The Silent Traveller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questionnaires and Interviews as Communicative Events

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Finally Getting Somewhere with Methods

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




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

View from the Koerner Library, 5th Floor

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

Upcoming Conferences, 2012-2015

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

Notes on Minimal Risk

just for my reference.

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

Minimal Risk Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Steiner on Holy Saturday

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

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

Real Presences

The sad realization that my study is actually about grammar

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

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

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

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

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

...thus saith Canagarajah (2006).

Seidlhofer briefly mentions writing/speaking

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

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

Ideas off the top of my head

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

only official language is written down

standard language is written language

then how do you keep it up?

nothing about writing actually makes it standard

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

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

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

and that has been exported along with english

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

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

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

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

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

Social phenomena as "myths"

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

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

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

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

Was this article actually published twice?

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

From English Today:

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

doi:10.1017/S0266078406004081

(Published in October)

From Changing English:

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

doi: 10.1080/13586840600833648

(Published in August)

Cha's China Issue

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

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

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

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

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

CELT 2012 Hong Kong

http://celtconference.org/celt_flyer.pdf

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

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

Comparison vs Description

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

Theory, or How the Present Produces the Past

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

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

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

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

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

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

English in the World and "Ideology"

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

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

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

Kingsley Bolton

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

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

Halliday 1978 - Language study and other fields

This makes a lot of sense!

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

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