Using Theories

Putting together a presentation - suddenly a theory/orientation I didn't really like a whole lot when I first heard about it popped into my head -- "hey, if you use this, it will help prove your point." Theoretical pragmatism: using what works without being religiously devoted to any particular theory.

Critical Pedagogy As Oppression

"I came to realize that my implementation of critical pedagogy without taking into consideration students' goals, needs, and expectations was an imposition of my belief and that it was antithetical to my goal of student empowerment. I recommend that when attempting to implement a pedagogy, teachers should understand the limitations of the pedagogy and adapt to unique implementation challenges each class presents."

Jungmi Kim, "Implementing Critical Pedagogy in an English as a Second Language Writing Classroom"

SEE ALSO:

"WHY DOESN'T THIS FEEL EMPOWERING? Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy" Elisabeth Ellsworth, Harvard Educational Review, Fall 1989 (electronic version not available, but you can read the abstract)

Professor Tony's English Classroom

This site is really interesting. Honestly it looks like there is a ton of stuff here and this could be a really, really interesting site for research on English writing in China. Professor Tony's English Classroom is a site for Chinese students of English writing, and

"its purpose is to provide the best possible help to any and all people here in China that want to improve their English. And the best part of it all is that everything is FREE OF CHARGE!"

TESOL Islamia

I seem to recall this site being down for quite a while, but I stumbled across it again today: TESOL Islamia is a one of few resources that takes the relationship between ESL and religion seriously.

UPDATE: It's down again. Someone needs to get it up and running!

China Holistic English

Up late working on a couple papers due tomorrow -- I see that Niu and Wolff, whose aggressive articles on Chinese EFL teaching (esp. the plight of the native English speaking teacher) have been both enjoyable and upsetting to me over the past few years, are gearing up for a pretty huge push with their whole philosophy over at China Holistic English.

While I'm really happy to see that someone is publishing a desperately needed book -- their forthcoming Teaching EFL in China: What Every Foreign Teacher Should Know Before They Go -- I'm disappointed to see that a) it is not being published by a reputable academic publisher and b) at first glance it does not appear to be substantially revised from the previous articles they have put up on their website.

Niu and Wolff are saying some really important things about a really important sector of global ELT, but their work frequently comes off as recalcitrant and unrealistic. I don't mean to be harsh, but hope their new book(s) will prove to be otherwise.

Some data on my SSLW project (Part I)

Looking at the results of my survey "English Writing and Futher Study Abroad."

n = 76 Chinese university students, so this is by no means a huge sample. Also, note that these students are among the "best and brightest" in the entire country -- most of them either scored in the top 100 or so among millions of other students in their province taking the college entrance exam, or performed so well in high school that they were invited to join an honors program at a top university without taking the exam. These are the kinds of students who are almost inevitably going on to grad school.

75% are in their second year of university (although many of those identified this year as their "first" year, because they spent one year at a mainland university before beginning year 1 of a 3-year Bachelors' degree in Hong Kong).

25% currently attend one particular "top 3" university in China, and it is those 19 students I want to focus on in the follow-up interviews. 67% currently attend a university in Hong Kong, and the rest attend other universities in China.

Take a look at this (click for a closer look)

49% are seriously interested in attending grad school in North America, and 42% are "maybe" interested. Only 2 of the 76 students have no interest in studying in North America. (3 are already in grad school there.) Ambitions are high - 91% have some interest.

Surprisingly, 70% of these students had taken an English writing course in college or high school. I suspect this data is skewed by the high number of students in this special mainland-HK program. They are given lots of English instruction in preparation for entering an English-medium university. I don't think I want to emphasize this in my write-up; I will mention who the students are (as above), but this statistic doesn't really seem all that important. (Maybe it is?)

This is interesting, too - click for a closer view.

I asked the students what kind of writing they felt their English classes in the past had prepared them for. As I expected, the highest percentage (58.9%) said standardized English writing tests in China. I was kind of surprised that the next highest number (they could choose more than one) was English for "real-world" uses such as emails and letters -53.4% said that. Writing for foreign standardized tests wasn't too low (42.5%), and the lowest two were writing in English for academic purposes in university in either China or an English-speaking country. Only 34.2% of students felt their English classes had prepared them for the writing they need to do in Chinese universities, and only 32.9% felt prepared for writing in an English-medium university in an English-speaking country.

