this sounds borderline The Boy Who Cried Reverse Racism or some crap like that. I don't mean that I'm somehow afraid that nobody is going to let me Join the Club because I'm not Chinese. I just mean it's something I've noticed and I am a little worried that not speaking fluent Chinese makes me a poser. But ultimately I don't think it does, for a couple of reasons mentioned above.)

Andy Kirkpatrick Breaks it Down

From his book World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching (slightly changed here but mostly his exact words):

a - Variation is natural, normal, and continuous, and ELT professonals must establish a tolerance and understanding of variation

b - Prejudice against varieties is likely to occur

c - the differences between all varities, both native and nativized, are similar and comparable 

d - the specific teaching and learing contexts and specific needs of learners in those contexts should determine the variety to be taught

e - multilingual non-native teachers represent ideal teachers in many ELT contexts.

I strongly agree with (e) and wonder where it leaves me as a monolingual native teacher. As I think about my future career, I hope I'll still be "in the trenches" at least part of the time, actually in a classroom teaching something to students who want to learn English --  but I'm not sure what my role should be. Right now I feel like I can do the most good as a mediator between the Chinese educational context and the North American one, but when I think about the "humanitarian" side of ELT (if there is one - it's hard to say), I sometimes think helping elite students get into elite universities isn't my ultimate goal. I'm attracted to the idea of teacher training for local English teachers in "less-deleloped" areas, but when I think about that the ghost* of Robert Phillipson starts moaning in my ear about imperialism.

(*He is not actually dead)

How to Improve Your Oral English

Q from Chinese college student:

"How can I improve my oral English?"

Best possible A from monolingual English teacher:

1. Make a list of 5-10 Chinese people you know who you believe speak English well, or at least better than you do.

2. Ask them that question. Because, really. I mean, think about it.

May 3 Number Rundown

238 is the number we occupy on the waitlist for UBC housing

6 weeks of teaching remaining [Hong Kong Culture / English Writing / Public Speaking / Communication Strategies for students preparing to study abroad]

2  conference proposals pending [1 - Study of what Chinese college students preparing to study in North America want from English writing instrution  2- "Does China English Matter to China?" - A look at what's being published within China on the subject of China English]

1 monster book review to write this summer [Handbook of World Englishes for Linguistlist]

1 other interesting book I hope to read & review this summer [Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue: Pedagogical and Ethical Dilemmas]

PhD - the Decision

The Final Scorecard

Accepted:
Purdue - with TAship ($12k stipend for 50% time teaching job)

UBC - with fellowship ($16k CAD stipend for 4 years)

Arizona State Applied Linguistics - with TAship ($12k stipend for 50% time teaching job)

Not Accepted:
University of Washington English

Penn State Applied Linguistics

Withdrew my application from waitlist:
Arizona State Rhetoric and Linguistics

----

This was by no means an easy decision, but I am delighted to say that Sarah and I will be moving to the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia, where I will be studying and working with a small, dedicated group of people in a field I love.

--

I am planning to start a new website over the summer which will eliminate the need for various blogs and stuff that I currently have going, so look for that later. In the meantime, let's all do good work in the places God has seen fit to scatter us around this planet.

Why Teaching Language is Hard

...you can't just be good at teaching -- you have to know everything, because people use language for everything.

Three ZJU Professors Fired for Academic Dishonesty

The story in the Christian Science Monitor:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0323/p01s01-woap.html?page=1

At Eddie Cheng's blog which follows plagiarism and academic integrity in China:
http://fangzhouzi-xys.blogspot.com/

10% attendance

New record: 2 of my 18 IELTS students showed up today. Actually, it was a lot more fun than it usually is.

No One's Watching

Professional development should begin with YOU, I suppose, but it is a little difficult when nobody is watching what you do. I have been working in China for 17 months now, and no administrator or supervisor of mine has ever been in the classroom while I was teaching. I'm not saying it would necessarily be different elsewhere, but I feel like maybe it would.

New semester starts on Monday! Plans for 09/10 are still up in the air. Many possibilities, but nothing concrete yet.

Idea for Annotated Bibliography on Chinese English Research Published in China

Note: Obviously, I can't do this alone and I need help from people who read Chinese.

1. Identify which journals in China are likely to have "good" research on English / Applied Linguistics.

2. Search databases for articles on Chinese English / Chinglish / China English.

3. Read abstracts. (thankfully in English.)

4. Read articles. (this is the step I can't do)

5. Write summaries of articles.

6. Cast a wider net to all 45 bazillion academic journals in China.

7. Repeat steps 2-6, but during step 3, attempt to weed out articles which are obviously just summaries or plagiarized or otherwise worthless.

8. Publish.

I don't know how feasible this is, but I think it's at least worth pursuing steps 1-3 even if nothing else comes of it.

IAWE Day 3 (Dec 5 2008)

My summaries of Day 1 and Day 2 of IAWE at these links.

First, I forgot to mention the last thing I saw on Day 2: "Maintaining an apprecation of accents" by Fergus O'Dwyer and Leon Bell, who are Irish and Australian, respectively, and who teach in Japan. Both teachers found that their students rarely had exposure to anything outside Standard American English, which they both do not speak. (I admit, I pride myself on being more able to understand accents than most, and I had a hard time understanding O'Dwyer.) They created several resources: first, an example of Japanese accents from various regions of Japan (in order to raise awareness among Ss about accents in general), and then some kind of activities/games involving listening to various English speakers (with different accents). These were fun activities -- we tried them out during the session -- and they introduced my to a method which I think were called "alphabet trees" (is that right?), a kind of quiz multiple choice quiz where you take different paths depending on your answer and end up at a certain letter.

Onward to Day 3, then:

The first keynote session was Dr. KK Luke (University of Hong Kong), who spoke on "Stress and intonation in Hong Kong English." Much of this was over my head, but the basic premise:

Luke presented a brief sociolinguistic background of Hong Kong broken into three historical periods: colonial (1842-1980), transition (1980-1997), and post-colonial (1997-now). [It's been said, by the way, that Hong Kong has no pre-colonial history, which is fascinating and weird. I just ordered A Concise History of Hong Kong from HKUP, so I hope to learn something about this.] For most of this history, HK was a place of diglossia -- different languages, Cantonese and English, used in different domains. Recently, though, the city has gone through a "sociolinguistic reconfiguration" as the government promotes its "tri-lingual/biliterate" plan. The languages and their changes:

Cantonese: Diversified and expanded from a "low" language (for home/informal talk) to a dominant one, and now sometimes used in government.

English: De-colonized and internationalized, going from a "high" language to a working one (commerce, education, etc.), and now sometimes used in the home.

