"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.

The Long List

Let the whittling down commence. Here is a list of potential places to apply for PhD programs:

Penn State
University of British Columbia
Purdue
Arizona State*
Northern Arizona University*
University of Washington**
Columbia
UC Berkeley
Indiana University
University of Wisconsin
New York University
Indiana State
UCLA

I chose these 12 because they are either strictly Applied Linguistics programs, TESOl-focused programs, or English programs with strong applied linguistics and interdisciplinary components. You may note that these are all in North America. Ideally, I'll do more research about each of these over the next few months and start asking questions, narrowing it down to about 5-7 to apply to in the fall, for admission in 2009. My priorities in no particular order are easy-to-work-with/accessible/friendly faculty, a program that's do-able in under 5 years, lots of TA opportunities, full funding, a place where I can get a strong foundation in qualitative research methods, and a proven record of decent job placement. Which I realize means I probably want to go to an imaginary unversity.

* Not because of any masochistic desire to live in Arizona.
** Almost solely because of a desire to live in Seattle. If Portland State had a PhD program, that would be way up on the list too. Sadly they don't, although there's a rumor that they may start one in the next few years or so.

Undergraduate Thesis Defense

Today I took part in the oral thesis defense for graduating English majors at our college. I was given very little preparation about what to expect (for example, I was given some of the papers a few minutes before the presentations, and I wasn't told that I'd have to conference with some of the students until it was time to do so), but overall I was really impressed. These guys had to write papers that would be difficult for native English speaking students to write, and some of them did it with great aplomb. One student even carried out his own empirical quantitative study, which I can't imagine doing as an undergraduate English major. (Maybe that's just me, though. After all, my undergraduate thesis was a sprawling, formless 50 pages about religious themes in J.D. Salinger's Glass family stories.)

Many of the students wrote about cross-cultural communication, and they referred to "English culture," "English people," and "English countries." I tried to challenge one student to explain what she meant by those terms, and she gave me the run-around. A popular theme in this kind of paper is the difference between "western countries" or "English culture" and China. The same kind of oversimplification that we "English people" make when we do cross-cultural comparisons?

Current Happenings

Oral English: mini-debates for the next 4 weeks.

Writing: planning the final exam this week.

Grading: way behind as always. (Why am I writing this, then?)

The Wikipedia page for "Chinglish" is awful. It needs to be changed and I'm going to change it.

Summer job: probably teaching kids' EFL (gulp) for a month in Shaoxing. Further updates soon.

"Discourse"

The first chapter of James Gee's An Introduction to Discourse is so riddled with scare quotes that I find myself reluctant to continue despite its otherwise readable style. Why do I dislike seeing words like "truth" and "discourse" in quotation marks? Maybe it's because of the highly political nature of quotation marks that I see in the media here in China, but it's more than that, too. If we have to put everything in quotes -- well, what's the point?

Also, I have to cut right to the chase when I get involved with stuff like this: if a theory is based on the social construction of knowledge/reality/language/whatever -- that stuff is the way it is because we make it the way it is -- what are the implications for somebody who believes there's a God somewhere above/behind/inside this mess?

I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer. A scholar I admire said "I am critical because I am Christian." This gives me hope, but I don't know quite if it would play out the same way in my own work, if I chose that path.

Zhejiang University

This week, I accepted a job teaching English at in the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University. ZJU is widely acknowledged as one of the best universities in China (most surveys, however subjective they may be, put it at #3, after Beijing and Qinghua Universities -- which, incidentally, are also known as Peking and Tsinghua U, using the old Wade-Giles romanization system).

Next fall, I'll be starting a new job there. The SIS includes 12 different research institutes, including literature, translation studies, German, Russian, Japanese, foreign language teaching, and discourse studies. I've been following the development of the Institute of Discourse and Cultural Studies for the last year or so, and it looks like they're doing some really cool stuff there. In fact, they are introducing a new international PhD program called "Communication and Contemporary China" next semester, and I am flirting with the idea of applying in the future. (There are a lot of variables, not the least of which is the fact that full-time teaching and full-time student-ing aren't exactly compatible.)

There are several attractive things about this program: first, it's a 3 years and research-based. In terms of time (to say nothing of money), that's appealing. Second, it would, I hope, give me a chance to work on my Chinese language more than I do now. The working language of the program is English, but there are language courses involved. Third, it might just be the perfect place for me to do the kind of research I've been mulling over, which is something about Chinese indie rock (for example: the use of English in Chinese indie rock, the construction of Chinese indie rock in "Western" media, "indie" discourse, etc.).

