East-West Station

To kick off, here’s a nicely provocative comment from a Chinese lady on the Dalian Xpat forum…

most of foreigners in china are rubbish(except those who are assigned to work here),they cant support themselves in their own countries and that is why most of them are english teachers (or other languages),coz they can do nothing but teaching their own languages. china is just like a dump(but i love it),so welcome those rubbish from different countries.

and this was followed by a comment from a Russian

Nice comment, I totally agree
(At least I’m not an English teacher)

Well, as I have written before, I am used to comments like this and I suppose there is some justification for them. There’s no smoke without fire, as the old adage has it, and some of the English “teachers” I have met over the years have been unqualified, psychotic, alcoholic, incompetent etc etc. But but but…the majority are normal, likable, interesting and decent people who are capable of teaching English very well. (Just like me! Shucks.)

It should also be said that some “English teaching” does verge on the pointless, particularly when teachers are stuck in, and then stuck with, a class of students who don’t want to be there and indeed often have no good reason to be there other than that the lessons are a parental or governmental requirement. I am lucky enough to be able to avoid teaching classes like these. I teach motivated university students, businesspeople, and adorable little kids.

I am an English teacher. It is my job and it is part of my identity. When people ask me what I do, I say I am an English teacher. I suppose I could, if I was feeling poncy, reply instead that “I teach literature and applied linguistics at a University” but that would be, well, poncy.

Anyways, a couple of weeks ago, via the wonderful haohao report, I came across an interesting article that both analysed and criticised that bally rotter the Chinabounder. In case you know him not, Chinabounder is (was) a young English teacher from the UK who wrote what became an infamous blog about his womanising in Shanghai. He then became the victim of a storm of indignation and media curiosity when a certain Dr Zhang, a university psychology lecturer, demanded he be hunted down and kicked out of China for humiliating and mistreating Chinese.

The article was from a site called The Middle Kingdom Life which has the subheading Perspectives on Living and Teaching in China. It is run by a few people but there is a Dr Greg (Gregory Mavrides, Ph.D.)who does most of the writing and moderating. In his own words… Dr. Mavrides is an American psychoanalyst who has been working in China as a professor and mental health consultant since August 2003.

I left a comment saying, more or less, that while Chinabounder is a prat he does have some insightful points to make about China and Chinese society. But that’s by the by, what I want to focus on is the Doc’s response and the point he made about English teachers in China. He said…

If Chinabounder’s situation was a relatively rare one, there wouldn’t have been any reason to write an article about it. In fact, he is a very common type of male foreign English teacher in China and I just used him as an example, as he decided to go public with his adventures.

I think the claim that the bounder is “a very common type” of English teacher is unfair and way off the mark and I commented back

I have been in Dalian for two years now and have hung out with an awful lot of, mostly male, English teachers and have never met anyone who sleeps with lots of Chinese women and brags about it. I have some colleagues who are young, male, and horny and in some cases absolutely smitten by Chinese femininity, yes, but they don’t sleep around and “break hearts”. They mostly joke about how all the beautiful girls are out of their league! Most of them are after a serious girlfriend…just like everywhere else! Anyway, I think you have an unfairly poor opinion of male English teachers in China, you even use “English teacher” in scare quotes…I do not think Bounder is representative of anything but a tiny tiny minority of English teachers. That’s my experience anyway.

To which the Doc replied

From the situation you describe in Dalian, it sounds like a very special, even unique, city in regard to foreign English teachers. We’ll have to investigate that for future editions of the guide.

This sounded distinctly sarcy to me so I tried to post this comment in response…

I must beg to differ. I am assuming your comment is not intended to slyly point out that I am wrong in my judgment of English teachers in Dalian and am taking it at face value. So, it seems to me extremely unlikely that Dalian is somehow unique…I mean, why should it be? Also, I have talked to English teachers who have worked in Ningbo, Shanghai, Jinan, Beijing, Changchun, Chongqing etc, and they all say that Dalian is very nice, but none of their stories suggest that the “English teaching community” is significantly different than the one here. Could I therefore suggest the point that it is not that Dalian is unique, it is that your opinion of English teachers is unfairly low? Cheers for now.

but the Doc censored it. That is, he wouldn’t allow the comment to stay on his site. More about why not later.

