The Interface Between Chinese & English

"English and Chinese constitute two of the most powerful language complexes on earth and it seems highly likely that their influence on one another in future will transcend anything that has so far transpired between them."

Tom McArthur's Oxford Guide to World English (2002)


"At a time when the PRC is moving towards full membership of the World Trade Organisation and the further opening of trade and other contacts with the world (including the 2008 Beijing Olympics), much more might be said about the possible futures of Chinese Englishes. That however would be the subject of another study, one which would deal with the contemporary and unfolding story of the continuing 'interface' between the world's largest two language cultures, both in China and throughout diasporic Chinese communities worldwide."

"I am grateful to Professor Tom McArthur for suggesting the use of the term 'Chinese-English interface' to refer to the complex cultural and linguistic interactions between the Chinese languages and World Englishes at a seminar on this topic at the University of Hong Kong in March 2000."

Kingsley Bolton's 2003 book Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History


“ [McArthur’s] idea was that English and Chinese are  both world languages, and are  both pluricentric languages, and that these languages are in contact in various places worldwide – in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Taiwan, but also, in the Chinese immigrant communities of Europe and North America. And that this contact is significant for the development of world languages, and for the development of both languages, not least modern Chinese which has been influenced by European languages in many ways over the last 200 years or so.”
– Bolton, personal communication


...stay tuned...

Categorizing acceptability judgments

Goss, Zhang, & Lantolf (1994) were actually the first to use a discourse analysis approach to AJTs. Here's what they say about characterizing the participants' judgments (their tasks were done in groups):

"...we need some criterion to differentiate between talk that reveals evidence of judgments based on genuine linguistic intuitions and talk that points to some other source, such as memorized rules or L1 translations, underlying the judgments."

[Personally I don't care especially about that difference at this point, but I do want some kind of taxonomy along these lines.]

"At the moment we believe that talk that cites rules, pedagogical or otherwise and accurate or not, the source of which may be an instructor or textbok, or that involves translations into the native language, is indicative of judgments based on something other than real linguistic intuitions."

[Again, leaving aside the question of determining 'real linguistic intuitions,' this starts to suggest a way to categorize.]

"On the other hand, talk characterized by the absence of rules, by remarks like It sounds right, or a difficulty on the part of respondents in putting what they know into words, we construe as evidence that abstract linguistic competence of some type underlies the judgments."

[This is good stuff for the interviews, definitely, when participants are asked to explain their judgments.]

Higgins (2003) and Rubdy et al (2007 & 2008) look for evidence of ownership:

"...not just indigenization in which speaker appropriate English for their own needs but the degree to which speakers 'project themselves as legitimate speakers with authority over the language.' (Higgins)

Higgins uses some ideas from Erving Goffman, of all people, to get at that. Between the three studies there are 5 things they look for in the data:

1. references of legitimization (appeal to external authority)

2. Use of pronouns ('you' or 'I' (or we?) rather than 'it's wrong)

3. modality indicators (what you can, can't, should use)

4. References to the speaker's own English usage 

5. References to intuition / not being able to explain

I might add

6. Teacher-y comments about incorrectness/error and/or direct suggestions for changes

So, all together now, based on this and what I recollect from the data I've seen in my own study so far

1. appeal to external authority

a. textbook/dictionary

b. teacher/how I was taught

c. native speaker or other expert speaker usage (eg 'Americans don't say this' or 'I've never seen this' - although maybe this could be under #4 also)
d. reference to grammar? Does a reference to grammar automatically mean 'external authority?"

2. Use of pronouns

a. "You say" (indexes authority - I tell you what to say)

b. "We say" (indexes membership in community of expert English-knowers)

c. "I say" (asserts individual authority as an expert English-knower)

d. "They say" (if referring to a preferred usage, a reference to expert/NS use; if referring to a dispreferred usage, a reference to learners or people who don't know English well)

3. modality (can, should, may, etc -- could analyse based on 'strength?') + how it is modified (definitely, etc) - not quite sure how to classify these.

4. References to the speakers' own English usage/knowledge (broaden, include S usage as in 2d?)

a. "I would say" (similar to 2c or 3, I suppose)

b. References to what is taught (I/we teach them to do X)

c. probably some other stuff...?