Mandarain: Moved from irrelevant to symbollicaly and commercially important, often used in business.

Dr. Luke gave the example of Mong Kok shopkeepers (in a heavily touristy zone) using Mandarin as the default language to talk to customers, because they are likely to be mainland tourists.

Then the discussion shifted to his work on Hong Kong English (HKE) intonation. He showed this YouTube video, which is more funny than educational, of a guy doing exaggerated HKE.

Essentially, Luke's hypothesis was that HKE speakers speak English based on Cantonese intonation patterns -- "perceptually prominent" syllables would be assigned a high tone, any syllable before it a low tone, and any one after it a low falling tone. This makes HKE not stress-based, as, say, American English, but tone-based. Emphasis is conferred by tones rather than stress, I believe. The hypothesis turned out to be correct - Luke could actually predict exactly how a HKE speaker would say a sentence, tone-wise.

Next up: Shih-yu Chang (PhD student at Purdue) with her presentation, "A sociolinguistic profile of English in Taiwan, 2000-2008." I'm always interested in seeing English in a Chinese context outside of the Mainland, since that's what I'm surrounded with, so this was great. She started with a brief history of who had ruled Taiwan -- European colonization, the Chinese Qing government, Japan, and so on. In my notes it says "Japan --> into English" but I don't know what I meant by that.

Her analysis of English in Taiwan reminded me a lot of the way English works in China - educational reforms have placed heavy emphasis on learning, English is seen as important politically and economically in order to build international relations (though she called English a "quasi-official language" of the gov't, I don't think I'd go that far for China), and the use of English in media (which I don't see a ton of here, but there is certainly more than in the past, which I think is similar). Learning English is "a part of public Taiwan culture."

English tends to be used in work (medical, tourism, IT, foreign-owned business), by students (61% are in 'cram schools' where they "improve" their English, and some universities require TOEFL or a particular GEPT score), and as a symbol commercially and culturally.

Chang said codemixing was (implicitly) encouraged, which I think it is not in China, but I probably don't know enough Chinese to back that up. As far as linguistic creativity goes, though, people tend to ignore or discount it, as there is (as here) much more attention paid to deviation from standard English as "error" rather than innovation. Some great stuff comes from young people texting and blogging, including 3Q (三Q = san Q = thank you), and a new favorite:

Orz

which is kowtowing in gratitude. Think of the O as the head, r as the arms and torso, and z as the waist and legs. 

Conclusion: English is on the rise in Taiwan, and the younger generation is "immersied in a richer language environment." It would be fascinating to compare any aspect of English use in Taiwan with Mainland China -- attitudes, usage, place in education, teaching methods, etc. (Note to self, file this away for later?)

Next I caught a couple of things I wasn't planning on - Johnathan Websters' "No alien mythologies in World Englishes," which was an examination of Edwin Thumboo's poetry. Thumboo is a basically a Singaporean James Earl Jones, voice-wise, and he is also an OG WE scholar. He was on hand to read his poems, which was great, but I didn't get into the literary anyalsis because I had to go to another presntation.

I also saw a bit of Rajeshwari Pandharipande's "Secular as sacred: English in the Hindu Diaspora in the United States."  I had a little trouble understanding the context as I missed most of it, but what I did see was interesting. Some notes -- religious language is similar across national languages, so even when people don't share the same language, the shared religious context allows greater understanding. "Hallelujah" in Hindu worship was seen as potentially problematic, I think, as it is understood as a trigger for Christian discourse, like "om" would be one for Hindu discourse. (Interestingly I think plenty of Christians wouldn't feel the same way about "om," but the idea makes sense.)

I don't have notes on one of my favorite talks, which was Ni Ni's (Australian National University) presentation on English in Chinese pop music. I'll dig them out when I can.

I went to Lisa Lim's (University of Amsterdam) presentation on Singapore English -- "Singapore Dreaming, Singapore English, and Singapore's languages: How linguistics can be enriched by popular culture" using the film Singapore Dreaming, which maybe I shouldn't have because I have already seen the film several times, but to hear it exegeted in a scholarly way was worthwhile. I liked her idea of "Mandarin + Hokkien + English" as its own code. The focus was the "multilingual ecology" of Singapore, appropriate because the theme of the conference was actually "World Englishes and World's Languages: Convergence, Enrichment, or Death?" Lim's was one of the few papers on Singapore (that I saw) which focussed explicitly on this interaction.

I took insane notes at the final symposium, which was basically the sort of senior scholars in the field being given a few minutes to hold forth on whatever they thought was important. I'll write that up in my next post, and also, I hope, add something about the English & Chinese pop music thing.

IAWE Day 2 (Dec 4 2008)

My wrapup of Day 1 of IAWE here.

I admit i had a little trouble paying attention during Berus Van Rooy's (Northwest University, South Africa) talk, partly because it was the first session of the day, and partly because it was more on the theoretical linguistics tip, which I find intimidating and confusing, since I am totally a pretend linguist. The speech was on "Societal and linguistic perspectives on variability" and to be honest Van Rooy was quite funny and made the whole thing much more palatable than it could have been. My notes cover four or five pages and are confusing to read now. His introduction explains: Language must be understood as a real (not idealized) phenomenon; variability is part of the vitatlity of language; linguistic and social forces operate in language which both creates and constrains variability; and differences between language varieties can be accounted for systematically. I don't think I have any hope of understanding that last point, but the rest made sense to me.

Elsewhere, some one-liners from the speech:

- "Language is a specis, uterrances are DNA." Change can be inherent - an organism always grows/changes - or it can be acheived by replication - parents create w new organism that is a little different. (cf. language varietes.)

- "Beef me up, Skattie!" A South African English advert combining wordplay on Star Trek with an Afrikaans word meaning "darling."
- "The feature pool must be filled." Think of language as a pool, which is filled by all the people who use it. We take out the features we need/want to use, but we're also always putting new ones in. I think. Maybe this is meant to be on the level of a language variety rather than of individuals adding features. I like it, though. Outer Circle English is staring to develop a larger feature pool than English used to have.

- "I need to want to be a part of the linguistic community in where I live - otherwise my speech won't change." To that I can only say, “哦，知道了。"

- "If you want to, it is possible not to understand someone." Yes! I am trying so hard to point out to everyone, "native" and "non-native" English speakers alike, that it is so frequently THIS, and not the "bad English" of L2 speakers, that is the problem.