Anyway, this little to-and-fro then prompted another article by the Doc called What Exactly Is An English Teacher?. In this, Doc expanded on his previous comment

And, for the record, I have absolutely nothing against English teachers: they were certainly among my favorite in high school. It’s just that I don’t think it’s reasonable to refer to anyone who can speak English as an “English teacher” (even if they’re being paid as one in China), hence my use of quotation marks. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear to you.

and went on to talk about some of his experiences with “real” and “genuine” English teachers, who, in his opinion, are those who teach English as an academic subject rather than as a language.

This is one definition of “English teacher”, but there are quite clearly others and I found it amazing that the manager of a site purporting to help English teachers in China would be so blinkered and condescending. Accordingly, I attempted to post a reply stating my opinion about other definitions, but again the Doc wouldn’t allow it on his site.

Here it is for those of you interested…

Dear Dr,

Hello again. I came a bit late to this post, but to be honest I found it hard to believe what I was reading! As a manager of a website for English teachers in China, you do surely realise that “English teacher” has different meanings in different contexts? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that you consider a “real” English teacher to be an English literature/grammar teacher, and a trained and qualified one of course, and probably a native speaker of English. I am inferring this from the following parts of your article;

two genuine English teachers
Because he is a real English teacher
I thought again about how loosely the term “English teacher” is thrown around in China

But this is just one type of English teacher and no more “real” (or “professionally authentic” perhaps) than me or any of my Chinese friends who teach English at Chinese schools or universities. If you ask my Chinese colleagues at Dalian University of Foreign Languages what they do, many of them will simply say that they are “English teachers”…although at University level they might mention a specific focus.

So, what about me? I am not qualified to teach English literature/grammar in England, but I have been an English teacher for 12 years now. I have a TEFL certificate (a month long starter course) and I have an MSc in Applied Linguistics. I am an English teacher: I teach English to people whose native language is not English. I have worked (teaching English) in Universities in Hungary, Japan, Thailand, England, Scotland and China. I have both taken and given teacher training programs, and I have taught general English in Private schools, multinational companies, and kindergartens. And I am not that unusual, there are a lot of people with similar professional experience in the world these days because teaching English is big business! There is also a huge literature, including several academic journals, devoted to the field of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL, TESOL etc) and to work for a university or for a quality institution like the British Council or a respected private school, you have to have a Masters degree or a Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA). Both of which take a year or more to get. To work as an English teacher in most universities in developed countries these days, you need a PhD.

What about those teaching English who have no other qualification than that English is their mother tongue? Are they the ones who are disqualifying me and others like me from being “real”? Well, they are there because there is a demand for them to be there. The desire to have a “native speaker” as a teacher is misguided in my opinion, but it is strong enough to mean that there are not enough qualified people to fill the posts. So, you get people teaching English who are not properly trained. Some of them turn out to be very effective teachers and some do not; some of them like the job enough to go and get certified, and most go on to other things.

But please, just because there are maybe more unqualified first-timers (as well as some chancers/sexpats etc) in China than in, say, Japan, please do not assume that there is not a body of well qualified and dedicated English teachers here, both Chinese and native speaker.

To repeat my main point, the term “English teacher” means different things in different contexts and to try to limit it to “English literature/grammar teacher”, presumably because that is what your “English” lessons consisted of at school, is misleading and unhelpful. Please use your site to welcome a broad church of English teachers to China and please give them more professional respect. Thank you!

End of comment.

Again, the Doc wouldn’t allow this on his site, but he did at least have the courtesy to tell me why not. He sent me an email explaining that…As I have spent upward of one year researching, writing, and revising this guide, I am going to use this website as my personal pulpit and not as a forum for open debate…I’m going to use it to proselytize my point of view…Of course there are exceptions, as pointed out in the guide, but I don’t feel the need to air them in a way that casts dispersions (sic) on or distracts readers from the main points that have been raised.

Well, there we have it. It’s not only the CCP that thinks that reasonable and rational discussion is “unhelpful”. If you don’t like the voice of the other side, silence it! (NB The only comments I have censored on my blog have been insulting or abusive ones…yes Dude, those ones.)

On the other hand, it’s his blog (his little domain) so he can do what he wants. Fair enough, I just think it paints a misleading, not to mention condescending, portrait of English teachers.

We’re not that bad, are we? Comments welcome.

My neighbourhood in downtown Dalian has a new little teashop that has jauntily named itself “Jocund Hut”. That’s a pretty funky name and I guess the owner got that obscure and odd adjective from an electronic dictionary, and I also wonder how many native speakers - even - know what it means.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually utter the word, but I know it well coz Wordsworth used it in “Daffodils”, one of the most famous poems in the English language. When speaking of the gleeful dancing daffydillies he emoted

A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company

which couples, so to speak, an archaic usage of “gay” with our equally archaic “word for today.”