5. References to intuition - more for the interview, but could be things like:
a. feels, seems, etc (suggests strong intuitive sense of language?)
b. Vague/ambiguous adjectives ('this seems weird')

6. Teacher stuff
a. Simple "this is wrong" stuff. (also 'this is Chinglish') - could specifically mention an error
b. correction without mentioning anything else (could include modals)

...to be developed...

What Linguistic Features of CE have been 'claimed' in the Literature?

It's easy to complain that most people are operating with an unclear definition of Chinese English, but what have people actually claimed in the literature as empirical features of CE? Leaving aside discourse, which is a big one in itself, here's what I'm seeing.

Vocabulary

Summary:

1. Loanwords via transliteration of Chinese words

2. Loanwords via direct translation of Chinese terms

3. Semantic shift - word's meaning changes due to cultural context (many types mentioned by Xu)

4. Direct translation of Chinese idioms/chengyu (may be grammatical ...or 'weird?')

---

From the literature:

- Political terms (running dog, capitalist roader) 

- Standardized English translations of official slogans

- semantic shifts -- propaganda ('bad' in AmE, 'good' in CE)

- some Chinese idioms 

[Cheng 1992]

- loan translations (special economic zone)

- semantic shift (peasant = good, intellectual = bad)

[Gao 2001]

- loan words (baozi, mantou)

- loan translations (red envelope)

[Yang 2005]

- borrowings (same as loan words above) from various Chinese dialects

[Yang 2009]

- "Chinglish" idioms widely recognized (good good study, day day up)

[Fang 2008]

- Chinese loanwords (ginseng, feng shui) 

 - loan translations (paper tiger, Cultural Revolution)

-- standing LWs (tai chi) vs ad hoc loanwords (standing LWs probably begin as ad hoc LWs)

- 'nativized English words whose original meanings in ENglish have shifted...in relation to the sociolx contexts of China' (p 35) - aka semantic shift

INCLUDES: semantic broadening (play), semantic narrowing (acheivement = grade in school), pejoration (copy = piracy), amelioration ('upgrading' a word -- fixed = reliable), semantic change (open = turn on), "haphazard use of hyponyms" (hard to tell if this is on purpose or not)

[Xu 2010]

Grammar/Syntax

Not a lot out there done from a WEs perspective, but we could probably get something from CR if we wanted. Xu offers:

(from spoken discourse)

1. Adjacent default tense (yesterday I write a letter)

2. Null subject/object utterances (sometimes just play basketball)

3. Co-occurrence of connective pairs (because I X, so I Y)

4. subject pronoun copying (my mother she..., the building it...)

5. yes-no response (you don't like sports? yeah (i don't))

6. topic-comment (Cigars, the president never smokes them; Beijing...there are many old buildings)

7. unmarked OSV(other jobs I want to try; both languages I can't speak well)

8. inversion in subordinate finite wh-clauses (I don't know what should I learn)

(from newspapers)

9. Nominalization (there are a lot of specific things here that I need to take more time to read)

10. Multiple-coordinate construction (done with 'Chinese pragmatic motivations') (p. 92 - not unique to CE, but still a feature of CE for cultural/pragmatic reasons -- like 'the three represents)

11. Modifying-modified sequence (preference for forward-linking, subordinate clauses first)

12. Use of imperatives (in Ha Jin -- doesn't seem that unique to me, but he makes a good argument on p 102)

13. Tag variation (varying tag Qs, like Chinese)

Think-Aloud Data Analysis: "Open" vs "On"

"...your alarm clock is open..."

6 commenters point out that "open" is not the 'right' word to use here. Other suggestions are "on," "set," "turned on," etc.

So: what kind of situation is this?

You can call it a 'direct translation' error, assuming the student is "thinking in Chinese" where 关 means both open (like a door) and turn on (like a light or appliance). So he incorrectly translated guan - he picked the wrong meaning. (But maybe he didn't know that it can be translated as 'turn on' at all.)

Similarly, you could call it 'interlanguage' or 'interference' from Chinese, both of which would also refer to the situation above.

