Is there a "China English" Corpus?

Tian (2010) makes a compelling point:  "...more corpus study needs to be done in showing the features and the practice of the pragmatic norm of Chinese English. There has been corpus studies on error analysis of the “learners’ English” of Chinese with prescriptive method. More corpus description could present features  objectively and make the demonstration more convincing."

He's got a good point -- there are many studies of "Chinese learner English" which are intended to find out what errors Chinese learners of English make. But where does one draw the line between a 'learner' and a 'user' of English? Is a 21-year-old university student who has studied English since age 7 still a "learner?"

The Chinese corpus linguistics website www.corpus4u.org includes a post by a user which identifies the following corpora (in addition to SWECCL, which I've been looking at lately).

Corpus for English Learners in China (Gui Shichun, Yang Huizhong),
College Learner’s English Spoken Corpus (Yang Huizhong),
Chinese English Major Learner’s Spoken Corpus (Wen Qiufang),
CEC Chinese English Corpus (Li Wenzhong)
Middle School English Spoken Corpus (He Anping),

I don't know anything about Li's corpus (his definition of CE is frequently cited by Chinese scholars), but it is the only one that doesn't purport to be a 'learner' corpus. This list comes from a 2002 article by Feng Zhiwei on the history of corpus linguistics in China (read it here). He makes a point about EFL in China (though it could be applied to any 'expanding circle' country really) here:

The third feature of English corpus linguistics in China is its application-oriented tendency and intensive self-awareness. For years, most of Chinese research in foreign language learning had been devoted to the introduction and interpretation of western linguistic theories while there has been not enough independent research fuelled by the linguistic traditions of China. This situation had made it difficult for Chinese foreign language teachers and researchers to develop their own theoretical frameworks, and thus it had limited the contribution they could make to the international research community.

The applied research of corpus has now opened a new platform for English teachers and researchers from China on the international arena, to display their achievements, and to share and exchange their ideas by presenting the cornucopia of their achievements. Therefore, the intimate combination of corpus-driven applied research and the reality of English teaching and learning is a deliberate choice of scholars in the field of English language teaching in China that will propel corpus research in China and give Chinese linguistics an important voice in the international research community. 

This is all well and good. The irony, though, is that many people who are advocating a more "China English" based approach to English teaching in China (that is, the one you'd think would be more homegrown) are working in "western-style" English-medium universities (mostly in Hong Kong), and world Englishes is a "western theory" in the sense that it originally came from linguists working in American and British universities.

Anyway, my real point here is that the purposes of research on traditional corpus(es) of Chinese learner English are, in a sense, "features-based," and WEs studies can also be "features-based." The difference is that the former is starting with a codified, authoritative US/UK English as a norm against which to judge the errors of Chinese learners, while the latter looks for possible innovations which are frequent and seem to be acceptable (by some). This is also Tian's point, I think. What if we took all the error analysis research, all the stuff about "features of L2 writers' texts," etc, flipped it, and started looking for innovations against a WEs framework? Isn't this what has been done for the Outer Circle? Why are we so reluctant to do the same for the Expanding?


Pang (2005) proposes a China English corpus that should "include texts that are published in Chinese official publications （journals, magazines, newspapers, books，CD－ROMs or broadcast through radios or TV channels）．English texts written by English learners at various levels at different schools, universities or training institutions do not fit the criterion."


This is interesting to me because, while it supports a CE corpus rather than a "learner" corpus, it doesn't entertain the possibility that Chinese university students can be competent users of English. Granted, I have worked with some of the most elite students in the country (I'm not trying to toot my horn, I just happened to be blindly thrust into teaching them one year), but I assure you that many of them are. What we seem to be coming away with here is the idea that there are two kinds of English in China: the "learner" English which is what every student does, and the "professional" English which is used by academics and the media. This has some merit to it, but it leaves out huge domains -- blogs, microblogs, message boards, business, creative writing, English corners (cf. Kubota on English as a hobby in Japan), etc. And of course the lines are probably not so well-drawn.

China English Ironies*

Reading through an article about China English norms. Many good points, but I think above all the way it is written suggests that CE is in the eye of the beholder. I can't tell you how many times I read an example comparing "Chinese English" to "Standard English" by a Chinese scholar in which I read the so-called Standard English sample as Chinglish.

Here's just one of many examples. This scholar gives the following example (cited from another paper) as an example of Chinese Englsh:

It was raining, the match was postponed.

This is given as an example of parataxis, which it is. But here is the author's "correct English" rewrite:

Because it was raining the match was postponed.

This is interesting to me for two reasons: first, because of the frequent mention of "forward-linking because" being a feature of Chinese (and CE), which suggests that any "Because...therefore..." construction is "Chinese," and second, the lack of a comma for this kind of construction, which looks weird to me. Wouldn't it be more "English" to say this?

The match was postponed because it was raining.

Here are some other examples that make very little sense to me. A is supposedly Chinglish, while B is supposedly "English."

A: You go first!

B: After you!

At most, there's a difference of register here.

A: He is very able!

B: He is an able man.

Both sound odd, but B sounds more Chinglishy to me.

A: I am going out for some minutes.

B: I will be back in some minutes.

A is slightly less than usual, but B expresses a different meaning.

A: He only said a few sentences. He made us very disappointed.

B: We were quite disappointed that he said only a few words.

Not sure why "quite" and "words" are more English than "very" and "sentences."

A: I think he shouldn’t go.

B: I don’t think he should go.

I assume a real grammarian could split hairs on this one, but I'd say that these sentences are barely different at all, and at most they are just ways of emphasizing different things.

A: Last night I worked for my dissertation and slept very late.

B: Last night I worked for my dissertation and went to bed very late.

I agree, the last part of the sentence matters here. But of course careful readers are noticing the preposition oddity in both sentences.

A: Do you want something to drink?

B: Would you like something to drink?

No meaningful difference whatsoever here, if you ask me.

A: Your English is very good. Thank you.

B: Your English is very good. No, no. It’s very poor.

I get where they're going with this. I think it's a mistake in that they have switched B & A. (B is the 'typical' Chinese response to a compliment, whereas A is the 'typical' "English person" response.) But isn't this more of an intercultural communication issue? Can we call this a linguistic or even a sociolinguistic issue? Maybe, but I wouldn't call it a 'feature' of CE unless otherwise persuaded.

This has been pedantic punditry about English with Joel. Thanks for tuning in.

* (The greatest irony, of course, as Xu Zhichang pointed out in a conversation I had with him, that the term "China English" itself smacks of Chinglish.)

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POSTSCRIPT: Another interesting "irony" (maybe not ironic, really) is that theories produced in English-speaking countries which no longer hold much quarter there (at least among those who keep up with the trends) are often deployed by Chinese scholars as arguments in favor of CE. For example, Kaplan (1966) is used to show that CE must be as it is because of the "Chinese way of thinking." There is a lot of essentializing done by Chinese scholars on CE. One example: that a certain culturally biased British usage is "something that Chinese cannot bear."