I'm now reading responses to the question:

In your opinion, is there a difference between the English writing you do (or have done) at your Chinese university and the English writing you would need to do in your future study at a North American University? What, if anything, is the difference?

We'll see what comes up!

A few links

Lots of laughs at The "Blog" of Unnecessary Quotation Marks and Apostrophe Abuse.

Also recently saw this site -- Chinglish.com -- actually it's mostly a translation service, but if you poke around you'll see some interesting stuff about issues of English in China.

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Planning to submit an abstract to the EMP Pop Conference again this year (theme: music and technology) and feel better about this one than any others I have had rejected -- we'll see.

Getting Schooled

Lunch with students departing for the UK, June 2009

ME (sympathetically to student who isn't great at English): So, I guess English must be, like, your third language, right? (Since I figure she speaks a local dialect and Mandarin also)

STUDENT (pausing to count on fingers): I can speak....five languages.

ME: (shameful silence)

World Englishes vs Contrastive Rhetoric

Obvs, CR has moved beyond "Chinese people think in a circular way, whereas whiteys think in a logical way" (I mean, they call it intercultural rhetoric now), but the point, or a big point, I think, is this:

Written* "China English," whatever it is, does not exist only because of the Chinese language or even the "Chinese way of thinking" (once a common answer from Kaplan et al, now common answer from Chinese students/teachers/etc) -- it also exists because of language attitudes and ideology, educational policies, educational cultures, expressions of identity, the internet, internationalization of English, increased acceptance of language mixing in China, standardized tests, and idiosyncratic choices made by writers (professional or not). And probably a lot of other things.

(*I want to qualify these because I am not really looking at spoken CE, currently -- it is certainly a reality and in some ways a lot easier to identify in terms of pronunciation, intelligibility, unique phonology, etc)

"English Songs" as a Genre of Chinese Music?

Seriously, how does a list like this get created??? This is a list of "English Songs" by a blogger known as happyguy. What is going on here? How do these songs get so popular in China? Is it only marketing? Why do Chinese people love Richard Clayderman when no one else in the world has ever heard of him? Anyway, I might have an outlet to explore this sometime soon. Until then, puzzle over this list with me.

Country road, take me home
Song--Tell me why (Declan Galbraith)
Edelweiss
Auld Lang Syne
Big Big Girl
Smoke Rings In The Dark
La Isla Bonita(Alizee)
Scarborough Fair -Sarah Brightman
Bressanone
Somewhere Only We Know
Only Love
My love
Sailing
My heart will go on
You took my heart away　
When you love someone
Hero
Take Me To Your Heart
The day you went away (M2M )
Yesterday once more(昨日重现)
The Straw Hat
MY OH MY
Pretty Boy
Casablanca
Say you say me
Seasons In The Sun

Search Magazine on SIL and Christian Linguistics

Michael Erard explores the (sometimes uneasy) relationship between the academic community and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a Christian missionary organization which seeks to record the world's lesser-known languages. Read the story at Search magazine (formerly Science and Spirit) here. You might (not) remember my mention of SIL from a couple years ago here.

Where English Isn't

Has anybody done a study on the countries/regions of the world where English is spoken very little or not at all? It would be really interesting to explore how and why that is.

I'm convinced, by the way, that a good way to find something novel to study is to just take the opposite of stuff that is being talked about a lot, because the flipside of a topic can be illuminating.

For example:

Multilingualism is hot -- study monolingualism.

The global spread of English is hot -- study places that don't have English.

Communicative Language Teaching is hot (in China) -- study people who persistently use the Grammar-Translation method.

And so on.

Notes on China English

Just got done with a productive meeting with the student who's been helping me with this "State of China English Research" project. Interesting to note he is a NNS and I am an NS, yet he supports NS-based pedagogy and I support NNS-based pedagogy. Irony!

