Learning Chinese: Linguistic, Sociocultural, and Narrative Perspectives 9781934078778, 9781934078761

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Duff, Anderson, Ilnyckyj, VanGaya, Wang, Yates Learning Chinese

Trends in Applied Linguistics

Edited by Ulrike Jessner Claire Kramsch

Volume 5

Patricia Duff, Tim Anderson, Roma Ilnyckyj, Ella VanGaya, Rachel Tianxuan Wang, Elliott Yates

Learning Chinese

Linguistic, Sociocultural, and Narrative Perspectives

ISBN 978-1-934078-76-1 e-ISBN 978-1-934078-77-8 ISSN 1868-6362 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 6 2013 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Cover image: Roswitha Schacht/morguefile.com Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Preface This book represents the commitment of many people to understanding the fascinating process of learning and using Chinese as an additional language. Here we would like to acknowledge some of the people and institutions that have supported our work and also clarify some of our choices or conventions in the text with respect to our use of Chinese orthography and references to Mandarin and to different Chinese-speaking regions. First of all, as the inaugural project of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education (CRCLLE) at the University of British Columbia, numerous colleagues associated with CRCLLE deserve our deep thanks for their enthusiastic support and interest. Among these, especially, are our former Dean, Rob Tierney, former Department Head, Geoff Williams, and current CRCLLE codirector, Duanduan Li. All three were instrumental in the establishment of the Centre and shared a vision of what could be achieved in that unique physical, intellectual, and socio-educational space. During the three years in which the research and writing of this book were undertaken, CRCLLE received generous funding from The Office of Chinese Language Council International (also known as Hanban) in China. We are extremely grateful for their crucial infrastructure support, which enabled us to conduct the study. In particular, through their funding of our (then) Centre coordinator, Rachel Wang, we were able to sponsor various research and educational activities such as academic symposia and short courses. These events allowed us to better understand the state of the art in Chinese language education research. Together, we considered new directions in Chinese language teaching and learning, new possibilities and tools for the analysis of narrative and linguistic data, and changing sociopolitical and institutional contexts for Chinese education. The activities also provided opportunities for establishing and strengthening our international and local networks for research and outreach. However, despite the kind practical assistance of Hanban and the insights of many of our colleagues with whom we have conferred over the course of this project, especially Hongyin Tao, Shuhan Wang, Mike Everson, Jun Da, Chuanren Ke, Agnes He, Keiko Koda, Jane Orton, Wu Yongyi, Li Wei, and others in our international network, the perspectives and interpretations contained in this book are ultimately our own. Thus, our funders and colleagues, while very much appreciated, bear no responsibility for the content expressed herein and all remaining errors or faulty interpretations are our own. Other individuals assisted us in the preparation of this manuscript and we thank them for their important contributions as well. Duanduan Li and Ed

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McDonald provided substantial feedback and editorial suggestions and advice on parts of the Chinese linguistic analysis, in particular, for which we are very grateful. Li Wei also offered invaluable feedback on the first complete version of the manuscript. We thank Lorita Chiu for her assistance with the transcription of our second interviews and Teresa O’Shea for her helpful and timely office management support. Our (other) friends and family also deserve our warm thanks for enabling us to finish this project over three calendar years — including three summers. The research and writing involved many Skype and face-to-face meetings, data analysis sessions, and the drafting and redrafting of documents, taking time which otherwise might have been devoted to them. We are particularly grateful to the late Cathleen Petree at De Gruyter Mouton, as well as Emily Farrell, Claire Kramsch, Ulrike Jessner, and others connected with the Trends in Applied Linguistics series, for their encouragement and confidence not only that we could complete this book but that it would make a valuable and original contribution to knowledge in our field. Their feedback on proposals and early drafts was extremely helpful and greatly appreciated. Finally, the collegiality of the six co-authors and co-researchers and willingness to engage in collaborative research of this nature – extending well beyond the original institutional roles or even residence in the same city for some of the members – was critical to the successful completion of the book. For three and a half years we worked together on this project, often across geographical borders and time zones, and using various forms of information and communication technology, while we explored optimal ways of sharing research and co-authoring chapters. The group and its joint activities constituted not just a model community of practice for educational research, with each member bringing unique strengths and interests to our shared endeavours, but also a valuable and compassionate social network and group of friends. We encourage other researchers to explore ways of fostering similar sorts of communities and collaborations as well, as it has been a remarkable experience for all of us! With respect to the structure of this book and the best ways to approach the material, we invite readers to follow their interests: reading the book linearly from beginning to end, starting with the larger global contexts for learning Chinese, continuing with our analyses, and ending with the personal narratives; or, rather, starting as we did from the opposite direction, with the narratives in Appendix A and then moving across the six main chapters in reverse. Each chapter and narrative provides a unique window through which to view Chinese language learning and is fairly self-contained. Together, the material constitutes a kaleidoscope of observations about learning and using an additional language such as Chinese, experiencing interculturalism, and doing applied linguistics research in the 21st century. The linguistic analyses are based mainly on observed

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behaviours whereas the narratives themselves capture some of the deeper and less visible underpinnings of behaviour, such as desires, hopes, dreams, and frustrations. These multiple facets of learning, engaging with language and culture, and reflecting on lived experience, are the essence of the book. We would also like to explain our conventions for representing Chinese examples and Chinese-speaking regions in this book. Where necessary or possible, we have included characters plus pīnyīn (with tone markings) and English global translations for Chinese expressions rather than morpheme-level glosses. In some places, including all three forms seemed overly cumbersome for our purposes, as did the inclusion of morpheme-by-morpheme glossing, typical in linguistics. Therefore, not all orthographic representations or micro-level glosses are shown for a given citation. In addition, our use of Simplified vs. Traditional characters in the text reflects the form found in the original source. Thus, if it appeared in Traditional characters in a narrative, for example, we have reproduced it in that form. Similarly, pīnyīn, a romanized orthography for Mandarin, includes tone markings except where the original source (such as Patsy’s narrative) omitted tone markings, and word boundaries shown also reflect the original. In terms of geographical representations, we use the terms Mainland China, China, and People’s Republic of China (PRC) more or less interchangeably. Similarly, we use the terms language dialect and variety synonymously. Lastly, although we have adopted the term Chinese as an additional language (CAL) as a neutral and inclusive way of referring to the acquisition of Chinese when it was not or is currently not one’s primary language (i.e., it is a second, foreign, heritage, third or fourth language), we also refer to it as Chinese L2 learning in places, even for multilingual learners, for the sake of variety and brevity. The term Chinese as an International Language (CIL) could have been substituted for CAL, but the former, with its focus on the international plane, might seem less appropriate to some learners whose purposes of learning Chinese in diaspora contexts are primarily local community (e.g., familial) engagements rather than international ones even though the language itself is now truly international.

Table of contents Preface v List of figures List of tables 1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.12.1 1.12.1.1 1.12.1.2 1.12.1.3 1.12.1.4 1.12.1.5 1.13 2 2.1 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2

xiv xv

‘China Rising’: Chinese and Chinese Language Learning as Global Phenomena 1 Introduction: China (and Chinese) rising 1 Media portrayals of the rise of Chinese 1 Complexities and politics of Chinese language(s) and literacies 4 Cultural politics and ideologies surrounding Chinese language education, learning, and use 8 Chinese language education: Pragmatic curricular issues 10 Trends and gaps in Chinese language education and applied linguistics research 11 Investigating Chinese language learning from multiple new perspectives 13 Existing (auto)biographical accounts of learning Chinese 14 Contemporary case studies in CAL on identity, ideologies, and narrativity 17 Chinese as a heritage language 19 New directions in Chinese language learning 20 The study presented in this book 21 Research methodology 22 Participants 23 Research design and procedures 23 Triangulating epistemic stances: “Insiders” and “outsiders” 23 Procedures and timeline for data collection and analysis 25 Description of research procedures and process 25 Organization of this book 29 33 Developing Chinese Proficiency: Linguistic Perspectives Introduction: Researching Chinese language learners’ development 33 Existing research on linguistic dimensions of Chinese as an additional language 34 Linguistic approaches 34 Linguistic development in sociocultural and phenomenological (narrative) accounts of Chinese SLA 36

x 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.1.1 2.3.1.2 2.3.1.3 2.3.1.4 2.3.1.5 2.3.1.6 2.3.2 2.3.3 2.4 2.4.1 2.4.1.1 2.4.1.2 2.4.2 2.4.2.1 2.4.2.2 2.4.2.3 2.4.2.4 2.4.2.5 2.4.3 2.4.3.1 2.4.3.2 2.5

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Table of contents

CAL participants’ linguistic profiles 37 Overview 37 Ella’s language background 37 Elliott’s language background 37 Patsy’s language background 38 Roma’s language background 38 Tim’s language background 39 Summary of participants’ language backgrounds 39 Formally assessing and describing CAL proficiency 39 Proficiency self-assessments 42 Oral proficiency 45 Challenges in learning to speak Chinese 45 The challenge of dialects in CAL 45 The challenge of tones in CAL 48 The CAL proficiency interviews 49 Interview structure 50 Transcription of interviews 50 Contextualizing the proficiency interviews in relation to learner background, learning contexts, and interview context 51 Rachel’s observations 52 Quantitative analysis and linguistic comparison of group’s interview data 55 Qualitative analysis of oral proficiency data: Grammatical variety analysis 69 Morpheme analysis: Semantic and grammatical functions and constructions 70 Issues with qualitative analysis of grammatical competency 74 Summary of linguistic analysis of proficiency, development, and variation 75 Developing Everyday Chinese Literacies: Sinographic Choices, 78 Practices, and Identities Introduction 78 Chinese orthography and literacy: Investments, practices, and identities 78 Contexts for and commitments to acquiring Chinese characterbased literacy 80 Developing advanced Chinese literacy 82 Literacy as mediated social practice 85

Table of contents

3.6 3.6.1 3.6.2 3.6.3 3.6.4 3.6.5 3.7 4 4.1 4.1.1 4.1.2 4.1.3 4.1.3.1 4.1.3.2 4.1.3.3 4.1.4 4.2 4.2.1 4.2.2 4.2.2.1 4.2.3 4.2.3.1 4.2.3.2 4.2.3.3 4.2.4 4.2.4.1 4.3 5 5.1 5.1.1 5.1.2 5.2

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Writing, technology, and literate/textual identities, choices, and practices 88 Ella’s transcriptions 90 Elliott’s transcriptions 91 Patsy’s transcriptions 93 Roma’s transcriptions 96 Tim’s transcriptions 97 Summary 99 Sociocultural Approaches to Chinese Language Learning and Research: Negotiating Identities and Communities 102 Introduction: Exploring identity and community in socioculturallyoriented Chinese language learning research 102 Traditional and contemporary approaches to research: The sociocultural imperative in SLA 103 Sociocultural theory and SLA 106 Identity 107 Identity(ies) as multiple, situated, fluid 107 Emic versus etic perspectives on identity 108 Identity in heritage versus non-heritage learners of Chinese 109 Community 110 Thematic analysis of narratives: Procedures and priorities 113 CAL in relation to community engagements 114 Agency 116 Agency, identities, and communities 117 Positioning 125 Positioning and race 126 Positioning, identities, and communities 128 Positioning, lǎowài, and English 129 Gender 133 Gender and communities 135 Summary 139 Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives on Learning, Researching, and Theorizing Chinese as an Additional Language 141 Introduction: Narrative inquiry in second language research 141 Purpose and procedures of (meta)narrative analysis 143 Becoming participant-researchers in a CAL community of practice 145 Stage 1: Narrative generation process 147

xii 5.2.1 5.3 5.3.1 5.3.2 5.3.3 5.4 5.4.1 5.4.2 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.7.1 5.7.2 6 6.1 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.2.3 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7

Table of contents

Approach, genre, voice, and style in Narrative One (N1) 150 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives 154 Coding comments on Narrative One 158 Analyzing comments on Narrative One 158 Metanarrative activity as community building and theory building 166 Stage 3: Writing, analyzing, and theorizing SLA in Narrative Two (N2) 168 Narrative Two prefaces as personal metanarrative reflection 170 Analyzing Narrative Two: Focus group discussion vis-à-vis written annotation 171 Stage 4: Collaborative research and writing with digital aids 174 Creation and inclusion of Narrative Three (N3) in this book 174 Some final reflections: The benefits and limitations of the (meta)narrative research 175 Benefits 175 Limitations and constraints 177 Conclusion: Reflections on Research in Chinese as an Additional 180 Language Exploring diverse approaches to research in CAL 180 Recurring themes in CAL and in our study 181 Descriptions of language proficiency 181 Literacy 184 Negotiating identities and communities 185 Triangulating, reconciling, and interrogating diverse perspectives, experiences, and methods for analyzing CAL 187 Limitations and reflections 190 Pedagogical and policy implications 191 Future research directions and possibilities 193 Conclusion: Learning Chinese as a global and cosmopolitan language 194

197 Appendices Appendix A: CAL Learners’ Narratives 199 Preface 199 Ella’s Narrative (N3) 200 Elliott’s Narrative (N3) 224

Table of contents

Patsy’s Narrative (N3) Roma’s Narrative (N3) Tim’s Narrative (N3)

244 264 283

Appendix B: Sample Questions for Chinese Proficiency Interview (2009, 2010) 301 303 References Index 317

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List of figures Chinese text in Canadian newspaper 2 English interspersed between lines of Chinese text 2 Project procedures and sequence 26 Changes in self-assessed proficiency (by skill area, 2009 and 2010) 46 Figure 2.2 Lexical measures for each interview 57 Figure 2.3 Comparisons of 2010 interview data to HSK word lists 59 Figure 2.4 Comparisons of 2010 interview data to high-frequency words in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) 59 Figure 2.5 Measures of oral fluency and rate of speech for each interview 65 Figure 3.1 Ella’s wrist tattoo: “thoughts” 81 Figure 3.2 Ella’s 2009 interview transcription 90 Figure 3.3 Ella’s 2010 interview transcription 91 Figure 3.4 Elliott’s 2009 interview transcription 92 Figure 3.5 Elliott’s 2009 interview transcription (using a computer input method editor) 92 Figure 3.6 Patsy’s 2009 interview transcription 94 Figure 3.7 Patsy’s 2010 interview transcription (typed pīnyīn and handwritten characters) 94 Figure 3.8 Patsy’s 2010 interview transcription (using computer software to input pīnyīn from the transcript in Figure 3.7) 95 Figure 3.9 Roma’s 2009 interview transcription 96 Figure 3.10 Roma’s 2009 interview transcription (using a computer input method editor) 97 Figure 3.11 Tim’s 2009 interview transcription 97 Figure 3.12 Tim’s 2010 interview transcription 99 Figure 4.1 Overarching themes: Identity and community 115 Figure 5.1 Ella’s N1 148 Figure 5.2 Elliott’s N1 148 Figure 5.3 Patsy’s N1 148 Figure 5.4 Roma’s N1 148 Figure 5.5 Tim’s N1 149 Figure 5.6 Snapshot of Roma’s Narrative One (p. 1) with comments 155 Figure 5.7 The conceptual map of themes in narratives 157 Figure 5.8 Narrative inquiry process as reflected in coded functions of annotations 166 Figure 5.9 Composite of four pages in Patsy’s N2 170 Figure Figure Figure Figure

1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1

List of tables Differences between orthographies for written Chinese 6 Comparison of assessment tools: CEFR, ACTFL OPI, HSK, and TOCFL 41 Table 2.2 Most recent standardized test results for each participant 42 Table 2.3 Participants’ CAL proficiency self-assessments based on CEFR (2009 and 2010) 44 Table 2.4 Examples of the HSK vocabulary produced by participants in 2010 61 Table 2.5 Examples of the LCMC vocabulary produced by participants in 2010 62 Table 2.6 Measures of fluency for each interview (based on 4 minute samples) 64 Table 2.7 Participants’ use of the directional morpheme 到 dào in the interviews 71 Table 2.8 Participants’ use of the morpheme 来 lái in the interviews 71 Table 2.9 Participants’ use of the morpheme 过 guò in the interviews 72 Table 2.10 Participants’ use of the morpheme 了 le in the interviews 73 Table 3.1 Self-reported recent reading activities (in 2009 and 2010) 86 Table 4.1 An overview of thematic analysis from Narrative 1 114 Table 5.1 Narrative One: Quantitative descriptive features 157 Table 5.2 Coding categories for Narrative One annotations/comments 159 Table 5.3 Comment themes (codes) on narratives 162 Table 5.4 Comment themes offered by individual annotators (commenters) on others’ N1s 165 Table 5.5 Approach to narrative analysis: N1 vis-à-vis N2 173 Table 1.1 Table 2.1

1 ‘China Rising’: Chinese and Chinese Language Learning as Global Phenomena 1.1 Introduction: China (and Chinese) rising The phrase China rising is ubiquitous in academic and mass media headlines and reports, reflecting the increasing economic power and clout (and perceived threat in some accounts) of China in relation to other nations whose economies are less robust and seem to be declining rather than rising. The Chinese language too, in recent years, has been rising in both visibility and importance due to its emerging status as a powerful, global language used by proficient Chinese speakers and learners of Chinese around the world. Its prominence is also related to the economic allure of China, which has enticed many nonChinese to engage with Chinese organizations and opportunities and, in some cases, to also study the language. It is no wonder, then, that in his introduction to Teaching and Learning Chinese in Global Contexts (Tsung and Cruikshank 2011), Lo Bianco (2011) describes Chinese as “the gigantic up-and-comer” (xiii). There are, after all, more than a billion native speakers of one variety (dialect) or another of Chinese, and tens of millions of non-Chinese learners of Chinese (Graddol 2006; Hanban 2010). Chinese is the third most widely spoken language (cluster) in homes in Canada and the United States according to national census data (Statistics Canada 2010; US Census Bureau 2000). The number of education programs being established from Australia to Zambia for teaching Chinese to children, adolescents, and adults, and for the professional development of Chinese language teachers (Duff 2008a) has grown considerably in recent years, at least in part due to a massive infusion of human and material resources, soft power diplomacy, and advocacy by the Chinese Government through The Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (also known as Hanban) to disparate regions of the world (see Dodd 2010; Hanban 2010). Considerable resources have also been invested in Chinese language education through recent initiatives in the United States, funded by the U.S. government as well as by various other non-governmental agencies and organizations (Wang 2010; Wen and Grandin 2010).