Hu Xiaoqiong on foreign teachers in China

"...so few of them are well trained and come, not for professional reasons, but to travel, to fill in time while looking for a job in their own country, or even simply to find a girlfriend...Many are not deeply interested in Chinese culture...some have personal problems and difficulties of adjustment, and, above all...the great majority are simply not teachers." (Hu 2005, p. 35).

I'd like to disagree, but I can't really.

L2 writing and ideology

When I was doing my MA at Humboldt, we read my professor Terry Santos' article "Ideology in Composition: L1 and ESL." I didn't realize at the time that it was written in 1992, and that the "ideological turn" in TESOL was actually just about to occur; in fact, don't quote me on this, but you could partly date the turn to people who did their PhDs at OISE in the 90s, several of whom are my profs at UBC now.

While Santos' 1992 paper certainly no longer describes the field as it once was, I still have a great fondness for her 2001 followup, "the Place of Politics in Second Language Writing." What I like so much about the paper is that it is not afraid to say those things which are often caricatured by those on the 'critical' side as "tacit" or "hidden" mainstream ideologies. E.g.:

"...as one who supports the mainstream in applied linguistics and L2 writing, it has been interesting to me to reflect on why the positions of critical applied linguistics, critical pedagogy, and critical EAP and L2 writing remain wholly unrepresentative of my intellectual perspectives, professional experiences, observations of student needs and preferences, and general worldview. Also, as an adherent of centrism and pragmatism...critical approaches seem to me extreme -- extreme in terms of the mainstream -- as well as out of touch with the reality I see of people in schools and universities actually living their lives, at least in the United States and other countries I have lived, worked, and traveled in....I find myself not only in disagreement with both the theoretical positions and pedagogical recommendations they espouse, but in closer embrace of pragmatism, vulgar or otherwise, as a far more satisfying approach to TESOL, EAP, and L2 writing, and, for that matter, everyday life."

How Do You Choose What Language to Speak?

You are a functionally bilingual person living in a city which is dominated by one language (which is not your L1) but includes a large number of speakers of many others (including and especially your L1). You are in a restaurant conversing with a friend in your L1, which you share. The staff of the restaurant are communicating in your L1 (which is also their L1) to each other, but they are communicating with their customers in the dominant local language.

What language do you speak to the waitress and why?

Does CR care about WEs?

KUBOTA & LEHNER 2005:

Y. Kachru (1995, 1999) critiqued traditional contrastive rhetoric as reducing English rhetoric to normative patterns based mainly on style manuals and textbooks. Furthermore, from the point of view of World Englishes, Y. Kachru critiqued contrastive rhetoric’s sole focus on the Inner Circle varieties of English as a point of reference and its failure to validate Outer Circle rhetorical varieties of English (i.e., English used in former British colonies). Furthermore, the tendency to define the expectations of ‘‘native speaker or reader’’ as the rhetorical ‘‘norm’’ reflects a prescriptive orientation that overlooks plurality within language groups and the blurred boundaries between them, which ironically contradicts Whorf’s anti-essentialist plea for  broadening perspectives of humankind through developing a deeper understanding of diverse cultures and languages.


The critique of traditional contrastive rhetoric from a perspective of World Englishes (Kachru, 1995, 1999) exemplifies the postmodern significance of diaspora and multiplicity. For example, Chinese diaspora poses a problem for assuming the existence of a single cultural rhetorical system or thought pattern in Chinese (Kowal, 1998).


As English continues to be seen as an ‘‘international’’ language par excellence (McKay, 2002) on the one hand, the localization of World Englishes (B.B. Kachru, 1986, 1997) has generated a variety of rhetorical practices on the other. Thus, it becomes increasingly vital for students to critique the positioning of English through problematizing: Whose language is English?, What English am I using?, When and why do I use it?, Is it a  language I perceive a need for within my present or future life?, etc

CONNOR 2005 (response)


Another criticism cited by Kubota and Lehner, related to the assumed norms of English, is misdirected. They  cite Yamuna Kachru, 1995 and Kachru, 1999 with regards to the point of view of World Englishes, who “critiqued contrastive rhetoric's sole focus on the Inner Circle rhetorical varieties of English as a point of reference and its failure to validate Outer Circle rhetorical varieties of English (i.e., English used in former British colonies)” (as cited in Kubota & Lehner, 2004, p. 10). Again, contrary to what Kubota and Lehner would like us to believe, contrastive rhetoric has been very aware of the point of view of World and International Englishes (see Connor, 1996, pp. 16–17). In fact, the last section of Connor's (1996) book, dealing with research directions, includes the study of international Englishes as one of the five major research directions guiding contrastive rhetoric work. Not only has the field dealt with the Outer Circle varieties of English but also with the expanding circle of EFL varieties, such as EuroEnglish, as providing emerging norms.

Looking for a Collaborator

I have worried in the past that somehow I lack "credibility" as a Chinese English researcher. While I'm not terribly concerned about that right now, I do have some ideas about English & China that I'd like to pursue, but I feel like the best way to do that would be to work with a Chinese researcher who is interested in the same stuff. At the very least, it would be nice to have someone else to talk to about this stuff, and it would help me feel like I'm not just speculating.

The only problem is, most of the Chinese colleagues I have a relationship with are pursuing more practical aspects of ELT or linguistic research. (I remember a discussion with one of my colleagues in Shaoxing; when I told her I was interested in culture and EIL, she said, very politely, "but really, in the end there's no point in studying that.")

So I'm looking for a collaborator who, like me, is a youngish teacher/researcher interested in sociolinguistics and sociocultural aspects of English in the PRC. I will be probably working on these issues for the next 2-3 years.

Let me know if you know anybody.

Non-inverted Wh-questions

Was just talking to Sarah about this -- it's commonly done by NNESs, but we agreed that we both do it sometimes. Logged into the internet ten minutes later at Blenz Coffee and this came up on their homepage:

Chiang - questionnaire on coherence and cohesion in L2 writing

Could work as part of my attempt to approach this from a "WEs" framework -- use Bamgbose's 'acceptability" and 'authority'  constructs to see how Ts in Canada and China view features of Chinese student writing. Eh?

Notes from IAWE 2010 Chinese English session

Last summer when I was at the IAWE conference I attended a great session on Chinese English. Here are my notes typed out - my attempt to decipher the scribbles I scribbled down that day, plus additional thoughts I'm adding now.

Xu Zhichang (I have since met and corresponded with him -- really nice guy) - Linguistic Features of CE

Def'n of CE: "English in a Chinese context used by Chinese." (Simple -- too simple? Interesting though)
All attempts to come up with a good terminology for CE have been against Chinglish. There is a strong desire to find a place for CE that is not simply learner error, etc.

CE is used for bother intra- and international communication. (Though not interethnic communication among citizens of China, obviously) Compares CE to a picture of a teddy bear dressed in Chinese garb: "It is not a Chinese thing, but it came from America, and it became Chinese."

China Daily has a handbook of some kind related to English words? Published (internally?) in 2002? Is it like a stylebook? How can I get my hands on it?

Xu agrees with Hu -- there is a continuum from Chinglish to China English.