The next panel was a personal favorite subject of mine: world Englishes and popular culture. I only spent a few private moments kicking myself for not getting my act together in time to submit a proposal, which would have been perfect for this panel, and settled in to enjoy it. The first bit came from Phil Benson (HKIE), and it was on Asian female singers's music videos and YouTube comments about them. Really interesting stuff -- I'd never heard of the singers, like Utada Hikaru, Tata Young, and Koda Kumi  (I had heard of Jolin Tsai, who is from Taiwan), but their music, and their fans' reactions, were interesting, and revealing about the use of English and other markers of (perceived) "western" identity. There was one Hikaru lyric which was so awesome I almost fell out of my chair: "You're easy breezy / and I'm Japanesey." This also provoked the funniest YouTube comment ("Oh HELL no....Asian card revoked"), but I thought it was a fantastically blunt couplet with all kinds of inercultural/interracial romance commentary crammed into it. Themes which commenters brought up in general, according to Benson:

- Should Asian female singers sing in English?

- Are Asian singers who sing in English really Asian? (Interestingly, two of the singers are actually Asian Americans who moved to Japan and Thailand, respectively, and became huge stars.)

- Should Asian women be so "comfortable with their sexuality?" (aka sexy/promiscuous?)

- Is English linked to ethnicity?

I asked a quetsion about Asian male singers and English, but I don't remember being satisfied by the answer. Benson said there wasn't much and I believe him, but I'd like to do a little more research on my own. It did help me build this hunch I've been building that English is viewed as feminine in some contexts in Asia. Still only a hunch, but could be an interesting topic in the future.

Next was Alice Chik (HKIE), who is basically doing for HK indie bands exactly what I had hoped to do for mainland bands -- write about how and why they use English. Her presenation was "English as an 'alternative' language in Hong Kong pop music." She and Benson run a fantastic HK Pop study/project/website. Jealous a little? For some reason I didn't take notes, probably because I was paying such rapt attention. Their website contains almost everything she talked about. Some stuff I remember was - English as a way to connect with an international audience, English as a way to sort of get outside oneself and thereby express oneself more fully, English as creative (weird new meanings with "broken English"). I loved this, a lot.

Joseph Park (National University of Singapore) did a presentation about reactions to a particular commercial for Neutrogena skin care products. At first, I was like, "does this really have anything to do with world Englishes?" because the commericial has about two English words in it. It turns out that these words caused a ton of debate and obnoxious comments online -- 67% of online comments on a Korean video site re this commercial and the actress in it centered on her English pronunciation of the words "cleanser" and "Neutrogena." Final conclusion: English is inseparatble from the cultural significance of a cultural product (ie an advert starring a famous actress). A mashup of English, modernity, celebrity, and fan-gossip.

Roger M. Thompson (U of Florida), who talked about English in a Filipino sitcom, would have had a fanastic presentation if it were not for the absolutely atrocious A/V problems, which I suspect were only partly due to the equipment. It seemed the actual video file(s) he had were messed up. I found it almost impossible to make head or tail of the sitcom clips he showed, which took most of the time. I learned a lot about the linguistic history of the Philippines -- isn't it funny that the country was ruled by Spain and Japan yet English is now  much more widely used language than either Spanish or Japanese? The sitcoms seemed funny, and Thompson's conclusion  - "A good Filipino resists English assaults" was interesting. Also, he didn't mention sexuality despite the fact that the English assualts come from an aggressively gay general trying to get the main character to join the army and his, um, "other" cause.

Let's take a breath after all that pop culture. By the way, most of the particpants were contributors to a book that should be out soon, edited by Andrew Moody, who chaired the panel. Pardon me while I email him about it. Done.

Andy Kirkpatrick (HKIE - is this place awesome or what?) gave a riveting presentation on English in Southeast Asia, focuing on the ASEAN countries, who among them are home to over one thousand languages. Their motto, "the spirit of unity in diversity," is not necssarily linked to their use of English as a working language, but both those facts seem to be endemic of what Kirkpatrick called "unity at the expense of diversity." He compared ASEAN, which has no official language, to the EU, which has 23 official and working languages. Europe, he said, "need citizen who can all communicate in some of the many languages spoken within its borders." ASEAN doesn't feel the same way. (If transnational associations of countries can be said to have feelings. Which they probably can't.) So few languages outside English, Chinese, and Japansese are taught in ASEAN countries.

Why English? Why not Malay, which is spoken in 6 of the 10 ASEAN countries? The Vietnamese even proposed adopting French in the 90s. Proposals for both languages were unceremoniously tabled. Well, the same reason English is everywhere now and won't be leaving soon - history, and money, and convenience, but mostly money. Kirkpatrick talked about the more humanistic approach to FLL that once ruled in education - "learn to understand others, it will be good for you," to today's approach: $$$. (Or to quote Li Yang, "Make. More. Money.") Many other good tidbits from this talk, including a lot of history I didn't have time to write down. 

{Interestingly, by an informal scan of the presentations, I'd say SE Asia is by far the most popular place in the world to be doing WEs research now. I met one guy, an American who teaches in Sweden, who studies English in Europe. I asked him why it wasn't be done there and he said the European attitude toward English is so wholeheartedly geared toward RP/British English that almost no one considers anything else. Sad if true, but also, I think worth exploring? I'm always interested in the unintersting, which somehow crosses over back into interesting by virtue of being ignored.}

Next: Claudia Kunschak of the ELC at Shantou University (currently my dream job), who did a survey on lanaguage awareness and attitudes toward Asian varieties of English with a colleague, Fan Fang, who was not in attendance. A few useful bits from the survey, which involved listening to speakers of different English varieties: China and US English speakers were most easily recogznied by participants. The Chinese voice was the most accepted/well-evaluated. (Not the American one! Surprised me.) Students claimed overwhelmingly to prefer "native" teachers who speak "standard" English. Some conclusions included the importance of intelligibility and the necessity of addressing students' preferences.

I was one of few people attending Emily Hunter's  presentation, "Lao Pop Identities and English mixing", which I found really interesting. Hunter is a geographer, not an English specialist, but I thought she did a good job of emphasizing the use of English in Lao pop songs. One thing I really liked was that although the Lao gov't has tended to be conservative and resist western influences in a lot of ways, Lao pop music has become a way of expressing Lao identity (this occasionally includes English mixing) and is therefore encouraged, even to the point that the gov't gives grants to rock bands and stuff. That's pretty cool. Also cool is a band called the "Laos Original Gangstas" which I think proves that "gangsta" doesn't have to mean gangster because they are definitely not.

Finally (whew!), I wish I'd gotten to see more of Suzanne Noor Nasir's (SEAMO RELC)I presentation because I think it was about a really important subject, and it had the best title ever, and I met her later and she was really nice. The title is "Even though I'm very appreciated with the teacher it's better to have native speak for the next time" - sweet! Unfortunately, I am lack of (as my students would say) notes from this talk, I don't have much to talk about here. I can't find an email address for her either. Searching...