Nearing the end, or really the beginning, of this project, which will be presented in Ningbo in a couple of days, a few observations:

1. Almost every author writes about the distinction between China English (中国英语) and Chinese English aka Chinglish (中式英语) -- but there is little empirical evidence given toward actually describing/defining these two things. I'm inclined to agree with Hu (2004), who says that China English - Chinglish is a continuum, and one which is not (yet) well-defined. Of course, she doesn't actually give a concrete description based on empirical evidence either.

2. And really, no one has. Nearly every article (with the exception of maybe 5%) contains only anecdotal examples of CE, very often quoted from Ge (1980), the first person to propose the idea. These are terms like "the four modernizations" and "Mr. Science." Most articles say CE has unique vocabulary, syntax, grammar, pronunciation, discource, etc, but almost no one even comes close to defining how it is unique in any of these areas.

3. Overall, the percentage of articles based on empirical research is higher in international journals than in Chinese journals, but not much higher.

4. There is not much overlap between which scholars publish in international journals and which publish in Chinese journals, although with very few exceptions, all researchers are Chinese. The significant exceptions are Hu Xiaoqiong and Jiang Yajun. The most prolific authors on CE in Chinese journals (Jin Huikang, 5 articles, Liu Xiangqing, 3 articles and Qiu Lizhong, 3 articles) do not publish in international journals.

5. Overwhelmingly, articles on CE are not published in "key" or "core" Chinese journals. I haven't done the final tally, but I think there are  at most 5 out of 105 articles.

6. On a related note, I count only 3-5 authors from key universities in China. This means essentially that those who have some degree of power and influence in the field are not, by and large, pursuing this work. This suggests that there is not much interest in promoting China English for pedagogical (or other) purposes at the national level. (This jives with Li (2007), who says that essentially only researchers support a China English - based pedagogy, while most teachers, administrators, testing bodies, government officials, and parents don't).

7. Most authors seem to argue for the benefits CE will bring to two fields: English teaching in China and translation of Chinese to English. I haven't done a count but I think pedagogy is quite a bit higher than translation in terms of numbers. A lot of the articles also seem to have no clear goals or implications apart from arguing that "China English is an objective reality" (a title of one of the articles) and that it is in some vague way a good thing.

Those are the observations for today. Tomorrow is day to write...a whole lot.

Looking ahead

Next week: finish preparing for presentation about the state of China English research

in 2 weeks: design questionnaire for my SSLW presentation (just accepted! 1st week of Nov at Arizona State)

July & August: read some books and write reviews (mentioned earlier); follow-up interviews for SSLW project

September: Start classes! So far signed up for doctoral seminar, theory & research in ESL, theory & research in second language writing, and interviews in education research (may need to drop that one).

 

Notes to self:

* You still have to file a bunch of paperwork in order to legally live in Canada.

* 2 conferences a year is p l e n t y. Try to rotate between SSLW, AAAL, TESOL, and IAWE. (Although tentatively, I'd like to go to AILIA 2011 if possible.)

* 1 book review a year is probably enough, too.

* It would be nice to not do much next summer. Isn't that the whole point of working in education?

Doing What You Do and Being Who You Are

Is there a need for non-Chinese people to do research on China English?

Most of the academic writing (that gets publshed in respected international journals) about China English is done (quite naturally, I'd say) by people from mainland China. (Though most of them do not live and work here.)

What is personally at stake when somebody does academic research? One might say that Chinese TESOL professionals / scholars/teachers have a vested interest in understanding China English because it is somehow a "part of them" -- it gets at important personal, national, international and professional issues that are important to them.

But, since I'm gearing up to do a PhD that is focused on China English and ESL writing, what is at stake for me when I do research about China English? Many of the same things. I am an American English teacher/researcher/whatever, and I (currently) am a part of this bizarre "foreign expert" system here in China -- my experience, too, is a part of what makes China English. This research also gets at personal, international, and professional issues that are important to me.

