Review

My review of Christian and Critical English Language Educators in Dialogue is in press with the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. I'm really happy to be publishing this!

Is the Answer in the Question?

Imagine the following two items on a survey.

A) Read this a text written by a Chinese person and published in China. Please identify any vocabulary, grammar, phrasing, sentence, word choice, etc. which strikes you as nonstandard, unusual, or unique in any way.

or

B) Read this text. Please identify any vocabulary, grammar, phrasing, sentence, word choice, etc. which strikes you as nonstandard, unusual, or unique in any way.

I'm beginning to think that you could do a study comparing the results of A and B. For my purposes, I may want to go with the wording for B...

I'm still thinking that Chinglish is in the eye of the beholder. A sign on the building I work in reads "WELCOME ANYTIME PARKING." In China, that would be Chinglish. In Vancouver, it's just a sign.

Employment

I got a job teaching a real live undergraduate course at UBC this summer - "Language Across the Curriculum in Multilingual Classrooms: Secondary." May 17-June 25. Yeah!

Remaking of Face

Ouyang, Huhua (2000) Remaking of face and community of practices: An ethnographic study of what ELT reform means to local and expatrate teachers in today's China. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong.

Read it here.

Hugely eye-opening to anyone who is or is considering becoming a foreign teacher in China. I read chapter 3, which is about the students' and administrators' complaints about foreign teachers and how they go about voicing them. Another major part (which I didn't read) is an explanation that Chinese universities are based on the danwei ("work unit") system, which is a kind of Maoist/communist community, which doesn't necessarily hold as much currency in the job market in today's China.

It's stuff I didn't really know at all -- definitely worth a read as an explication of why the "foreign expert" system is deeply flawed, and (in my view) why other emerging models of NEST/NNEST integration (I promise to stop citing Ningbo and Shantou as soon as I learn about others) may be better.

Apparently was published as a book in 2004, but maybe in Chinese - I can't find any references.

Thinking about my possible role in the future as a teacher-trainer / someone with etic/emic knowledge of ELT in China. Don't want it to define my career, but I think it could be a rewarding part of my future work.

Chinglish debate is about what, exactly?

I feel like a debate on terminology (we should call it X vs Y) or even preferred terms (X is bad English, Y is good English) obscures the fact that a) English in China does have its own characteristics, b) People who think it's bad also think anything other than inner circle Englishes are bad, and c) It needs to be described if there is any chance of changing b. Then again, that whole Ebonics debate didn't turn out so well.

Books on China/English - to be contd

Bolton - Chinese Englishes (2003)

Adamson - China's English: A History of English in Chinese Education (2004)

Liu - English Language Teaching in China: New Approaches, Perspectives, and Standards (2008)

Lo Bianco - China and English: Globalization and the Dilemmas of Identity (2009)

You - Writing in the Devil's Tongue: A History of English Composition in China (2010)

Feng - English Language in Education and Societies Across Greater China (in press)

Journals with short lead times

Selected ournals with an average time of less than one year (preferably closer to 6 months) from submission to publication, from "How to Get Published in ESOL and Applied Linguistics Serials" by TESOL, 2007

listed in months for review / months till publication / total average time from submission to publication

Obv. some are more prestigious than others; I haven't heard of some of these

Asian Journal of ELT - 2-3 / 6-9 / 8-12 (CUHK http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ajelt/)

Assessing Writing: 3 / 3 / 6

Canadian Modern Lg Review: 5 / 2/ 7

Essential Teacher: 2 / 3 / 5

Journal of Asia TEFL: 2 /3 / 5 (http://www.asiatefl.org/journal/journal1.html)

Journal of Basic Writing: 1 / 4/ 5

JLIE: 2 / 6 / 8

JSLW: 3 / 3 - 12 / 6 - 15 (mentioned bc I should aim for this one)

The Language Teacher: 2 / 2 / 4 (JALT http://jalt-publications.org/tlt/)

System: 2 / 10 / 12

TESL Canada: 4 / 4 / 8

TESL-EJ: 2 / 4 / 6

Reflections on ELT: 4 / 3 / 7 (Singapore http://www.nus.edu.sg/celc/publications/reflections.htm)

"There is Something Furtive"

Suresh Canagarajah's 2007 article, "There is Something Furtive About the Behavior of Evangelicals in TESOL," touches on themes later discussed in his chapters of Christian and Critical Language Educators in Dialogue -- which should be required ready for any MATESOL student at a religious institution. The whole article is worth a read.

Perhaps we should propose a semantic shift and ask that our critics change their pejorative terms for a positive experience. Evangelical teachers are not being furtive, stealthy, deceptive, and separatist. They periodically bond together and recharge themselves in safe houses for a very social/public mission that is holistic, integrated, embedded, all pervading, deeply ingrained, transformative—in short, incarnational.