IAWE Day 1 (Dec. 3 2008)

The last time I went to a major academic conference was TESOL 2007, and I have always regretted not sitting down and writing summaries and my own thoughts on the whole thing as a way of processing it. I probably saw about 50 presentations and today barely remember any of them. So here, better late than never, is the first part of my writeup on the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE) conference which I attended about six weeks ago.

I wasn't able to attend the pre-conference workshops (though I really wanted to go to them, since they were all about World Englishes in the classroom), and my flight didn't allow me to arrive at the conference, which was held at the City University of Hong Kong, until a little before lunch. 

I was just abke to catch the end of a presentation by Xu Zhichang (Hong Kong Institute of Education) called "Chinese English: liguitsic features and pedagogical implications." It was mostly a summary of features of CE that most of us somewhat familar with it would recognize, but it was good to hear them laid out clearly. I caught bits on lexical, syntactic, and discourse features (especially liked the "ancestral hometown discourse," something I have seen/heard almost every single one of my students do in writing or conversation), though there may have been more. The talk ended with a section on the potential use of a CE model for ELT in China. More and more articles seem to be arguing for or at least looking forward to this, but I am not sure if it's being put into practice -- it certainly isn't done by foreign teachers, and most Chinese teachers I know are too busy trying to teach to standardized tests. I think the three points he made were really useful though: a) maximize mother tongue experience, b) raise awareness of Chinese identity ( these two are prefereable I think to asking students to sort of imagine themselves in England or the US, or asking them to discuss "foreign" ideas/concepts), and c) legitimize experiences of Chinese English teachers and students - which could go some way in helping to eradicate the bias toward "pure" English that plagues, um, almost everybody in the world. Andy Kirkpatrick touched on this issue in his plenary session as well, which I'll mention later.

Next up was Kwok Kan Tam (Open University of Hong Kong, link not working for me here in China without a proxy) with "Bilingual Metaphor: examples from Hong Kong and Singapore Writings." I haven't done much study of literature since college, but his illustrations of creative bilingual metaphors were effective in showing the way new meanings and ideas can be expressed/created when languages mix. I especially liked the "Rice-tastic" hamburger advertisement (饭tasitic - fantastic). The main point, I think, was to focus on creativity as opposed to interference, or to show that interference gives rise to creativity. He also said something I found interesting: "Part of Hong Kong people's identity is constructed by English." He also referred to this as a "westernized Chinese identity." I sometimes have trouble with people saying Hong Kong is "western," because I think this is an oversimplification (though I guess there is certainly good reason to say it), but I think this is a model that I can use to encourage my students, especially those bound for Hong Kong -- the idea that English can be part of a Chinese identity. (Of course, you could argue that Hong Kong identity isn't "Chinese" identity, but that's tricky...)

There was a scheduling kerfuffle, and I missed Tatiana Ivankova's (Far Eastern National University, in Russia) "Intelligibility of Chinese English" talk. Please wait a moment while I email her. OK, done. Instead, I saw the beginning of Cecil Nelson's (Indiana U) talk on intelligibility, which was pretty comprehensive but since I only heard about ten minutes I can't really comment on, other than to say that the name Jennifer Jenkins came up. Her name was frequently bandied about, and I don't think anyone brought her up because they agree with her. I'm not familiar with her work, but I'm now convinced I need to know something about it.

After that short sojourn, I was off to see Aya Matsuda (Arizona State) talke about the terminological confusion plaguing the field - EIL, ESL, EFL, ELF, EMT, ENL...bwuh? The problem is that the terms are applied inconsistnely, Matsuda said, and they're often inadequate and theoretically unsound. ELF (English as a Lingua Franca), she said, should be considered a function or a use of English, not a variety; some tend to think ELF, she says, as the happy-medium-like language shared by all English users in the world - which it isn't. No such thing exists. EIL (English as an International Language) and EInrtaL (English as an Intra-national language in a multilingual nation) are also subcategories of ELF, themselves again referring to functions of English. ESL, EFL, and some other lesser used terms (above), then, are contexts of acquisition. They describe the time/place/social/cultural/etc conditions in which the language is being learned. Again, these are not varieties of English either. Not a lot of talk about what are varities, and Matsuda argued that semi-international varities may be evolving, but that we shouldn't confuse these functions and contexts with Englishes themselves. One thing that came up in the Q&A was (I'm not sure who said it), "A(n international) variety may emerge when a community is stable." ASEAN was mentioned as a possible example.

Then I went to see an interesting presentation on blogging in Hong Kong, by Genevieve Leung (University of Pennsylvania) and Winnie Tang (HKIE). IKeywords I wrote down were "multiliteracies," "critical language awareness," "the complex notion of identity," and "Hong Kong English and creativity." They studied blogs by HK college students and the ways they use Chinese and English, then asked the students some questions about what makes a "typical" HK blogger. One thing that was mentioned was "bad grammar" and a few other somewhat negative comments about their own use of English. However the authors found that HK blogs were evidence of localization and indigenization of English, and a certain reconcilation of prescriptivism and creativity. They also talked about hopes for a future move from a "culture of complaints" (as one blogger wrote, "omg my grammar is rubbish") to a "culture of confidence." I got to meet Genevieve and Winnie after their talk - it was nice to chat with some Americans who are roughly in the same place I am in my career (post-MA/professional/eyeing or in PhDs). 

Finally, the last talk I saw on the first day was perhaps the most unique one at the whole conference: it was Michael Meyler (British Council) talking about his book, which is a dictionary of Sri Lankan English. He had never really heard of World Englishes before the conference and was refreshingly self-deprecating and unacademic. It was kind of just a tour through his dictionary - he's lived in Sri Lanka for 20 years and just compiled it in a kind of by-hand, ad-hoc fashion - with some bits on features of SLE, its differences with Indian English, and so on. You can see Meyler's website for the dictionary here. It's a really remarkable piece of work.

That was it for Day 1, after which I took a bus out to the peaceful hamlet of Sai Kung where I stayed with my Canadian friends Dave and Debbi and Caper, the last of whom is not technically Canadian, though I'm sure his hybridized linguistic identity is constructed by Cantonese, Putonghua, Hong Kong English, Canadian English, and above all the fact that he is a dog an as such is unable to use language.

Ha!

Done with applications

Now just waiting to hear back. Frankly I'm not totally sure when the decisions will be made, but I'd guess sometime before March? I don't really know how it all works. I have to tell ZJU if I want to come back by March 15, anyway.