If you didn't want to think about it from an SLA perspective, you could call it a 'word choice' or even 'collocation' error -- any time you write, you can pick whatever word comes next, and in standard English we wouldn't expect an alarm clock to be 'open' but we would expect it to be 'on.' It's not necessarily directly because of Chinese. (It probably is, though, but you can't always prove that. Plus, other NNESs might use it.)

We could go so far as to call it a 'variation,' (that is, a legitimate dialectal difference from standard English) because it seems to be attested that open/close for things like lights is pretty widely used by NNESs. (I know some people who use it.) (see this Google search.)

I guess the most likely (I want to be careful about ascribing intent to the writer) is the 'direct translation' scenario. The commenters are more generally calling it a 'wrong word choice,' and I'm personally sympathetic to calling it a variation. Who's right?

Don't Be Polite

This is an example of the kind of comparison between Chinese English and "English English" that makes me crazy. (NB, this is not written from a world Es perspective -- clearly the author is doing a kind of contrastive analysis and pointing out difficulties or mistakes learners have -- elsewhere in the passage there's pronunciation, vocab, etc.)

I don't mean to be mean to the original author -- I get what they're trying to do. It's meant to be helpful. But from my perspective, it just isn't.

Seeing an asterisk in front of a phrase that is simply not idiomatic in "English English" (note another phrase here I've always been a little weirded out by -- "English people") doesn't seem right. The * is used in linguistics to designate an ungrammatical sentence, or in language learning texts to designate an error. "Please eat more" is not an "error." In fact, it is not just not an error, it's something you could very well hear in a conversation between "English people."

It's not that I don't understand that some of these are uniquely Chinese phrases -- but for the asterisked ones especially, I just don't see any benefit in telling a student not to use them, other than helping them to become some imaginary version of an English Person.

In conclusion*, some corpus linguistics work might really come in handy in reshaping the way we think about this kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Shamefully I note no instances of "don't be polite" or "please eat more" in the British National Corpus. But the limits of what we have already observed does not preclude the existence of the reasonably plausible utterance, right? (Right?)

* PS: I usually use "in conclusion" ironically, to introduce something that is basically a non sequitur. FYI.

Course Evaluations

New rule: don't look at your evaluations until you've taught another (different) course.

Every time I look at my evals I get depressed for several days. I know that they're supposed to be constructive criticism, that they're actually not that bad (really only a few negative comments), that people who have something negative to say are more likely to do the evaluations (only half my class did them), and that people who get lower grades give lower evaluations, but I still end up feeling like I am not only a bad teacher but a bad person. It just makes me feel awful -- and I just glanced at the comments.

I do know I have a lot to work on as a teacher -- I'm pretty disorganized (getting better) and when I give an assignment for the first time I tend to make the instructions vague (getting better at this too).

But I've got to quit reading the comments right when they're emailed to me.

What is Left Unmarked...

....is almost more important that what is left marked.

Usually in AJTs you can only get data about what is unacceptable, not what is acceptable. In other words, you get "this is not OK, because ...." but even if you ask them to give a thumbs up to sentences that are OK, you're not getting much (or any) feedback. On a traditional AJT, you just get nothing and can assume the sentence is part of the language's grammar.

Even on one of these in-context AJTs, though, you don't get anything on the unmarked parts unless you talk about it in the interview. (Which I don't think I did much of, really, though I will go through and find out.)

But...and here is where I am thinking/hoping that using a corpus might come in handy...I think that if I can create a kind of grammatical "map" of the essays and focus in on the stuff that was NOT commented on, I might get an interesting idea of nonstandardisms that are OK in the eyes of readers. (Or at least marginally OKer than what they commented on.)

For example, off the top of my head, I know that none of the commenters marked the chunk "Gulou campus" as unacceptable. In a sense that is the most Chinese phrase in the whole study, because it is an untranslated word used in an English essay. The fact that no one marked it suggests to me that things like this -- names of places I guess, or maybe this could even be considered a direct borrowing from Chinese into English -- are seen as OK by readers. And that therefore doing this, which seems like a feature of CE discourse, is not marked as wrong, and is acceptable...

