Done with applications

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

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

The final list was:

UBC - Language & Literacy Education

Purdue - English as a Second Language

Penn State - Applied Linguistics

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

Arizona State University - English (Rhetoric and Linguistics)

Arizona State Universty - Interdisciplinary program in Applied Linguistics

A Beautiful Sentence

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

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

Grad School Applications continued

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

Arizona State AppLx is done but for one transcript.

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

Whew.

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

International Dialects of English Archive

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

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

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

A pretty cool thing.

International Dialects of English Archive

Grad School Applications

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

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

Ling Shi on NNS/NES English Teaching in China

"NES teachers need to understand the background training of their

EFL Chinese students just as NNS teachers need to incorporate the

standards of their NES counterparts into their teaching and testing

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

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

of English writing being cultivated by NNS teachers. They should

adjust their teaching accordingly in a setting where most students are

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

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

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

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

should be aware of the diverse instructional emphases of their NES

colleagues. Both NES and NNS teachers should also help their

students to understand how readers’ expectations can vary based on

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

should write. Seminars for teachers and training workshops for raters

should be organized to help the communication between NES and

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

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

could lead to more effective writing instruction for EFL students

in China."

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

Note to Self: Writing Really Is Thinking

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

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

加油！

Lack of Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discussion Questions

What can we learn from this incident?

Different Kinds of Analysis

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

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

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

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

Discourse Analyzin'

It's a start...

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

created at TagCrowd.com

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

Interview with Suresh Canagarajah at The Other Journal

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

First Day of School

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

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

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

A Recent History of Teaching EFL in China

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

The Short List

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

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

More posts coming in mid-August.

"Chinglish" vs. "China English"

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

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

on the other hand,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(*in the "correct" and colloquial sense)

The Chinese EFL Journal

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

English Songs in China

From a Chinese college student's blog:

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

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

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

Some questions that interest me:

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

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

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

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

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

When Students Get Mad and/or Even

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

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

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

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

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

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

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