I've been thinking lately about the huge importance of monolingualism, specifically English monolingualism, in shaping the way English has been taught around the world for years. If knowledge is personal, like I read in that Michael Polanyi book they made me read at SPU, then I think I have some compelling reasons to look into China English from my (American) ("native-speaker") (monolingual) (etc) perspective. Inasmuch as English is "my" language, any variety of the language is interesting to me. As a monolingual speaker of English who is at least dimly aware of the way the language has changed and is changing globally, I now feel a greater urgency to help people -- not only my students in China, but "my people," "back home" -- understand how the language works, or maybe even how Language works.

When I see the sheer number of Chinese surnames on the articles I'm reading these days, I get a little intimidated*, and worried that maybe I am getting into the wrong gig. But I think I have some reasons to be doing this. I also think that if I am pursuing knowledge for the right reasons (let me know what they are if you know...some that I can come up with are a. it's interesting b. it can potentially help people c. it might make the world a better place) it's maybe not something I really need to worry about too much.

(* I realize this sounds borderline The Boy Who Cried Reverse Racism or some crap like that. I don't mean that I'm somehow afraid that nobody is going to let me Join the Club because I'm not Chinese. I just mean it's something I've noticed and I am a little worried that not speaking fluent Chinese makes me a poser. But ultimately I don't think it does, for a couple of reasons mentioned above.)

Andy Kirkpatrick Breaks it Down

From his book World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching (slightly changed here but mostly his exact words):

a - Variation is natural, normal, and continuous, and ELT professonals must establish a tolerance and understanding of variation

b - Prejudice against varieties is likely to occur

c - the differences between all varities, both native and nativized, are similar and comparable 

d - the specific teaching and learing contexts and specific needs of learners in those contexts should determine the variety to be taught

e - multilingual non-native teachers represent ideal teachers in many ELT contexts.

I strongly agree with (e) and wonder where it leaves me as a monolingual native teacher. As I think about my future career, I hope I'll still be "in the trenches" at least part of the time, actually in a classroom teaching something to students who want to learn English --  but I'm not sure what my role should be. Right now I feel like I can do the most good as a mediator between the Chinese educational context and the North American one, but when I think about the "humanitarian" side of ELT (if there is one - it's hard to say), I sometimes think helping elite students get into elite universities isn't my ultimate goal. I'm attracted to the idea of teacher training for local English teachers in "less-deleloped" areas, but when I think about that the ghost* of Robert Phillipson starts moaning in my ear about imperialism.

(*He is not actually dead)

How to Improve Your Oral English

Q from Chinese college student:

"How can I improve my oral English?"

Best possible A from monolingual English teacher:

1. Make a list of 5-10 Chinese people you know who you believe speak English well, or at least better than you do.

2. Ask them that question. Because, really. I mean, think about it.

May 3 Number Rundown

238 is the number we occupy on the waitlist for UBC housing

6 weeks of teaching remaining [Hong Kong Culture / English Writing / Public Speaking / Communication Strategies for students preparing to study abroad]

2  conference proposals pending [1 - Study of what Chinese college students preparing to study in North America want from English writing instrution  2- "Does China English Matter to China?" - A look at what's being published within China on the subject of China English]

1 monster book review to write this summer [Handbook of World Englishes for Linguistlist]

1 other interesting book I hope to read & review this summer [Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue: Pedagogical and Ethical Dilemmas]

PhD - the Decision

The Final Scorecard

Accepted:
Purdue - with TAship ($12k stipend for 50% time teaching job)

UBC - with fellowship ($16k CAD stipend for 4 years)

Arizona State Applied Linguistics - with TAship ($12k stipend for 50% time teaching job)

Not Accepted:
University of Washington English

Penn State Applied Linguistics

Withdrew my application from waitlist:
Arizona State Rhetoric and Linguistics

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This was by no means an easy decision, but I am delighted to say that Sarah and I will be moving to the beautiful city of Vancouver, British Columbia, where I will be studying and working with a small, dedicated group of people in a field I love.

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I am planning to start a new website over the summer which will eliminate the need for various blogs and stuff that I currently have going, so look for that later. In the meantime, let's all do good work in the places God has seen fit to scatter us around this planet.

Why Teaching Language is Hard

...you can't just be good at teaching -- you have to know everything, because people use language for everything.