Hmm. I'm just kind of riffing here, but can we say anything about CE as a result of this "finding?" Can we say something like this?

No reader objected to this  direct transliteration of a Chinese place names. Therefore, transliterations of Chinese place names are likely to be an accepted feature of Chinese English discourse.

I think maybe we can.

Grammar/Vocab Pet Peeves of Today's ESL Teachers

I asked my TESL certificate students to name their grammar (or vocab) pet peeves last week. Here's the list:

- there/they're/their
- contractions in formal writing
- nucular
- anyways
- the word "moist"
- misuse of 's
- your / you're
- the word "bro"
- overuse of articles by ESL students
- the term "VVTI" as relating to cars (this was a bit of an outlier)
- "can not" vs "cannot" (not sure which is right!)
- WRITING IN ALL CAPS
- the word "can" (overused?)
- "my bad"
- "mindful"
- "there is" / "there are" confusion
- you & I vs you & me
- confusion with plurals (for ESL Ss)
- the word "chillax"
- misuse/underuse of apostrophes
- overgeneralization of grammar rules (ESL Ss)
- "wuz up" (spelling)
- "have a fun" (apparently said by Korean moms)
- How to answer "do you mind if..."
- Effect vs affect
- "I could care less"
- "A lot" vs "Alot"
- overuse of exclamation marks
- "_____ one's ass off" (what is its origin, why do people say it?)

Notes on ethnographic notes

Pseudo-procrastinatory/preparatory/general knowledge-up-keep-y notes about how to take ethnographic field notes, ostensibly to jog my memory before commenting on students' attempts to write such notes.

From Atkinson & Hammersley's Ethnography: Principles in Practice. (Ch 7) (Note to self: this is from 1995 edition. 3rd edition pub'd in 2007 is out.)

Fieldnotes: relatively concrete descriptions of social processes and their contexts.


Adopt a wide focus

No attempt to code systematically

"Write down what you see and hear." (BUT: What should you write down; how and when should you write it?)

Use of actual words important.

Balance: concrete and descriptive, yet large scope.

Record speech and action: who, where, what time, what circumstances.

Spradley suggests trying to keep track of the following as a kind of checklist:

Space, Actor, Activity, Object, Act, Event, Time, Goal, Feeling


-----

Thin vs thick description: link.
Thin description: the bare details. The essentials and nothing more.

Some NVivo Resources

Teach Yourself NVivo 8 - Lyn Richards

QSR Tutorials page

Qualitative Data Analysis with NVivo - Patricia Bazely (book)

Handing Qualitative Data - Lyn Richards (book)

Take that post-structuralism

"If language is without an object, action becomes impossible - and therefore all human affairs disintegrate and their management becomes pointless and impossible." - Confucius

Halliday v. Chomsky

Halliday is always courteous and circumspect when referring to Chomsky: he only hints at their differences. Nevertheless, it becomes clear from the hints that their theories of language differ radically. Chomsky believes that language is innate: Halliday believes that it is learned. Chomsky believes that all human beings possess a grammatical programme hardwired into the brain: Halliday does not – he believes that grammar mirrors function and is mastered through experience. Chomsky believes in ‘Universal Grammar’: Halliday does not. Chomsky believes that language exists separately from experience: Halliday believes that language only develops through experience of other people and the world around us. Chomsky’s theory is Cartesian – in other words: mind exists separately from matter: Halliday’s ideas are Darwinian – in other words: language and the mind obey the same laws as all other aspects of reality. Chomsky’s theories are metaphysical: Halliday’s are scientific.

From "Michael Halliday at 80: A tribute"

Building on what I mentioned earlier about Dan Everett -- Everett is lately touted as the first linguist to seriously challenge the foundations of Chomskian linguistics, and Halliday's work is extremely unsexy so it's rarely mentioned, but this paragraph shows that most of Everett's criticisms are implicit in Halliday's work. I've said before that I think SFL basically has a marketing problem: all the theory seems incredibly relevant, but then somebody tells you you're not allowed to call things nouns and verbs anymore and it's thanks but no thanks.