And I also half-remembered Conrad using it in “Heart of Darkness” for a grimly humoured description of some skulls on poles, but when I checked the quote I found

a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

so it was jocose, not jocund. And who the hell uses “jocose” these days? it must be even more obscure than “jocund.” I guess that’s why it’s not a “Jocose Hut” round the corner from where I live.

And then I also remembered that English was Conrad’s third language and that he was wont to use it somewhat eccentrically from time to time; a habit that led to literary critic FR Leavis’ catty comment that “Conrad’s sea smells of Roget’s Thesaurus”.

Anyways, maybe Chinese and Japanese electronic dictionaries are going to resurrect a few long dormant and/or incredibly obscure words and blazon them on the shopfronts and T-shirts of the Pacific rim. And then we English teachers over here will have to find out what they mean.

Have a jocund day!

K

Next week my University has a big and ever so very important government inspection. A bunch of experts from Beijing are coming down to check out how Dalian University of Foreign Languages does its stuff and we lowly provincial teachers are going to try to wow them so we can get a good grade, and thus more students and more money. It’s being taken very seriously indeed and so I am, of course, anxious to do my bit and not let the side down.

All of which means that I’ve been bloody busy recently preparing lectures, schedules, and course descriptions, and typing out lesson plans. This semester I have to give a lecture series on Discourse Analysis (looking for patterns of organisation in text, basically) and since I’ve never given a 90 minute lecture before - let alone 14 of them - I have had to put in quite a few hours of preparation.

The week after next I hope to have time to blog/breathe easily again.

Till then.

K

I have decided that much of the Chinese way of life can be captured by two words, or rather two binaries: comfortable/not comfortable “shu fu/bu shu fu” (shu fu 舒服) and bully/be bullied” qi fu/bei qi fu” (qi fu 欺负). And, just to dichotomize my binaries, so to speak, I would say that shu fu falls squarely within the passive female Yin and qi fu within the active manly Yang.

The comfortable/not comfortable binary basically sums up all you really need out of life. I mean it’s either going well and things are smooth and cozy, or it’s not. Beer/smoking/good food/nice weather will all make you feel shu fu. People can make you feel shu fu or bu shu fu too. Good times with friends you like are very shu fu, people who bore you, or make your flesh creep somehow, are bu shu fu.

We all like our creature comforts, right? And this is the Yin, the passive laid back low-key no stress lazy cozy life. It is Taoist wu wei 无为 and Epicurean indulgence rolled into one.

But politics and work relationships as seen through Sino-specs are basically all about who can bully who. (Or whom if you’re a pedantic twat). It’s the old doctrine of “Might is Right” writ large. There is a contingent historical aspect to it too: China was well and truly bullied during its century of humiliation…but it will never happen again! China and Chinese must be big and strong! Every good boss knows that he has to bully his workers to get their respect. What’s more you have to line them up outside the shop to make sure everyone knows you bully your workers in your fine establishment. Big face there! If you don’t bully then you will be bullied. The pecking order has to be established or we won’t know who we are. It is Hobbesian and Darwinian and Maoist.

So, once again the feminine Yin is the civilized value and civilizing influence. Modern China is getting stuck into the good life and can begin to enjoy a comfortable standard of living after the post-war Mao induced hardships. China is big but soft; a friendly if slightly touchy nation that is looking to work together with the rest of the world to improve our collective lot. But I fear that someday Yang will feel the urge to qi fu Yin and problems with Taiwan and Japan will loom large, and we are not going to feel shu fu about it.

What do you make of this little diagram without any context, I wonder?

For your information, it’s taken from a 1966 academic article called ‘Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education’ by an American professor called Robert B Kaplan and is better known in linguistics’ circles as Kaplan’s doodles. It aims to show (in a rough and ready way) how five different cultures approach the task of writing an essay - or presenting an argument perhaps - and he came up with it after teaching international students for a while at the University of Southern California.

As you can guess, it shows the English style as being straight to the point, Semitic writers tending to use parallel structures, Orientals circling around the point, Romance writers straying from the path somewhat, and Russians going off on unconnected tangents, hence the broken lines.

Hmmmm, as you can also doubtless guess it’s pretty controversial and was heavily critiqued in academic journals. But where I think it is useful is as a pedagogical tool for raising awareness about how different cultures might approach the the task of writing essays, or arguing a case.