It's really too early to tell if this PhD program is right for me, but being at ZJU will, I hope, be a stimulating environment and give me a chance to explore whether this kind of thing is what I want to do in the future.

PS: On our recent trip to Hangzhou (where ZJU is), we went to the newly remodeled Foriegn Language Bookstore, where I found the mother lode of cheap applied linguistics books. Seriously. The entire TeacherSource series for about $4 apiece; the entire Cambridge Applied Linguistics series for about $3 apiece; the entire Oxford Introductions to Language Study series for about $1 apiece. In the US, the former two series are around $25-$35, the latter $15, but here they are reprinted by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and given China-friendly prices. I bought about 8 books, and I'll be back.

The Pronoun Battle for China's Soul

Every day, I preside over a bitter linguistic struggle for the hearts and minds of China's youth. My students are torn, absolutely torn, about whether to use "we" or "I" when they write from a first-person perspective, and their pronoun usage twists and turns all over the place as this struggle plays itself out.

A classic example was from a response to one of my questions about Fan Shen's article "The Classroom and the Wider Culture," in which the author mentions that, at least when he was a college student in China (late 1980s), the use of the word "I" was considered bad, or at least unnecessarily self-centered.

I got several responses like this (I'm paraphrasing):

Of course "I" is not a bad word in China. Our country is developing, and we should show our unique ideas and our individuality.

You see what I'm getting at. A number of these linguistically conflicted constructions show up in my students' writing, like As an English major, we need to study hard. Or we should relax ourself.

I tell them I don't care if they want to write with a we-voice or an I-voice, as long as they're consistent and grammatically correct. But consistency is hard to come by in life, these days.

Briefly

I've really been neglecting not only this blog, but the things that are supposed to be feeding it: reading academically, reflecting on my own teaching, and figuring out the PhD-or-Not question. As such, I have very little to say, except to lay out some tentative plans, like:

a. Tentative plan to interview Suresh Canagarajah for the Other Journal's education issue.

b. Yesterday, I read "Mixers lyricing in Hinglish " by Y. Kachru, which was an inspiration in terms of studying pop music from a World Englishes perspective. (Also heard a Chinese pop song, which after a quick Googling seems to be "你的甜蜜," on the radio, which included a repetition of the English phrase "Sorry doesn't mean anything.")

c. Today I bought volume three in the Collected Works of MAK Halliday, (Language and Linguistics) which I was surprised to find at my local Xinhua Bookstore! They actually have a pretty good selection of scholarly stuff in English.

d. I want to put together a proposal for this conference, something on American rock critics' perceptions of Lonely China Day (and/or other bands as relevant). I'd also really love to get a job at the university hosting the conference.

More soon, with any luck...

ESL Writing for Indie Rockers/Confidence

Here's an illuminating post from Miho Hatori's blog. Hatori was the musician who first made me interested in exploring the use of English as an L2 in pop music, with her great band Cibo Matto. She wrote:

I had a dinner with my old friend Ami and talked about blog.
I am shy about writing in English in public ( I love talking in English ).
I often got nervous that people judge me about my bad grammar.
But you know what ?
The year of 2008, my slogan is....
"Who cares ? I don't care. A horses ass is better than yours."
Cibo Matto song, Beef jerky.
Going back to my principle of Art.
I just need to write here for my own sake.

Anyway,
Ami said "Miho, Don't worrrrrrry !!!"
So I believe my old friend.

So, I will have wrong grammar on this blog.
You can correct my English if you want.
That's the reason of comment section for.

I do think it's interesting that somebody whose English lyrics are often brashly weird -- really this is one of her great strengths as a vocalist/lyricist -- would still express reticence about writing in English. Still, this post displays the kind of creativity and confidence that I've come to appreciate about Hatori's music over the years. And it's the kind of creativity and confidence I hope my students can learn to have regarding their own use of English.

---

Another great post from David Crystal, "On Learning English," offers some encouragement to learners as well. It reads, in part:

...if you have adopted English as one of your languages, then you are able to adapt it - to take personal ownership of it. One of the great joys of making headway in a new language is that you can use it to talk about what you want to talk about - and if that means inventing new words, to express your local experience, then do not hesitate to invent them. Just translating the culture of your school and town into English - such as the names of localities and personalities - will immediately add dozens of new expressions. Don't restrict yourself to the words that are already in the dictionaries. English is yours now...