Side note: this paragraph also offers a fine example of the discourse I mentioned earlier, as well. Halliday = realistic linguistics = hard science = Darwin. Chomsky = 'theoretical' linguistics = metaphysics (which to a metaphysical naturalist = imaginary magic) = idle speculation = Descartes (who by the way gets an unnecessarily bad rap).

Not that I don't agree with the criticisms of Chomsky's way of explaining UG, but this description sets up a pretty unsustainable binary, if you ask me. And want an answer in fashionable jargon.

I'm blogging a lot so I must be thinking.

Rescuing acceptability

See, the thing is, we have to stop treating competent bilingual English-users are "mere learners." We can't treat their language use or their metalingusitic talk about their language as deficient. Even if that is how they want to see themselves. (There, I said it! I'm an academic asserting that I actually know better than the people whose behavior I am studying! I have crossed over to the dark side!) Modesty about your ability in an L2 is one thing. I am exceedingly modest about my L2 abilities (not without cause, in my opinion). But English is a special case. It is a lingua franca. It is a working language for millions of non-native speakers. It is a language that L2 English teachers function in at a high level.

I believe my Chinese colleagues who teach English at the tertiary level to be highly competent users of English. (I believe many upper-level L2 college students and certainly grad students are highly competent users of English as well.)  Certainly I believe my professors at UBC who speak English as a second language are highly competent users of English. Is there a difference between their English usage/knowledge and mine? Sure, in some abstract way. I am 'closer' to English on a personal level than they are in some ways, though I would argue that many of them are closer to it in a professional way.

Moving acceptability judgments from the domain of theoretical linguistics frees it from accusations that it is not actually measuring what it claims to be measuring -- linguistic/grammatical knowledge at a deep/unconscious mental level.

Moving acceptability judgments from the domain of second language acquisition frees it from the undue burden of having to provide an accurate map of a learner's 'interlinguistic competence' (to use Birdsong's term).

Putting them squarely in the domain of sociolinguistics, language attitudes, and world Englishes, etc. allows AJTs to be considered as another kind of behavioral data, elicited from people who use English in a specific way and a specific context, that can be analysed in a social practice framework.

This AJT data can then be considered in light of the sociocultural realities of English around the world -- insead of in terms of an abstract generative linguistics based on native-speaker intuitions (which is not that relevant to applied linguistics, much of the time), or a gauge of how well someone is learning the 'target language' which should conform to native speaker standards.

Birdsong (1989) on the abuse of acceptability judgments

Theory must account for data; if elicited data are shaky, other data are supplied by introspective fiat. These data conspicuously fit the existing model. If these data are questions by proponents of another model, then the search is on for speakers, be they naive or trained, whose idiolects provide data that fit the first.

He's saying that's a bad thing, FYI. "Introspection" is basically a linguist thinking about it and pronouncing his view as the correct one.

It is in a theory-internal sense that the distinction between 'grammatical' (derived from a grammar or accounted for by a grammar) and 'acceptable' (derived from elicited or introspective evidence) is to be understood.

Birdsong quoting from Levelt et al:

The empirical domain of Chomskian linguistics is linguistic intuitions. The relation between these intuitions and man's capacity for language, however, is highly obscure.

(This does seem pretty nuts.)

Linguistics is a potentially fraudulent enterprise when elicitation data can be manipulated to substantiate pet theoretical analyses.

What language is and does

I don't devote a lot of time to thinking about the fundamental nature of language as a thing in itself, nor the origins of language. (Partly because I am not (a) a linguist or (b) an evolutionary psychologist.) But I do feel like those things are pretty high up in the popular imagination in terms of what "laypeople" (for lack of a better term) want to know about language.

It also seems like the larger discourses of the primacy of the hard sciences, the idea of 'dethroning' the human species as unique in the world, and (maybe this one is reaching too far, but I do think it's growing) the assumed importance of evolutionary explanations for how we do (or even should) go about our business are driving people's interests in language as a cognitive phenomenon that should be studied "scientifically."