At this point I seem to have a note about some things said by Kingsley Bolton. He asked the majority of the questions at the session, including: "Who is exposed to English in China? Who uses English in China?" He mentioned later, and also I think in a private conversation we had, that foreign researchers tend to be more interested in looking more deeply into the many uses of E in China than Chinese scholars do. Interesting.

Xing Fang - (from Shantou University) - China English

English hegemony -- "80% of world's information is in English" (ok, but how do you measure that -- what is "information"?). E is a "global currency" and there is a belief that "English is superior." There are arguments that Chinese literacy is declining and that E is promoted over Chinese in Chinese business contexts. Uighurs struggle to learn English in addition to Mandarin. McKay -- English related to a "global culture" based on "western mental structures." (This is probable, but again, how to measure it?)

Language ecology, lx equality and human rights, EU's multilingual policy. (Basically getting into newer perspectives on how language should be in the world, how English interacts with other lgs. Both ecology and human rights are interesting frameworks but both have their probs, mostly with insisting on static conceptions of peoples and languages.)

He lays out what seem to be some features of CE: standard BE/AE phonology but syllable-timed; loan translations & calques; lexcial hybridization (taikonaut); grammar: innovations or unsuccessful interlanguage? He says that lecixcal innovations usually work, grammatical ones do not. Lx transfer "should not bend the rules" of SAE/BE, but should be "grafted" onto it with "Chinese thinking patterns." (On grammar, I agree with most of this, but I usually don't make the journey to 'thinking patterns' or 'mental structures.' Not that they don't or can't exist, but I think they are very often invoked without any real clear definition of what we're talking about. The classic case that I rail against is one I heard many times in China: Chinese and English idioms about dogs show that the Chinese look down on dogs, while English-speaking people revere them. I just don't see where that gets us. Anyway, I'm off-topic here.)

Examples of grammatical innovations? "Because" forward-linking: "Because I am hungry, [so] I will eat."(Actually he didn't mention so...but it's the 因为/所以 structure from Mandarin.) Also mentioned the more frequent use of "maybe," though I'm not sure that's a grammatical innovation.

Rhetoric -- didn't catch a lot of this -- something about culture and intercultural communication.

Pragmatics -- again, cultural things. "Have you eaten?" and not using "please" with people you know well.

CE used for ICC within China, closely bound up with AE/BE.

In the end, he argues that actual innovations for CE come variations in vocabulary, rhetoric, and pragmatics. He rejects variations in pronunciation and grammar.

Some questions about intelligibility and standardization came up. CE is not standardized.

Bolton asks: "Who is speaking to whom?" More than Chinese and foreigners communicating, he argues. (I suspect he's right -- but where do we see this? English corners, English classrooms, business? Other?)

Fan Fang -- Attitudes to CE "not yet established." In his study he asked for opinions about CE. Didn't take many notes bc I already knew something of his work. Calls for future -- "non-Chinese opinions, clearer definitions  samples, and triangulation through interviews."

Here comes Bolton again: is the intra-national use of English confined to certain domains? (Again, suspecting that English has a further reach than is being explored.) What about the "language worlds" that young people in China live in? Chinese students "live in a world where there is English." Where in China is English right now? If it's only Ss "learning EFL" in classooms, then all that is happening in China is traditional EFL. BUt -- in some contexts there is a visible use of English in society -- where is this happening?

(Srdihar (was the moderator?): mentions "the enormity of the numbers -- six million teachers" (where?))

Bolton continues: Where is English? It's an empirical question. Contact. Coastal -- taxi drivers in Shanghai. Inland - students learning English. E is mainly used in education - more and more schools use it. Therefore, the most visible form of English in China is in fact Chinese using English with other Chinese. Traditionally, it's thought of as an EFL country, but there are enormous numbers of learners/users now, and English is playing a role in modernity and young people's lives. ("Dangerous to label?" I wrote. Don't know what is meant.)

He continues: Really, there is no such thing as British English, either. All varieties can be deconstructed. Standard language is an idealized form. Local English can be useful for creating a new _____ (I can't read my writing!!).

Bolton's punchline: "What China English is, in fact, is a discourse. It's a phenomenon."

This is key. What we are witnessing is a conscious push to appropriate English in a non-English speaking, EFL, expanding circle country, where English has not been colonially imposed. Oddly, there are some resonances with how American English was named and claimed. This has not really happened before. China + English + Globalization are inextricably connected. The last decade (2001-) has been pivotal if not in actual linguistic innovation, than in how people (scholars, teachers, students, regular people, politicians, journalists, whatever) understand what is going on with China and English.

Possible lexicogrammatical equations

Variation - Intelligibility = Error
Variation + Intelligibility = Creativity
Creativity + Authority = Innovation
Innovation + Codification = Acceptance

Eh? To be revised, maybe.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a (N)NS

Given that the ever-expanding internet has emerged as a de facto repository or huge English language database, the popular practice of checking for grammatical correctness on the web is thus gradually altering if not revolutionizing our perceptions of what constitutes correct and normative English usage. One crucial point here is that often it is difficult to tell whether the authors of internet texts are English-L2 or English-L1 users.

- David CS Li, "When does an unconventional form become an innovation?"

Resources on the SWECCL 2.0

Just realized that my emails to a prof in Beijing were basically me admitting that I had downloaded the corpus w/o paying for it. (Somebody emailed it to me!) Now that I know you can get it in book/DVD form I will get it as soon as I can (somehow!) but for now I'm looking for info in English on how it was put together and what exactly the written texts are. This will be a list of what I can find.


Abstract of "Constructing and researching the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (2007)"

This paper describes the Project of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL) co-constructed by Nanjing University and the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. It also reviews some of the recent SWECCL-based studies on the Chinese EFL learners' interlanguage by the project team. It points out that learner corpus-based research is a new direction in the studies of second language acquisition.

The rest is in Chinese. 

Here's a quote from Lee & Chen's  (2009)Making a bigger deal of the smaller words: Function words and other key items in research writing by Chinese learners which seems to refer to version 1.0:

Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL; Wen, Wang, & Liang, 2005), a major corpus project covering university English major students in China, contains only timed argumentative essays written for proficiency exams, ignoring dissertations and other academic genres.

So far this is all I can find.

Why It's OK to Use Learner English

Because I'm studying people's reactions to whether it's correct.

This is a great weight lifted, in some ways. I am not linguistically analyzing these texts. Not really. I am analyzing what other people think of them -- that is, "acceptability." Which, according to Bamgbose, trumps nearly all else.

Big gap that needs to be filled though -- like, today -- is what features to focus on. Shall I use Xu or other lx analyses as a guide? (Don't want to be overly deterministic though.) I can't leave it totally open, because then people will just say "well, this looks weird." (Then again that kind of data is useful too.) I can't be totally like "please identify the morposyntactic features which do not conform to your understanding of Standard Written English for Academic Purposes" because that is lame. So we need something.


Also: Just came across He & Zhang (2010). Right smack dab where I'm headed in terms of looking at norms, but with matched-guise (spoken) tests. Looking forward to reading!