P.S. Looking at a review of the book Controversies in Applied Linguistics, I came across this quote:

No doubt Phillipson would argue that the dominant threat of linguistic imperialism is such a vital issue in the world today that adopting a measured, respectful approach is not appropriate and that it is only by aggressively attacking those who are perceived to be defending this hegemony of English that one can hope to achieve anything in the struggle against the new imperialism. I remain unconvinced.

Chinese School - BBC 4 Documentary

Filmed in 2008 (the only full calendar year I was in China!) in Anhui province.

Caught an episode on TV yesterday and plan to watch the rest ASAP!

Sometimes TESOL feels like

white academics arguing with each other about what's best for poor people in other countries.

CE/CR idea

China English and Contrastive Rhetoric: The Challenge to (non-Chinese / Western) ESL Writing Teachers.

Yeah?

Notes on Fulbright to China

Country info: http://us.fulbrightonline.org/program_country.html?id=22

2-3 years of studying Mandarin at the college level required!

Host institutions for Education

Anhui Normal

Beijing Normal

Huazhong Normal (Wuhan)

Nanjing Normal

NE Normal (Changchun)

SWU (Chongqing)

NW Normal (Lanzhou)

Sichuan Normal (Chengdu)

Hosts for Linguistics (maybe not suitable for my project)

BFSU

B Lg & Culture U

Huazhong

SISU

XISU

Years of Chinese lg study required to be considered for Critical Lg Enhancement Award: 2

The equivalent of one year of college-level language study includes but is not limited to:

a summer of intensive language study,

two semesters of study (audited or for credit)

or a year of private tutoring.

A typical academic year is 9 months (36 weeks). A typical language course is 3-5 hours per week or 108-180 hours per academic year of language instruction.

Applicants may not count use of Rosetta Stone, conversational “language exchange” or web-based/distance learning classes as part of their one year of study. Study outside of the above mentioned categories will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Super in-depth fine print on the CLEA: https://us.fulbrightonline.org/thinking_clea.html#overview

2011-2012 ideas

2011 is the year I plan to start my PhD research in China. Aside from the fact that the project is still really nebulous, here are some thoughts on things I (might) want to do during that time.

July - August: Lead a team for Amity Foundation's Summer English Program (volunteer English teacher to middle school English teachers in rural areas). This would be really cool, but Sarah is not keen on teaching, so trying to figure out how we could swing it.

August 23 - 28: AILA, Beijing

Sept - January (or entire schoolyear): Research based at a Chinese university.

Here's where it gets sketchy -- which university? Some options....

- Get my old job at Zhejiang University (or even Shaoxing!?)

- Go to one of UBC's partner universities:

Fudan

Peking

Shanghai Jiaotong

Uni. of Nottingham Ningbo (already know some people there)

- UBC also has some partners in Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong (didn't know much about their Eng ed/applx, but see that they do focus on World Englishes and have some well-known faculty) and Hong Kong University. The latter has a well-established research unit on English Education in China - could be an awesome place to be based, but not sure about the cost of living. Good thing about HK is their academic year matches up with UBC's, but Chinese universities don't.

Anyway! This is just the beginning. If I had to rank my preferences at this moment:

1. HKU

2. UNNC

3. ZJU

4. CUHK

5. Fudan/Peking/SHJT

FUNDING POSSIBILITIES:

- UBC scholarships from research office

- Fulbright? (Look into this) Would change the possible host institutions.

- Does the Chinese gov't give any money to stuff like this? Look into it

- RA for my profs research projects in China (Duff, Shi)

- Work PT at whichever university I go to (would have to be FT to get accommodation at ZJU, not sure if working for accommodation $ is the same at all these places) - would be great to get some undergrad courses at an EMI institution in Asia

Phillipson on Nottingham

One wonders how it can be that monolinguals are seen as experts in second language acquisition. I fear that this foundational principle is carried over into the export of English-medium universities worldwide. Thus the University of Nottingham’s subsidiaries – its campuses in Malaysia and at Ningbo, China - give the clear impression that what is being exported, even in degrees in such subjects as Education, English, Applied Linguistics, and Content and Language Integrated Learning, is not only the British English medium but also British content. The Ningbo website proclaims: ‘All undergraduate and postgraduate programmes …. are conducted entirely in English with the same teaching and evaluation standards as at the University of Nottingham, UK.’ Can this really be considered culturally, linguistically or pedagogically appropriate in Asia, with teachers either from Nottingham or controlled by Nottingham? If such campuses are a meeting-place for UK expertise and Asian needs and realities, is the interaction uni-directional, or open and reciprocal, and how is the project being implemented and perceived?