I mapped out my (possible) professional options the other day and there are like 20 different possible combinations of things that could happen this year, depending on which school(s?) offer me a place.

The final list was:

UBC - Language & Literacy Education

Purdue - English as a Second Language

Penn State - Applied Linguistics

University of Washington - English Language and Literature (Rhetoric and Cultural Studies)

Arizona State University - English (Rhetoric and Linguistics)

Arizona State Universty - Interdisciplinary program in Applied Linguistics

A Beautiful Sentence

From a student's online discussion about her favorite song:

"It makes think that these sort of little miracles are happening everywhere."

Grad School Applications continued

All materials have been sent to UW, Purdue, and Penn State. (And UBC, as mentioned before.)

Arizona State AppLx is done but for one transcript.

Arizona State Rhetoric/Lx has not been submitted yet, but all that remains is writing a statement of teaching philosophy for the TAship application.

Whew.

Someone asked me what would be my top choice, all things being equal. It's hard to say. Any one of these schools would be great. The best programs for the most part are in places where I don't necessarily want to live...

International Dialects of English Archive

Designed for actors who need to train themselves on how to do different accents, this site is useful to researchers interested

in international varities of English. Unfortunately the authentic data comes after the paragraph which is read by each

interviewee. If you skip ahead in the recordings, though, you can hear interviews with English speakers from nearly every corner of the planet.

A pretty cool thing.

International Dialects of English Archive

Grad School Applications

UBC is done. (And so close to the deadline I wouldn't be totally shocked if the application was rejected due to some supporting documents arriving late -- which I hope they don't, of course.)

Next up -- UW, Purdue, Penn State, and Arizona State.

Ling Shi on NNS/NES English Teaching in China

"NES teachers need to understand the background training of their

EFL Chinese students just as NNS teachers need to incorporate the

standards of their NES counterparts into their teaching and testing

evaluation so as to socialize their students into English academic discourse.

On the one hand, NESs should be aware of the different variety

of English writing being cultivated by NNS teachers. They should

adjust their teaching accordingly in a setting where most students are

studying to pass exams rated by local NNS teachers. Based on similar

findings, Kobayashi and Rinnert (1996) suggested that NES teachers

in an EFL context should be aware of the needs of local students to

meet the standards of NNS teachers. On the other hand, NNS teachers

should be aware of the diverse instructional emphases of their NES

colleagues. Both NES and NNS teachers should also help their

students to understand how readers’ expectations can vary based on

their cultural backgrounds, and how this would affect the way they

should write. Seminars for teachers and training workshops for raters

should be organized to help the communication between NES and

NNS teachers so that each group gains access to the shared background

and beliefs of the other. Such cooperation and share of expertise

could lead to more effective writing instruction for EFL students

in China."

- Native- and nonnative-speaking EFL teachers’ evaluation of Chinese students’ English writing

Note to Self: Writing Really Is Thinking

Therefore, self, you need to leave yourself a lot more time to do the writing, because if you think you've done all the thinking (brainwise) already, you'll totally be proven wrong once you start writing. Like, I dunno, once you're 5,000 words into an article about American music critics writing about Chinese indie rock which you're going to present at a conference in three days and suddenly it seems that everything you've written is nonsense.

I wish that were hypothetical. On the plus side, I scaled my ambitions down quite a bit on this piece and I'm going to parlay it into a more in-depth study of features about Chindie rock, which might someday be publishable.

加油！

Lack of Communication

Here's an exchange that took place in my Intercultural Communication Class this week.

Student: Will our final exam be the same as the other ICC class?

Me: What other ICC class? I didn't know there was one.

Student: Yeah, they meet next door at this time.

Me: Nobody told me about it. So no, the exam won't be the same. In fact, I doubt the teacher in that class is even using the same textbook.

Student: Actually, he wrote this textbook (holds up the textbook I chose for the class after looking through every ICC textbook I could find).

Me: 不会吧! I can't believe nobody told me about this!

Discussion Questions

What can we learn from this incident?

Different Kinds of Analysis

Linguistic Analysis: "...tends to focus on formal features of a language at phonolgical, lexical, syntatcis, and pragmatic levels." (Xiaoye You, 2008)

Rehetorical Analysis: "An efort to understand how people whinin specific social situations atemtp to influence others through language." (Selzer 2004 quoted in You 2008)

Discourse Analysis: "the analysis of spoken and written language as it is used to enact social and cultural perspectives and identities." (James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis)

It seems like you could and maybe should do them all at the same time.

Discourse Analyzin'

It's a start...

album american around art artists avant-garde band beijing buddha cd change china chinese city club country cultural electronic face foreign government influence local mr music musicians nation night noise opening people performance pettis playing pop public rock says scene song sonic sound underground western world years new york youth zhang

created at TagCrowd.com

"Hello, We're Talking About Language..."

Interview with Suresh Canagarajah at The Other Journal

It was an honor to do this short e-mail interview with somebody whose work I really admire. You can read it here: Working for Transformation: An Interview with Suresh Canagarajah.

First Day of School

My term at ZJU starts today. Light schedule, and very different from what I taught last year. 2 content classes: Intercultural Communication (twice a week, one class) and American Culture (once a week, three classes). Finally all that reading about culture that I did for my MA project will pay off...

I'm teaching two groups of students: one is from the ZhuKeZhen Honors College, the alleged "cream of the crop" of ZJU students -- a good 2/3 of them are science or engineering majors -- and the other are what we call the "Hong Kong Students," who have been accepted to universities in HK but who do a year here at ZJU before going. (I'm not sure why, because they're not really "exchange students" in Hong Kong. I guess ZJU is a halfway house, a way to help them move from Chinese high school to a "western"-style English-medium university.) Hardly any of my students are English majors, as far as I know, but a few are designated as social sciences or humanities majors.

Anyway -- I'm really looking forward to the semester, and I should have a lot of time for reading and writing, which is great.

A Recent History of Teaching EFL in China

An informative, brief article in TESOL's Essential Teacher.

The Short List

Purdue
Arizona State
Penn State
University of British Columbia
University of Washington

This should probably be longer, but currently, these are the 5 schools, in order of preference, I plan to apply to. Purdue is number one with a bullet - it really fits what I want to do the best.

More posts coming in mid-August.

"Chinglish" vs. "China English"

Finally found a sensible distinction between the two. I am still not sure what, if any, is supposed to be the difference between "Chinese English" and "China English." I don't have access to English Today, which has at least one article on the subject. But anyway, here's what Mingjun Lu says on the subject (she sees "Chinglish" and "Chinese English" as synonymous). I got this from a website at the University of Toronto, but I'm unaware of Lu's current affiliation.