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update: There are some problems with this. As I look at the corpus, I become quite  clear that it is indeed a learner corpus. Let's say that I find, as I'm looking at it right now, that the term "human being" is frequently used without an article, yet in a situation that seems to call for a plural. All of my participants have indicated that this is unacceptable, yet it is a common feature of these texts. Let's say I then take that to the Chinese teachers/students, and they all agree that it is unacceptable. What have I proven? That nobody accepts this as an innovation, yet it is a common feature of Chinese L2 writing students' texts.

I guess we can say that's worth doing. I have a hunch that almost none of the features that NSs would reject would not also be rejected by the Chinese teachers. I suppose this would show that CE is indeed exonormative and that these variations are being rejected as potential innovations.

Also, another piece of shaky ground I'm wondering about is the choice to include English students. Presumably, English majors in China are supposed to graduate with "near-native" proficiency (citation?) in English. This is interesting in that it tacitly acknowledges the difficulty of the NS-based model. But it also gives us a chance to test this, if we do the quiz with 4th-year English majors. (I do sort of see some reasons to do this at the end of the schoolyear though, if that is what it's being based on.)

Still,  I wonder if what I'm proposing really differs from Hinkel's study of the features of L2 texts. Is it just that I'm thinking about it differently, as 'potential innovations,' that makes the difference? I guess so.

"Potential innovations" -- remember that. That seems like an important hook to hang some of this on.

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UPDATE 2: Remember:

This is a study about acceptability.
It is not a study which actually purports to identify features of CE.
It assumes certain things about CE based on WEs theories.
It aims to test certain aspects of WE theorizing by using (potential) CE.
Norms, standards, and acceptability are all part of WEs theory.
Features is another big part.
Is there an empirical basis for saying a variety of English has certain feature? Yes, but I don't know what.
Will my study provide an empirical basis for what some possible features of CE are? Maybe.
But that isn't necessarily the point.

If NSs and NNSs reject something, it's widely considered an error.
If NSs reject something and NNSs don't, this seems like evidence for an 'innovation.'

Erasing the Expanding Circle

Well, I don't want to erase it, per se, but my main criticism of the 3-circles paradigm is the assumption that because postcolonial societies have taken on English for different reasons than those countries who use English as a Foreign Language, English cannot become institutionalized in the expanding circle, and expanding circle Englishes are necessarily "performance" varieties. English may be a much more prominent part of Singaporean or Nigerian social life than it is in China, but I don't see why this should mean that the unique way in which English has become deeply embedded in education and social status for the middle class in China ought to be dismissed as a "mere" performance variety.

While I agree that the acceptance of an endonormative model would follow Kachru's steps (non-recognition, expansion of bilingualism, gradual acceptance of local norm, recognition), and  is much less likely to happen in an EFL/EC context, or at least to happen more slowly, I also think that the criteria laid out for an institutional variety stacks the deck -- it only allows for a 'real' variety to have characteristics similar to the Inner Circle. (Maybe. I'm making this up.) I'm thinking here of Butler's (1997) making "a standard and recognizable pattern of pronunciation handed down from one generation to another” her #1 criteria, and Kachru's (1992) list of criteria ending with "a body of nativized English literature." I'm not convinced those things are better criteria for a 'real' variety of English than some other things -- for example, the internet wasn't really around when those taxonomies were developed, and clearly that's become one of the most important domains for English.

Anyway, more soon, probably.

Problematizing "Mere Learner English"

Maybe what I want to do is use critical app lx to erase the clear divisions Kachru erected between ESL/EFL varieties and between outer circle and expanding circle contexts. Mollin (2005, 2007) and others, after Kachru I believe, have referred to some language  as "mere learner English." (Even though they've tried to break down the idea of 'interlanguage.')  Of course there is such a thing as learners making a bunch of random mistakes on their way to greater proficiency in a language (right? I sure hope so), but I still have a hunch that there is room for finding certain features in the language of a particular group of language users, and that this can (potentially) be considered a variety. Is it too silly to think of there being not perhaps a cohesive "Chinese English" but maybe an "English of Higher Education in China?"

Even among Chinese undergraduates, the population I've chosen to focus on, one senses ways of using English that remain common, if not, "acceptable." The somewhat uniform use of textbooks (what are they using nowadays -- New College English?), the widespread popularity of self-study books sold in every Xinhua bookstore, the chain of New Oriental schools with their patented (or whatever) methods....does this not create a kind of "English culture?"

And let's not forget the "Happy Everyday" phenomenon. This might sound simplistic (and it is a little), but say that phrase to any English-knowing undergrad in China and they will know exactly what you mean. Is that "mere learner English," or is that a legitimate semantic shift, a way of using English that does not exist in any other variety, but does in this one? My money is on the latter. Perhaps it is not an either/or question, though.

Critical Approaches, Rational Argument, and Commitments

"I turned to Alastair Pennycook’s Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction  in the hope of finding a systematic and coherent account of what I took to be one particular way of doing applied linguistics. I was looking for an (introductory) text which would make explicit not only the “real-world” problems critical work addresses, but also the principles it is based on together with an exploration of the (philosophical) origins of these principles and above all on their interrelation with each other. These expectations turned out to be inappropriate for a (critical) book on critical applied linguistics. But even more than that: I know that everything I have said above is based on my belief in the value of rational argument. And since I am not sure whether (or how) there is a place for rational argument in Pennycook’s world of critical applied linguistics, I am not sure whether what I have said here has any relevance. Maybe – if one truly adopts the CALx way of thinking and doing – a book review like this ceases to have any point or purpose."

 - Katharina Breyer (2002) in her review of Pennycook (2001).

I am sympathetic to Breyer's desire to, in essence, "critique the critical" (though I have promised myself this will not be a central feature of my own work -- too often my resistance feels to me like petty squabbling). Yet I am also (maybe due to my postmodern sympathies) suspicious of her deployment of "rational argument." Basically: Whence rationality? It is this critique of modernist discourse which both neo-Marxist/Gramscian/etc scholars and crazy religious people like me who actually believe in transcendence can agree on. (See, for example, Canagarajah's contributions to his and Wong's Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue.)

One wonders, then, is there room to wade in the waters of CAL for someone who will ultimately choose not to embrace its theoretical commitments? I'd like to hope so. Critical approaches tend to be shunned in part, I think, because of what reads like a you're-either-for-us-or-against-us attitude: if you are not questioning the basic assumptions of your discipline, you tacitly support existing injustice. This is a hard pill to swallow, yet it feels important. Like Canagarajah, Freire, and Osborn, I see important resonances between Christianity and critical practice. But I'm Just Not That Into Foucault, Marx, etc. I like to hang out with the Russian Orthodox version of Bakhtin; neither he, nor I, nor any theorist, is "the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe."

If one declares one's epistemological commitments, one is open to critique. Tell a staunchly materialist neuroscientist and philosopher of mind that you are committed to a particular religious story, and you may be ridiculed. Tell a critical theorist that you are committed to scientific materialism and Reason, and you may be written off as naive. Tell a critical applied linguist you are committed to an alternative vision of justice and ethics and you may be taken to task.