-Robert Phillipson, from "Disciplines of English and disciplining by English" in the Asian EFL Journal, Dec 2009.

Duly noted. As far as I know, of the 4 professors in the English Studies unit at Ningbo, only one is "monolingual" in the way Phillipson means, which seems like a good thing for sure; of the 50 or so tutors in the first-year EAP program, many are English monolinguals, but a fair number are not.

It's interesting to compare this setup to a place like Shantou University's English Language Centre, which has an equal number of "foreign" and "local" teachers and is set up so that both groups work together. That system seems more amenable to the "open and reciprocal" ideal Phillipson favors. Then again, I'm willing to bet a degree from Nottingham holds a lot more cache in China than a degree from Shantou does. I'm not arguing for or against anything here, I just think it's kind of interesting to see the different models for ELT or English-medium education that are emerging in China now. I'd love to learn about others as well, but these two are the ones I'm most familiar with.

Finally, the bold text above (my emphasis) is an example of why I can never get 100% on board with Phillipson, even when I agree with the general thrust of his arguments.

Conferences 2010 and beyond

TESOL (March 21-27) - Doctoral Forum poster session accepted, professional development scholarship awarded (free registration for conference and pre-conference institutes), but flying to Boston is not cheap. Not sure I'll attend and have to make up my mind by Jan 21. ACCEPTED! (BUT GOT SICK AND MISSED MY PRESENTATION.)

EMP Pop Conference (April 15 - 18) - submitted abstract in Dec, will hear back in Jan. I have been rejected by these guys 3 or 4 times and would really, really like to make it this year. REJECTED! AS ALWAYS!

BC TEAL (April 30 - May 1) - Got a cool idea for a worshop on world Englishes and professional development which I'm sure would be accepted, but not sure I'd have time to do it. Still, it's after spring courses end, so maybe I should go for it....ACCEPETED!

IAWE (July 25-27). I'm on the committee (it's in Vancouver), and am scheming a paper with a classmate. Deadline FEB 28. ACCEPTED!

AILA 2011 (in Beijing, August 2011) - Brainstorming China English stuff - was thinking about trying to do a panel but not sure it's possible. Deadline Feb 28 (Actually Feb 27 in USA). ACCEPTED!

Prisencolinensinainciusol

Anyone know where the myth that this song is meant to represent "what American English sounds like to foreigners" or whatever? Seems a little fishy. Is this idea that far removed from saying that Chinese sounds like "ching chang chong," which is to say, it's totally wrong?

The song is pretty great, though.

See more funny videos and Music Videos at Today's Big Thing.

NES/NNES Shibboleths?

I'm almost positive

* use of articles

* use of prepositions

Maybe

* -s for third person verbs

* -ed for past tense verbs

* þ and θ pronunciation

What is an English dept for in a non-English speaking country?

Does the focus on humanities/cultural studies impede the improvement of ELT by conflating Western civilization, literature, etc. with actual everyday usage of language? Maybe that's not even an issue.

See: "English departments in Chinese universities: Purpose and function." by Chen Zhaoxuang.

TEML isn't

Pennycook and Coutan-Marin (2005), in an article of the same name, refer to the evangelical Christian practice of English teaching as "Teaching English as a Missionary Language." This is an inconsistent use of the TE(x)L acronym. In common usage, (x) is an adjective modifying language (think of EAL, ESL, EFL -- additional, second, and foreign, respectively) and referring to the learners' relationship to the language. TEML suggests that English is being taught for the purpose of later being used, by the learners, as a language for missionary work, which, while such a thing is possible, is not at all what Pennycook and Coutan-Marin are talking about.

I'm just saying.

PS - this article, or at least the version of it I can see online, contains a completely fake quote from George Bush about non-Christians "burning in hell." Did the authors bother to consider that if the piece they quoted was listed under "humor" on an atheist website, it might just be, you know, a joke?

Bibliographies I Would Like to Assemble Someday

-- Comprehensive Bibliography of articles on China English (as a variety of English -- not just English in China) -- published in both English and Chinese. (I was on my way to doing this and then I lost a bunch of data -- still hope to do it within the next 12 month)

-- Critical approaches to critical pedagogy -- both research-based and conceptual papers critiquing traditional concepts of critical pedagogy. (Cuz maybe it's been reified enough for us to start talking about it as "traditional") Important to have sources that are explicitly in favor of CP and those skeptical of it, not only one side.

-- Variety of perspectives on religion and TESOL. Separate sections: Christianity and TESOL (specifically interested in a variety of perspectives on how Christianity and ELT are integrated, mainstreaming/making explicit Christian perspectives, goals, purposes of ELT, etc.) Islam and TESOL, other relgions and TESOL (what's out there?).

-- World Englishes / EFL in pop music. (English as a Language of Popular Music??? ELPM?)