World Englishes, Pop Musics, and Writing about Writing about Music

"I even have a column in Ebony magazine called 'Musings.'"
- Tracy Morgan as Tracy Jordan (NBC's 30 Rock), on the subject of whether or not he is illiterate.

• Writing about writing -- that is, studying professional, published writing -- seems like a dangerous thing to do if you want people to like you. I don't mean being a critic, writing about whether or not you think Joan Didion's new book is any good, because we seem to have a pretty well-accepted system set up for that kind of thing. I mean being a rhetorician, and making a study of people who write. This is on my mind because I've been kicking around (for some time now) the idea of studying music reviews -- how they're written and why, all their attendant tropes, expectations, and biases -- and it seems to me that what I'm thinking about is nothing short of, you know, kind of ripping on my colleagues. How could it not be? You know, something like "Sexism in Pitchforkmedia.com reviews" or "Music critics' portrayals of Japanese women." It's like to be "critical" in every possible sense of the word, yes? How can I do this? I specifically want to start looking at the way music critics write about Chinese rock bands.

A further question: does this fall under the general heading of "cultural studies," a discipline which I have claimed to hate for the last two years? Or is this simply rhetorical analysis? I have this scary feeling that it's cult-studs. Noooooooooo!

• Still doing a lot of thinking about a program of research that involves studying the use of English in rock/pop music in "non-English-speaking" countries (i.e., "expanding circle" countries, particularly China, because if you are interested in the global spread of English, how can you not study China? Plus, I live here).

Potential research questions include:
What influences a band/singer's choice to sing in English vs. any other language?

Codemixing in songs -- for example, throwing in English words like "yeah," "uh huh" or "come on" in a song that's otherwise not in English. Why?

How do fans react to the use of English in pop music?

How and why do bands/singers choose English pseudonyms/band names?

How do a country's language policy and planning decisions affect/interact with the use of English in pop music? (For example, the Singaporean government's enlisting of rappers in Speak Good English campaigns.)

How do English learners in China use English-language pop music (by Chinese artists and otherwise)? What about the weird pseudo-genre my students refer to as "English songs," which is basically songs in English that nobody outside China has ever heard and which are often translations of Chinese pop songs?

What I need to do to investigate this:

First and foremost - listen to more expanding circle pop music, esp. Chinese pop and rock. Need to find a balance between indie rock and big pop stars, but I'll have much easier access to China's indie rock bands if I want to actually interview musicians.

Find out who is doing research on this stuff. Obviously Pennycook is looking at language, identity, and hip-hop; I need to start trolling his bibliographies. Lily Kong looks at geography and pop in Singapore, but I haven't found anybody who is specifically looking at English + pop music + China. (Maybe this means I am original! Until some PhD student reads this blog and steals it!) Search back issues of World Englishes and other WE-related journals, and also relevant pop music-related journals.

Start writing more about it in a popular capacity (newspapers, magazines). Find some outlets who are interested in Chinese indie rock and start covering it for them! If possible, make trips to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and make contacts in the indie rock scenes. Make money while doing research! (...just call our toll-free number...)

Mystery of the (dry) Salty Peanut

The mystery: why is the Chinese word gan (土) inexplicably -- and frequently -- translated as everybody's favorite English swear word? I myself enjoy snacking on a local brand of packaged, salted peanuts, the label of which reads: "Salty to F*** the Peanut."

The mystery is solved by a couple of bloggers, including Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania.

Please visit these links if you're up for a frank discussion of 土, which is supposed to mean "dry," but often isn't translated that way, with hilarious results. Plenty of pictorial evidence.

The Language Log (UPenn)
The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation
Bokane.org
F***ing Stationery

esl vs efl

Maybe, just maybe, this is the case:

Purpose of ESL writing in the US: Teach Ss the conventions of English academic writing for use in "content" classes, in which they'll be graded by professors who are well-versed in "inner circle" English writing.
Purpose of EFL writing in China: Teach Ss formula for "a good essay" which will earn them high marks on the TEM and CET exams -- which will be graded by English teachers who may be grading them "Chinese-style*" -- therefore allowing them to graduate from college.