This, I suppose, is the price one pays for finding a way of thinking, being, and doing which allows one to sleep at night. The source of our commitments is complex, multifaceted, and mysterious, yet I suspect the further we drill down into them, the better chance we have of strengthening, rather than destroying, the foundations. What, after all, is the purpose of tearing down, if not to build?

Social Construction & Wikipedia

I'm still wading through Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, trying to grapple with the authors' argument for using the term "invention" to describe the social construction of language. It's probably that I just don't have the theoretical background but I'm still not convinced it makes a big difference. On a related note, I also came across the Wikipedia page for "the Tinkerbell Effect" which purports to refer to "things that only exist because people believe in them." The (unreferenced) list includes items like private property, the monetary system, authority, and compulsory education. Aside from being one of many examples showing just how sloppy and nonspecific Wikipedia often is, the implication is clear: things that exist because they are discourses sustained by beliefs, social actions, and language, somehow are not real. Or to put it even more extremely: ideas don't exist.

Following this idea into broader cultural currents which seem to value a certain perception of the 'hard sciences' and material reality as ultimate would be a big detour for this blog, and has been too big a detour for my mind (er, I mean, "brain"), so we'll leave it at that.

End of Crowley's "Standard English and the Politics of Language"

This is the final paragraph of Crowley (2003), after a lengthy chapter describing the debates about Standard English and teaching in the UK in the early 1980s. What I find interesting is how his proposed redefinition of standard spoken English is so similar to the idea of "Lingua Franca English" in which grammar and adherences to particular standards are downplayed in favor of emergent intelligibility (I might have made that term up). It's also notable that he elides the importance of defining standard written English; indeed, many scholars who argue for the non-stigmatization of traditionally marginalized English usage tend to hew more closely to the importance of traditional standard Written English than one might expect. I'm not accusing Crowley of this -- just noting that he doesn't posit a redefinition of a written standard in this passage.

Anne Pakir on Standardization

Pakir (1997) writes that "we well recognize that:

standardization is the recognition of the status of a particular variety;
standardization does not tolerate variability;
standardization is motivated by social, political, and commercial needs;
standardization is promoted;
standardization is an ideology; and
standard language is an idea in the mind rather than a reality"

Once again, this word reality -- I want to reclaim it. Standard language is a reality. It's a reality because it's an idea. Ideas are real and have real consequences. I'm happy to say "standard language as a system with special characteristics that make it sacrosanct" is not a reality.

Anyway, Pakir's main concern is actually codification. I need to read a little more about what that is.

I Do Believe in Language(s)

I've been perusing Makoni & Pennycook's Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages -- some fascinating ideas, but I don't think I'll jump in wholeheartedly. Even if existence of discrete languages can be shown to be 'false' -- or at least if the beliefs that laypeople hold about what languages are can be shown to be dangerous and/or harmful, which can certainly be true -- I'd prefer to retain the concept of 'a language' just as we tend to retain concepts like 'native/nonnative speaker' or even' race'/'ethnicity'. They are terms that may be deployed in problematic ways but my tendency is to stick with 'commonsense' definitions and work on ways of understanding language that are a) nuanced, b) likely to be useful/helpful in educational and other social contexts, and c) plausibly acceptable by non-specialists. I can't see 'language isn't a thing' meeting the criteria for c).

Trevor Pateman (who I hadn't heard of until, um, today) writes in his essay "What is English if not a language?" "whatever isomorphism between speakers' knowledge of language and their beliefs about their language exists, it should not be allowed to obscure the major differences between these two orders of reality." That's important to remember, certainly. But he also writes, with a pragmatism I appreciate:


"...despite everything I have said, it is clear enough that the idiolects of speakers who believe themselves to be speakers of the same language do indeed cluster enough for the belief to be highly plausible. For most practical purposes, it is true to say that over there they speak French while over here we speak English."


So far I'm most convinced by those who argue that form and function of language are tied to belief/ideology, but the work that people do on this (like Silverstein 1979) is so technical I usually have no idea what's going on.

The Silent Traveller

One unexpected outcome of my studies of Chinese English, or English education in China, or whatever, has been  another interest I've developed as a sidebar: English-language literature of Republican China. I realize this sounds really hoity-toity and specialized, and it kind of is. I do not in any way consider myself a "sinologist" -- I think of my interest in China as something similar to my newfound interest in Vancouver Canucks hockey: when you live in a place, it becomes part of you. Anyway.

I'm talking about the period roughly between 1912 and 1949, after the last Chinese emperor and before the communist revolution. I hardly know anything of the political or social history of this period, but what I like about it is the literature written in English -- probably the first, really -- that it produced.

My first encounter was with Gu Hongming's 1915 book The Spirit of the Chinese People, which a colleague in Shaoxing lent me. Here's what I wrote after reading it:

Gu Hongming was a Malaysian Chinese born in Penang who went to England for an education, became a polyglot (speaking English, Malay, French, German, and Chinese), and eventually moved to China where he became a kind of apologist for Chinese civilization and especially religion (which he believes Confucianism is). This book, written around the time of the first world war, is, as far as I know, his only surviving legacy. It's hard to buy his premises by today's standards, since he he completely essentializes people based on nationality (especially, of course, the Chinese -- he says they are a people with adult intellect and child-like hearts). There are some delightful passages -- most of the latter half of the book actually -- in which he excoriates western academics who he sees as total posers when it comes to knowing about China ... but unfortunately Gu rarely gives a convincing reason why we should believe him more than anybody else.

The greatest writer of this time is probably Lin Yutang, a prolific author in English whose books My Country and My People and The Importance of Living were bestsellers in the U.S. in the 1930s. (He wrote dozens of other books.)

My latest discovery is Chiang Yee, who wrote a series of travelogues of his time in England  (not unlike Charles Dickens' travel diaries) in the 1930s and 40s. (He also wrote about other countries into the 1970s.) I picked up his book The Silent Traveller in London on sale at the Regent College bookstore yesterday. I'm looking forward to reading it.

I'd welcome any other information about authors from this period.

Questionnaires and Interviews as Communicative Events

I get that an interview is a piece of discourse in and of itself that's worth being analyzed as such (that is, not only for mining data from the interviewee's responses). What the interviewer says is bound to help produce what the interviewee says and vice versa. Looking into this is a good way of finding something out about whatever construct you're studying.

Questionnaires are a kind of interaction, too, though, no? The writer's audience is always a fiction, and a questionnaire is a piece of writing* so the writer of the questions is already making certain responses possible/impossible.



(* Maybe I am wrong about this, but I tend to think that anything that has, like, words in it, orthographically, is writing. I was pretty surprised to run into a linguist last year who told me that blogging wasn't writing. What else is it?)

On the (Non-)Integration of (L2) Composition and World Englishes

Why haven't we seen more integration of what I've been calling a "world Englishes perspective" in the field of Second Language Writing?