1.2 Media portrayals of the rise of Chinese News and commentaries abound about the international spread (or rise) of Chinese language education and opportunities for learners of all ages and

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‘China Rising’

the social, political, and economic reasons for this development and its possible consequences. To give one vivid example, the front page of the Globe and Mail, the respected national Canadian newspaper, in a special weekend edition of the paper (dated October 23, 2004), highlighted both economic and linguistic aspects of China Rising – the title of the special issue. In large, bold-font Chinese characters that filled the first page of the paper were the following phrases, one per line:

Figure 1.1: Chinese text in Canadian newspaper

The English translation, which appeared in very small print in a note two pages later, read: “Ambitious, powerful, restless. Get ready for China’s century.” (p. A3) Interestingly, on the same front page, interspersed between the lines of Chinese, were the following considerably smaller and rather ominous English words warning readers:

Figure 1.2: English interspersed between lines of Chinese text

Considering the longstanding politics in Canada surrounding English-French bilingualism, language education, and languages of publication and signage, featuring a Mandarin-dominant front page on the Toronto-published newspaper was sure to garner attention. To make matters even more potentially contentious, Simplified characters, not Traditional ones, were used in the headline,

1.2 Media portrayals of the rise of Chinese

3

whereas the widely read Chinese daily newspapers available in Canada all still use Traditional characters exclusively.1 Multiple messages were being conveyed to the Canadian public which were no doubt disquieting to many, English speakers and Chinese alike. In the Culture section of the same newspaper that day, the headline announced: “The new must-learn language is likely to be Mandarin.” From CNN2 to the Economist magazine to the New York Times, from NBC to the Washington Post and The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “China Rising” has been a clarion call to the West to pay attention to China and to the Chinese language as well.3 Many of the news articles reporting on the increasing numbers of nonChinese Mandarin learners employ highly emotionally-charged words and metaphors to describe the phenomenon, many of them with negative connotations. For example, some refer to China’s financial investment in the spread of Chinese as an attempt to “conquer the world” (French 2006, in the New York Times) or even call it “The Mandarin offensive” (Erard 2006, in Wired Magazine). Many highlight the use of language in China’s “soft power” approach to international relations (e.g., Dodd 2010, in a BBC World Service documentary). Economic metaphors, such as calling Mandarin “a hot new Chinese export” (French 2006) are also common. Regardless of whether they consider it to be positive or negative, popular news articles such as those found on bbc.com, Foreign Policy, cnn.com and The Economist tend to have two things in common: they assert the economic advantage of learning Mandarin by arguing that knowledge of the language will help young people secure jobs, and they emphasize the difficulty that Westerners (speakers of English and other European languages) experience learning Chinese because of its non-alphabetic script and its system of tones. In this way, they exalt Mandarin as a key to economic success, and also characterize it as a mysterious and impenetrable code, a topic expanded on in the next section.

1 Traditional characters are known as Fántĭzì “complex form characters” (Zhèngtĭzì, or “correct” version, in Taiwan) and simplified characters are Jiăntĭzì “simple form characters” in China; the politics of character choice is discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter 2. Incidentally, the Vancouver International Airport recently switched its signage from Traditional to Simplified and from Cantonese to Mandarin keywords (sometimes inadvertently mixing the two), which also caught the attention of many local Chinese (D. Li, personal communication, Jan. 15, 2010). 2 For example, see “How Vital is it to Learn Chinese?,” a CNN videoclip aired in September, 2010, downloaded Jan. 11, 2011 from http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/world/2010/ 09/14/vause.mandarin.cnn.html. 3 A Google search of “China rising” provides links to many of these resources.

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‘China Rising’

1.3 Complexities and politics of Chinese language(s) and literacies The issues connected with the rising status of Chinese and with Chinese language learning addressed in this book are important because Chinese is one of the most widely spoken languages (or, to be more accurate, language groups) in the world. Furthermore, as a lingua franca, a heritage language, a first or second language within a Chinese-speaking region, or an additional (second, third, or foreign) language for people in many non-Chinese regions, Chinese poses a rich and complex assortment of issues connected to the (geo)politics of language and literacy and of code and character choice and use. Even the Chinese word used to refer to the Chinese language points to different political, regional, and economic allegiances: e.g., Zhōngwén (literally “Chinese writing”) and Hànyŭ (literally “Han language”) are both terms used in Mainland China as generic forms of the “Chinese Language” (Zhōngguóhuà is another less frequent variant, “China/Chinese Speech”), whereas Pŭtōnghuà is a more politicized reference meaning the “Common Speech” or Modern Standard Chinese, the official lingua franca of China promulgated through official state media and education. On the other hand, Guóyŭ, “National Language,” is the term now used for the national Modern Standard Chinese in Taiwan, although the term originated in early 20th century China; Huáyŭ is the term used in Singapore (and also to some extent in Taiwan and Malaysia) to refer to Mandarin Chinese, with an emphasis on Chinese heritage (see Swihart 2003, for a comparison of Pŭtōnghuà and Guóyŭ; Chen 1999). Thus, the words used to represent the language are themselves often contentious cultural and geopolitical signifiers, just as the different writing varieties are (see below). We use the term Mandarin in this book instead of Pŭtōnghuà, except when writers emphasize a particular variety of Chinese, as it is the more general term and is not tied to one particular region or variety of spoken Mandarin (although historically connected to elite scholar-officials known as mandarins, in imperial China). Chinese in this book refers primarily to Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken variety of Chinese now and the one that has gained the greatest international currency over the past generation. Investigating Chinese language learning opens up fascinating issues related to the multiple varieties of oral Chinese that exist and sometimes compete for recognition in educational and other spheres. Generational differences in diaspora contexts also exist with respect to the varieties spoken and learned, as well as the various written orthographies associated with Chinese, including different phonetic (phonographic)4 writing 4 Although the common description of the writing system is “phonetic” (e.g., Chen 1999), E. McDonald (personal communication) and Chen (1999) note that it is actually “phonemic;” we use the terms interchangeably here to describe pīnyīn.

1.3 Complexities and politics of Chinese language(s) and literacies

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systems and character-based (logographic) ones. It is therefore not uncommon for first and additional language learners to go through stages of learning and using multiple forms and varieties of Chinese, depending on the educational and social context, as well as other languages. As an indication of the complexities of the written language, the word for school in Mandarin is written as xuéxiào in the romanized orthography known as hànyŭ pīnyīn, used in (Mainland) China and Singapore, but as ㄒㄩㄝˊㄒㄧㄠˋ in the non-romanized phonetic orthography colloquially called bopomofo (i.e., zhùyīn fúhào) used in Taiwan. Earlier, in Taiwan, another system of romanization known as Wade-Giles was used, with tones indicated by numbers, e.g., hsueh2 hsiau4, followed by a switch to Tōngyòng pīnyīn in 2002. In 2009, this was officially replaced by hànyŭ pīnyīn (Taiwan Ministry of Education 2012) and like other Chinese orthographic systems has been rather contentious, with various interim stages as well, typically linked to political and national identity formation and loyalties. However, proper names often still reflect the earlier system. For example, the surname Hsiao in Taiwan is equivalent to Xiao on the Mainland. In the Simplified Chinese characters used in Singapore and Mainland China, school is written as 学校, whereas in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and many diaspora locations in which Cantonese has had a longer history of use, it is written as 學校 (the first character reflecting the Traditional, not Simplified, version – also known as the “complex” or “original” version; the second character in both is the same, which means it is the Traditional version that was not changed when Chinese characters were simplified in China in the 20th century). The pronunciation of this word xuéxiào also varies greatly along dialectal and regional lines, usually in terms of tones and vowels.5 Hundreds of Chinese characters (more than two thousand) were simplified in the various literacy reform movements and “schemes” in China over the past century. But over the past two millennia simplification of original oracle-bone and tortoise shell pictographs has continually taken place, with shifting ideological reform movements driving changes to the written language in intriguing ways, including simplification of characters in Taiwan (Chen 1999).

5 Affricates and fricatives often vary dialectally in terms of retroflex and apical forms (E. McDonald, personal communication); Beijing dialect distinguishes both kinds – zh vs. z, ch vs. c [ts], sh vs. s – but most other Mandarin dialects, particularly southern ones and Taiwan Mandarin, do not, having only one series (normally the latter category, i.e., apical) or mixing of the two. This point becomes relevant in Chapter 2 because some of the group members started learning Chinese in Taiwan or in the southern part of China and later migrated to other regions or varieties, often with attendant difficulties and confusion.

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‘China Rising’

Table 1.1 shows some additional examples of this variation for the words telephone, dim sum6 and women. Notice that for telephone, both the first and second characters in the compound differ in Traditional and Simplified versions, with far fewer strokes per character in the latter. For dim sum, only the first character (for diǎn) is different (and is also a different word than the diàn in telephone), with many more strokes in the left component of the word in the Traditional version. For women, however, both characters are the same, representing the original, Traditional character form. Table 1.1: Differences between orthographies for written Chinese English

Pīnyīn

Zhùyīn (bopomofo)

Traditional character version

Simplified character version

Telephone

diànhuà

ㄉㄧㄢˋㄏㄨㄚˋ

電話

电话

Dim sum

diǎnxin

ㄉㄧㄢˇㄒㄧㄣ

點心

点心

Women

nǚrén

ㄋㄩˇㄖㄣˊ

女人

女人

That different versions of the same language group have multiple dialects and lexical, grammatical, phonological, and orthographic realizations and variants (cf. Chappell 2004) is certainly not unique to Chinese. However, these features of Chinese make it a particularly intriguing language that also gives rise to numerous educational dilemmas and options. Chinese characters range from having one single stroke to as many as 65 (Hodge and Louie 1998). Chen (1999) provides estimates for the number of characters required for functional literacy, indicating that 500 commonly used characters represent about 80% of those in Modern Chinese publications; 1000 characters cover 91% and 2400 cover 99%. To read a typical newspaper in China requires knowledge of approximately 3000 characters, whereas a Chinese dictionary might contain 60,000 characters (Chen 1999). The “threshold” for literacy in Chinese is generally set at 2000 characters, according to Chen, with graduates from primary school (at least at the time of his publication) expected to know approximately 2500 characters and college graduates 3500 characters. Character knowledge is tremendously challenging for learners of Chinese – “a dragon guarding the gates that lead into two categories: those who can read characters . . . and those who can’t, who are forever outsiders, dependent on translators to select and give the sense of the meanings that they need” (Hodge and Louie 6 Dim sum is a southern Chinese form of brunch (tea and snacks like little dumplings) common in diaspora contexts as well as in southern China and particularly Hong Kong and other Cantonese-speaking regions. It is now used as a borrowing in English as well.

1.3 Complexities and politics of Chinese language(s) and literacies

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1998: 47). This aspect of Chinese has beguiled Westerners (Europeans and, later, Americans and others) in China and in contact with China for centuries. Written accounts of “how the [written] language puzzled and enchanted them” were produced by missionaries and other travellers and scholars in China from the 16th century (Watters 1889, cited in McDonald 2011a: 82). Another issue and potential source of confusion for students of Chinese writing and even casual observers is text orientation. Traditionally Chinese was read from top to bottom and from right to left. However, now the majority (but not all) of Chinese texts are written from left to right, just as English is (see Chapter 3). This means that for a reader who is struggling with comprehension, it may not be apparent from which direction a text should be approached, and multiple attempts to find a thread of meaning or to detect word boundaries may be needed. For texts with punctuation it can be quite an easy choice, but for texts like newspaper titles, advertisements, or those without punctuation, it may take considerable processing time before any real reading for comprehension can begin. Additional cultural and historical information, such as the types of texts that are usually written in a specific orientation (i.e., poetry and classics tend to be written from top to bottom), can be crucial in making this decision. An additional challenge posed by the written code is the ambiguity, compression, and allusion of many of its literary forms, such as four-character set phrases or slogans known as chengyu (Hodge and Louie 1998). Hodge and Louie observe that “a high level of ambiguity is a major semiotic resource of Chinese” (19), but one that is certainly not easy for learners of Chinese to master. The tonal nature of Chinese is, similarly, a fundamental aspect of the spoken language that learners must acquire, often with difficulty. Although tones are certainly not a unique feature of Chinese, and are found in many other languages, particularly in Asia, Mandarin is variably said to have four, four and a half, or five tones, where tones one to four are clearly established (high, rising, falling-rising, and falling), and the fifth is either considered “no tone”, “half tone” or “light tone.” Other dialects, such as Cantonese, may have even more tones. Tones are intimately connected to the large number of homonyms in Chinese (and reflect other historical phonological changes), and help distinguish between otherwise similar-sounding syllables7 (like dian, in Table 1.1, which means ‘electric’ in ‘telephone’ with one tone and ‘a little (bite)’ in dim sum with another tone). Chen (1999) provides the example of Chinese syllable ji, which can be written using 137 different characters (and thus meanings), each pronounced with one of four different tones, depending on the intended 7 Chen (1999) reports that there are in total 420 distinct syllables in Modern Standard Chinese, which increases to 1300 if tones are included.

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‘China Rising’

meaning. For the English speaker accustomed to attending to utterance-level intonation to signify pragmatic or functional meaning, rather than word or syllable-level tones as a fundamental part of establishing semantic meaning (phonemic distinctions), accurately perceiving and producing tones typically requires a major linguistic shift in orientation.

1.4 Cultural politics and ideologies surrounding Chinese language education, learning, and use According to some scholars of Chinese language and discourse(s), cultural and academic politics and ideologies connected to the teaching and learning of Mandarin have also conspired historically against the successful learning of Chinese by a wider range of students worldwide (e.g., Hodge and Louie 1998; McDonald 2011a, 2011b). The field of sinology (Chinese studies) itself, they claim, since the 19th century in the UK and elsewhere, has played an important role in perpetuating this ideology. Characterizations of Chinese as impossibly difficult, even in the late 20th century Chinese and non-Chinese media, did not help matters either: The relative difficulty of the Chinese [written] language is used to great advantage by Sinologists in creating the myth of a unique Chinese “essence,” “sinicity,” which can only be properly understood if you are Chinese (from the educated classes) or if you have a very special talent for decoding the culture (that is, a good training in Sinology). Until very recently, very few non-Chinese had mastered the language, so that this talent was the exclusive realm of only a select few (who were of course the judges of what counted as mastery of the language, from a Western point of view) (Hodge and Louie 1998: 14).

Among the factors discussed by both Hodge and Louie (1998) and McDonald (2011a) – authors who share a critical discourse orientation to Chinese studies – is an enduring nativized and global “orientalism,” and elitism that “fetishizes” character knowledge – and often classical Chinese knowledge first and foremost. McDonald adds to that list of descriptors that constitute barriers to Chinese language learners that of “exceptionalism,” the uniqueness, difficulty and inscrutability of things Chinese, including the language and culture – in the section of his book entitled “The Great Wall of Chinese Language Teaching.” Aspects of Chinese most potentially beneficial to language learners are not taught, McDonald laments; and the language that is taught marks the learner as “foreigner.” He argues that “the goal of a university Chinese studies program should be to turn students into linguistic and cultural hybrids . . . learning Chinese should inevitably involve, to a greater or lesser degree, a process of turning Chinese” – phrases in the title of his book (2, italics in the original).

1.4 Cultural politics and ideologies surrounding Chinese language education

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In other words, they should become “sinophones.” 8 Becoming sinophone involves developing a Chinese “voice” and identity for McDonald – a process of adoption, internalization, and hybridization. Such discussions, of course, lead to issues regarding the “ownership” of Chinese, following on earlier work concerning the ownership of English (e.g., Norton 1997; Widdowson 1994): Who, other than “native speakers” can lay claim to a language and be granted legitimacy as its user (Marx 2002)? The elitist trends of past generations are perhaps now beginning to change, however, with more grassroots movements driving the teaching and learning of Chinese in addition to top-down ones. As Hodge and Louie (1998) observed, from an Australian perspective, over a decade ago, Increasingly, courses in both Chinese and Asian Studies are filled with students with just a pragmatic wish to understand China, as a place to work in or trade with or, just as important, with a vaguer but powerful desire to understand themselves and their own culture, its limits and possibilities, through opening themselves to the unpredictable difference of another. (17)

A recent sign of the changing public symbolism was the showcasing of people from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds learning Chinese to different levels on the CCTV (national) Chinese New Year Gala and variety show televised in February, 2011. (Similar trends have been observed in Taiwan, as well.) Canadian Mark Rowswell, whose Chinese name is Dashan (Big Mountain), is one of the best known and most proficient non-native speakers of Chinese, as well as a comedian and businessman. He has regularly appeared in the Chinese TV media in PRC for the past generation including in New Year’s Galas. In this case, however, the skit he was in foregrounded the learning of Chinese by foreigners. He is asked in Chinese by a series of five younger learners of Chinese (from Russia, Kenya, Australia, and the U.S.) about whether he has studied Chinese. They then introduce themselves and sing, recite poems, and produce humorous exchanges, typical of the program genre. That an assortment of Chinese language learners from various international Chinese language programs (Confucius Institutes) were included in such a high-profile New Year’s skit sent an important message about the phenomenon of Chinese language 8 McDonald (2011a) defines a sinophone as one “capable of operating fluently and comfortably in a Chinese language environment” (35) — and the term should potentially apply to native Chinese speakers as well. He views “the ‘sinophone’ precisely as a ‘linguistic and cultural hybrid’ – whereas the (unstated) goal of most Chinese studies programs is to turn their students into ‘sinologists’ or ‘sinophiles’ – both of which terms ultimately leave learners outside the society/culture they are studying . . . [The] more inclusive goal [should be one of ] “becoming sinophone and thus part of sinophone societies/cultures” (personal communication, Sept. 2011).

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learning to the broadcast audience of over a billion viewers around China and via satellite worldwide about Chinese as a global language.9

1.5 Chinese language education: Pragmatic curricular issues For three decades, Chinese has been classified in the United States, based on Defence Language Institute research in California, as a foreign language that, for all the reasons outlined earlier, requires more hours of formal instruction for Anglophone learners to acquire advanced proficiency in it than most other languages typically taught in the U.S. It shares that classification with Japanese, Korean, and Modern Arabic (see Liskin-Gasparro 1982). Chinese is now becoming more widely taught and learned and funding agencies and schools seek not to educate future scholars of classical Chinese literature primarily but people who can communicate in Mandarin for a variety of social, economic, and intellectual purposes. Accordingly, the sibling fields of Chinese language education and Chinese applied linguistics are faced with myriad practical questions from the public, from educators, and from other applied linguists related to how Chinese is, or should be, taught, learned, or used in bilingual and multilingual contexts, and using what source materials. Other questions concern which varieties or sequences of writing should be introduced: pīnyīn or zhùyīn fúhào? Simplified or Traditional? Traditional first and then Simplified, or vice versa, or the option to learn and use either one concurrently? Case studies exist of instructional processes in teaching Mandarin as an additional language (e.g., Duff and Li 2004) but such research on teachers and classroom instruction is beyond the scope of this review. Appropriate pedagogical materials for teaching Chinese are another source of concern – not only with respect to which oral and written varieties are presented, but also the content and the “world” of Chinese language and culture that is featured. Whose worlds and whose culture(s) are included and whose are not? Language policies connected with Chinese, or work on how it is being used on the Internet by members of Chinese diaspora communities and additional-language learners, many of them already speakers of a variety of languages, are also ripe for further study. Lo Bianco (2007a) and his colleagues in a special issue of Language Policy on Chinese education (the “re-emergence of Chinese”) spearheaded dialogue on some of these issues, but much more interdisciplinary and applied work needs to be done both inside and outside of Asia. Within diaspora communities meanwhile, parents and educators worry about

9 For skits and a short English summary, see http://english.cntv.cn/program/newsupdate/ 20110202/107371.shtml, downloaded May 10, 2011.