This isn't always true, but it's making me rethink the way I teach. This semester, I mostly taught the writing process and focussed on clearly expressing original thoughts and ideas. We've been going through it step by step, with, I'm sorry to add, little explicit grammar instruction. (Shamefully, I'll try to make up for this in coming weeks.)

Perhaps what the students need -- as much as it goes against my own training and beliefs -- is instruction that's heavy on "correctness." I need to do a lot more thinking about this!

* I don't mean this pejoratively; I just mean that in some cases, writing in a more "Chinese" style may be preferable to writing in a "Western" style. I'm too tired to explain this properly.

Every Coin Has Two Sides*

(*or, Every Chinese Student's Favorite Maxim)

Just now, I found myself unable to answer a student who asked me whether it's OK to argue both sides of an issue in an essay. I suddenly felt conflicted, even paralyzed, first thinking:

Of course you can't do that. If every essay argued two different sides of an issue, then every thesis statement would be "moderation is good."

(Or would it be "moderation has both good and bad aspects?")

But wait, is this cultural imperialism? You know, "you must take a stand, fight for your individual opinion, show why you are right like a good American..."

Then I started going through all the contrastive (now called intercultural!) rhetoric stuff: do I believe "Chinese logic is circular" -- thanks a lot, Kaplan 1966 --or not? And, do I have to teach American writing conventions, or do I leave room for them to write "Chinese-style" essays in English? And how can I tell the difference between Chinese rhetoric and poor "Western" rhetoric?

And then I got even more concerned: Am I even teaching them about how to come up with thesis statements at all? So far we've talked a lot about "topics," and I've told them that their thesis needs to be supported by detailed, specific examples, but how much time have I put in to making sure they know how to craft worthwhile thesis statements? Is every thesis statement simply going to be "we should do X" or "X is bad?"

Which led to the other ultimate concern which plagues me every time I speak with the other sophomore English writing teacher, who focuses more on mechanics in his classes: Have I gone too far altogether by focusing on ideas and arguments instead of sentence structure, mechanics, grammar, vocabulary, diction?

I have a long way to go if I ever want to get as far as this guy...(ha ha!)

Chinese English (pt 2): "I have right to speak English in this way."

After my students read Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue" (yes, I realize this is utterly unoriginal in terms of comp class readings), I asked them this question:

Amy Tan believes that there is not only one way to speak English, but many different “Englishes.” Do you agree or disagree? We know about “American English” and “British English,” but can you describe “Chinese English?”

I expected that I'd get a lot of answers telling me the Chinese English (or "Chinglish," as some call it) is sub-standard and that students should work hard to improve their English. Why did I expect this? Because a lot of times, students like to give the answers they think we want to hear. I've read a ton of freewrites that end with something like "I know I must be a good student and study harder."

Actually, though, about 90% of the responses concluded the following basic points (my paraphrase):

1. Chinese English is as valid as any other English.
2. Chinese people can understand each other when they use Chinese English, so what's the problem?
3. As long as the basic meaning comes across, it's not necessary to use "correct" English grammar.

some even added:
4. Chinese English will eventually become known as a standard English*.

One of my favorite responses reads, in part:

"Sometime we use the wrong tense that American cannot understand what we say but we think we do the good work. And most of us pronunciation is not correct. It is easy misunderstanding. But I have right to speak English in this way."

Some responses indicated a pretty sophisticated understanding of language (as in, who decides what is the right way to speak English anyway?), while some were more nationalistic. One thing's clear: these students have no problem with Chinese English. What does this mean for me as a teacher of "academic English writing" in China? I don't know yet...

* I'll also mention here that almost all of my students, when unscientifically polled, believe in the inevitability of Chinese replacing English as the "international language" in the future.

Briefly: OWL

The more I use Purdue's OWL (online writing lab), the more I appreciate it. It's a rich resource for students and teachers alike. I just did a lesson on plagiarism based mostly on stuff I found there. (Irony alarm goes off.)

More to come on Chinese English; I have a lot to say about it and so do my students.

Starting to think about next semester's courses. I've been really re-energized by the book Teaching Large Multilevel Classes by Natalie Hess. The schedule here is still not ideal -- seeing students only once a week for speaking, and even worse, only twice a month for writing -- but I think we can do some cool stuff next term.

All night lesson planning extravaganza

4 am, Beijing Time:

I'm in the middle of what may become my first all-nighter since I was a junior in college.

Note to self: don't do this ever again.