TIME OUT: I do think that "world Englishes perspective" is a legit term. Why "world Englishes?" I do realize that it alienates ELF scholars, and it simplifies a bit much -- it emphasizes the Kachruvian origin of the pluricentricity of English, but also implies being limited to Kachru's concerns. I could be persuaded by Saraceni to adopt "English in the World," but world Englishes feels a bit simpler at this point. Why "perspective?" Because as much as it may be taken for granted by (socio/applied) linguists and other social scientists, and some teachers, the idea that multiple legitimate varieties of English exist, are worth knowing/using, etc, is not a mainstream idea. Therefore, even though it's not exactly a whole new take on what Language is or what English is or whatever, I feel like taking Kachruvian ideas for granted does indeed constitute a perspective. OK, time in.

I think there are two reasons WEs hasn't caught on in L2 writing:

1) There simply are not many studies of the implications of WEs for teaching English as a language. (Please school me if I am wrong.) There are plenty of conceptual papers advocating a general orientation to WEs in pedagogy -- a call for a "paradigm shift" -- , but I'm not aware of many studies that empirically investigate what it means to teach Indian English, for example -- a Google Scholar search reveals six articles. ("Teaching American English" give 328.)

2) L2 writing is already fraught with problems regarding cultural variation in writing -- that is, contrastive rhetoric, or the newer intercultural rhetoric. WEs in writing style is covers virtually identical territory as CR (though with a decidedly different motivation and historical impetus).


I do think (and yes, I am totally CARS here) that zooming in on the sentence level -- the grammar stuff, the stuff we supposedly don't care about but that most people actually really care about vis-a-vis 'good writing' -- opens up a place for world Englishes to mesh with L2 writing studies. I realize it is not particularly fashionable to talk about describing particular English varieties now (since it's all 'hybridity' these days, and there's some truth to that), but the fact remains that in nearly every context, there is a syntagm (I prefer to call it an 'orbit') of meanings floating around ideas like "good writing" and "standard English" and so on. And grammar -- lexis and syntax -- plays a big part there.

Once again I think of the "can able to" example, from Canagarajah via Min-Zhan Lu's 1994 article "Professing Multiculturalism." Of course, you don't even have to look that far -- any time you (I?) make fun of somebody for using the wrong word, every time a bookworm chastises you for saying "I feel badly," every time you get into a quandary about whether to use "who" or "whom," you're playing out grammatical drama of What Is Acceptable, Legitimate Language Use -- and, more often than not, whether people are educated, worth listening to, etc.

Simply put, grammatical variation plays a huge role in everyday language users' (and teachers' and students') notions of what English is, what is acceptable in academic writing (or professional writing, or creative writing). If these variations are said to exist, they are worth investigating in any context -- as are people's attitudes toward them.

PS:  I am starting to wonder whether I have subconsciously started moving this way in my research due to a kind of grammatical guilt for having been my whole life the kind of person who cannot physically stop himself from correcting someone for making grammar errors. (It makes me a good proofreader, I guess.) Whatever the reason, it's kind of funny to note that I'm moving into an area I've kind of always been in, one way or another.

Finally Getting Somewhere with Methods

"Just focus on how best to design, analyze and integrate questionnaire and interview data--and why one would want to do that--in language education research—and what is missed if only one type of data collection is used, for example."  (Duff, personal communication)




Less philosophizing, more working towards my own actual research design!

View from the Koerner Library, 5th Floor

A university campus with no students on it
is a beautiful thing
but to read and to write well
is a daily struggle.

Upcoming Conferences, 2012-2015

TESOL 2013 Dallas Convention Center Dallas, Texas, USA March 20-23, 2013 TESOL 2014 Oregon Convention Center Portland, Oregon, USA March 26-29, 2014 TESOL 2015 Metro Toronto Convention Centre Toronto, Ontario, Canada March 25-28, 2015 ----- AAAL: 2013 Dallas, Texas March 17-20 [submitted] 2014 Portland, Oregon March 22-25 2015 Toronto, Ontario March 21-24 ---------- SSLW - try to go to at least one of these 2012: Purdue University, USA, Sept 6-8 2012 [deadline May 1] 2013: People's Republic of China, October 2014: Arizona State University, USA, Dates TBD ---- AILA 2014 - August 10-15 in Brisbane, Australia (Deadline April 2013) ---- BC TEAL 2012 - Capilano University May 4-5 [attended] TESL Canada 2012 - Kamloops, BC - Oct 11-13 [presented] --- CSSE/ACLA 2012 - Waterloo - May 31 - Jun 2 ACLA allegedly in Victoria in Spring 2013! [Deadline Nov 2012] ---- IAWE 18 - Hong Kong and Guangzhou, December 6-9, 2012 [May 30 deadline]

Notes on Minimal Risk

just for my reference.

http://ors.ubc.ca/ore/breb-frequently-asked-questions

Minimal Risk Review

If your study qualifies for Minimal Risk Review, you may submit the application anytime, but we ask that you avoid the deadline dates listed above.

Please refer to the Guidance Notes for criteria on Minimal Risk projects, paying careful attention to the exceptions (if your research is incorrectly categorized it will be redirected to Full Board Review, which lengthens the turnaround time).

http://rise.ubc.ca/helpCenter/GN/BREB_Guidance_Notes.html#Guide2.1

Minimal Risk is defined in the Tri-Council Policy Statement as follows: “if potential subjects can reasonably be expected to regard the probability and magnitude of possible harms implied by participation in the research to be no greater than those encountered by the subject in those aspects of his or her everyday life that relate to the research then the research can be regarded as within the range of minimal risk.”

NOTE: all phases of my study seem to fit this.

The BREB retains the right to decide to put any application submitted for minimal risk review forward for full board review. The applicant will be notified of a change. There is no deadline for applications that meet minimal risk criteria.

Types of studies that may be considered for minimal risk review include (but are not limited to):

· Questionnaires or interviews with competent adults that do not cover topics that could be considered sensitive

George Steiner on Holy Saturday

There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable, suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives. We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate. We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of liberation from inhumanity and servitude. We look to resolutions, be they therapeutic or political, be they social or messianic. The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible).

But ours is a long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?

Real Presences

The sad realization that my study is actually about grammar

...may be upon me. Probably a sociological look at a reified "correct grammar" rather than a deep look into what grammar is (I hope?), but hey: writing is full of grammar. Grammar is a contentious thing in L2 writing. For many students, it's the only thing.

If I stay at the sentence level, 'grammar' is -- maybe along with vocabulary -- kind of the only game in town. Discourse-level features? Elusive.

But remember the "can able to" example and the argument that grammar is ideological:

"I didn't want to jeopardize my case for pluralizing academic writing by extending it to

the controversial terrain of grammar. But a combination of developments in theoretical discourses, social changes, communicative advances, and pedagogical rethinking (reviewed in this article) tell me that now is the time to take my position to its logical conclusion. The moment is ripe to extend my argument of pluralizing English and academic writing into the “deep structure” of grammar."

...thus saith Canagarajah (2006).

Seidlhofer briefly mentions writing/speaking

"Since the intention is to capture a wide range of variation, a corpus of spoken ELF is the first target, at one remove from the stabilizing and standardizing influence of writing"

Ah but this is exactly what is so confounding and interesting about looking into writing. That present progressive -- does writing every fully stabilize and standardize? Maybe sorta, but maybe not!