1.6 Trends and gaps in Chinese language education

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language shift from Chinese to dominant local languages such as English and the consequences of language attrition or loss for individuals, families, and communities. Their concern is how to encourage and sustain interest in retaining and cultivating Chinese proficiency in the next generation of Chinese heritagebackground youth and not just in non-Chinese learners of the language. In summary, given the global size and reach of the Chinese-speaking world, representing up to a fifth of the world’s population, with transnational migration, international adoptions, and communities and community memberships and political and linguistic significations of all types, the learning and use of Chinese requires much more concerted academic attention. It therefore behoves applied linguistics as a field to address the complex phenomenon of Chinese language learning in innovative, rigorous, and socially relevant ways in contemporary society.

1.6 Trends and gaps in Chinese language education and applied linguistics research Chinese is not yet nearly as widely taught in the United States or Canada as French or Spanish but it is gaining ground at the k-12 and postsecondary levels (e.g., ACTFL 2011; Furman, Goldberg, and Lusin 2007). It is the fastest growing language being taught in the U.S. and from 2000 to 2008, the number of students studying it increased dramatically. Thousands of public and private schools, universities, colleges, and community centers worldwide now offer Chinese. Among these, more than 825 Chinese-language Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms (the latter for younger learners, typically in public school programs) have been established since 2004 in over 100 countries by the Chinese Government (Hanban 2012), usually on major university campuses as well, promoting Pŭtōnghuà (Mandarin) and Simplified characters. As another indication of the global push for proficiency in Chinese, 420,000 people took either the HSK Chinese Proficiency Test (or YCT version for younger learners) in 2008 alone (Hanban, personal communication, November 2009), a test used much as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is for English, to determine eligibility for academic study (in China), employment eligibility (e.g., for Mandarin teachers), or for foreign-language course exemptions.10 This represents a fourfold increase in the number of test-takers since the turn of this

10 Another examination known as MHK is designed for students from different ethnolinguistic minorities in China; it is divided into four levels of proficiency.

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century when test-takers numbered around 100,000 (Graddol 2006). There have no doubt been comparable increases in numbers of test-takers of the Taiwanese equivalent, the Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL, formerly known as TOP, described in Chapter 2) as well. Remarkably, despite the level of activity, enthusiasm, and occasional concern expressed about Chinese language education and use internationally over the past decade, surprisingly little research has been conducted on Chinese as an additional language (CAL). Ellis’ (2008) massive volume on second language acquisition (SLA), for example, provides only two brief mentions of research on Chinese as a target language (two studies by the same author, Yuan 1998, 2001, of non-heritage language (HL) learners’ grammatical intuitions and/or production).11 Both were quantitative, experimental studies whose main goal was to test formal aspects of Universal Grammar theory in SLA. Although not reviewed by Ellis, a generation of applied linguistics research on Chinese SLA, literacy acquisition and orthographic awareness does exist, however (e.g., Everson 1998; Ke 1998; Le 2004; Samimy and Lee 1997). A comprehensive recent review of Chinese SLA research (from both generative and functional linguistic perspectives) can be found in Zhao (2011), for example. Not surprisingly perhaps, given the brief introduction to Chinese literacy presented above, one of the most commonly studied aspects of Chinese L2 learning has been the thorny issue of how people learn to recognize or read Chinese characters, which even native speakers can find difficult to learn, retain, and reproduce correctly. The acquisition of particular grammatical particles or constructions is a close rival to literacy in the focus of CAL research, with literacy research typically being conducted by cognitive psychologists and SLA by linguists (see Chapter 2). Therefore, most existing studies analyze acquisition from a (psycho)linguistic or cognitive perspective rather than from a sociocultural or social-practice perspective. The impressive volume Research Among Learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language (Everson and Shen 2010), for example, described as “cutting-edge in its approach” by drawing on “a range of research methodologies” (as quoted from its back cover) is representative of much current research in Chinese applied linguistics. Topics include the acquisition of individual linguistic structures, radical knowledge development for the acquisition of Chinese characters (which contain types of radicals or components), cognitive and metacognitive strategies in reading, and free recall by readers of Chinese texts.

11 Both studies were about the linguistic technicalities of a single parameter (each) of Universal Grammar: binding of reflexives (zìjĭ ‘self’; the Binding Principle for Anaphors) and placement of frequency adverbs (e.g., ‘often,’ ‘rarely’; the Verb Movement Parameter).

1.7 Investigating Chinese language learning from multiple new perspectives

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1.7 Investigating Chinese language learning from multiple new perspectives Whereas traditional SLA is sometimes characterized as cognitive and linguistic, approaches examining SLA from a more social-practice and phenomenological (experiential) perspective are sometimes described as “alternative,” despite their rising popularity and increasingly mainstream status (Atkinson 2011). Regardless, research on CAL for the most part has not yet embraced the theories, methods, and debates that have been the focus of much applied linguistics research on European languages and literacies, and on bilingualism and multilingualism since the mid-1990s. Research informed by sociological, anthropological, and sociocultural theory focusing on contexts and meanings of learning and using language is therefore missing – or at best, nascent – in Chinese applied linguistics, whose departmental and disciplinary homes, traditionally, have been departments of linguistics or Asian studies. Even detailed linguistic case studies are lacking in the extant literature, with most studies involving intact classes of learners or cross-sectional studies. Some of the most interesting and provocative issues and research methods arising from the social and narrative “turns” in applied linguistics over the past fifteen years (e.g., Block 2003, 2007; Pavlenko 2001a, 2007, 2008; Swain and Deters 2007) involving other languages and moving beyond the comprehension and acquisition of discrete elements of language or of processing are therefore conspicuously absent from even the most recent publications on Chinese, such as in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. Yet Chinese is an incredibly fertile domain for examining precisely the sorts of social, cultural, political, semiotic, and narrative dimensions of language and literacy learning being taken up elsewhere. Few studies of CAL have provided an in-depth and contextualized analysis of individual learners’ motivations and goals for choosing to study Chinese, their experiences and milestones in Chinese language and literacy acquisition, the social, linguistic, cultural or affective characteristics of their development, the relationship between engaging in Chinese learning and their social, cultural and linguistic identities and selves, and their longer-term trajectories as Chinese learners and users. One significant recent exception is Tasker’s (2012) doctoral dissertation, The Dynamics of Chinese Learning Journeys: A Longitudinal Study of Adult Learners of Mandarin in Australia. The study follows several dozen individual learners of Chinese and then, from the larger sample, seven focal individuals over a five-year period (and retrospectively back many more years), examining their narratives and reports of CAL learning in terms of complexity theory. However, many more qualitative, interpretive case studies like Tasker’s

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and of the sort that have been very important and influential in the development of SLA as a field generally (Duff 2008b) are needed in Chinese applied linguistics. Otherwise, Chinese language learning is not understood well, or holistically, and SLA theory has not benefited from knowledge related to how speakers from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds learn this particular East Asian language and the multiple forms of literacy associated with it, which may have implications for SLA theory more broadly. The unique challenges associated with the graphically complex orthography of Chinese, as well as politicallycharged decisions around dialect, accent, and whether to study Simplified or Traditional characters make this a particularly pressing issue. Detailed accounts of personal forays into Chinese have therefore been much less common – at least in English academic publications – than the numerous diary studies, autobiographies, memoirs, and case studies of the processes and transitions involved in SLA, bilingualism, and (im)migration for European target languages, especially in post-immigration contexts but also for shorter-term sojourns in another country such as study-abroad visits and education. Oft-cited examples related to English and French (L2s) include those by Hoffman (1989), Kaplan (1993), Kinginger (2008), Mori (1997) and Watson (1995), among others, most written by female language learners and writers (see Chapter 5). These same sorts of studies have been analyzed by researchers interested in personal SLA narratives (e.g., Kramsch 2009; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000; Schumann 1997). Inexplicably, few such accounts exist for learners of Asian languages, with Siegal’s (1994, 1996) research and the more recent autoethnography of Simon-Maeda (2011) representing valuable exceptions dealing with the learning of Japanese as a second language by Western women in Japan.

1.8 Existing (auto)biographical accounts of learning Chinese Several case studies of American or Canadian non-HL learners of Chinese have been written, however. A short biography of the first American student of Chinese (Cantonese) language, Samuel Wells Williams (Chao 2007), described his decades-long experiences, frustrations and professional achievements in Chinese language and literacy acquisition in China. The biography was based on letters he sent from China to family and friends that documented his acquisition from the 1830s, until he took up a Chinese professorship at Yale University in 1877. Described by Chao as “a pioneering student of Chinese, as a Chinese scholar, and eventually as the first professor of Chinese in the U.S.” (1), Williams’ life offers a tantalizing but all-too-short biography of CAL and one that could no doubt have filled an entire volume.

1.8 Existing (auto)biographical accounts of learning Chinese

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Shifting to the modern era, Bell (1997a), a specialist in adult ESL literacy and narrative SLA research, described her own attempt to learn Chinese literacy over an eight-month period in a book devoted to the topic. Her “story of learning Chinese” (one chapter in the book) outlines her struggles and successes – and also the difficulty with trying to learn oral and written Chinese and research one’s own learning processes at the same time. Her underlying research objective was to gain a firsthand understanding of her own students’ struggles with ESL literacy learning by studying a language typologically unrelated to English and with a different (non-alphabetic) “literacy system.” At the time, there was also a large infusion of Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong immigrating to Toronto, where Bell lived, and Chinese signage in Chinatown shops and items on Chinese menus. The study was therefore anticipated to be useful for her future work with ESL literacy learners from Chinese backgrounds and also a source of data for her dissertation as she investigated “the kind of expectations that an adult attempting literacy in a new language might have and exploring how those expectations would be fulfilled or modified” (94–95). A Cantonesespeaking ESL tutor agreed to teach her Chinese literacy (initially 3–4 Traditional characters a week), while Bell concurrently enrolled in a Cantonese conversation class. There she learned the Yale phonetic system and simple oral expressions, enabling her ultimately to “greet someone, introduce myself, talk about my family, my job and my interests. I had the language to purchase items in a store or market, discuss prices, count to 999, order simple food in a restaurant, and ask for directions. . .” (135). Bell’s level of attainment through the study seemed rather modest in light of her goals (e.g., to learn the most common 2000 characters), which she conceded is a common phenomenon in adult L2 literacy learning. However, she documented that she had “worked with some two hundred and twenty characters and knew a further fifty collocations [words], where two more characters are used together to make a new meaning” (141–142) and was able to “exchange notes with a non-English speaking Chinese student” (142). She was frustrated in the early stages by the way “literacy” was being presented to her as mastery of handwritten character production through considerable rehearsal of the same individual characters, which Bell contrasted with her own earlier conception of literacy and of her “self” as a learner, user of language, and language and literacy education expert. She explained that “as I progressed and began to realize the benefits of learning in a more holistic fashion, in fact I became totally (and probably unrealistically) enamoured” of learning Chinese (Bell, personal communication, July 2012; see Bell’s (1997b) fuller account of her vacillating attitudes toward learning Chinese). In this spirit, at the end of her Chinese L2 learning narrative she cites an excerpt from her learning journal:

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“I am in love with the Chinese learning – I wish I could forget the [research] study temporarily and focus on the language” (143).12 More recently, Ogulnick’s (2000) edited collection of “language crossing narratives” includes an intriguing account of an adult Caucasian learner of Chinese; however, the scope of that collection does not allow for any in-depth analysis. Also in the memoir genre, Fallows’ (2010) book of essays of her experience as a linguist living in China for more than three years recounts aspects of Chinese language, literacy, and culture often viewed as bewildering or annoying for Westerners such as Fallows and her American journalist husband. Since her book is not intended for (applied) linguists but is designed for nonspecialists with an interest in China and Chinese, she does not describe in any depth her own language development, apart from a few anecdotes of her experiences with various Chinese teachers and tutors and her adventures in everyday Chinese culture and society. Mostly, her chapters are organized around one Chinese word each that is meant to be representative of larger social and cultural observations (e.g., ànmó ‘massage;’ lăobăixìng ‘ordinary people,’ rènào ‘hot and noisy’). Unfortunately, much of the book, while amusing in places, reads as a rather stark and essentialist contrast and even caricature of Chinese people, language and culture, on the one hand, and “Western” (European or American) people, languages and cultures, on the other, and betrays some disdain for the former. Several other travel memoirs written by non-linguist expatriates who have spent extended periods of time in China and have also grappled with Chinese focus on social and cultural commentaries primarily, with much less emphasis on the language and literacy learning (e.g., DeWoskin 2005; Dunlop 2008; Hessler 2001; Pomfret 2006). DeWoskin’s salaciously-titled Foreign Babes in Beijing, for example, is an account of her five-year stay in China in the early-tomid-1990s, centering on her role as a foreign woman in a very popular Chinese soap opera bearing the same title as her book, which aired in the mid-90s. Although language learning is not the primary focus of the book, DeWoskin shares her experience of learning Mandarin at university in the United States, with a tutor in China, as well as through everyday interactions.13 The book provides interesting insight into the experiences of a White foreigner in the early years of China’s “opening up” to the world, much as Pomfret’s (2006) does 12 We thank Jill Bell for clarifying her experiences and also responding to our question about whether she persisted with her study of Chinese after completing her study and book. She writes: “some years later I took a position at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and immediately began [Chinese] classes again. It was evident in those classes that my earlier study had given me a significant advantage” (personal communication, July, 2012). 13 In light of the aforementioned popularization of Chinese culture, note that HBO has optioned Foreign Babes for an upcoming English-language series.

1.9 Contemporary case studies in CAL on identity, ideologies, and narrativity

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from the early 1980s and during his time subsequently as a newspaper bureau chief editor in Beijing. Other case studies of CAL by (applied) linguists are typically short in duration, or in scope or data, and thus offer limited insights (e.g., Chao’s (1998) brief case study of two students’ learning in immersion programs in the US). Fuller treatments, such as dissertations, typically provide much more linguistic detail of Chinese acquisition (e.g., Wang’s (2001) year-long study of three American students’ acquisition of Chinese negation, interrogatives, and temporality in China, and Le’s (2004) analysis of learner beliefs and foreign language anxiety among American university students studying Chinese) but with little reference to social, cultural, or personal aspects of learning Chinese or of the learners’ lives. Conversely, Tasker’s (2012) aforementioned study provides rich, longitudinal biographical and socio-educational profiles of her seven focal participants, all of whom are longtime learners of Chinese in different age groups (including one who is nearly 80). She addresses issues of identity, agency, and desire very directly, noting how they evolve or are acted upon over time and to what effect. However, that study, which is otherwise very informative and innovative, does not analyze the Chinese learners’ actual linguistic competence, as that was not the focus.

1.9 Contemporary case studies in CAL on identity, ideologies, and narrativity Apart from Tasker’s (2012) research, almost no studies framed by sociocultural theory or narrative inquiry have been conducted on the acquisition of Chinese by English speakers. Yet research described as either or sometimes both poststructural or sociocultural related to identity and language learning (e.g., Block 2007; Duff 2012a; Norton 2000, 2010; Pavlenko 2007, 2008; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000; Swain, Kinnear and Steinman 2011), often in combination with narrative inquiry and feminist research, has become a major focus in (qualitative) SLA. The appeal of that line of research, and the one taken in this book, lies in its aim to effectively capture some of the tensions, struggles, desires, and ambivalence inherent in the process of learning another language and dwelling in another culture – or moving across languages and cultures in the case of bilingual or multilingual learners such as immigrants, postcolonial citizens, transnationals, and sojourners. Lantolf and Genung (2002), drawing on sociocultural theory and aspects of identity, did address some of the social-contextual and affective factors that inhibited Genung’s acquisition of Chinese in her university-level course, but her

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language study was limited to the one-semester course taken to fulfill a graduate program requirement. Overall, CAL was a negative and short-lived experience for her and Genung’s actual linguistic progress was given minimal attention. Recent graduate theses by two of the authors of this book (Ilnyckyj and VanGaya (formerly Lester)) are also notable exceptions to the trends reported in previous sections. Ilnyckyj (2010) focuses primarily on sociocultural themes, such as race and social positioning or othering, in the self-reports of five expatriates (not the same five as in the present study) who had learned Chinese and lived in China for some time. She was especially interested in the significance of the term lǎowài (foreigner) for the non-heritage learners in terms of their attitudes toward and opportunities to learn and use Chinese and to become part of local Chinese communities. Lester (2010), in turn, presented an innovative trio of creative non-fiction accounts of her own decade of language learning experiences, but especially during a recent six-month sojourn in Taiwan that followed on many prior years of Chinese study elsewhere. She employed autobiographic narrative, readers theatre, and bricolage (all framed as different versions of autobiographical narrative, some pictorial) to address themes based on her experiences and often shared by other Westerners. She deliberately opted not to provide a more traditional linguistic or sociolinguistic analysis of her language and literacy development during that time and in that respect her thesis is complementary to the account of her learning and that of the rest of the team provided here. Regarding the learning of Chinese by people originally from regions outside of North America, McDonald (2011) presented an analysis of the CAL experience and linguistic identities of Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore. Lee first started learning Chinese in Japanese-occupied Singapore; while his Chinese dialect affiliation was Hakka, his ethnic affilation was peranakan or Straits Chinese (which came from a variety of dialect backgrounds). Yet he was a native speaker of English educated in English-medium schools who also went by the name “Harry” as a boy – and to this day among his family, according to McDonald (personal communication). Lee learned Chinese (characters) initially in order to understand the written Japanese propaganda notices in his midst in Japanese-occupied Singapore and later learned spoken Mandarin (and Hokkien, the variety of the majority in Singapore, although not his family’s own heritage variety) to garner the support of the Singaporean Chinese-speaking community as his political ambitions grew. The ideologies Lee and others in his community held with respect to Chinese language and culture as an English-educated Singaporean and statesman (but never “an Englishman”) revealed the kinds of tensions in identity often found in (post)colonial and diaspora contexts.