Chinglish is also called “Chinese English,” and it is a nativised English noted for its incomprehensibility. Hu Xiaoqiong defines it a kind of pidgin “whose words are ungrammatically strung together, with often inappropriate lexis and probably only a partially comprehensible pronunciation.”

on the other hand,

To establish a unique variety of English in China, critics coin the word “China English” to signify this new identity, which finds an eloquent articulation Li Wenzhong’s definition (1993:19-20), “China English has normative English as its core but with Chinese characteristics in lexicon, syntax and discourse, and it is employed to express China- specific things through means of transliteration, borrowing and semantic regeneration but without interference from the Chinese language.”

Finally, Lu points out probably the most crucial issue vis-a-vis the use of English in China today:

CE remains in an unstandardised state, nor is it known and accepted by the ordinary people, the students, and even a majority of the teachers...But on the other hand, CE is widely used in an unofficial manner, as is shown in those unauthorized grammar manuals and class facilitating materials. This paradoxical position makes it both necessary and urgent to identify CE’s position at the administrative and pedagogical levels, for the gap between its uncodified status and its wide use not only impedes the learners’ language competence at home but also hinders the acceptance of CE as a distinctive variety of English internationally. A systematic promotion of CE through a pedagogical syllabus at the college level is intended to advance both the learners’ language proficiency and CE’s independent status.

This is a really smart article. Read the rest of "ELT in China and a 'China English' Model" here.

In related news, my editing of the "Chinglish" entry on Wikipedia continues. There is still a long way to go, but I have learned a lot in researching this, and it's nice to have a semi-practical reason to do all the reading.

Bonus: how much of this is really "Chinglish" that obscures meaning and intelligibility, and how much is just our pet peeves as "native" speakers of standard English(es)? I ask myself this often, and my answer is changing, which will surely affect the way I grade writing in the future.

Baurain - The Impacts of Christian ESL Teachers' Religious Beliefs.

Brad Baurain, author of the excellent article "Christian Witness and Respect for Persons" in the JLIE last year, is working on a study about Christian ESL teacher's beliefs. If you want to contribute, have a look here:

http://www.cetesol.org/Baurain.html

The estimated time for filling out the survey is 30 minutes.

BONUS: Check out this essay by James Waller of Whitworth University on Christian scholarship in the "secular" academy. I had some problems with the link but eventually got it to work. Hopefully*, you can figure it out.

(*in the "correct" and colloquial sense)

The Chinese EFL Journal

Apparently I am now on the editorial board of the newly launched Chinese EFL Journal. And, apparently, I'm a "professor." Really? OK by me...

English Songs in China

From a Chinese college student's blog:

“I find that I begin to love English songs very much.And when I listen to the English song that can make me dance,I always feel very happy. Now,I think I fall in love with English songs,and I start to love this subjuct-English....So,from now on,I will try my best to study English grammar and listen English songs in my spare time in order to improve my English speaking and writing skill."

The notion of "English songs" has been fascinating to me ever since I came to China, for two reasons. First, I have for the most part never heard any of the songs that students listen to, know, and love, as "English songs," which makes me wonder where these songs come from, how they got to China, and why they are popular here. Second, a lot of students seem to have the belief that listening to these songs is a good way to improve their English. (The same is said of watching movies in English.) Whether this is actually true remains to be seen.

I have a suspicion that the construction of "English songs" as a genre has something to do with "English culture," itself a construction that has a lot more to do with prestige, economics, ice cream, romance, and brand-name clothes than it does with the English language. (This is just a thought-doodle, not a genuine scholarly observation, mind you.)

Some questions that interest me:

- Why are the most popular "English songs" in China songs that most people in "English-speaking" countries are unfamiliar with. For example, some of the most popular "English songs" among my students are: "She" by a German group called Groove Coverage; "Pretty Boy" by a Norwegian group called M2M; "Take Me to Your Heart" by the Danish band Michael Learns to Rock.

- Somewhat more unscientifically, why are the most popular "English songs" songs that I totally hate? Chinese pop music is mostly what we would call "adult contemporary" and/or "teenybopper," and the English-language music that is popular here tends to fall along those same genre lines. Westlife, Backstreet Boys, Celine Dion, et al are hugely popular.

- What exactly do students believe is the benefit of listening to these songs vis-a-vis their general English abilities, their performance in English classes, their scores on exams, etc?

- What are some non-academic reasons that students like to listen to "English songs" ?

More thinking about this subject to come, which, unfortunately, means I probably should start listening to more of it.

When Students Get Mad and/or Even

Since I started teaching, I've really only had one or two run-ins with disgruntled students. (Lucky, I guess!) Today, one guy (who frequently misses my writing class) wasn't doing the assigned activity, so I went to take a look at his essay. Turns out he had basically written me a note accusing me of failing him out of spite last semester; ergo, he explains, he chooses, frequently, not to come to my class. And he doesn't come because he isn't interested in it, he writes.

This really took me by surprise, and after thinking about it for a while, I realized that what bothers me is not that he doesn't like my class, or that he doesn't come to it (I mean, that bothers me a little, but it's his choice), or even that he thinks I failed him "on purpose" (which is impossible, since I don't know whose exam I'm grading when I grade the finals). It's that he waited five months to tell me that he was unhappy with his grade and the class. I told him that if he had a problem with his grade, I would have been happy to talk about it -- a few months ago, which might have prevented all kinds of problems.

I have to ask myself, could I have done something to prevent this? I try to make myself accessible to the students, but from the beginning of the year, I've been of the mind that one-on-one time is impossible, since I have a total of about 400 students in the 9 classes that I teach (only 4 classes are writing, though). I encourage questions, I give students my email address and QQ number, and I give specific, targeted feedback on essays -- but I can't make students come to me if they have "issues," and I sometimes just can't know there's a problem.

At the end of last term, I made a tentative plan to have one-on-one meetings with the writing students whose scores were consistently low or who didn't turn in assignments. I scrapped it (wrongly, I think) due this misguided "oh, there are too many students" belief. Now I'm wishing I hadn't.

Incidentally, the other run-ins I've had were:

1) A student refused to get up to do a group dialogue when I told his group to go sooner than he had expected. Eventually he calmed down and did his thing a few minutes later.

2) A student was talking continuously and loudly over another student's speech -- which was the final exam. I ended up yelling at the kid (who really should not be an English major, but that's another story) and completely spooking the one who was giving the speech.