I don't by those scare quotes mean it shouldn't be studied that way. I just note that there's not a lot of interest in sociocultural explanations of what language is and how it works in the media. Dan Everett's book Language: The Cultural Tool (which I'm currently reading) has attracted a lot of attention to linguistics and I'm glad that his formula for 'what language is' -- cognition + culture + communication -- includes so much that is sociocultural. And I feel like people will be more likely to accept this argument from him than they would from a sociologist or literary theorist because he couches his arguments, to some extent, in terms that track with the discourses mentioned above.

Of course there's a danger of people seeing that the study of language is a science and thus reifying culture and communication as things that can somehow be pinned down by, say, neurological or biological observation (obviously I don't think they can, and I suspect most people don't), but overall I think the popularity of Everett's work is a good thing for the general understanding of what language does.

Some writing projects

Short essay on long time no see  - submitted to a journal. If rejected, retool and submit elsewhere.

Methods comp - need to edit down more, possibly add examples. Will submit to a journal.

Essay on ''new'' approaches to variation in academic ESL writing - abstract by end of month, draft by end of summer.

Review of Language the Cultural Tool for Books and Culture -- sometime this summer.

Learning the Wrong Lesson from the Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is an endlessly fruitful metaphor for linguists, and it's showing up in current books like Michael Erard's Babel No More (which I recently won a free copy of somehow), Nicolas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, and Dan Everett's Language: the Cultural Tool.

Regardless of who's referencing it and for what purpose -- and whether in a religious or secular context -- usually the implication is that it's a drag that we don't all speak the same language, because if we did, it would be better and easier and we'd understand each other. (Think of Douglas Adams' babelfish, a creature that instantly translates from any language to any language.)

This is the wrong lesson to take from Babel -- wrong in the religious sense, and simply wrong in the sense that it  misunderstands what language is and how it works.

To briefly sum up why this is the case, I'd like to quote from Mingyan Hong's excellent dissertation "Spirituality and SLA" (Second Language Acquisition):

Many Christians cite the Babel story as clear evidence that ... that the diversity of languages is not to be celebrated, but should rather be mourned or tolerated while waiting in hope for a promised future restoration of unity. 

This in fact is not the point, she argues. Hong goes on to interview Suresh Canagarajah (a thinker whose implications for a Christian understanding of language really need to be further explored), who adds:

...this is what I see as a sign of the Tower of Babel, eliminating diversity in order to become one against God. And God punished them. The lesson is against monolingualism, or even monoculturalism, reducing the diversity of humanity by becoming one people with a single language, culture, etc.

The point, then, is that the divine mandate for human flourishing is for diversity and difference, not singularity. And indeed, most of us accept the weak form of linguistic relativity -- that linguistic (to say nothing of cultural) differences allow for different perspectives, ways of expressing things, etc. And really, if you get into social constructionism, it's our use of language that in large part creates the world(s) we live in. If we abide by that theory, a single language describing a single reality is nearly impossible. (That assertion has its own epistemological and theological controversies which would need to be sorted out.)

Also, Babel is linked with Pentecost, which is really interesting in that it is an affirmation of multilingualism (because everyone is using his own language) but it also claims that everyone understands what is being said equally. It would be worth exploring that.

The Future of English in Japan (ca. 1935)

From a 1935 issue of the Journal of the American Dialect Society.

Also of note, a related issue some 75 years later: the somewhat dramatically titled "Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English".

Long Time No Figure This Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

World Englishes and Teaching Writing

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

Advice on Texts for Teaching World Englishes

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

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

The Future of English

English Next

English Next India

"Hegemony Takes No Prisoners"

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

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

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

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

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

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

hegemony takes no prisoners." - Alan Davies

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

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

Cynthia Nelson, in a 2010 TESOL Quarterly article on gay students in language classrooms, writes: "The widespread collective ignorance about gay students may have many reasons, including...[a] tendency to view (homo)sexualities as a private matter involving physical sex, rather than a public matter involving community, identity, knowledge, and discourse..."

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

2012 Planner

Notes from meeting with advisor.

Data:

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

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

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

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

Writing projects:

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

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

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

Conferences:

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

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

Work:

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

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

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

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

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

3. Find a corpus.

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

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

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

(#6 needs some work.)