1.10 Chinese as a heritage language

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McDonald (2011) juxtaposes his own “sociolinguistic autobiography,” as an Anglophone Australian (non-Chinese-heritage) learner/user of Chinese, with Lee’s. McDonald had studied several European languages, both modern and classical, prior to taking up Chinese as a university student in Australia and subsequently an international graduate student in Beijing. His nickname in China became Lǎo Mǎ (Old Ma/Horse – where Ma is a common Chinese surname with this meaning). Reflecting on his process of becoming sinophone, McDonald writes: “Becoming Lǎo Mǎ may have happened almost instantaneously, when [my] tai chi teacher bestowed this label on me, but learning how to live as Lǎo Mǎ, exploring the potentialities of this new identity, was a somewhat longer and more complicated process” (203–204). He proceeds to explain the process, comparing his own sinophone trajectory with examples of ethnic Chinese individuals in diasporas who do not speak Chinese (and do not wish to) but who are positioned by other members of their communities in unflattering, ethnicized, and racialized ways because of their visible Chineseness, “an impossible burden” for many of them, no matter how many generations removed from life in a Chinese-speaking region (211). One provocative example is that of Ang (2001: 3), “an ethnic Chinese, Indonesian-born and European-educated academic who now lives and works in Australia,” whose book is titled On Not Speaking Chinese. In contrast, others who seek “full sinophone status” may “forever be locked out from a productive and meaningful engagement with sinophone language and culture” (McDonald 2001a: 211) because of their ethnicity, their instructional experiences, expectations in the sinophone community, and so on. We address similar themes in Chapter 4. Several other autobiographical accounts of sojourners in China have also been produced which focus to varying degrees on the authors’ encounters with Chinese language and culture (the sinophone world) and residence in China (see earlier references). Yet the possibilities for examining the teaching, learning, and use of Chinese in Africa or the Middle East (among other regions) or by learners from various Chinese-speaking communities, such as Lee’s, and not just Westerners of European ancestry learning Chinese, are endless. Indeed, the new volume Teaching and Learning Chinese in Global Contexts referred to earlier in this chapter represents an important contribution to that goal but the “global contexts” discussed by chapter authors are limited to the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and the United States.

1.10 Chinese as a heritage language The emerging scholarship on Chinese as a heritage language in North America, the UK, Australia, and elsewhere, such as the narrative about Singaporean former

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Prime Minister Lee’s experience in his postcolonial Anglo/Chinese region, is just beginning to address social, cultural, and affective issues to some extent. The research is typically framed in terms of linguistic and cultural identities and ideologies (e.g., He 2008, 2010; Hornberger and Wang 2008; Li and Duff 2008; Lo Bianco 2007b; Kelleher 2010; Curdt-Christensen 2006; McDonald 2011). However, relatively few authors (notably He, Kelleher, and Wang) have drawn on social or (socio)cultural approaches to investigate Chinese heritage learners’ experiences and identities, or issues of how they are positioned with respect to their heritage backgrounds. Few combine linguistic, sociocultural, and (meta) narrative approaches as we do in this book for an examination of learners’ changing subjectivities, community affiliations, alignments, and abilities in relation to Chinese. Chao (1997), for example, discussed the challenges faced by six American Chinese-HL learners but provided almost no information about the individuals, their personal profiles, and learning contexts, except for a short appendix. Agnes He (2006, 2008, 2012) described one 19-year old heritage-language (HL) learner whom she called Jason, who was not a single actual individual but a composite or prototype of numerous learners in studies she conducted over several years with Chinese-American youths at different age levels, from elementary school through to university. Thus, “Jason” was a narrative, discursive, and theoretical construction – an attempt to provide coherence to, and a sense of overall trajectory for, the cross-sectional experiences, and linguistic and educational profiles of He’s larger sample of research participants and students over a number of years. Jason’s experiences therefore represent a common path for many young American HL learners as they experience their HL (Cantonese in “Jason’s” case) in the home, first enter public school and gain a strong foundation in English, begin weekend HL classes (Mandarin), perhaps drop out of HL classes after a year or so, and then later as university students resume their study of Chinese and possibly their dream of “working in China someday” and both consolidate and transform their identities as Chinese Americans (see Comanaru and Noels 2009; Li and Duff 2008, for similar profiles of HL learners).

1.11 New directions in Chinese language learning It appears that applied linguistics is on the cusp of wonderful new possibilities for research on the learning of Chinese in a variety of local and global contexts. The goal of this book is to offer an original, collaborative, multimethod, and multiperspectival overview and empirical analysis of research on learning Chinese.

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Our project is admittedly both experimental and exploratory, part of a very organic process of making sense of the processes involved in learning and researching CAL and the significance they have for learners and their communities, and the L2 milestones they achieve as well as for SLA. The research was conducted by our team over a period of more than two years but also draws on the multifaceted experiences of each of the team members with respect to their own personal experiences of learning Chinese over a much longer time period, spanning up to three decades. One of the shortcomings of both the cognitivist and sociological research on second language learning reported above is that the former often lacks any sense of the sociocultural contexts or meanings associated with language learning. Conversely, the latter, the social or cultural or narrative, explores precisely those sorts of contexts, meanings, subjectivities, and tensions but lacks any detailed description of learners’ actual oral and written proficiency or its development and use. For that reason, in this book we bring the two together and also wrestle with the challenges of trying to integrate or reconcile the seemingly disparate structural (linguistic/literate), sociocultural, and (meta)narrative methodologies and epistemologies in our multi-method treatment of CAL. We also try to examine the research process itself, and the resulting community building, catharsis, and impetus it provided for members to persevere with their Chinese learning in ways that were unanticipated at the outset of the project. The annotation, discussion, and analysis of one another’s narratives was one vehicle for this form of personal exchange and reflection and we therefore devote much of Chapter 5 to the actual mechanisms for responding to the narratives and the content and function of the interactions in order to understand the individual and collective representation of learning in and across the narratives and over time and the functioning of the team as a community of practice as learners, analysts, and writers. We also reflect on the possibilities that a study of five Chinese learners’ experiences offers for other researchers (and learners) in Chinese as an additional language and what it also offers the wider fields of applied linguistics and language education for those working in other language areas.

1.12 The study presented in this book The empirical core of the book is the experiences of five Anglo-Canadian team members (Patsy Duff, Tim Anderson, Roma Ilnyckyj, Ella VanGaya,14 Elliott 14 Please note that Ella changed her name from Pamela Lester to Ella VanGaya in early 2012, and that references for Lester refer to the same person.

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Yates, hereafter referred to by first names), who have been learning Chinese, both formally and informally, actively and passively, for many years in a variety of contexts: in Canada, China, the United States, Singapore, and Taiwan. The sixth team member (Rachel Wang) has been involved in Chinese language education and applied linguistics for many years herself. The study was conducted under the auspices of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education (CRCLLE) at the University of British Columbia from January 2009 to August 2011 with continuing writing and revising after that. The overarching research questions were: 1. What descriptive and analytical approaches and tools are available for capturing Chinese learners’ linguistic experiences and abilities and how effective, useful, and compelling are they? 2. What similarities and differences emerge across the five cases of adult EnglishL1 speakers’ experiences of learning Chinese and in their observed/reported proficiency in Chinese, both oral and written? 3. What factors seem to account for those similarities and differences? 4. What developmental patterns and themes are most salient in the individual and collective accounts of Chinese language learning and how do these relate to existing research? We also sought to understand how the themes or critical incidents discussed by the research participants (e.g., in relation to identity, community, agency, gender) as well as the linguistic and (meta)narrative analyses might differ from research on L2 learning in other linguistic and cultural contexts. Finally, though not a research question per se, the team also became very interested in the question of how the use of a collaborative, participatory, narrative-based research approach to investigating the learning processes, factors, meanings, and achievements in Chinese, as well as the collaborative writing of this book, would change not only our understandings but also our ongoing practices as language learners/users, researchers, scholars, and educators (see Chapter 5).

1.12.1 Research methodology In each of the next four chapters, we present the methods used and the epistemologies, instruments, and background literature that informed our linguistic, sociocultural, and (meta)narrative analyses, respectively. In what follows, we provide a general overview so as to familiarize readers with the overall project, its scope, procedures, and our modes of participation.

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1.12.1.1 Participants The six authors constitute the research team conducting this study and five are the research participants. Those same five are Caucasian adult English-speakingCanadian learners of Mandarin and the sixth member is a native speaker of Chinese originally from Shanghai who helped coordinate the project. Four of the participants (Ella, Elliott, Roma, and Tim) were graduate students in applied linguistics at the University of British Columbia (in their 20s and early 30s) for most of the duration of the study; one (Patsy) was a middle-aged professor of applied linguistics and research centre director; and one (Rachel) was a former master’s degree student in the same department – and now a doctoral student in Chinese language and literacy education – who was the same age as most of the CAL (student) participants. A profile of each CAL participant is found in Chapter 2 together with more detailed information about each learner’s oral proficiency, literacy(ies), and experiences.

1.12.1.2 Research design and procedures The study was an exploratory, multiple-case study informed by narrative inquiry and by current linguistic and sociocultural approaches to SLA (e.g., Swain and Deters 2007). Narrative research, an umbrella term that subsumes narrative inquiry (see Chapter 5), often takes the form of memoirs of language learning and teaching and accounts of professional socialization in applied linguistics. This approach to knowledge generation and representation and the various methods for collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting data is now receiving considerable attention in the humanities, social sciences, and education (e.g., Barkhuizen 2011; Clandinin 2007; Clandinin and Connelly 2000; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Ochs and Capps 2001). The study was especially informed by work by Pavlenko (2001, 2007, 2008), Kinginger (2008), and others (reviewed in Chapter 5) and by our own collective desire to reflect on our language learning histories, abilities, and goals with one another. The productive earlier tradition of diary studies in SLA (e.g., Bailey 1983; Schmidt and Frohta, 1986; Schumann 1997) also provided a foundation for this study.

1.12.1.3 Triangulating epistemic stances: “Insiders” and “outsiders” Narrative research, such as narrative inquiry, can be an individual, solitary, introspective, and aesthetic enterprise (e.g., Lester 2010). However, in this study we sought to engage in a much more collaborative process of describing team members’ SLA journeys, perspectives, and abilities/practices, while still allowing space for creativity and interactivity. In that sense, there was a high level of

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intersubjectivity in the research process as well as in the production of this book (see Chapter 5). We wanted to engage with others’ narrative (or expository) accounts of their own journeys and perspectives and attempted to jointly investigate the group members’ Chinese language and literacy development and evolving practices. Finally, we set out to consider themes in the experiential accounts of the five participants in relation to contemporary theory in SLA. This project involves several kinds of triangulation of different perspectives on the phenomenon. One is methodological and another is theoretical, by bringing in (post)positivist or structural perspectives on language development as well as more interpretive ones. Another form of triangulation involves having multiple participants – and analysts – in the project, each providing their own perspective and way of viewing the phenomenon of Chinese language learning – that is, stances regarding their learning (and ways of representing that) and ways of viewing and analyzing those and others’ experiences. Here we reflect a bit on the latter sense, and in Chapter 6 we reflect further on the methodological triangulation (literally three different approaches) we have undertaken. Schmidt and Frohta’s (1986) (then) quite novel approach to teaming up an applied linguist/language learner (Schmidt) recording and reflecting on his own processes of learning a new language (Brazilian Portuguese) with another applied linguist (Frohta, a native speaker of that L2 living in Brazil, where Schmidt resided temporarily), providing her perspective on the learner’s language use and development, seemed like a useful model for capturing different perspectives on the same phenomenon – those of the learner (the insider with respect to their own past and present experiences and perceptions) and those of the analyst (the outsider, to some degree), particularly in Chapter 2. Thus, we have adopted that approach to some extent, while acknowledging that the insider (emic) and outsider (etic) metaphors are problematic when the two parties are both (or all) involved in the production and interpretation of data. In the present study, we have five “insiders” with respect to their own CAL stories and one “outsider” (Rachel, a non-CAL learner), in that respect, who interviewed learners and helped analyze the data. However, in a sense, each of the five CAL learners also provided an outsider (etic) or additional perspective with respect to the others’ narratives and Chinese production – but not a disinterested or detached one. Furthermore, differences in the experiences of the CAL learners in Taiwan vs. Mainland China or at one period of time vs. another provided others with additional ways of seeing Chinese language education and use more broadly. Indeed, the “insider” and “outsider” were in constant interaction looking for common ground, for intersubjectivity. Given the larger purpose of the project, all six authors were insiders (members of the team) seeking to understand the processes of moving back and forth across linguistic and cultural

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backgrounds – that is, negotiating community and identity-based memberships and alliances, in which “insider” and “outsider” status often loomed large as themes. In addition, the process of narrating and analyzing one’s own experiences – especially those in the distant vs. more recent past – while very personal and sometimes intimate, also serves to distance one’s self from one’s account. The written account then becomes an externalized form (or object) of experience and one that can be analyzed, coded, discussed, and revised in various ways as an artifact, as data. The same is true of the Chinese-L2 data that were generated through research interviews. The original narrators (interviewees) themselves then become outsiders of sorts – analysts or subjects whose “output” is being analyzed – seeking etic insights when analyzing their own data too, just as they are when analyzing others’ data. The analysts, in turn, seek to understand the insiders’ (experiencers’) experiences – to enter into the situations, worldviews, and events being described, with empathy and insight. One manifestation of the shifting roles and stances of insiders vs. outsiders was our struggle to use pronouns in describing our different roles and forms of participation in the project, individually and as a team and to find a common “voice” for the volume. The inclusive pronouns “we” and “us” worked for the project as a whole but were inappropriate when discussing “our” experiences as CAL learners, when most but not all of us were included in that pronoun. For that reason, we refer to the research team members and authors as “we” and the learners in the project as “they,” which is an inevitable form of selfothering as well.

1.12.1.4 Procedures and timeline for data collection and analysis The research objectives, questions, and methods of data generation and analysis were all decided by group discussion and consensus. However, these changed to some extent as the group became more familiar with one another and as our interests, narratives, and lives evolved. A short description of the study’s procedures and timeline is captured in Figure 1.3.

1.12.1.5 Description of research procedures and process Here we briefly describe our research procedures, sequence, and process, which are described more fully in the following chapters. The different components and steps of the study are shown in Figure 1.3. The steps shown in the boxes in the columns on the left and middle of the figure took place in the first year (2009) and those on the right-most side represented 2010–12.

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Figure 1.3: Project procedures and sequence

Year 1 (2009) The research group was formed in January 2009, voluntarily, at the suggestion of the research centre director (Patsy) and based on shared interests in CAL that had emerged through coursework and discussions the preceding semester. Thereafter, the group met at regular intervals to discuss the planned project. A password-protected wiki was established, allowing members to share relevant research articles and comments. Eventually the wiki also served as a site on which to post participants’ narratives and to comment on them. A secondary group called Mandarin Circle was formed by four of the participants for regular informal Mandarin language practice that semester. Over the following months in spring 2009, each participant (i.e., apart from Rachel) generated a first written narrative (hereafter N1, ranging from roughly 7000 to 14,000 words and in Ella’s case also in a multimedia DVD file) of their experiences learning and using Chinese. Narrative One was guided by a set of 10–12 general questions, topics, or components that the group had generated at one of the earliest meetings (see Chapter 5). No common narrative structure was prescribed, by design, although a page limit of about 25 double-spaced pages was agreed upon to help constrain our work. The first narrative was then annotated by others and followed by a revised narrative, Narrative Two (N2). Appendix A contains only an abridged third narrative (N3) by each participant originally produced in 2011 and then edited lightly the following year for those

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who wished to do so, reflecting additional revisions and updates intended for readers of this book (see Preface to Appendix A and Chapter 5). The first two narratives, in comparison, were not written for a public readership. In the interim, the group next met to brainstorm on common themes that had emerged during the process of generating and annotating the narratives. From this meeting, a list of themes (described below) was produced and then team members conducted a closer analysis of these themes across all five narratives. That analysis constitutes the core of Chapter 4, which was the primary focus of the project in the first year. During this same period, Rachel interviewed each CAL participant in Chinese (approximately 45 minutes each), following a semi-structured interview protocol. The purpose of the interview was to provide a somewhat less subjective assessment of our level of oral proficiency at the time than the self-assessments we had produced using the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2001) by allowing us to examine language samples from the group. The interview included several questions related to four main sets of topics (see Chapter 2) and enabled interviewees to elaborate on their language learning experiences in Chinese. Participants then transcribed portions of their own interview data – a few minutes for each of three main questions (tasks) – using the form of Chinese orthography that they felt best represented their CAL literacy abilities at that time. Rachel transcribed all the interview data independently and made observations about the interview interactions as well as the (apparent) proficiency of interviewees and other related observations. Proficiency profiles, similarities, and differences were reported for the five CAL learners and the interview data was turned into a corpus for the linguistic analysis (see Chapter 2 and Yates 2012). Group members worked independently on revised versions of the narratives (N2), incorporating additional information based on feedback on first drafts or addressing themes from the first thematic analysis. In addition, updates in learners’ experiences, proficiency, activities, or perspectives in relation to Chinese were noted. The revised versions were posted to the project wiki when completed. In the meantime, several of the group members (Ella, Elliott, and Tim) had made important decisions closely related to further Chinese learning and use, and two (Roma and Ella) had their M.A. thesis proposals accepted for studies of Chinese language learning.

Years Two and Three (2010–11) Once second drafts of the narratives were completed, the group met regularly in person or via Skype to discuss each revised narrative. This oral discussion was

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done (and also recorded) in lieu of repeating the written annotation process and thematic analysis conducted for Narrative 1. The result was a more immediate and coherent discussion of each individual’s CAL experience, including reasons for any changes they had made between the first and second versions, and readers’ reactions to the pieces. In Chapter 5 we discuss the pros and cons of each approach to analyzing the narratives. The five participants (CAL learners) produced increasingly detailed written narratives of their Chinese acquisition, documenting their CAL learning processes, achievements, and frustrations, generally over many years of prior (and ongoing) language study and socialization. Learners’ narratives and Chinese L2 data were then analyzed and salient, recurrent themes were noted. We became especially interested in the identities, communities, and language learning trajectories depicted in the data. We also considered the relationships between these themes and participants’ observed/perceived proficiency levels and identified commonalities and differences across the five learners. In summer 2010, group members were each interviewed in Chinese a second time, roughly one year after the first proficiency interview, to capture changes in abilities over time and possible explanations for those changes. Each participant again transcribed parts of the interview to reveal their current literacy practices and abilities. In addition, the metanarrative analysis proceeded with coders examining the functions and forms of annotations in the margins of the first narrative, with a view to understanding the purposes of those interactions and how, in the end, they influenced the shape and content of the revised versions of narratives. Team members paired up to work on various components of the analysis and preparation of book chapters between Fall 2010 and Summer 2011. The last-completed piece of the analysis (but the one presented first in this book) was the purely linguistic one, which required gaining a better understanding of the various assessment tools and corpora available for Chinese research and other ways of characterizing Chinese language production. That analysis (see Chapter 2) was also related to the M.A. thesis research of one of the team members (Yates 2012) investigating the utility of various computational and other descriptive tools for linguistic analyses of L2 development and use. However, along with the linguistic analysis, we felt it was crucial to devote some attention to aspects of literacy – people’s everyday Chinese literacy practices, choices, and dilemmas – given the nature of Chinese character-based literacy (see Chapter 3, and Duff, Anderson, Ilnyckyj, VanGaya, Wang and Yates 2012, which extends the analysis of multiliteracies). Drafts of analyses and chapters were prepared and then circulated iteratively to the group for commentary, feedback, and extensive revision. Along the way, participants provided updates on

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their current language/literacy self-assessments and preferences and reasons for any reported changes or filled in other information that was not clear from the earlier data or reports. Finally, once chapter drafts were completed, as noted earlier, a “public,” sometimes much shorter version of the individual narratives, Narrative Three (N3), was produced by each CAL learner in 2011.