The Long List

Let the whittling down commence. Here is a list of potential places to apply for PhD programs:

Penn State
University of British Columbia
Purdue
Arizona State*
Northern Arizona University*
University of Washington**
Columbia
UC Berkeley
Indiana University
University of Wisconsin
New York University
Indiana State
UCLA

I chose these 12 because they are either strictly Applied Linguistics programs, TESOl-focused programs, or English programs with strong applied linguistics and interdisciplinary components. You may note that these are all in North America. Ideally, I'll do more research about each of these over the next few months and start asking questions, narrowing it down to about 5-7 to apply to in the fall, for admission in 2009. My priorities in no particular order are easy-to-work-with/accessible/friendly faculty, a program that's do-able in under 5 years, lots of TA opportunities, full funding, a place where I can get a strong foundation in qualitative research methods, and a proven record of decent job placement. Which I realize means I probably want to go to an imaginary unversity.

* Not because of any masochistic desire to live in Arizona.
** Almost solely because of a desire to live in Seattle. If Portland State had a PhD program, that would be way up on the list too. Sadly they don't, although there's a rumor that they may start one in the next few years or so.

Undergraduate Thesis Defense

Today I took part in the oral thesis defense for graduating English majors at our college. I was given very little preparation about what to expect (for example, I was given some of the papers a few minutes before the presentations, and I wasn't told that I'd have to conference with some of the students until it was time to do so), but overall I was really impressed. These guys had to write papers that would be difficult for native English speaking students to write, and some of them did it with great aplomb. One student even carried out his own empirical quantitative study, which I can't imagine doing as an undergraduate English major. (Maybe that's just me, though. After all, my undergraduate thesis was a sprawling, formless 50 pages about religious themes in J.D. Salinger's Glass family stories.)

Many of the students wrote about cross-cultural communication, and they referred to "English culture," "English people," and "English countries." I tried to challenge one student to explain what she meant by those terms, and she gave me the run-around. A popular theme in this kind of paper is the difference between "western countries" or "English culture" and China. The same kind of oversimplification that we "English people" make when we do cross-cultural comparisons?

Current Happenings

Oral English: mini-debates for the next 4 weeks.

Writing: planning the final exam this week.

Grading: way behind as always. (Why am I writing this, then?)

The Wikipedia page for "Chinglish" is awful. It needs to be changed and I'm going to change it.

Summer job: probably teaching kids' EFL (gulp) for a month in Shaoxing. Further updates soon.

"Discourse"

The first chapter of James Gee's An Introduction to Discourse is so riddled with scare quotes that I find myself reluctant to continue despite its otherwise readable style. Why do I dislike seeing words like "truth" and "discourse" in quotation marks? Maybe it's because of the highly political nature of quotation marks that I see in the media here in China, but it's more than that, too. If we have to put everything in quotes -- well, what's the point?

Also, I have to cut right to the chase when I get involved with stuff like this: if a theory is based on the social construction of knowledge/reality/language/whatever -- that stuff is the way it is because we make it the way it is -- what are the implications for somebody who believes there's a God somewhere above/behind/inside this mess?

I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer. A scholar I admire said "I am critical because I am Christian." This gives me hope, but I don't know quite if it would play out the same way in my own work, if I chose that path.

Zhejiang University

This week, I accepted a job teaching English at in the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University. ZJU is widely acknowledged as one of the best universities in China (most surveys, however subjective they may be, put it at #3, after Beijing and Qinghua Universities -- which, incidentally, are also known as Peking and Tsinghua U, using the old Wade-Giles romanization system).

Next fall, I'll be starting a new job there. The SIS includes 12 different research institutes, including literature, translation studies, German, Russian, Japanese, foreign language teaching, and discourse studies. I've been following the development of the Institute of Discourse and Cultural Studies for the last year or so, and it looks like they're doing some really cool stuff there. In fact, they are introducing a new international PhD program called "Communication and Contemporary China" next semester, and I am flirting with the idea of applying in the future. (There are a lot of variables, not the least of which is the fact that full-time teaching and full-time student-ing aren't exactly compatible.)

There are several attractive things about this program: first, it's a 3 years and research-based. In terms of time (to say nothing of money), that's appealing. Second, it would, I hope, give me a chance to work on my Chinese language more than I do now. The working language of the program is English, but there are language courses involved. Third, it might just be the perfect place for me to do the kind of research I've been mulling over, which is something about Chinese indie rock (for example: the use of English in Chinese indie rock, the construction of Chinese indie rock in "Western" media, "indie" discourse, etc.).

It's really too early to tell if this PhD program is right for me, but being at ZJU will, I hope, be a stimulating environment and give me a chance to explore whether this kind of thing is what I want to do in the future.

PS: On our recent trip to Hangzhou (where ZJU is), we went to the newly remodeled Foriegn Language Bookstore, where I found the mother lode of cheap applied linguistics books. Seriously. The entire TeacherSource series for about $4 apiece; the entire Cambridge Applied Linguistics series for about $3 apiece; the entire Oxford Introductions to Language Study series for about $1 apiece. In the US, the former two series are around $25-$35, the latter $15, but here they are reprinted by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and given China-friendly prices. I bought about 8 books, and I'll be back.

The Pronoun Battle for China's Soul

Every day, I preside over a bitter linguistic struggle for the hearts and minds of China's youth. My students are torn, absolutely torn, about whether to use "we" or "I" when they write from a first-person perspective, and their pronoun usage twists and turns all over the place as this struggle plays itself out.

A classic example was from a response to one of my questions about Fan Shen's article "The Classroom and the Wider Culture," in which the author mentions that, at least when he was a college student in China (late 1980s), the use of the word "I" was considered bad, or at least unnecessarily self-centered.

I got several responses like this (I'm paraphrasing):

Of course "I" is not a bad word in China. Our country is developing, and we should show our unique ideas and our individuality.

You see what I'm getting at. A number of these linguistically conflicted constructions show up in my students' writing, like As an English major, we need to study hard. Or we should relax ourself.

I tell them I don't care if they want to write with a we-voice or an I-voice, as long as they're consistent and grammatically correct. But consistency is hard to come by in life, these days.

Briefly

I've really been neglecting not only this blog, but the things that are supposed to be feeding it: reading academically, reflecting on my own teaching, and figuring out the PhD-or-Not question. As such, I have very little to say, except to lay out some tentative plans, like:

a. Tentative plan to interview Suresh Canagarajah for the Other Journal's education issue.

b. Yesterday, I read "Mixers lyricing in Hinglish " by Y. Kachru, which was an inspiration in terms of studying pop music from a World Englishes perspective. (Also heard a Chinese pop song, which after a quick Googling seems to be "你的甜蜜," on the radio, which included a repetition of the English phrase "Sorry doesn't mean anything.")

c. Today I bought volume three in the Collected Works of MAK Halliday, (Language and Linguistics) which I was surprised to find at my local Xinhua Bookstore! They actually have a pretty good selection of scholarly stuff in English.

d. I want to put together a proposal for this conference, something on American rock critics' perceptions of Lonely China Day (and/or other bands as relevant). I'd also really love to get a job at the university hosting the conference.