Sin Boldly (A Navel-Gazing Interlude)

I'm in no position to be giving advice about how to do research. I've long considered it my weakest academic skill. I've always thought that being an academic consisted of chiefly these four things: reading, writing, teaching, and doing research. Here's how I'd rank myself in terms of level of confidence in each of those:

1. Writing
2. Reading
3. Teaching
4. Doing research

Actually, bump those all down a notch and add:

1. Obnoxiously inserting my opinion about what I study into every possible conversation while deriding non-specialists' views, even though my only point is usually "well, it's complicated"

Which is also something academics are known for.

I sometimes think that I've made it this far (through -- dear God -- eight and a half years of postsecondary education now) based almost solely my ability to put together a readable compound-complex sentence, and while that may not be entirely true, a lifetime of reading widely has, I think, afforded me a certain facility with language, if I can say so without being arrogant. (I can write stupid sentences, too, of course.) I have a long way to go as a teacher, but if I get going about something I really know, I can do pretty well with it (I'm psyched to be teaching two sections of world Englishes next term -- kind of a dream come true). But research -- even after writing a 40-page paper on methods, taking courses on ethnography, surveys, and interviews, and having my dissertation proposal passed by my committee -- still fills me with dread.

I know that research never pans out exactly the way one hopes (I've had to lower my sights quite a bit on this project) -- but I have so little experience with data collection and analysis that I'm constantly fearful that each step I take is further in the wrong direction. And getting derailed by a lack of confidence at this stage has proven even more debilitating than the "oh-crap-I-don't-know-what-I'm-talking-about" anxiety of writing 100 pages worth of comps this summer. I spent the last month hemming and hawing about getting Ethics Review Board approval for my study (which I finally got last week, 2-4 weeks later than I'd hoped), and during that time I could have been analyzing my pilot data (which I've barely looked at), learning NVivo, doing other writing and reading, making contact with more potential participants, and so on. Instead, as best I can tell, most days I woke up at noon, felt sorry for myself that I had a broken arm and no BREB approval and was in China away from my friends and family, sent a few emails, read a few articles, and watched 6 hours of television.

I'm not proud of any of this. But as I look back on the last month, I can see how (and I can still feel how, every time something goes wrong) my main malady has been a constant fear that I'm somehow doing something horribly wrong and irrevocably ruining my chances to do a good project and actually finish my PhD. (My brilliant defense mechanism, apparently: avoid thinking about the work.)


Rationally, I know this is silly. My university grades (since an unfortunate incident involving sophomore year physics) have been impeccable. I was accepted by the top PhD programs in my field. I've had book reviews published in well-known academic journals. I've presented at the top local, national, and international conferences in my field.  I wrote and published a book just for fun. Yet now, more than ever, I hear a nagging voice saying you're doing this wrong.

What's the remedy?  Well, as Martin Luther once wrote, "sin boldly." When I was looking up the context of that phrase, I came across a college writing guide of the same title by David Williams, which I'd like to quote here:

One important point about your adopted voice and its argument: you have at least to pretend to believe it. Like Solomon and all great minds that ever contemplated the human condition, Martin Luther was right when he said that all of humankind are sinners and sin in every thought and deed and must necessarily sin, so far are we removed from God. His response was, he declared, to "sin boldly." Do not hide quivering under the bed. Do not shuffle shamefully onto the stage full of abject apologies. Be assertive, be bold, adopt a self-confident voice. Fake it if you have to. The cynics may be right. Our worldly institutions and values may all be relative and artificial constructs like the money in our wallets, paper with ink on it and not anything of real value at all. But few of those who believe this line can be found burning the ten dollar bills in their wallets. We live in the world "as if." To some that "if" is a constantly looming threat; to others it's a challenge.

Williams is writing about writing, but the same is true of research. Here I am; I'm in this. I'm doing what I came here to do. I'm definitely going to screw some things up. And then I've got eighteen more months to diagnose what happened, make sense of it all, and head back to point #1 above -- my ability to write sentences -- to tie it all together.