Ideas off the top of my head

Bias toward writing - it's official and educated and real

only official language is written down

standard language is written language

then how do you keep it up?

nothing about writing actually makes it standard

the mere idea of writing as a thing is what made us think it was standard

the appropriation of writing as a 'learned' technology by educational institutions

so now whatever the educational establishment says is good writing is good writing

and that has been exported along with english

english and education and 'western values' or whatever have been exported from the center to the periphery

the same emphasis about what grammar is acceptable, what good writing is, etc, are maintained

but when a project to appropriate english writing for local institutional purposes is undertaken

e.g. when writing in English becomes a vehicle for local ("un-english")ways of being, identity, etc

then there is a struggle between local norms -- "this is what is right for us" -- and center/international norms -- "we need to fit in with what is right for everybody"

Social phenomena as "myths"

It's pretty common to hear things in our field referred to as "myths" in the sense of "stuff that common sense says is real/true, but actually isn't." Some concepts that have been called myths are the native speaker, English as an international language, the idea of "a language" itself, and, most notable to me currently, standard language, specifically "Standard Written English."

This might be really naive, but aren't socially constructed phenomena real, rather than myths, because they're socially constructed? Because the social world is a real world that we live in? Even if almost nobody can conclusively state every single rule of Really Truly True Real Standard English, don't the facts of a million teachers with red pens, a thousand "whoms," and a general vague sense held by almost everyone who has gone to school that there is such a thing as a standard language make it at the very least an important thing to be reckoned with?

I don't think most people would disagree, in fact, that these are "important things to be reckoned with." I just don't think it's very helpful to use the word "myth" to describe them.

I remember when, as an undergraduate, I learned in a sociology class that race was socially constructed. I felt like I had just learned an amazing secret that hardly anybody else had access to. "Race isn't even real," I'd say, as if that somehow settled things. It took me a little while longer to realize what real meant.

Was this article actually published twice?

I'm not posting this to accuse anyone of doing something unethical, I'm just genuinely confused about how something like this can happen. As far as I can tell, they are the same article.

From English Today:

Chen, M. & Hu, X.(2006). Towards the acceptability of China English at home and abroad.English Today, 22(4), 44-52

doi:10.1017/S0266078406004081

(Published in October)

From Changing English:

Chen, M. & Hu, X.(2006). Towards the acceptability of China English at home and abroad.Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 13(2), 231-240.

doi: 10.1080/13586840600833648

(Published in August)

Cha's China Issue

The (online) Hong Kong based literary journal Cha is accepting submissions for their "China Issue," pitches due by April 15. See info below. I'll have an essay about English in China in there! (Assuming I write it...)

Cha: An Asian Literary Journal is now accepting submissions for "The China Issue", an edition of the journal devoted exclusively to work from and about contemporary China. The issue, which will be published in June 2011, will feature poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, scholarly works and visual art exploring the modern Middle Kingdom. We are looking for submissions from a wide range of Chinese and international voices on the social, political and cultural forces which are shaping the country. If you have something interesting, opinionated or fresh to say about China today, we would like to hear from you. Please note that we can only accept submissions in English.

We are pleased to announce that Cha former contributor, distinguished Chinese scholar and poet Yibing Huang will be joining Cha as guest editor for the issue (see his biography below) and read the submissions with co-editors Tammy Ho and Jeff Zroback. Huang has graciously agreed to lend us his extensive knowledge of Chinese literature and keen critical eye to help us select the pieces and shape the issue.

The Reviews section will be devoted exclusively to books related to China. If you have a recent book that you think would be right for review in "The China Issue", we encourage you to contact our Reviews Editor Eddie Tay at eddie@asiancha.com. Books should be sent to Eddie before the end of March 2011.

If you would like to have work considered for "The China Issue", please submit by email to submissions@asiancha.com by 15th April, 2011. Please include "The China Issue" in the subject line of the email or your work will automatically be considered for one of the regular issues. Submissions to the issue should conform to our guidelines.

CELT 2012 Hong Kong

http://celtconference.org/celt_flyer.pdf

Christians in English Language Teaching: Exploring the Volcation of English Language Teaching and Scholarship

OK, suddenly thinking it might be worth it to stick around in China for this. Jan. 27-29 at Chinese University Hong Kong. Plenary speakers: Suresh Canagarajah, Agnes Lam, Zoltan Dornyei.

Comparison vs Description

Should we get away from the 'comparing new Englishes to old-school Englishes' way of looking at varieties of English, or embrace it as a useful tool? Thinking about whether a study that starts with "native speaker" reactions is the best way to go -- it may be preferable not to use categories of 'features' generated by NS reactions....or, it may be useful if the goal is a comparison. Is the goal comparison or description of the cultural/sociolinguistic place of English in (a) society on its own terms? That would be the question. I can see value in doing either one

Theory, or How the Present Produces the Past

New theories create new problems -- or they respond to problems -- by "problematizing" things. That's fine.

Yet what strikes me as wrong with this is the assumption that "traditional" or previous ways of thinking/being/doing/understanding certain issues have not yet been 'problematized.'

There is an assumption that if certain things were not, in the past, understood in the way they are in the present, with a theoretical perspective available only in the present, then these things were previously misunderstood, or at the very least have been 'undertheorized.'

This strikes me as mostly a political, not an intellectual, judgement. And while it is not wrong to make your approach to research fit into how things are moving in your field at the moment, I think there is a kind of contemporary arrogance to arguing that old theory X is problematic because it did not take into account new theory Y.

New theories don't simple replace old theories. They produce old theories. They tell us what old theories were and why they were wrong, doing so in the light of theories that exist in the present. In a scholarly climate where 'knowledge creation' is the watchword of research, new theories will always have the upper hand.

(Unless you want to get into some arguments about space and time, which I don't.)

English in the World and "Ideology"

Looking more into "language ideologies" and came across this helpful footnote from Seargeant 2008:

Approaching this issue from the tradition that has developed under the rubric of ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard, 1998; Blommaert, 2006), the assertion that the subject of English in the world is one that is predominantly ideology-led reads as something of a truism. Within this tradition, all language use happens within a framework of entrenched beliefs (ideologies) about language, and it is these patterns of belief that create the pragmatic conventions and orientations which imbue linguistic behaviour with particular meanings (Silverstein, 1979). In the case of ‘world’ English, however, the ideologies that structure research and discussion are often explicitly foregrounded, leading to a situation where debate in this area regularly takes a self-consciously political turn. There is, then, a distinction – though one more of degree than of kind – between the explicitly ideological (the political) and the ideology of entrenched beliefs (the cultural); and it is the former which inflects the majority of work on English within a globalized context.

OK....let's hear it for the latter, though! That sounds better to me.

Kingsley Bolton

As I look through the relevant literature on World Englishes and related subjects (e.g., English as a Lingua France, English as a global language, etc), one author whose work and perspective I really appreciate is Dr Kingsley Bolton (not to be confused with Kingsley Shacklebolt), who is currently at City University of Hong Kong. He has a knack for looking at the field historically and explaining the various streams and trends of scholarship that make it up -- especially worthwhile are two chapters he wrote for the Handbook of World Englishes: "World Englishes Today" and "Varieties of World Englishes" clarify a lot of questions I've had.

