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.

Is there such a thing as Christian sociolinguistics?

Berry, W., (2005). Standing by Words : Essays. City: Shoemaker & Hoard.

Coates, R., (1998). Christianity in Bakhtin. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press.

Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kristjansson, C. (2007). “The Word in the World: So to Speak (A Freirean Legacy)” in Smith, David I. & Terry A. Osborn (eds.),Spirituality, Social Justice and Language Learning. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

Steiner, G., (1991). Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Percy, W., (2000). Lost in the Cosmos. New York: Picador USA.

Poythress, V., (2009). In the Beginning Was the Word. Wheaton: Crossway Books.


Also the pope's Verbum Domini seems important maybe.

Methods

Carmen Isabel Luján García, in her review of Sandra Mollin's 2006 book Euro-English: Assessing Variety Status (in which Mollin rejects the existence of such a variety):

"For this research, a questionnaire survey was used as the unique method of studying attitudes towards English across Europe. It was administered via e-mail, and the sampling was the population of academics across Europe, as university lecturers’ e-mails are easily accessible. The total number was 4230 addresses from 21 countries. The questionnaire was composed of three sections; the first being elicited to analyse the error correction by means of a set of sentences that had to be checked by the respondents offering a correct alternative in case of mistakes; the second section asked for personal data required as sociolinguistic variables: age, country of origin, mother tongue and branch of science (Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, or the Arts); the third targeted the respondents’ general beliefs and attitudes towards English by questioning their agreement or disagreement on a scale of five items that ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Two rounds were necessary. After both were completed, 746 completed questionnaires were obtained."

Thoughts:

1. Part 1 is a lot like what I have been proposing for my study. Good! That means it's legit.

2. 4,230 people were contacted? Yeesh! Maybe I should set my own sights a little higher. (Like sampling professors at Project 211 schools, maybe?)

3. I need to read this book.

4. García suggests the study would be stronger if follow-up interviews were used. I'm proposing to do so!

More CE brainstorming

I had a weird conversation with somebody recently: I said something like "yeah, it's interesting how English is becoming a big part of Chinese society, it's pretty fascinating since it doesn't have much of a history there compared to some other countries" [yes, I am aware that there have been English/Chinese interactions for hundreds of years, but in terms of English really taking hold in the PRC, it's relatively recent] and she made a somewhat confusing comment like "that's a very typical attitude of an English-speaking person." I didn't really get what she was getting at -- maybe she was saying that only an L1 English speaker would think English in a non-English-speaking country was fascinating/interesting/worth studying?

Anyway, I think I need to be leaning even harder than I thought on the "I'm not Chinese" angle. And I want to actually embrace the connection between native English speakers and Chinese English. I exchanged brief thoughts on this with Oliver Radtke last year -- he's interested in looking at both Chinese and non-Chinese attitudes toward Chinglish, which in his case I think refers more to the ludicrous signage one often reads about in popular articles on the topic. Most previous studies in "my field" (i.e. ESL/L2 writing/World Englishes) focus on Chinese English speakers' attitudes about CE/Chinglish. Hu included some NESs in her studies but again, those were generic 'attitude' studies.