1.13 Organization of this book This book represents what we believe to be a ground-breaking, multifaceted approach to Chinese language learning research by providing rich accounts and cross-case analyses of quite diverse CAL experiences, supplemented with literature based on other learners and other languages as well. Every attempt is made to help readers with no knowledge of Chinese to understand the linguistic and literacy examples and issues. We trust that by reading our overview of CAL contexts and research, together with our narratives and analyses, readers will gain greater appreciation for the special attributes and challenges of learning and researching Chinese as an additional language. With its three-pronged methodological and cross-disciplinary approach and multiple narrators, analysts, and authors, the project is admittedly ambitious. Our intention was to avoid some of the shortcoming of previous research described earlier in this chapter and also to explore a number of promising avenues and areas for research on Chinese and potentially other languages. As noted earlier, many sociocultural or narrative analyses of language learning omit actual evidence of participants’ linguistic or literacy abilities, at either one or additional points in time, offering only perceptions or reflections of their abilities and identities as language learners or users. Although these reflections may be valuable, because they reveal the desires, ambivalence, strategies, actions, or trajectories of the participants with respect to their engagement with learning and using the target language and seeking access to particular linguistic communities, they provide only a partial picture. Conversely, many linguistic analyses do not take into account powerful socio-affective, historical, cultural, and situational aspects of learning or the meaning of language learning for individuals. Finally, many narrative studies do not also include an analysis of the narrative generation, analysis, and authoring process itself, or an analysis of narrative as genre, and as social practice, but focus instead on the kinds of themes that appear or arise from the narratives (e.g., as we do in Chapter 4 of this book). Yet all of these aspects constitute important interactive features of data generation and interpretation and are part of theory building. In addition, these were not divorced from our ongoing

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learning and use of Chinese. Indeed, the research process and engagements became interventions in learning, since they catalyzed further CAL study and reflection. We present the multiple analyses, respectively, in separate chapters, but then look across the three primary approaches in the concluding chapter to examine what each contributes to an understanding of learning Chinese and other languages and SLA. At the end of the book, an abridged CAL narrative (N3) is provided for each of the learners in this project as a means of preserving the original flavour of their narrated experiences, although each has been edited out of consideration for space, privacy, and audience. Below, we describe the main focus of each subsequent chapter but save a more detailed explanation of methods used, theoretical frameworks, and analysis for the chapter itself. In Chapter 2, we examine the learners’ oral Chinese development and production primarily. Most existing developmental research in CAL tends to either look at discrete aspects of oral language development or, alternatively, give a much more global assessment of proficiency using standardized assessment tools. There are no widely accepted matrices or developmental sequences that we know of for Chinese grammar or vocabulary (we describe two useful tools that help provide benchmarks for vocabulary, however) as there are in German, English, or certain other well-research L2s, such as canonical word order or particular aspect markers or particles (see Ellis 2008; Ortega 2009). We therefore provide a global discussion of participants’ oral (and written) abilities, trajectories, choices, and alignments, in terms of oral dialects, and thus their linguistic identities and capabilities as Chinese learners and users. We also present brief linguistic profiles and histories of the five learners in the study, who, though all intermediate to advanced in some Chinese domains, are quite linguistically heterogeneous in other respects. Learners’ self-assessments of what they “can do” (or could do) in Chinese, based on CEFR rubrics, are also provided. We then present an analysis of the learners’ Chinese oral proficiency interview data (at two points, one year apart, for each learner), self-reports from the narratives, and an examination of several ways in which oral proficiency can be captured, through existing standardized tests, and through quantitative and qualitative analyses of participants’ lexical sophistication, fluency, and grammatical production. In Chapter 3, we explore the development of everyday Chinese literacies. Chinese literacy is a topic that clearly warrants close attention in discussions of Chinese language development and use. Unlike most discussions of Chinese L2 literacy development and use, we approach literacy more as social practice than as (purely) cognitive process, shaped and mediated by the local contexts in which different written varieties are cultivated and used and the different media

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and technological tools for its production and interpretation. Of the five CAL learners, some are highly literate in Chinese and others nearly illiterate, at least in terms of Chinese character use. Some have even learned two different character-based systems plus two romanized ones or two dialects of oral Chinese as well as other Asian languages (e.g., changing from one dialect or orthographic system to another and sometimes back again; or shifting from minimal literacy skills to full-time study of Chinese literacy and thus greater proficiency). This analysis is based on participants’ production of written Chinese texts (transcriptions of their own oral interview data) first without the assistance of Chinese word-processing tools or dictionaries and then with. We compare what the same learners are able to produce with the assistance of such tools (e.g., basic word processing programs that convert a romanized script form, such as wŏ (‘I’), to the Chinese character for the same word: 我 (and not 沃, 卧, 窝, or 涡, some of the other choices offered by the software for the sound segment wo but with completely different meanings). Images of these emerging forms of literacy and their significance are included and discussed. Chapter 4 features a sociocultural thematic analysis. We examined the two extended written narratives (N1 and N2) produced by each learner/participant to look for salient themes. Identity and community were major interrelated themes across narratives. We therefore frame the chapter theoretically, epistemologically, and methodologically in terms of previous research on identity and community in SLA (if not in CAL yet) and then focus on additional related subthemes in the narratives, such as agency and social positioning in CAL based on race or gender (we deal with the latter separately). We define these constructs and exemplify their relevance in Chinese language learning. Agency was, for example, associated with some learners’ desires to “conquer” Chinese, to own or master it and, to that end, to take concrete actions that might further those sometimes lofty (or overstated) goals; thus it is also related to motivation. Positionality or positioning is related to how learners were perceived by others in terms of their abilities, legitimacy as Chinese speakers, and their membership in the communities they were part of or sought access to. Thus positioning here is also associated, in part, with (social or ethnolinguistic) difference: in aiming to achieve a position of prominence or success or uniqueness in learning and using Chinese, participants also found themselves being positioned in ways that were both advantageous and disadvantageous in terms of their Chinese (or sinophone) identities, communities, and learning trajectories. We provide many examples of how positioning took place, was resisted or was taken up, the relationship between identity, community and positionality, and the consequences or meanings of such positioning for learning Chinese, as well as implications of these findings.

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In Chapter 5, we present a metanarrative analysis of the collaborative narrative inquiry process and resulting findings and artifacts (e.g., the narratives themselves). The crux of the analysis is the individual and collective production, annotation, and revision of the narratives as multimodal and co-constructed genres and data (following e.g., Clandinin 2007). We discuss how each CAL learner took up the narrative writing project stylistically, rhetorically, and conceptually, and then engaged in socially constructed, iterative, and very intensive annotations and discussions of one another’s narratives, both in terms of style and substance, over a one-year period (cf. Goldman-Segall 1998, who looked at recursive annotation in accounts of children’s science learning). We also consider how engagement in the narrative activities of the study itself changed aspects of participants’ CAL identities, communities, and trajectories. The narrative inquiry dimension of the study also became a form of socialization into collaborative research, into a new local community of practice, and into academia in Chinese applied linguistics for the participants, and an opportunity to create and perform new identities as author, scholar, graduate student, language teacher, language learner, friend, narrative researcher, co-researcher, academic professional, authority on Chinese language, leader, mentor, and co-author. Thus the narrative research itself impacted participants’ identities, communities, and trajectories in quite interesting ways that were highly relevant to CAL. Finally, we reflect on the process of not only integrating three types of epistemological and methodological analysis in this book within a broader contextual framework but also attempting to create a coherent and cohesive voice and intersubjectivity as a team of six analysts, writers, and (five) research participants. In the concluding chapter, we summarize some of the main findings in the book. We then discuss in some detail our reflections on the insights and limitations associated with combining the multiple primary approaches to SLA research; the strengths and challenges of undertaking collaborative, participatory research of this sort; and directions for future research in both Chinese and other language learning contexts. Also considered are some implications of our research for pedagogy, for policy, and for catalyzing similar projects in Chinese and other L2 learning contexts and as a way of engaging learners in studies of their own experiences and futures as multilingual subjects (Kramsch 2009) and of extending traditional domains of inquiry.

2 Developing Chinese Proficiency: Linguistic Perspectives 2.1 Introduction: Researching Chinese language learners’ development In this chapter, we take a closer look at ways of characterizing and analyzing the development of linguistic proficiency in Chinese, particularly in light of the various linguistic and sociolinguistic dimensions of Chinese (e.g., dialects, tones, lexical variation), that learners encounter and must differentiate and internalize. We then present the CAL learners’ linguistic profiles and provide a more detailed description of their language abilities in Chinese across several skills and domains of knowledge and ability, including lexicon, fluency, and grammar. In their research agenda regarding major issues in the burgeoning field of Chinese language education, Cruickshank and Tsung (2011) state that “there is a need for language specific research on how Chinese developed as a second/ additional language in [a] range of contexts. This would include linguistics research and research into the learners themselves” (223). This perspective was shared by members of our Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education, including the participants in this study, all of whom had studied Chinese in different regions at different times in both formal and informal settings. By examining their language performance and learning experience, we hope to provide a relatively accurate and holistic picture of learners’ acquisition and use of a language notorious for its difficulty, particularly for learners from non-sinographic languages (i.e., those without Chinese characters). We also aim to represent the participants not only as Chinese language learners, but also as users, learners, speakers, and teachers of multiple languages because multilingual identities in some cases play an important role in participants’ ongoing relationship with Chinese. Participants’ language proficiency is examined from several angles, using the two versions of the narratives in which they reflected upon their abilities (in English), L2 self-assessments, and Chinese L2 interviews with Rachel on two occasions. By comparing and combining these sets of data, we provide a triangulated description of what the CAL learners were able to accomplish in Chinese. Our detailed discussion of literacy development and use and orthographic awareness then follows in Chapter 3. Subjecting participants to a full battery of Chinese language proficiency tests would have been a more comprehensive and global form of assessment

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but was inconsistent with the overall spirit of the project, which focused more, at least initially, on the meanings the learners attached to their experiences of learning and using Chinese, more so than a clinical assessment of their actual abilities across skill areas. In addition, we set out to determine how their previous learning experiences in different settings, such as educational exposure (informal vs. formal), geographical location (Taiwan vs. different regions of China), and time period (1980s vs. 1990s vs. 2000s), are reflected in their language performance.

2.2 Existing research on linguistic dimensions of Chinese as an additional language 2.2.1 Linguistic approaches As discussed in Chapter 1, there is an increasing interest in learning Chinese in recent years, especially with China’s rapid economic growth and the Chinese government’s continuous efforts to promote Chinese as a global language as well as Chinese culture. Other countries, such as the United States, have also devoted considerable federal and state resources to Chinese language education since the turn of the 21st century. In addition to this growing local educational activity and professionalism, and a parallel increase in commitment to language teaching in established heritage language communities, many cities, universities, and public schools worldwide have either witnessed the opening of Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms or welcomed thousands of volunteer teachers sent by Hanban since 2004. Accordingly, there is a strong need for research related to CAL, such as effective teaching methods, teaching materials, language curriculum for different levels and ages, appropriate and valid language assessment instruments and procedures, and developmental scales for Chinese SLA. Previous studies in applied Chinese linguistics have focused mainly on a rather small set of linguistic features of Chinese and their acquisition, such as the 把 bǎ (focus) construction (Bender 2000; Du 2010; Feng 2001; Wen 2010; Ziegeler 2000), the morphosyntactic partitive/genitive/complementizing particle 的 de (Li 2010), the perfective了le particle (Duff and Li 2002; Ross and He 2008; Soh 2009), and topic chains in Chinese discourse (Li 2004; Xie 1992; Xiao 2008). This linguistic trend in Chinese SLA in the CAL literature reflects pursuits in the larger field of SLA, and particularly work undertaken in the 1980s, when developmental scales, stages, processes, and functional categories (e.g., aspect) were being established for, and examined in, a number of European languages and, later, non-European

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languages such as Japanese. However, Chinese still appears to lack comprehensive baseline data regarding such scales, stages, processes, and interrelationships among grammatical subsystems. Furthermore, even in the linguistic research on CAL, there are obvious gaps, which seem to reflect the relative recency of SLA research in this area. Tseng (2006), for example, addressed the dearth of specific descriptions of the linguistic gains in Chinese (L2) from study abroad. In her study, she explored both objective measures of linguistic proficiency (Chinese Proficiency Test designed by the Center for Applied Linguistics) as well as learner observations to help interpret the results. However, learners’ oral proficiency (speaking) was not assessed. In contrast, a generation of finetuned research on study abroad has been conducted for learners of European languages and other Asian languages such as Japanese (e.g., Collentine and Freed 2004; Freed 1995; Kinginger 2008, 2009). Those studies have examined development in such linguistic domains as vocabulary and reading, oral fluency, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, and grammar, often (in U.S.-based studies) using data from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) supplemented with other tests and measures, but almost no such studies to date have involved learners of Chinese.1 Another gap is that while studies of individual aspects of Chinese SLA are useful, very few studies have charted the development of individual linguistic features over time (including ungrammatical or creative interim stages), or in relation to a broad range of other features developing at the same time or at other points in time. In contrast, such descriptions of the development of word order, negation, question formation, relative clauses, tag question formation, tense-aspect distinctions, articles, and other features, developed more than two decades ago, remain robust measures of developmental sequences in L2 English, French, and German (Ellis 2008). Moving away from descriptions of learner language itself, there have also been studies in recent years incorporating cognitive approaches to examining Chinese L2 development and use, such as exploring themes of learning strategies (e.g., Winke and Abbuhl 2007; Lee-Thompson 2008). Though these do highlight the corollary skills learners employ when acquiring Chinese, they do not delve deeply into sociocultural contexts of identity, which we explore in Chapter 4. Further evidence of the priority given to discursive and functional linguistic descriptions of Chinese and of CAL is the relatively new journal, Chinese Language and Discourse, and another (bilingual) journal, launched in 2012, called Chinese as a Second Language Research. Some of the Chinese SLA research at 1 In 2012, at least one U.S. Ph.D. dissertation study was being conducted on this in Chinese study-abroad contexts (Wenhao Diao at Carnegie Mellon University), with research by others in planning phases. Please see also Footnote 1 in Chapter 6, Section 6.1.2.

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Developing Chinese Proficiency

the sentence or discourse level offers concrete pedagogical applications for classroom instruction environments and is published in the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. An edited volume resulting from a conference (Chen, Wang and Cai 2010), for example, focuses heavily on classroom pedagogy and linguistic obstacles that learners face when studying Chinese, such as morphological awareness and orthographic processing. 2.2.2 Linguistic development in sociocultural and phenomenological (narrative) accounts of Chinese SLA As we noted in Chapter 1, studies examining both sociocultural phenomena and Chinese language acquisition seem to be rare, as are studies attempting to explore multiple contexts and multiple learner profiles in relation to each other. Though anecdotal writings and autobiographical narratives describing sojourners and Chinese language learners are becoming more common (see Chapter 1), in step with China’s growing allure as a destination for global travel and economic investment and trade, these accounts rarely include anything but the most general sense of the learner’s development as a Chinese language user or proficiency in various aspects of the language. They also by nature tend to represent only a single, subjective point of view on the learner(s) described in the narratives, who is typically not a linguist or applied linguist and thus may lack metalinguistic awareness of language learning processes. Some autobiographical narratives of CAL provide a more nuanced personal account of sociocultural aspects of individual language learning, focusing on the relationship between the author and Chinese, including both the language and various aspects of the culture (e.g., Hessler 2001). Dunlop (2008), for example, describes her experience learning Chinese through her training and socialization to become a Chinese chef. The learning of new culinary vocabulary enabled her to understand Chinese culture more deeply. In her own words, as she went deeper into her culinary studies, she “was not only cooking, but also in some ways thinking, like a Chinese person” (104). However, though we are able to speculate about her language proficiency level from the stories she told, no detailed description of her language ability is provided. In another narrative, Millison (2000) talks about his experience learning Chinese both in America and in China after his marriage to a Chinese woman. He reported being able to read and write about 2,000 Chinese characters and being able to tackle contemporary books, magazines, and newspapers. However, as in Dunlop’s narrative, there is no additional indication or evidence of his overall language proficiency. In this study, therefore, we sought ways of providing somewhat objective measures and descriptions of language proficiency and development in addition to more impressionistic self-assessments.

2.3 CAL participants’ linguistic profiles

37

2.3 CAL participants’ linguistic profiles 2.3.1 Overview In Chapter 1 we introduced the authors of this book briefly. Here, their backgrounds as multilingual subjects are further detailed to give a sense of the repertoires and resources that they had access to and drew upon as learners of Chinese. The profiles below give a brief summary of participants’ histories up to the commencement of the research. Team members are introduced in alphabetical order, based on first names. More elaborate narratives of each learner’s CAL history, reasons for learning Mandarin, and reflections on their intercultural SLA journeys are found in the autobiographical accounts included in Appendix A. Some of the quotations that follow are based on earlier versions of the narratives, which provided “data” for these profiles.

2.3.1.1 Ella’s language background Ella’s experience learning Chinese began during two years living in Shanghai (2000–2001), where she acquired oral competency informally. For a few months during that sojourn she also took a non-credit, introductory Chinese course in a small class of less than ten students. She returned to Canada and majored in Chinese Language and Culture during her undergraduate degree, which included a year spent teaching English and studying Chinese one-on-one with a tutor in Kunming, China. After a three-year hiatus she began graduate school in Canada, where she revisited her CAL experience and the role of Chinese in her life, both in her thesis work (Lester 2010) and through participating in this study. Prior to learning Chinese, Ella had some knowledge of French through her exposure via the Canadian school system, and later came into contact with Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese through personal interests. She had also long been exposed to Hungarian as a heritage language, but as she was never required to speak or even comprehend it while growing up, only a few key phrases have stuck.