In Hungary, about eight years ago, I used to teach English for Academic Purposes (EAP) at a place called The Central European University in Budapest, which had a fair mix of nationalities from that neck of the woods, such as Russians, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Mongolians, Czechs, Polish etc etc. I worked part-time at the university’s Writing Centre, popularly known as the WC, (staffed by toilet attendants from Britain, Ireland, and the US) and our main task was to help these easterners to write research papers in English. Some students had absolutely superb English but even a few of these, together with those who were struggling with the language, still had a problem writing English style papers.

Yes, even if they were word perfect in English and knew their topic inside out they still had issues, and probably the main problem was the organisation of ideas. So, we used to use Kapan’s doodles early on in our course to kick off discussions about how students were accustomed to writing esays.

The Russians were often none-too-happy with this depiction of their “cultural thought patterns” and indeed it does kind of come across as something out of American Cold War propaganda…remember it was published in 1966. On one memorable occasion, one of my Russian students pondered the handout for a while and then gave his considered opinion:

“Zis is bollshit…is zat direct enough?”

And here is a more academic style refutation

In Kubota’s words (1992, p.20), Contrastive Rhetoric tends to “construct a homogenous representation of the ‘Other’ while legitimating a certain kind of rhetoric as a canon”. Other scholars have also criticised contrastive rhetoric for its reductionist, deterministic, prescriptive, and essentialist orientation (e.g. Leki, 1997).

Well, it is is a complex and controversial notion but nonetheless, to ground it in my experience at The Central European University, the issue was that some of our students -we thought- would either beat about the bush too much, or sometimes never even really make their point clear at all. Some stronger students would tend to include too much stuff in their essays (showing off their wide reading a bit too much perhaps) and end up losing the thread for much of the middle of the paper. The weaker ones would string together rather random points and often conclude with a vague exhortation such as “this is an important issue and it needs more study!” To which it was tempting to respond, “Yes it does, and you should have done it.”

Not that these are not issues for students from English speaking cultures of course!

In any case, Kaplan was one of the pioneers of a field of study now known as Contrastive Rhetoric, which can be considered as a hypothesis claiming that the logic expressed through the organization of a certain written text is culture-specific. I guess most people would agree that different cultures express themselves in different ways and it’s an interesting endeavour to compare cultural texts, but it does, inevitably, lead to some clumsy generalizations…which I am about to indulge in in this post, so apologies in advance for that.

Quite a bit of later work in Contrastive Rhetoric involved itself with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writers…mostly student writers. A lot of East Asians have been doing stints in “Anglo-American” universities for a while now and so a fair bit of research has been done on them. Perhaps the best known researcher of “Oriental Writing” is a Dead White European Male called John Hinds, about whom I offer the following.

Hinds has shown that writers in different languages use certain textual structures to
achieve coherence. He has described how Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean
writers prefer to use a quasi-inductive style rather than an explicit inductive or
deductive style. He argues that there is an Oriental writing style, which cannot be
classified as either deductive or inductive. This style involves ‘delayed introduction of
purpose’ with the topic or thesis statement implied, not stated. Hinds’s argument for
quasi-inductive style is related to his (1987) assertion that Japanese is a reader responsible language as opposed to English which is a writer-responsible language.
Hinds claims that readers in Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean languages are
expected to think for themselves, to consider the observations made, and draw their
own conclusions. In English, however, it is usually the writer’s responsibility to
convince readers by explicitly presenting the idea in a way that they will be able to
follow.

Ah yes, those inscrutable Orientals! Not like us straight talking Anglo chaps, what?

Actually, Hinds was a serious academic and was careful to hedge his assertions and to back up his claims with a fair amount of samples. Hinds also used to write about the influence of the traditional four-part Chinese style essay, called a ‘qi-cheng-zhuan-he’ (‘beginning’, ‘development’, ‘turn’ and ‘conclusion’) essay. This was copied by the Japanese (surprise, surprise) and is known over there as ‘ki-shoo-ten-ketsu’.

I can’t say I’ve come across this very often, but here’s an interesting opinion from a Japanese guy, Paul Kei Matsuda, who moved to the US to become a writing teacher

I tried to argue that ki-shoo-ten-ketsu was not just a fantasy created by ethnocentric native-English-speaking readers, as some people seemed to be arguing. In fact, I was explicitly taught to use it by one of my elementary school teachers, my parents, and some of the popular writing handbooks in Japan. This organizational scheme was also apparent, I thought, in some student texts that I encountered in my work as a tutor.