Bolton recently left a co-editorship at English Today to take a similar position at World Englishes. To learn a little more about him, including an interesting story about his desire to study Hong Kong English and the way some people though (and think, surely) it's not worth doing, read "A Note about Kingsley Bolton" and "A Note from Kingsley Bolton" in the new issue of WE. (You'll probably need to have access to a university library to access them.)

Halliday 1978 - Language study and other fields

This makes a lot of sense!

Is there anything missing from this? Are there other fields that need to be considered now, 30 years later? (e.g. cultural studies)

I feel like I'm somewhere in the neighborhood of "language as behavior."

Wanted: A Braj Kachru Bibliography

As the "father" of World Englishes, Braj Kachru has authored a staggering assortment of books and articles on the subject since the 1960s. Unfortunately, to my knowledge no one has ever assembled a complete bibliography of these works.

I'm pretty keen on the idea of comprehensive bibliographies on any scholar, and I appreciate those scholars who make their CVs available online so I don't have to run all over the place seeking their publications. Google Scholar is suitable in many cases, but Kachru is so prolific that I give up easily.

I asked Suzanne Hilgendorf, who studied with Kachru, if she could suggest anything. She suggested the following as the most essential resources (in reverse chronological order, I believe) for assembling a bibliography:

• The Handbook of World Englishes
  Braj B. Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, Cecil Nelson
• World Englishes in Asian Contexts
  Yamuna Kachru, Cecil L. Nelson
• World Englishes: critical concepts in linguistics, Volume 3
  Kingsley Bolton, Braj B. Kachru
• The Other Tongue
  Braj B. Kachru
• The Alchemy of English
  Braj B. Kachru

Mollin's Euro-English

Just ILL'ed a copy of Sandra Mollin's book Euro-English: Assessing Variety Status. A quick skim reveals that it includes 3 studies - she determines that these 3 things need to be sorted out in order to assess whether a lg merits "variety" status:

1. FUNCTION - synthesis of previous statistical research on uses of English throughout EU states.

2. FORM - Mollin created her own corpus and mapped it to the ICE-GB. Don't know how features were singled out for analysis/explanation -- need to look into that.

3. ATTITUDE - Large survey of European professors, including a section on evaluating samples of Euro-English (oddly, not taken from the corpus, but based on "stereotypical" features from previous research - this seems a problem, but I think I understand why she did it), as well as questions about attitudes toward English in general.

To what extent could/should one try to replicate these in other contexts? Could they be single countries, or would it be better to look at analogous associations -- "the Sinosphere," ASEAN, Africa, etc?

How do you get at the question "What is a language?"

Other than a dialect with an army and a navy, I mean.

"What is English?"

Well, um, it's a language, a system with its own rules of morphology, phonology, orthography, syntax, etc., which can all be described by very specific references to...well, to itself, I suppose. That is interesting. One begins to understand the distinction between the "traditional" study of language-as-system and the "less traditional" study of language-in-use. Where does the system come from? Who makes it? While we all seem to have the innate capacity to understand and do language, we don't really map out the system ourselves. Nobody has the blueprints (despite what L'Academie might wish), yet we are constantly building. Bakhtin tells us that no one short of God has made an original utterance (and that I assume he means metaphorically).

The thing is, then, that language is made and re-made and grows and changes constantly. Maybe the changes take a while -- half a century to get the current connotations of, say, gay in English or tongzhi in Mandarin --but language is what it is because we keep on making it what it is. (Why? I have no idea what causes us to keep changing it. Maybe it has something to do with boredom.)

What I'm getting at is, I used to think that the most important thing for getting at a definition of a language -- or specifically, a variety of English -- was a hardcore analysis of the stuff of language itself -- linguistic or rhetorical or discourse analysis. What I think I think now (not a typo), though, is that those kinds of analysis are very good for some things, but they're not necessarily ideal for answering the question "what is this language?" (Well, there's also corpus analysis, which I used to think was overly sciencey and academic, but which I am more and more interested in since it is based on real samples of language-in-use.)

People -- everyday schlubs like you and me -- are the ones who make language, and the ones who decide what it is. So one of the best ways to figure out what a language is -- and this is going to sound so simple and naive as to be almost absurd -- is to ask people what it is.

Is this English?

Is this good writing?
Is this standard English?

Is this a well-written sentence?

Is this grammar OK?
What does this mean? Would you write it that way if it was your essay?

Why?

Why not?

Notes about advancing to candidacy in LLED

Comps

Option C: The Doctoral supervisory committee, in consultation with the student, determines the topics for three papers before any writing begins. The student may propose the three topics and/or draft three possible questions or outlines to present to the committee. The student may also provide initial reading lists (prior to Sept. 2010 all students were required to complete 3 comprehensive papers, as described here).

The papers typically cover the following three general areas:

1. The student’s area of specialization within Language and Literacy Education

does this mean TESL, or more specifically, L2 writing? How specific am I supposed to get here? ESL/EFL gap, NESTs and L2 writing, English writing in China -- some specific question about those?

2. One additional area or group of areas of special interest

Presumably world Englishes? Relationship of WEs to "China English?" Just English in China, broadly?

3. Appropriate research methodology

Review of survey/interview studies in WEs? In EFL writing? In Chinese ELT? In TESL, broadly?

Or....Dr Shi has suggested the papers should be:

1. Theoretical framework (Is WEs a theoretical framework? Should I delve into Bourdieu & Bakhtin as I did in an earlier paper that I totally fudged?)

2. Research Methods (I've heard it said this can be hard because it tends to be vague and not tied to anything real...Obvs need to do this at some point, but how shall I approach it?)

3. Empirical review of previous studies (To be folded into diss. Question is: Which studies? English in China? Probably, right? But if I'm influenced by other "is this a WEs variety" studies -- e.g. Europe, Singapore, India, Africa -- shouldn't those be just as necessary?)

Actually Dr Shi's way makes more sense to me...and it's basically half the dissertation. Yeah.

Proposal

(from the new procedures; comps above are based on old procedures. I have a choice. Not sure which one to go for with proposal -- new way is more work but more feedback.)

After the coursework and comprehensive examinations, the research design for the dissertation is brought together in the form of a proposal. The proposal for the dissertation includes the research problem, theoretical framework, methodology, a thorough review of the research literature and the context for the work within relevant literature, the significance and limitations of the study. Including a time line and summary of the scope of each chapter of the thesis is also recommended. The proposal should be about 40 pages in length.

The research supervisor, in consultation with the student, will determine when the proposal is ready for examination. The student will then submit the proposal to the supervisory committee and circulate it to members of the department. The proposal presentation date should be scheduled at least three weeks after the proposal has been circulated. The defence will comprise two parts: a public presentation with questions from the supervisory committee and others (maximum of one hour) and a closed session with the student and the supervisory committee. Although the dissertation proposal will be the focus of questioning, the student should also be prepared to answer questions on areas relevant to the study.

I like the sound of that a lot, actually.