2.3.1.2 Elliott’s language background After graduating from university in Canada, Elliott began learning Chinese in Taiwan, where he studied privately with a tutor and focused primarily on reading. Altogether he spent about four years living in Taiwan (albeit not consecutively) in the 2000s, two of which were spent engaged in full-time language

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Developing Chinese Proficiency

study. His interest in Chinese led to his return to Canada and enrolment as a graduate student in Chinese applied linguistics at UBC, where he joined this project. As a youth, Elliott took French courses in school, but did not use the language thereafter, and felt as though he was taken more seriously when speaking Chinese than French. Halfway through his time in Taiwan he began to study Japanese concurrently with Chinese by attending beginner classes with Taiwanese schoolmates, and via exposure through fellow Japanese CAL learners at his Chinese language institute. Since 2010, he has also begun to study Korean, which along with Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese represented “the 漢字文 化圏 Chinese-character society” (N2: 26) he is interested in.

2.3.1.3 Patsy’s language background Patsy’s interest in Chinese budded when she was a child, but the 1986–87 academic year during which she was teaching English applied linguistics in Hunan, China, was her only significant period of Chinese immersion and sustained informal study. She occasionally audited Chinese courses in North America later. In the years since, she has returned to China many times for applied linguistics research related to both L2 Chinese and English, and she has had some exposure to Mandarin plus a southern dialect of Chinese (Changsha dialect of the Xiang language) for several years at home in Canada as well. Patsy initiated this study while teaching at the University of British Columbia. Patsy’s earliest language study was in French, German, and Spanish (she cited these experiences as nurturing her love of language), and in her twenties she studied Korean, Japanese, and later, Hungarian, as well as Mandarin.

2.3.1.4 Roma’s language background Roma grew up bilingually in Alberta with Ukrainian as her heritage language. She also learned some French in school as a Canadian public school student. Her first exposure to Chinese was in Singapore as a schoolchild, where she attended an international school and studied one year of Mandarin Chinese. Back in Canada she took Chinese classes in her Calgary high school, and minored in Chinese during her undergraduate degree. In the year following her degree she took up a scholarship to study Chinese in Hefei, China, before beginning graduate school in Vancouver and participating in the current study. Roma did not specifically cite Ukrainian as a significant linguistic resource in her life in her narratives, but she continues to use it, even in relation to her

2.3 CAL participants’ linguistic profiles

39

study of Chinese – for instance, she related using a Chinese-Ukrainian dictionary to “undermine the importance of English in [her] life” (N1: 20). In 2010–11, Roma resided again in China to teach English academic writing at a college.

2.3.1.5 Tim’s language background Prior to joining this project, Tim had taken one course of introductory Chinese for a semester in Saskatchewan, Canada, and had spent two and a half years in Taiwan. In Taiwan he studied Chinese, mainly focusing on oral, not written, proficiency, and taught English, which eventually became the professional and academic focus of his graduate studies in Vancouver, where he became a participant in the current project. Tim had a brief exposure to French in high school but did not cite this, or any other language, as influencing his linguistic journey. However, his multilingual journey has continued; in 2011, his latest extended period in Taiwan, he began to study Taiwanese (Hokkien), while continuing his studies of Mandarin. During that time he had a renewed focus on literacy acquisition and concentrated on greatly increasing his proficiency in written Chinese.

2.3.1.6 Summary of participants’ language backgrounds The five participants have learned Chinese at different times in different places and vary greatly in their language ability and language use. Among the five, their repertoires included three distinct dialects (Xiang, Mandarin, and Hokkien), two versions of characters (Simplified and Traditional) and two forms of phonetic scripts (zhùyīn fúhào and pīnyīn), all of which reveal the complexity and diversity of the Chinese language as well as the challenges in teaching, learning, and assessing it. Further, participants’ language journeys did not stop upon beginning this research project; on the contrary, in many cases they were motivated to study Chinese in other places, forms, and ways, and in some cases began to study other languages as well.

2.3.2 Formally assessing and describing CAL proficiency The majority of extant narratives of CAL described earlier in 2.2.2, while illuminating, only provide the learners’ self-descriptions of their language abilities, which have a particular type of (emic or insider/internal) validity but do not allow readers the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about the authors’ proficiency. Therefore, in this study, after soliciting written (English) narratives from participants, we decided to also examine learners’ language proficiency

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Developing Chinese Proficiency

from both self-reported statements and observations from an etic (more armslength, “outsider”) perspective, in this case a native speaker and experienced Chinese language teacher (Rachel). While major internationally-recognized assessment tools exist for measuring proficiency in Mandarin Chinese, discussed below, the team felt that the wide variety of backgrounds and skills exhibited by the participants (e.g., some highly literate in Chinese characters and others with limited character recognition only) would only be narrowly captured by each of the options we explored. Therefore, we chose to characterize proficiency with a supportive, low-pressure interview-style assessment and self-assessment profiles following the guidelines given by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, Council of Europe 2001). Logistical constraints and mobility, furthermore, prevented the group from undergoing a battery of tests, but some of the participants had experience with internationally recognized language proficiency exams such as the Hànyŭ Shuĭpíng Kăoshì (HSK, Chinese Proficiency Test) administered internationally by Hanban (Beijing) and Taiwan’s Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL; see Steering Committee of the Test of Chinese Proficiency – Huayu n.d.). In this chapter we characterize the language proficiency of the participants using the CEFR (described more fully below) and observations derived from oral interviews with the participants. However, we also provide some data from standardized tests for those who have taken them. For reference, Table 2.1 provides a rough equivalency for the various proficiency tests widely employed at present in CAL, based on available data, particularly in North America. In the following tables, “HSK (old)” refers to the HSK as administered prior to the “current” version, introduced in 2009, and “TOP (old)” indicates the pre-2010 version of the TOCFL, known as the Test of Proficiency-Huayu (TOP). Four of the five participants had taken one or another of these standardized tests in the past (Patsy being the exception) and could therefore report on previously attained scores or levels. Roma took the (old) HSK Elementary-Intermediate version at the end of her year in Hefei in 2008, after four years of university Chinese studies in Canada and one year in China. Her final level was assessed at 5 (corresponding, roughly, to a high B2 on CEFR, or Advanced-Mid on OPI), with higher sub-scores in grammar and reading comprehension. Ella and Tim both took the TOP in conjunction with their Ministry of Education Scholarship in Taiwan in 2010, a couple of months after arriving in Taiwan. Tim passed the TOP Beginner in 2010 (scoring 61/80), corresponding roughly to CEFR A2 (at least in terms of literacy/grammar possibly; Tim reported that there was no oral component on TOP at that time). Ella had studied Chinese in both Mainland China and UBC before taking the TOP Intermediate, earning a level 3 result (approximately B2 on CEFR). Only Ella had taken both HSK and TOP tests;

41

2.3 CAL participants’ linguistic profiles

Table 2.1: Comparison of assessment tools: CEFR, ACTFL OPI, HSK, and TOCFL CEFR

ACTFL

HSK (old)

HSK (current)

TOP-Huayu (old)

TOCFL (current)

–

[Beginner (1)]

A1

Novice Low – Novice High

[Basic (1)]2

1

A2

Novice Mid – Intermediate High

[Basic (2)]

2

Beginner

[Beginner (2)]

B1

Intermediate Low – Advanced Low

[Basic (3)/ Elementary (3)]

3

Basic (1–2)

Basic (3)

B2

Intermediate High – Advanced High

Elementary (3–5)

4

Intermediate (3–4)

Intermediate (4)

C1

Advanced Mid – Superior

Intermediate (6–8)

5

Advanced (5–7)

Advanced (5)

C2

Advanced High – Distinguished

Advanced (9–11)

6

–

–

Note: TOCFL (current) levels prior to 2012 were Beginner (= Level 1), Beginner (2), Learner (3), Superior (4), Master (5), with 2012 numbered levels in parentheses. Data in this table is compiled from Chang (2011), Hanban (n.d.), Hanban (2011), Martínez Baztán (2008), SC-TOP (2010), SC-TOP (2011), UBC (2006), and Vandergrift (2006).

her two HSK tests were in 2005 (Basic Level 3) and 2006 (Intermediate Level 7, or approximately C1 on CEFR, Advanced-High on OPI). Finally, Elliott took the Advanced level TOP in 2007 towards the end of two years of Chinese language study at a university in Taiwan, which he found highly motivating, scoring in level 6 (also roughly C1 on CEFR). Table 2.2 summarizes the participants’ most recent test results for reference. Although the participants were all familiar with the existence of HSK, when this project started in 2009 HSK required learners to be able to read and write Chinese characters at every level, which made it unsuitable for the purposes of this study because Tim and Patsy were almost Chinese-character illiterate at the outset. Furthermore, that version of the test assessed oral proficiency only at advanced levels. However, a new format of the HSK was introduced in November, 2009, which aims to assess learners’ more global communicative competence,

2 The test levels indicated in square brackets have not been officially equated, to our knowledge, to other levels or assessment frameworks; thus, this is speculation on our part. For TOCFL (current), Level 1 assumes a knowledge base of 500 words, Level 2 = 800; Level 3 = 1500; Level 4 = 5000; Level 5 = 8000 (see http://www.tw.org/tocfl/).

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Developing Chinese Proficiency

Table 2.2: Most recent standardized test results for each participant CEFR

HSK (old)

TOP (old)

TOCFL (current)

Ella

Intermediate (7) 2006

Intermediate (3) 2009

–

Advanced (6) 2007

–

Elliott

–

Patsy

–

Roma Tim

Elementary (5) 2008 –

–

–

–

–

–

Beginner 2010

tests written and oral proficiency at all levels, and includes pīnyīn for elementarylevel learners. This offers future researchers another possibility for assessing research populations around the world at different levels and from different experiential backgrounds.3 What this section reveals, though, is the complexity of determining equivalencies in the multiple standardized instruments being used to assess Chinese proficiency internationally, only a subset of which have been presented. Some have also undergone substantial changes in recent years, resulting in new(er) versions – generally for the better in our view – and all of them involve different nomenclature, levels, components, and scales. These features make comparisons across studies and individuals using those different tools rather complicated. In addition, for some of the instruments, people self-select for or are assigned to a particular level of examination in advance (e.g., Beginner or Intermediate, on the old HSK or TOP). Thus, unlike ACTFL’s Oral Proficiency Interview, the level designation on the Chinese tests refers to a version of the test and not simply the outcome of assessment for which a level or score is given instead.

2.3.3 Proficiency self-assessments Given some of the challenges associated with standardized assessments, and for the purpose of contextualizing the beliefs and feelings about their proficiency expressed in the narratives, we used the CEFR as a proxy. This allowed selfassessments of participants’ competence in Mandarin Chinese (see Table 2.3 and Figure 2.1), shown in alphabetical order by participant, and then comparisons across learners and years. The CAL learners rated themselves on the five basic 3 Although not designed for heritage-language learners of Chinese, it is nevertheless commonly taken by students from Chinese backgrounds as well, in the absence of another version.

2.3 CAL participants’ linguistic profiles

43

CEFR categories4 (Listening, Spoken Interaction, Spoken Production, Reading, Writing) using the self-assessment grids, checklists, and “can-do” statements in CEFR.5 The CEFR provided a positive and accomplishments-based mode of selfassessment for participants who had not studied formally or taken tests before to state their capabilities based on what they knew they could accomplish in the language, as all members had lived, travelled, and worked in Chinesespeaking communities in the past. As Table 2.3 and Figure 2.1 show, the participants’ self-assessed oral competencies were quite heterogeneous, ranging from A1 (Breakthrough stage) to B2 (Vantage stage). In the A1 stage, for example, learners can understand and use basic everyday expressions as well as give simple personal details. When learners reach the B2 stage, they are able to perform more demanding tasks, including understanding and discussing both abstract and concrete topics in the target language as well as participating in fluent interaction with native speakers. The variation in self-reported reading and writing proficiency was even more pronounced, and Patsy’s and Tim’s literacy skills and exposure (especially to pīnyīn as an orthography), as noted earlier, would not have been captured (or considered valid) by the standardized tests that were available at the commencement of the project. We illustrate participants’ literacy – and especially their orthographic skills – in Chapter 3. Table 2.3 also provides an indication of the location where each participant reported having engaged in formal CAL learning. Participants’ formal CAL study ranged from half a year to nearly seven years (typically reflecting semester-based academic years of university study, or equivalent) in a variety of formal learning arrangements. In some cases this meant full time language study, while in others it meant a few hours a week of classes or one college course per semester. In each case this formal study was often interrupted by long periods of non-study or disuse of Chinese or, in other cases, was supplemented with informal interactions involving Chinese or self-study.

4 We adopted CEFR assessment because of its positive “can do” statements. However, the levels participants chose to describe their proficiency are highly subjective. For example, some participants may have under-estimated their language abilities while others may have overestimated them. Therefore, the CEFR assessments we provide here should be interpreted with caution since they only represent how the participants viewed their own proficiency levels, which might differ from their functional or performed language competence. 5 We had originally planned to have participants create CAL learning portfolios, as recommended by the CEFR, from which we could sample evidence of natural skills in various media, but as the study progressed we found that the data we had already collected was rich enough to provide a picture of the learners’ proficiency without them.

L: B2– SI: B2 SP: B2

L: A2 SI: A2 SP: A2

L: B– SI: B1+ SP: B1+

L: A2 SI: A2 SP: A1

Elliott

Patsy

Roma

Tim

L: A2+ SI: B1– SP: B1–

L:B1 SI: B1+ SP: B1

L: A2 SI: A2 SP: A2

L: B2 SI: B2 SP: B2–

L: B2 SI: B2+ SP: B2+

2010

R/W (characters, some) R/W: pīnyīn: B2 (with tones)

R: B2– W: B1

R/W: N/A except pīnyīn: A1 (w/o tones)

R: C1 W: B1+

R: B1 W: A2

2009

2010

R: A2 W: A2 (characters)

R: B1+ W: B1

R: (some) R/W pīnyīn: A1 (w/o tones)

R: C2 W: B2–

R: B1+ W: B1

Chinese Written

French/A1

Ukrainian/B2

French/B1+ Japanese/A2–B1 Hungarian/A1 Spanish/A1 Korean/A1

French/A2– Japanese/A2 Korean/A1

French/A1 Spanish/A1

2009

French/A1 Hokkien/A1

Ukrainian/ B2–C1

French/B1+ Japanese/A2 Hungarian/A1 Spanish/A1 Korean/A1

French/B1 Japanese/A2 Korean/A2

French/A1 Spanish/A1

2010

Other Languages/Global Proficiency

Taiwan, Canada

Singapore, Canada, China

U.S., China, Canada

Taiwan

Canada, China, Taiwan

2010

CAL study location

* According to CEFR, L = Listening; SI = Spoken Interaction; SP = Spoken Production; R = Reading; W = Writing. See http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_en.pdf (especially pp. 26–29).

L: B1+ SI: B2 SP: B1+

2009

Chinese Oral

Ella

Learner

Table 2.3: Participants’ CAL proficiency self-assessments based on CEFR (2009 and 2010)*

44 Developing Chinese Proficiency

2.4 Oral proficiency

45

Although each participant is a native speaker of English, several have studied European languages (Ella, Roma) or a combination of European and Asian languages (Elliott, Patsy) at least to a basic A1 level. Table 2.3 therefore includes a rough global estimate of learners’ proficiency in other languages, based on a general sense of what they could do at the time or taking into account what had been able to do in other languages in the past, if they felt they had regressed over the many intervening years. As the research project progressed, Ella and Tim each went for a six-month sojourn in Taiwan to participate in intensive Chinese courses. Therefore, their language ability in 2010 improved to various degrees. This was especially noticeable in Tim’s literacy, since he advanced from a state of near-illiteracy in Chinese characters to being functionally literate (see Chapter 3). Elliott’s and Roma’s self-assessed language ability also changed slightly in the second year. This change reflected their involvement with the Chinese language at the time of the assessment. Table 2.3 and Figure 2.1 also reveal the disparity between participants’ selfassessed oral/aural and literacy skills, with three (Ella, Elliott, Roma) reporting at least a B1 level of either reading or writing in Chinese and roughly comparable oral skills, and one (Patsy) reporting lower oral proficiency levels (A2) and minimal literacy skills. Tim, as explained earlier, improved in both oral and literacy skills and in 2010 reported an A2 level of reading and writing (characters) and slightly higher (A2–B1) oral skills. In 2010, Elliott self-assessed as the one with the highest literacy skills, followed by Roma and Ella, whereas Ella was the most advanced speaker, by all accounts. In Section 2.4 we describe participants’ oral abilities as evidenced by interviews in Chinese, and later in Chapter 3 we describe the kinds of texts each were reading in 2009 and 2010 and their Chinese writing practices and choices.