More soon, with any luck...

ESL Writing for Indie Rockers/Confidence

Here's an illuminating post from Miho Hatori's blog. Hatori was the musician who first made me interested in exploring the use of English as an L2 in pop music, with her great band Cibo Matto. She wrote:

I had a dinner with my old friend Ami and talked about blog.
I am shy about writing in English in public ( I love talking in English ).
I often got nervous that people judge me about my bad grammar.
But you know what ?
The year of 2008, my slogan is....
"Who cares ? I don't care. A horses ass is better than yours."
Cibo Matto song, Beef jerky.
Going back to my principle of Art.
I just need to write here for my own sake.

Anyway,
Ami said "Miho, Don't worrrrrrry !!!"
So I believe my old friend.

So, I will have wrong grammar on this blog.
You can correct my English if you want.
That's the reason of comment section for.

I do think it's interesting that somebody whose English lyrics are often brashly weird -- really this is one of her great strengths as a vocalist/lyricist -- would still express reticence about writing in English. Still, this post displays the kind of creativity and confidence that I've come to appreciate about Hatori's music over the years. And it's the kind of creativity and confidence I hope my students can learn to have regarding their own use of English.

---

Another great post from David Crystal, "On Learning English," offers some encouragement to learners as well. It reads, in part:

...if you have adopted English as one of your languages, then you are able to adapt it - to take personal ownership of it. One of the great joys of making headway in a new language is that you can use it to talk about what you want to talk about - and if that means inventing new words, to express your local experience, then do not hesitate to invent them. Just translating the culture of your school and town into English - such as the names of localities and personalities - will immediately add dozens of new expressions. Don't restrict yourself to the words that are already in the dictionaries. English is yours now...

World Englishes, Pop Musics, and Writing about Writing about Music

"I even have a column in Ebony magazine called 'Musings.'"
- Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan (NBC's 30 Rock), on the subject of whether or not he is illiterate.

• Writing about writing -- that is, studying professional, published writing -- seems like a dangerous thing to do if you want people to like you. I don't mean being a critic, writing about whether or not you think Joan Didion's new book is any good, because we seem to have a pretty well-accepted system set up for that kind of thing. I mean being a rhetorician, and making a study of people who write. This is on my mind because I've been kicking around (for some time now) the idea of studying music reviews -- how they're written and why, all their attendant tropes, expectations, and biases -- and it seems to me that what I'm thinking about is nothing short of, you know, kind of ripping on my colleagues. How could it not be? You know, something like "Sexism in Pitchforkmedia.com reviews" or "Music critics' portrayals of Japanese women." It's like to be "critical" in every possible sense of the word, yes? How can I do this? I specifically want to start looking at the way music critics write about Chinese rock bands.

A further question: does this fall under the general heading of "cultural studies," a discipline which I have claimed to hate for the last two years? Or is this simply rhetorical analysis? I have this scary feeling that it's cult-studs. Noooooooooo!

• Still doing a lot of thinking about a program of research that involves studying the use of English in rock/pop music in "non-English-speaking" countries (i.e., "expanding circle" countries, particularly China, because if you are interested in the global spread of English, how can you not study China? Plus, I live here).

Potential research questions include:
What influences a band/singer's choice to sing in English vs. any other language?

Codemixing in songs -- for example, throwing in English words like "yeah," "uh huh" or "come on" in a song that's otherwise not in English. Why?

How do fans react to the use of English in pop music?

How and why do bands/singers choose English pseudonyms/band names?

How do a country's language policy and planning decisions affect/interact with the use of English in pop music? (For example, the Singaporean government's enlisting of rappers in Speak Good English campaigns.)

How do English learners in China use English-language pop music (by Chinese artists and otherwise)? What about the weird pseudo-genre my students refer to as "English songs," which is basically songs in English that nobody outside China has ever heard and which are often translations of Chinese pop songs?

What I need to do to investigate this:

First and foremost - listen to more expanding circle pop music, esp. Chinese pop and rock. Need to find a balance between indie rock and big pop stars, but I'll have much easier access to China's indie rock bands if I want to actually interview musicians.

Find out who is doing research on this stuff. Obviously Pennycook is looking at language, identity, and hip-hop; I need to start trolling his bibliographies. Lily Kong looks at geography and pop in Singapore, but I haven't found anybody who is specifically looking at English + pop music + China. (Maybe this means I am original! Until some PhD student reads this blog and steals it!) Search back issues of World Englishes and other WE-related journals, and also relevant pop music-related journals.

Start writing more about it in a popular capacity (newspapers, magazines). Find some outlets who are interested in Chinese indie rock and start covering it for them! If possible, make trips to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and make contacts in the indie rock scenes. Make money while doing research! (...just call our toll-free number...)

Mystery of the (dry) Salty Peanut

The mystery: why is the Chinese word gan (土) inexplicably -- and frequently -- translated as everybody's favorite English swear word? I myself enjoy snacking on a local brand of packaged, salted peanuts, the label of which reads: "Salty to F*** the Peanut."

The mystery is solved by a couple of bloggers, including Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.

Please visit these links if you're up for a frank discussion of 土, which is supposed to mean "dry," but often isn't translated that way, with hilarious results. Plenty of pictorial evidence.

The Language Log (UPenn)
The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation
Bokane.org
F***ing Stationery

esl vs efl

Maybe, just maybe, this is the case:

Purpose of ESL writing in the US: Teach Ss the conventions of English academic writing for use in "content" classes, in which they'll be graded by professors who are well-versed in "inner circle" English writing.
Purpose of EFL writing in China: Teach Ss formula for "a good essay" which will earn them high marks on the TEM and CET exams -- which will be graded by English teachers who may be grading them "Chinese-style*" -- therefore allowing them to graduate from college.

This isn't always true, but it's making me rethink the way I teach. This semester, I mostly taught the writing process and focussed on clearly expressing original thoughts and ideas. We've been going through it step by step, with, I'm sorry to add, little explicit grammar instruction. (Shamefully, I'll try to make up for this in coming weeks.)

Perhaps what the students need -- as much as it goes against my own training and beliefs -- is instruction that's heavy on "correctness." I need to do a lot more thinking about this!

* I don't mean this pejoratively; I just mean that in some cases, writing in a more "Chinese" style may be preferable to writing in a "Western" style. I'm too tired to explain this properly.