The bit that tends to puzzle westerner academics, apparently, is the third part, the “turn”. This “turn” is often seen by them as a diversion from the main point, rather than a development of it.

And if that wasn’t enough, there is also something known as ‘ba gu wen’, “the eight-legged essay” and as I have never encountered one of these exotic sounding creatures I shall have to borrow this explanation

In Kaplan’s book (1972), he argued that the indirectness of oriental writing was largely
due to the influence of the Chinese ‘eight-legged essay’, which was actually a
traditional essay form used as a standard device in civil service examinations
hundreds of years ago. The origin of the ‘eight-legged’ essay ba gu wen can be traced
back to the Bei Song Dynasty (960—1127AD) in China. It was not until the Ming
dynasty (1368—1644AD) that the rules for the composition of the eight-legged essay
were explicitly laid down (Tu, 1974). The eight legs, or ba gu, refers to the
rhetorically parallel paragraphs (legs) of the four central parts of the essay—-the qi gu,
the xiao gu, the zhong gu and the hou gu. The required style of the parallel legs of the
eight-legged essay was, “as one falls another one rises” (yi fan yi zheng) (Tang, 1980).
This structure was extremely complex. The ability to write a good eight-legged essay
took scholars several years to master.

Cripes! I’m glad I didn’t have to do any of those at school…but as it turns out, neither, it seems, do Chinese students these days either

(Kirkpatrick, 1997), finds that Mainland Chinese students do not have to learn traditional Chinese text styles (eight-legged essays or even qi-cheng-zhuan-he) in order to enter university. In fact, eight-legged essays have been not been used for quite some time and have very little influence on contemporary writing. As for qi-cheng-zhuan-he, this model is not focused on in the Chinese school curriculum either. Chinese students do not have to master any contemporary style that could be classified as intrinsically Chinese. Furthermore, they are encouraged to be inventive and original in their writings. After a survey of contemporary Chinese textbooks on composition, Kirkpatrick (1997) concludes that the prescriptive advice given in these texts reflects a contemporary ‘Anglo-American’ rhetorical style more than a traditional ‘Chinese’ style.

And I must say that this clicks with my experience too. Having taught writing in both Japanese and Chinese universities now, I can’t say I have had many encounters with exotic essay forms. Although I have had to read a fair amount of drivel and dross over the years, it is not that much different from the kind of problematic writing I got from the non-asian students I taught in Hungary.

However, many studies do suggest that there are significant Oriental-Occidental differences

Among the contrastive rhetorical studies that have found their ways into composition
studies, Matalene’s (1985) ‘Contrastive Rhetoric: An American Writing Teacher in
China’ has become something of a classic. In her article, Matalene uses parts of
English compositions written by Chinese students and translations of various Chinese
texts to explain the characteristics of Chinese rhetoric. Unlike Kaplan, Matalene does
not dwell just on formal aspects of rhetoric (i.e., the forms that paragraphs take), but
discusses Chinese writers’ reliance on memorization and manipulation of set phrases
and textual forms to emphasize group values over individualistic goals. She found that
Chinese students could not use English rhetorical devices effectively to establish
arguments. Usually they would use narrations and statements that seemed
unconnected in the eyes of Western readers. She concluded that Chinese rhetoric
lacked argumentative coherence because of its reliance on references to history,
tradition, and authorities.

My guess is that there must be a generation gap here because the overwhelming majority of my students write clearly argued and coherent essays that use quotation in familiar ways. Although it’s also probably because I teach English majors who have learnt writing from American composition textbooks, or at least textbooks that are influenced by American composition.

Anyway, it’s not really that surprising that English majors are influenced by English language culture, but maybe it does hint towards the wider issue that what with our wired-up-world and the global village and all that, modern students, journalists, and other opinionated types are tending to think, talk, and write in similar ways.

The main exception to this, in my limited experience of course, has been the essays I’ve had to mark from Saudi, Omani and Jordanian students…Muslim Arab students in other words. Now they really do create flowery and winding pathways for their prose and my best guess is that it’s to do with their religious (medieval) worldview and constant references to and deference to The Koran, and their duty to memorise huge chunks of it. But that’s a WHOLE other topic there.

I’d like to end with the suggestion that a significant section of literate people around the world these days are not only tending to hold similar sets of opinions but are also expressing those written opinions in similar ways…with easy to follow points, clear paragraphs, and unconvoluted prose. Does that sound like most of the blogs and papers you read?

Is that the way you think?