2.4 Oral proficiency 2.4.1 Challenges in learning to speak Chinese 2.4.1.1 The challenge of dialects in CAL One complexity of the oral Chinese language is its diversity, in terms of its numerous dialects and the sociopolitical implications attached to them. Mandarin Chinese is an official language of Mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore, and differences in vocabulary (loan words and technical jargon), phonetics/phonology, syntax, and orthographic forms have developed in those regions (Bradley 1992). For example, 菠萝 bōluó in Mainland China, 凤梨 fènglí in Taiwan and 黄梨 huánglí in Singapore all refer to the same fruit, pineapple. In this chapter, we

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Developing Chinese Proficiency

Figure 2.1: Changes in self-assessed proficiency (by skill area, 2009 and 2010)

focus on Mainland (PRC) and Taiwan Mandarin because our CAL participants’ foreign-context language learning occurred mainly in those two regions. Swihart (2003) and Chen (1999) discuss how the syntax is sometimes different between the “two Mandarins” of Taiwan and China. A typical example from the oral language is that in Taiwan Mandarin, the verb 有 yŏu ‘to have’ is used as an auxiliary verb preceding the main verb to indicate the affirmative completion of an action. However, Mainland Mandarin uses “verb +了le” (an aspect-marking particle) to express the same meaning. Therefore, in Taiwan ‘I watched’ can be translated as 我有看 wŏ yŏu kàn, while in Mainland China one would say 我看了 wŏ kànle instead. These differences were also noticed and reproduced by the CAL participants in this study in terms of grammar, lexicon, and phonology. In his narrative, Tim reports that after months of interaction with a Mainland Chinese friend, his pronunciation and lexicon changed from their original Taiwanese Mandarin versions. For instance, in terms of pronunciation he produced more retroflex versions of zhi, chi, and shi sounds, said 哪儿 năr ‘where’ instead of 哪里 nălĭ ‘where,’ and in terms of lexicon he produced 垃圾 lājī ‘trash’ instead of 垃圾 lèsè ‘trash.’ When he returned to Taiwan with his “new” Mandarin, he was told that he sounded as if he had “eggs in his mouth” (Tim N2: 21). Later, Tim commented:

2.4 Oral proficiency

47

I never thought much about this until I heard a friend say the same thing about people from Beijing, and then I began to wonder if this person’s egg comment had something to do with my trying to emulate my friend’s pronunciation, at the expense of sounding less Taiwanese. (N2: 21)

Similar to Tim, Elliott recognized the salient differences between the “two Mandarins” during his trip to Mainland China after living in Taiwan. In addition to the distinctions in some tones and lexical items, he also reported noticing the different orthography in Mainland China. The Simplified characters, according to Elliott, had caused some confusion initially. However, as he became more familiar with them, he started to enjoy writing the more “economical” characters (N1: 13). While discussing the differences between Taiwan and Mainland Mandarins, we need to recognize that with the convenience of Internet and online video streaming, many Mainlanders are often exposed to Taiwan Mandarin by watching Taiwanese movies and TV shows. Therefore, it has been noticed in Mainland China that people (especially the younger generation) have started to adopt and use Taiwanese lexical terms and grammar. It is possible that the differences between the “two Mandarins” will become less salient in the future. Besides the differences between Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin, the various dialects in China also added difficulty to learners’ pursuit of proficiency. There are seven major dialects (regional languages) in China and the difference between two dialects is sometimes more distinctive than between two regional languages (e.g., French and Italian in the Romance language family) in Europe (Chun 2003). In addition to these distinct regional languages, there are many different “local” varieties of Mandarin, representing the diversity within each language group (see McDonald 2011a). The three female CAL learners studied Chinese in areas where the local dialect is very different from Standard (northern) Mandarin. All of them expressed their frustration with the dialect to a certain extent. Patsy (N1: 9) described her difficulty learning Mandarin during her sojourn in Changsha, Hunan Province, which is in south-central China and has both local varieties of Mandarin and another major regional language (Xiang): In addition to the Changsha/Hunan dialect [i.e., not Mandarin], I soon found that the language I was exposed to was, at best, a strongly Hunan-accented variety of Mandarin. So, fei jia [go home], which I commonly heard and said that fall, was actually hui jia. . . . I often looked up words I’d heard in a pinyin dictionary that I simply couldn’t find. What I was hearing and then internalizing and reproducing as “s” and “ts” [pinyin “c”] and “z” was actually “sh,” “ch,” and “zh” [pinyin]. I observed that the sonorant consonants l and n were in free variation in Hunanese, and I was perplexed by hearing the same word potentially uttered in three or more ways (e.g., Hunan, Fulan, Funan but never Hulan, as I recall).6 6 Duanduan Li (personal communication, Nov. 2012) confirms that Hulan is also possible in that dialect.

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Ella, similarly, expressed her frustration preparing for the HSK test, which is heavily based on the Beijing (northern) dialect. After living primarily in southern Chinese cities, she found that some of the HSK vocabulary was not very practical for her daily use because it was not easily understood by people on the street in the south. Ella’s experience is probably shared by many Chinese learners who are not located in the few Mainland cities in which (Standard) Mandarin is the primary spoken dialect. Learners in contexts in China like Ella’s and Patsy’s may study Mandarin in classrooms, but then often face the challenge of lacking consistent Mandarin input once they step out of the formal language learning setting. It can be equally frustrating for sojourning learners if what they learn in class is not useful in daily life and they have to learn another lexical item for the same word they have just acquired. These special issues caused by dialectal pronunciations, dialectal expressions, and accents add difficulty to the already complex process of oral Chinese language acquisition in English-background learners, native speakers, and heritage learners alike.

2.4.1.2 The challenge of tones in CAL The other, often related, difficulty in learning oral Chinese is tonal perception and production. Chinese is a tonal language in which each stressed syllable has a tone value attached to it. Altogether there are four basic tones for stressed syllables in Mandarin Chinese, each with a specific pitch contour – high level, high rising, falling-rising, high falling – and one neutral tone, which occurs in unstressed syllables and whose specific pitch level is determined by the tone of the preceding syllable. Tone learning is one of the biggest challenges for all beginning CAL learners regardless of language background. Furthermore, different dialects of Chinese often have different tone systems. The CAL participants in this study also reported different levels of frustration associated with their acquisition of tones. Roma described herself as a “tone-deaf” Chinese speaker. After the Chinese instructor repeatedly corrected her tones in one Canadian class, she decided that her strategy concerning tones from then on was “simply to ignore them” (N2: 7). Patsy, for her part, had never received formal Chinese instruction when she started living in Changsha, China over twenty years ago. She reported that although she was linguistically aware of the functions, number and type of tones, she was not able to find an easy way to learn them on her own. She ended up learning “high frequency formulaic expressions, hoping to keep the intonation intact as a unit that [she] could mobilize right away for basic social, cultural, and linguistic interaction” (N2: 17). Tim also reported having difficulty memorizing specific tones for each syllable.

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For example, in order to remember the tone mark for 画 huà (to paint), he drew the allusion that “painting strokes go down (and hence the 4th descending tone to represent this downness)” (N2: 17). Elliott, on the other hand, expressed enthusiasm toward the tonal nature of Chinese. In order to master pronunciation, he “visualized tone and intonation as waves through a line of text, like a hidden layer lying under but connecting the naked characters” (N1: 6). He wrote in his narrative that to this day, he has “a hard time [purposefully] misspeaking tones” (N1: 7). (This statement attracted three research group members’ comments; Rachel complimented Elliott’s tones, while Tim and Roma contrasted their own difficulties with tones against his success.) Tonal perception and production, although not the only components of oral Chinese, were evaluated by participants in this study and many other learners as a highly important aspect of oral proficiency; as Elliott commented during a personal conversation, one would always sound like a “foreigner” if one could not pronounce tones correctly. More positively, even when producing incorrect tones, Chinese-speaking interlocutors are often able to understand intended meanings regardless of incorrect tones, simply based on the discourse context, and interlocutors from different dialects of Chinese must themselves often negotiate meanings based on their use of different tones.

2.4.2 The CAL proficiency interviews In order to provide a more “objective” description of each participant’s language ability than the self-assessments described earlier, and a better sense of differences across participants in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and oral fluency, Rachel interviewed each one in Chinese for approximately 45 minutes in summer 2009 and then again in 2010. The interviews were conducted in summer because they were the only times when all research group members were physically present in Vancouver. In addition, we wanted to capture CAL participants’ language learning trajectories across two years of the study. We were especially curious to see how Ella’s and Tim’s language ability might have changed after their intensive studies in Taiwan for six months. Prior to the interviews, we had not yet decided how we would analyze the data. In one respect, our analysis was grounded in the data that were generated and our observations of interesting speech/grammatical phenomena connected with Chinese proficiency. We subjected the interview data to different kinds of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our goals, all of which were primarily descriptive in nature, were to achieve the following: to determine what kinds of analytic tools (apart from

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the standardized instruments introduced earlier) were readily available to describe learners’ oral proficiency and language development in CAL from a linguistic perspective; to consider the adequacy of the tools for that purpose and issues that arise in using them; to compare learners’ performance on two occasions; to compare learners with each other; to compare learners’ actual oral performance with their self-assessments; and to reflect upon promising directions for future quantitative and qualitative research on linguistic aspects of Chinese L2 development with a wider pool of learners.

2.4.2.1 Interview structure Both interviews adopted the same format, developed and agreed upon in advance by the research group members (see Appendix B for sample questions). Each interview included five sections. Section 1 contained a short greeting and chit-chat to establish a friendly atmosphere and “warm up.” Section 2 was a question and answer session with approximately five to seven questions for each individual. Questions were usually related to participants’ personal lives and Chinese learning experiences though the exact questions were not revealed in advance. In Section 3, participants described and discussed a photograph representing a particular social issue (two pictures were selected for the interview in 2010). In Section 4, participants described a book, movie, or TV program that they had read or seen (typically retold as a narrative). This section was the only part of the interview where participants were requested (or permitted) to conduct some preparations prior to the interview, spending a few minutes planning what they would discuss. Due to time constraints, however, not everybody prepared in advance for that section in either the 2009 or 2010 interviews. Section 5 was a debriefing session where participants discussed their overall feelings about the interview and whether they thought their language ability was well represented. Participants could use either English or Chinese for Section 5. Other sections were conducted in Chinese.

2.4.2.2 Transcription of interviews After the interview, participants transcribed portions of their own interview data, a few minutes for each of the middle three sections, using the form of Chinese orthography they felt best represented their CAL literacy abilities at the time; these transcriptions are discussed in Chapter 3 as evidence of the learners’ literacy (writing) skills and orthographic strategies. Rachel also transcribed all of the interview data independently and made observations about the interview inter-

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actions as well as the (apparent) proficiency of interviewees and other related observations. (In 2010 a research assistant carried out some of the transcription work, which was later verified and analyzed by Rachel.) Finally, Rachel’s transcriptions were used to compile a small experimental interlanguage corpus from the participants’ speech, discussed in the next section. For the linguistic analysis, only the participants’ output from the substantive interview questions was studied (i.e., omitting the warm-up and cool-down sections); Rachel’s output was not included.

2.4.2.3 Contextualizing the proficiency interviews in relation to learner background, learning contexts, and interview context Various researchers in SLA assessment and in discourse analysis have argued persuasively that interviews – whether designed for assessment or other research purposes – constitute a special kind of speech event, and the data must be interpreted accordingly (e.g., Coughlan and Duff 1994; Talmy and Richards 2011; Young and He 1998). That is, the discourse is not just produced by the interviewee in isolation, a perfect reflection of internalized language, but is co-constructed to some extent by interviewer and interviewee in interaction with one another in light of their particular social, historical, and institutional context, relationship, (perceived) purpose, and setting. It is a kind of socially constrained and jointly “performed” competence. Therefore, in what follows we reflect on some aspects of the interview as a speech event before presenting observations of differences between and among participants in terms of their speech behaviour in the interviews based on their discussion of this in the debriefing section of interviews and Rachel’s own observations. Following these general comments about the interview and individuals’ perceptions of them and of their performance, we proceed with a more detailed linguistic analysis of the data. The original purpose for the semi-structured interviews with Rachel was to create a low-pressure environment where everybody would have the opportunity to demonstrate what they could accomplish in Chinese by providing a sample of speech. However, some CAL participants still reported a certain degree of performance anxiety during the interview. In addition, Rachel had had occasional Chinese conversations with some participants in the past, which resulted in different levels of familiarity between Rachel and the participants in terms of pronunciation, style of speech, and ease of communicating with her in Chinese. Rachel’s observation and interpretation of their performance might also have been biased or conditioned by these prior experiences. Here we characterize

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each participant’s oral interview speech in general terms with some reference to their lexical choices (dialect forms, codeswitching for English word retrieval), grammar, and fluency. A more detailed linguistic analysis and comparison of all five across the two interviews follows these initial observations.

2.4.2.4 Rachel’s observations 2.4.2.4.1 Ella’s interviews Ella appeared to be a very confident Chinese speaker in both interviews, and she spoke very quickly and fluidly, exhibiting the group’s highest fluency measures and shortest unfilled pauses. (A more detailed analysis of fluency appears in a later section.) At the time of the second interview, she had a Taiwanese friend visiting and had the opportunity to listen to and speak Chinese at home. Her oral language proficiency seemed to have improved considerably from the first interview in Rachel’s estimation. Some of her proficiency gains may be at least in part attributable to her time spent in Taiwan after the first interview and before the second. She also adopted some Taiwanese lexical items in her conversation, such as 脚踏车 jiăotàchē (‘bicycle’) instead of the Mainland Mandarin expression 自行车 zìxíngchē (‘bicycle’), and Taiwanese expressions such as 很惨 hĕncăn (‘very tragic’), indicating the influence of her Taiwan sojourn. Ella used English words when she did not know the Chinese equivalents. During her interview in 2009, she switched frequently into English for such words as symbol, sense of ownership, and disconnected; in contrast, she used English mostly for place names in the 2010 interview, though she also resorted to English when she described a book she had read. During that section of the interview, she switched to English for ideas that she found difficult to explain in Chinese, such as cracked skull, war grouping, and sexuality.

2.4.2.4.2 Elliott’s interviews Elliott spoke very slowly in Chinese; he paused often and for long periods. Rachel noted that it seemed like he was mentally picturing all the tones before he started talking. His tones were very accurate, attesting to the comments in his narrative that he paid close attention to them while speaking. Even when he made a mistake, he would correct himself instantly as if there was a hidden switch somewhere giving out a warning signal whenever he pronounced a wrong tone. Elliott’s choice of vocabulary was usually both accurate and precise, in that he used specific terms rather than general ones, and his speech

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included many literary words (e.g., 不妨 bùfáng ‘might as well’; 使得 shǐde ‘to cause’; 疏远 shūyuǎn ‘estranged’). Perhaps due to his relatively developed vocabulary, Elliott used very few English words. However, his vocabulary knowledge was stretched when he tried to describe an information-technology-related project for which he needed to refer to English constantly for specific technical terms. He described feeling in the past that he could think and speak directly in Chinese without much mediating internal translation, but that for the interviews, especially during descriptive (less dialogic) tasks, he had to form his response mentally in English first, then translate in his head on the fly. Rachel assessed Elliott’s performance in the second interview as slightly lower than in the first. Elliott commented that it was because he had not had much chance to speak Chinese during the second year and was pursuing his Chinese study by reading books and listening to podcasts; he also chose to express his feedback on the second interview in English, whereas his feedback on the first was given in Chinese.

2.4.2.4.3 Patsy’s interviews Patsy assessed herself at an A2 level for conversation, the lowest of the participants, and the lack of formal study combined with her exposure to other Asian languages and dialects was sometimes evident. On the other hand, she was able to use some nuanced grammatical structures (see Section 2.4.3). Following her first interview she mentioned that she had not spoken Chinese for a while and had just come from a department meeting and was not in a Chinese mindset, plus she had not spoken Chinese to Rachel before and was very conscious of the purpose of the interview (i.e., that it was more of a test or data generation exercise than a natural conversation). In her 2010 interview, Rachel noted that Patsy seemed more at ease. Patsy occasionally used Japanese pronunciation of Chinese vocabulary (e.g., ゆうめいyūmei for 有名 yŏumíng ‘famous’) and Japanese-inspired vocabulary (e.g., expressing 医院 yīyuàn ‘hospital’ as starting with 病 bìng, the first component of the Japanese word for hospital (which also means ‘sick’ in Chinese), 病院 びょういん byōin). Overall, Patsy was able to convey her meanings very clearly and Rachel reported no difficulty in understanding her, perhaps owing in part to Patsy’s strategies and comfort developed from her long-term experiences with Chinese. However, Rachel also noted that she herself had become very used to non-native-like Chinese after being a Chinese teacher for many years. Therefore, she was not sure if what was comprehensible to her would be as comprehensible to others.

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2.4.2.4.4 Roma’s interviews There was a noticeable difference between Roma’s two interviews in terms of her comfort level. The interviews in summer 2009 were conducted during an extreme heat wave in Vancouver; Roma’s interview had to be paused at times so both the interviewer and interviewee could take breaks from the heat. Overall, Roma was very nervous during this first interview, partially because of the heat and partially because, according to her, she had never been confident in oral Chinese (she assessed herself beforehand at a B1 level). She often spent a long time trying to find the “perfect” word and refused to use English or other phrases that would convey the meaning less precisely; this speaking strategy caused many long pauses in the interview. During her second interview in 2010, Roma was much more relaxed and performed better (more fluently) than the first time. She explained in her debriefing session that she had stopped trying to say things that were more complicated than required, resulting in fewer pauses. In her second interview, she also exhibited a higher frequency of English use and a greater tendency to codeswitch, which likely helped her speak with less anxiety. In general, Rachel judged Roma’s Chinese to be very consistent, comprehensible, and straightforward.

2.4.2.4.5 Tim’s interviews The interviews with Tim were more conversational or interactive compared to the others, where mostly monologic responses were generated (and, indeed, sought as speech samples). Unlike the other participants, he often asked questions when he had difficulty understanding and also often directed questions back to Rachel. Therefore, interviews with Tim resembled casual conversations between two friends to a certain extent. For example, when Rachel asked Tim about his Hokkien proficiency level, Tim directed the question back to Rachel by asking about her ability in Cantonese. When Rachel replied that she could not speak Cantonese but had little problem understanding it, Tim complimented her and asked for the reason why she could understand Cantonese. This type of exchange, short conversations breaking up longer monologic answers, occurred occasionally during both interviews. Tim spoke quickly and switched to alternative options (lexical choices) when he could not come up with a specific word. Like Ella, he was very comfortable switching between Chinese and English. However, unlike Ella, Tim was very conscious of his tones and kept correcting himself when he felt that he pronounced something wrong (the relatively high frequency of self-repair in both interviews is discussed in the following section). Despite the fact that Tim felt his tonal accuracy was one of his weaknesses,

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Rachel assessed that the vast majority of his speech exhibited relatively accurate tone choices, given that certain language he used covered mostly familiar and well-practiced ground; only lesser-used vocabulary showed deviations from standard pronunciation, as would be expected for any learner. Rachel commented on Tim’s use of specific vocabulary as well. For instance, he chose to use Chinese for some place names, which many other learners in the study did not, even less-commonly known words like 柬埔寨 Jiǎnpǔzhài ‘Cambodia’ and 金边 Jīnbiān ‘Phnom Penh.’ Tim also exhibited Taiwan Mandarin linguistic forms, such as using 然后 ránhòu ‘and then’ more frequently as a discursive “filler” (roughly meaning ‘also,’ ‘so then,’ ‘then,’ in the sense of ‘now I’ve got something else to say’) than as a temporal adverb. Rachel felt his proficiency had increased from 2009 to 2010, perhaps attributable in part, like Ella’s proficiency gains, to his time in Taiwan between interviews, though Tim explained in the 2010 debriefing session that his studies in Taiwan were focused on reading and writing. (He felt that his reading, writing, and listening had improved, but was not as sure of his gains in speaking.) Interestingly, he also showed dramatically reduced use of English from the first interview to the second. He had explained in the 2009 interview that particularly when speaking slowly, he naturally thought in English and translated into Chinese (leading sometimes to a style of speech that Rachel characterized as “English-like”); his time in Taiwan might have increased his comfort finding the words he wanted in Chinese.