So, to conclude this pep talk to myself, here are some mantras for the next three weeks:

1. It's all data. Things that go right, things that go wrong, ever time I set foot on a campus, every newspaper article I come across about English education in China, every photograph I take, every student I talk to, every class I teach, every instant messenger conversation I have with a student or a colleague -- it's not all going to be rigorously analyzed, but it's all a part of the story of this dissertation. Really, the last four years, and the next two also, are part of it -- from the day we got off the plane in Shanghai to the day we moved to Vancouver to the day I arrived in Ningbo, to do the day we touch Canadian soil again in January. My job, what I'm doing right now, is writing a long-ass manuscript about what's going on with English in China, albeit with a particular focus on a certain research project.

2. Sin boldly. I haven't done a project like this before, and this methodology is, for the most part, unique. Nobody else has done it this way, so I get to make it up. The project isn't going to get better if I keep sitting down to do some work on it and I feel so depressed by my lack of progress that I abandon it.

3. Get out. Every day, meet with people, talk to people, email people, interview people. Check in with participants. Politely assert myself when I don't hear back. Get used to explaining it confidently.

4. If there's not enough data this time, it's possible to get more later. Sure, it won't be easy, but making contacts now could possibly lead to more and better help getting more data in the future if it's deemed necessary.

That's it for now.

Some Recent Recommended Academic Articles on English in China

Fong, E. T. Y. (2009). English in China: some thoughts after the Beijing Olympics. English Today 25(1), 44-49.

He, D.  & Li, D. C.S. (2009). Language attitudes and linguistic features in the ‘China English debate. World Englishes 28(1), 70-89.

Henry, E. S. (2010.) Interpretations of “Chinglish”: Native speakers, language learners and the enregisterment of a stigmatized code. Language in Society, 35, 669-688.

Lo Bianco, J. (2009), Being Chinese, Speaking English. In J. Lo Bianco, J. Orton, & Y. Gao  (Eds.), China and English: Globalization and the dilemmas of identity (pp. 200-211). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.  

You, X. (2011), Chinese white-collar workers and multilingual creativity in the diaspora. World Englishes 30, 409–427.

Time to Face Facts: This Study Isn't About "China English"

In fact, it's a reaction to the proliferation of China English studies, when I really think about it.

What influenced me to change this from a "what is China English" study to a "what do people think about English in China" study?

1. The growing consensus that labelling individual varieties of English in the Kachruvian framework is to some extent ideological

2. The notion (promoted by Saraceni) that it's more worthwhile to look at very particular contexts rather than whole "Englishes"

3. The fact that nobody I work with at UBC is academic progeny of any WEs scholars

4. I'm not entirely enthusiastic about what can be revealed by asking people direct questions about "China English"

5. I think that ideology and attitude have important implications for WE theory, but that they don't necessarily have to be attitudes and ideologies directly expressed about a variety.

Most importantly, I think that there isn't enough done to get at people's attitudes and reactions to particular instances of language use and exploring how they make judgments about language from an ideological/social perspective.


I think that's it.

Ruby Pan: Some English is More English than Others

Interpretations of “Chinglish"

One of the smartest papers on language ideology re English in China that I've read. My only beef is the emphasis on "learners" and spoken English when I think it's arguable that it is legit to call some CE speakers legitimate 'users' rather than learners, plus there is a lot more going on than speaking. He notes this, but I'd just like to see a clearer distinction made between "somebody made a funny translation on a sign" and "students make mistakes." These are almost totally conflated in popular culture, media, online, etc. I'm not saying Henry overgeneralizes -- he susses out this phenomenon better than almost anyone else. Here's the abstract:

As a linguistic curiosity, Chinglish has long fascinated native speakers of English, prompting numerous studies that analyze its form with a view towards either eliminating it or accepting it as a viable Standard English variant. In this article, I examine how various social groups involved in foreign language education in China, including Chinese students, foreign teachers and linguists, enregister Chinglish as a linguistic variety. I argue that Chinglish is not distinguished by the presence or absence of any particular linguistic feature, but a label produced in the intersubjective engagements between language learners and native speakers. Chinglish is structured by and reinforces the relations of expertise within the Chinese English language speech community, thus representing larger anxieties about nationalism and modernization in a global context.