2.4.2.5 Quantitative analysis and linguistic comparison of group’s interview data 2.4.2.5.1 Lexical sophistication and variety As part of the proficiency analysis – and one of our overriding research questions – we also wished to explore and evaluate some of the tools and techniques that computers and text processing software enable in the field of corpus linguistics. We decided to treat our interview data as a corpus in itself and run some elementary heuristics against it in hopes of pulling out interesting patterns, correspondences, or contradictions with CAL learners’ self-assessments or Rachel’s observations. As we discovered, the freely available tools for general text analysis and for parsing and analyzing Chinese text in particular are still developing in accuracy, and our results are therefore meant to illustrate the usefulness of these tools and the types of insight they make available, without professing to be perfectly accurate. To show participants’ knowledge of a variety of lexical and grammatical items, we chose to analyze the data using the sometimes problematic unit of

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word instead of morpheme.7 The preference for word as the unit of analysis is because almost all Chinese morphemes (in this case, linguistic units written with a single character in Chinese orthography and representing a single syllable) are used in multiple different words, and words are the linguistic units that enter into grammatical relationships and represent thoughts. (See Yates (2012), for a more comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the linguistic data.) Jun Da’s Chinese Vocabulary Profiler 1.0 (Da 2006) provided a very interesting starting point for our initial experiments in finding quantitative measures for lexicon, as it attempts to categorize the “lexical sophistication” (the degree of “difficulty” or “refinement” in expression with respect to word choice) and “lexical variation” (the range of different vocabulary choices) of speech. Consequently, Elliott’s computational expertise enabled us to develop a similar tool that incorporated updates in the parsing tool and reference word lists. Our process made use of the ICTCLAS 5.0 segmentation system8 to parse the interview data into words, then analyzed the parsed data based on lexical frequency and lexical variety. These results were examined for differences between the first interview in 2009 and the second in 2010 for each learner, and then across learners. The measures for lexical density produced by this process are presented in Figure 2.2. Total unique words in the figure represents the total number of unique (i.e., different or distinct) Chinese words9 produced by a participant in a given interview as segmented by the parser; this is essentially the set of different lexical items that the participant used to build his or her utterances, and was chosen to show the breadth of each participant’s lexicon. Lexical density is the ratio of unique words to total words spoken, meant to indicate 7 The exact guidelines for determining what constitutes a “word” in Chinese are somewhat contested as the morpheme-word distinction represents a kind of cline, or continuum, rather than clearcut binary (Ed McDonald, personal communication, Sept. 2011); each set of computational linguistic tools may use its own criteria for parsing a Chinese sentence into words and tagging the words with grammatical functions. A full discussion of these issues is beyond the scope of this project, but we attempt where possible to note the ambiguities that arose when we tried to use these techniques. 8 ICTCLAS (http://ictclas.org/) stands for “Institute of Computing Technology Chinese Lexical Analysis System,” and is developed by the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. 9 ICTCLAS segments a text and parses it for N-grams, or tokens. Generally speaking, the N-grams are equivalent to words themselves, so we refer to them here as “words” for sake of simplicity. In some cases, however, the segmentation algorithm identified N-grams that some linguists might consider groups of words, such as verb + object or verb + result combinations (e.g., 度假 dùjià ‘go on vacation’; 看不到 kàn bu dào ‘cannot see’), or common collocations of adverbs and other parts of speech, some of which are arguably lexical items (e.g., 每天 měi tiān ‘every day’; 很多 hěn duō ‘very many’; 只有 zhǐyǒu ‘only’).

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Figure 2.2: Lexical measures for each interview

the variety of words employed, and conversely the degree to which the same words were reused over the course of a conversation; lexical density is equivalent to the ‘type-token ratio’ used in studies of language complexity (Yates 2012). These lexical measures were calculated excluding the “warm-up” and “debrief ” interview sections, as in these sections participants often switched entirely into English, or were just chatting with Rachel and not focusing on their Chinese language production. In addition, participants’ English output was discounted in these measures, as we wanted to give an indication of the breadth of Chinese lexical usage only. Figure 2.2 indicates that the number of unique words produced by participants in the interviews range from a low of 349 (Patsy) to a high of 548 (Elliott) in 2009 and from 344 (Tim) to 591 (Elliott) in 2010. For three participants (Ella, Elliott, Patsy), the number of unique words produced increased from 2009 to 2010, in some cases quite considerably (e.g., Ella, who produced approximately 150 more unique words in the second interview than in the first, which accorded with Rachel’s observations during the 2010 interview), perhaps reflecting their greater feeling of ease in the interview situation, their opportunities for language practice in the interim, and also, possibly, a wider range of topics discussed. Note that these unique words do not represent all of the words in learners’ mental

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lexicons, only those that were produced during the interviews. In contrast, Roma’s and Tim’s unique word counts showed a slight decrease between 2009 and 2010, although like the three others, their lexical density measures increased somewhat from 2009 to 2010. Elliott’s interview discourse had the highest lexical density values (0.24–0.28) by quite a wide margin; followed, in order, by Ella, Roma, Tim, and Patsy, much as the CEFR self-assessments would suggest. Indeed, Elliott, the most avid reader of Chinese in the group and also the one with the highest self-assessed reading ability on the CEFR, also seems to have the richest and most varied vocabulary. In 2010, Patsy’s total unique words count was higher than Roma’s and Tim’s but her lexical density was lower, indicating that she tended to use the same words over and over. We also cross-referenced the lexical variety exhibited by the participants to the ranking of those words on (1) HSK word lists,10 which range from levels 1 (lowest) to 6 (highest), and (2) the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese11 (LCMC), which groups and ranks the 5000 most common words in their corpus, to get an indication of the types and apparent difficulty level (as judged by frequency in the corpus, with less-frequent words considered more difficult) of words being produced in the interviews. The results are summarized in Figures 2.3 and 2.4, respectively. Figure 2.3 shows the proportion of words produced by each participant in their 2010 interviews (the data selected for reporting and illustration purposes) that correspond to a given HSK word level. That is, of all the (unique) words produced by a speaker, how many of them were level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6, and how many are not even included on these word lists? Figure 2.4, similarly, shows the proportion of each participant’s words representing documented frequency levels and ranges on the LCMC. Recall that as part of our over-arching (first) research question, we sought to determine which types of analyses would provide us with the most useful information about participants’ proficiency and whether they would yield comparable results. One might predict, for example, that the participants in our grouped judged by all accounts (their own and based on standardized tests, etc.) to be most proficient would have the largest proportion of words at the upper levels of both scales and proportionally fewer at the lower levels, and some that might even be “off the charts,” so to speak. 10 The HSK word lists were adapted from those available at http://popupchinese.com/hsk/ test; these lists were retrieved on August 6, 2011. 11 We used the list provided by the compilers of the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) of the 5000 most frequent N-grams, or tokens, at http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/frqc/lcmc. num; it was retrieved on August 3, 2011. The LCMC is a balanced corpus of written Mainland Mandarin Chinese texts of various kinds, including fiction and newswire text. More information on the LCMC is available at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/LCMC/.

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Figure 2.3: Comparisons of 2010 interview data to HSK word lists

Figure 2.4: Comparisons of 2010 interview data to high-frequency words in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC)

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Several observations can be made about the data presented in Figures 2.3, and 2.4. Both scales do indeed indicate a relatively larger proportion of words in the HSK 4–6 levels for Elliott and Ella than for, say, Patsy and Tim. This can be seen in three ways: (1) from observing the lowest horizontal point at which the darkest-shaded band (Level 4) starts, moving up; (2) from combining the proportion of words that fit into levels 4 plus 5 plus 6 (compare Ella’s to Patsy’s much narrower bands for each, for example); and (3) noting, conversely, the proportion of words in the levels 1 to 3 range: for Elliott, the total accounts for approximately 33%; for Ella, 43% and for Patsy 52%. Tim and Ella hover around 50% for HSK levels 1–3 words combined. In all five cases, however, more than 30% of the unique words produced, and 40% for Elliott, do not even appear on the HSK word lists. Somewhat similar trends and distributions are observed with the LCMC data shown in Figure 2.4. For all, except Elliott, nearly 40% of their unique words represent the 500 most frequent words in the LCMC database. (Elliott’s measure is more like 35%.) Indeed, this figure is more helpful in distinguishing Elliott’s lexical-frequency-data from that of the other four, for whom differences are not as easy to discern. This is where a qualitative analysis can provide additional useful information about the kinds of words LCMC captures at different levels of frequency, using words produced by our participants as illustration. We therefore sought to answer the following question: What kinds of words (and not simply what proportion) are produced by participants at the different HSK levels (or not even included in the HSK word lists) or on the LCMC frequencybased lists? Table 2.4 and Table 2.5 list examples for each person using their 2010 interview. At the lowest level, typical Level 1 words on HSK lists produced by participants include function words, pronouns, and verbs such as to have and to be. At the upper end, Level 6, participants’ vocabulary referred to such concepts (e.g., nouns) as rock music, (cultural) customs, vocabulary, and plot. The HSK word lists, however, are not just based on lexical difficulty or frequency in everyday speech. To some extent, they also reflect the difficulty of the written character(s) for the word and the stage at which the word is expected to be introduced in formal language teaching, particularly at the postsecondary level. Likewise, but perhaps to a greater extent, the LCMC charts are based on word frequencies in written corpora culled from newspapers and other authentic sources rather than oral data. The higher-end words (in the 3000+ range), apart from proper names for places, religions, or languages, are therefore rather surprising because of their pervasiveness in vernacular speech – especially for CAL learners and sojourners in Chinese-speaking regions – such as terms for younger sister, [I am] sorry, about the same, anyway, foreigner, and English.

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Table 2.4: Examples of the HSK vocabulary produced by participants in 2010 Ella

Elliott

Patsy

Roma

Tim

Not in HSK

伊斯兰 Yīsīlán (Islam)

乱七八糟 luànqībāzāo (messy)

不错 búcuò (not bad)

贫穷 pínqióng (poor)

加拿大 Jiānádà (Canada)

HSK Level 6

偏僻 piānpì (remote)

词汇 cíhuì (vocabulary)

风土人情 fēngtŭrénqíng (customs)

情节 qíngjié (plot)

摇滚 yáogŭn (rock music)

HSK Level 5

诗 shī (poetry)

资料 zīliào (data)

宗教 zōngjiào (religion)

秘书 mìshū (secretary)

传统 chuántŏng (tradition)

HSK Level 4

感觉 gănjúe (to feel)

中文 Zhōngwén (Chinese)

可是 kěshì (but)

好像 hăoxiàng (as though, seems like)

最后 zuìhòu (finally)

HSK Level 3

比较 bĭjiào (relatively)

然后 ránhòu (then)

地方 dìfāng (place)

跟 gēn (with)

特别 tèbié (special)

HSK Level 2

对 dùi (correct)

所以 suŏyĭ (therefore)

也 yě (also)

但是 dànshì (but)

觉得 juéde (to feel)

HSK Level 1

我 wŏ (I)

的 de (structure word)

是 shì (to be)

有 yŏu (to have)

他们 tāmen (they)

The shaded rows at the top of each table represent words not included in HSK levels 1–6 or in the top 5000 words of LCMC. Further examination of the words falling outside of the HSK levels 1–6 showed that there were many ambiguous cases, where the word might be judged to be equivalent to or a variation of a word that does appear on the HSK list, and of numerous cases where the word could not be expected to be on the list due to the myriad combinatorial possibilities such words present (e.g., numbers, dates, and place names). For this reason, one cannot equate such ‘off-list’ words to more sophisticated word use (for a detailed discussion of this method of characterizing lexical sophistication, see Yates 2012). Clearly, these analyses help provide some global sorting of Chinese speakers according to lexical use, but perhaps are more appropriate to written Chinese text production instead. Looking at lexical bundles or collocations, such as three-to-four word formulaic expressions, might be an alternative approach to examining lexical production at the (more or less) single-word level, as these parsers and word lists do. Finding suitable oral language corpora (not readily available in the public domain at the time of this study) would also be helpful in such analyses.

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Table 2.5: Examples of the LCMC vocabulary produced by participants in 2010 Ella

Elliott

Patsy

Roma

Tim

Not included in the 5000 words

伊斯兰 Yīsīlán (Islam)

韩语 Hányŭ (Korean language)

风土人情 fēngtŭrénqíng (customs)

老外 lăowài (foreigner)

乐团 yuètuán (music band)

4001–5000

外国人 wàiguórén (foreigner)

反正 fănzhèng (anyway)

妹妹 mèimei (younger sister)

差不多 chàbuduō (about the same)

对不起 duìbuqĭ (sorry)

3001–4000

课 kè (lesson)

英文 Yīngwén (English)

小孩 xiăohái (kid)

英语 Yīngyŭ (English)

睡觉 shuìjiào (to sleep)

2001–3000

中文 Zhōngwén (Chinese)

将来 jiānglái (future)

外面 wàimiàn (outside)

奇怪 qíguài (strange)

一半 yībàn (half )

1001–2000

台湾 Táiwān (Taiwan)

资料 zīliào (data)

别的 biéde (other)

好像 hăoxiàng (as though, seems like)

进步 jìnbù (to improve)

501–1000

那个 nàge (that one)

书 shū (book)

故事 gùshì (story)

喜欢 xĭhuān (to like)

很多 hěnduō (many)

1–500

的 de (structure word)

我 wŏ (I)

不 bù (no)

是 shì (to be)

对 duì (correct)

2.4.2.5.2 Fluency measures A second measure of oral proficiency, selected because of its widespread use in study-abroad research in particular and also because of some of Rachel’s observations of interviewees’ speech described in the previous section, was fluency (e.g., Collentine and Freed 2004; Freed 1995; Yuan 2009). Normally, one would expect learners with lower self-assessments of oral proficiency to produce slower, more hesitant and less fluid speech, and also speech with more switches to English when Chinese words are not readily accessible, than those at higher proficiency levels. However, with such a diverse group, linguistically speaking, with different CAL experiences and priorities, it remained to be seen quantitatively what kind of variation existed across oral interview data with respect to fluency. It has also been well established in SLA research that there are often tradeoffs between accuracy, fluency, and complexity in speech production – people trying to produce more accurate or complex speech might produce less fluent speech as a result (Skehan 1998; Housen and Kuiken 2009; Housen, Kuiken and Vedder 2010; see review of this literature in Yates 2012). This SLA principle was also in evidence in the interview data, as we shall see, especially when higher-

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proficiency participants such as Elliott monitored their output very carefully so as to avoid mistakes in tone or lexicon or to correct them and to produce lexically and syntactically more precise and complex expressions rather than common, more general, or less-sophisticated ones. In order to calculate oral fluency, we followed a common approach (e.g., Collentine 2004), taking a 2-minute extract from the beginning of Section 3 (picture description) for each of the 2009 and 2010 interviews and another 2minute extract from the beginning of Section 4 (describing a book or a movie). This produced ten speech samples from the five participants, i.e., one 4-minute combined extract for each of the five participants’ two interviews. Measures of fluency were then based on an analysis of the following features: 1. Total number of non-repeated Chinese syllables (a syllable being equivalent to a character in written data and a morpheme in oral data); “non-repeated” syllables here does not mean “unique” as in the lexical analysis; it simply means these syllables were not self-repairs (e.g., self-corrections, such as stammering, wŏ- wŏ- wŏ- . . . ‘I- I- I. . . ;’ only one wŏ would be counted in that string of syllables as a non-repeated syllable); 2. Total number of English syllables; 3. Total number of Chinese syllables of self-repairs; 4. Total number of filled pauses (e.g., um, uh, en); 5. Total length of unfilled pauses 0.2 seconds or longer; 6. Total number of unfilled pauses; 7. Average length of unfilled pauses; 8. An “oral fluency” measure (sometimes called “quality production rate”) calculated as the total number of non-repeated Chinese syllables divided by 4 minutes (i.e., Chinese syll/min); and, 9. A “rate of speech” measure (sometimes called “articulation rate”) based on the total number of non-repeated Chinese syllables, divided by the difference of 4 minutes and the total length of unfilled pauses (i.e., Chinese syll/minute of actual speech). Of these, measures 8 and 9 each yield a different sense of fluency – one that takes into account pausing and one that does not. We chose to include both to see if they would reveal similar results. The digital data were entered into Audacity, a free software tool for analyzing and representing speech for both pedagogical and other purposes,12 which provides clear evidence of pauses in the speech flow whose length can be easily calculated using the program. The average number and length of such pauses were then calculated. The reason for including English syllables as well as Chinese ones is that codeswitching 12 See http://audacity.sourceforge.net/.

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Table 2.6: Measures of fluency for each interview Oral fluency measures

Ella

Elliott

Patsy

Roma

Tim

2009

2010

2009

2010

2009

2010

2009

2010

2009

2010

1. Non-repeated Chinese syll.

630

610

379

382

405

388

404

457

476

536

2. English syll.

29

33

17

4

25

24

0

4

55

13

3. Chinese self-repair syll.

17

20

11

23

50

53

16

19

29

63

4. Filled pauses

16

19

29

38

29

39

32

29

24

14

5. Length of unfilled pauses (total sec.)

60.6

66.6

120.5

101.6

99.8

90.8

111.3

83.8

92.1

86

6. Pauses

102

109

105

119

127

128

127

127

117

115

7. Average length of unfilled pause (sec.)

0.6

0.6

1.1

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.9

0.7

0.8

0.7

8. Oral fluency (syll/min)

157.5

152.5

94.8

95.5

101.3

97

101

114.3

119

134

9. Rate of speech (syll/(min – pauses))

210.7

211.1

190.3

165.6

173.3

156

188.3

175.5

193.1

208.8

from Chinese to English is seen in such fluency analyses to represent a search for an unknown word or an English pause filler, such as um, thus breaking the flow of the Chinese speech. Given the small datasets used and the exploratory nature of this and other analyses in this chapter, we have not conducted inferential statistical tests of difference here or elsewhere, but rather present descriptive numbers showing trends and patterns across the data. The results are shown in Table 2.6. We have summarized the key measures of oral fluency and rate of speech (items 8 and 9) in Figure 2.5 for easier visual analysis and comparison. As indicated in Table 2.6, Ella produced the largest number of non-repeated Chinese syllables in both interviews (over 600 in 4 minutes), indicative of the fluency Rachel observed and Ella’s own oral CEFR assessment relative to the group. In contrast, Elliott produced the smallest number of non-repeated Chinese syllables on both occasions (in the high 300s), reflecting the possible care with which he strove to produce accurate tones and a richer array of lexical items and grammatical forms (see 2.4.3) than other group members. Even more noticeable is Elliott’s unfilled pauses in seconds, with nearly double the total pause time found in Ella’s speech (a total of 2 minutes out of 4) and more than each of the other three as well. All five produced over 100 short pauses in their 4 minutes of speech, with the average length of Ella’s pauses across the two interviews at just 0.6 seconds compared to Elliott’s 1.0 seconds. Patsy, Roma, and

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Figure 2.5: Measures of oral fluency and rate of speech for each interview

Tim had pause lengths between these extremes, averaging 0.85, 0.8, and 0.75, respectively. As a result, when pausing is factored into the fluency equation, Elliott’s measure is the lowest in the group (item 8; see the darkened bars in Figure 2.5); when it is not factored in, his fluency is roughly comparable to Roma’s and exceeds Patsy’s. Interestingly, some fluency measures for Elliott, Patsy, and Roma decreased in the second interview. In both interviews, Patsy produced a large number of Chinese syllables for self-repair, taking multiple runs at words, phrases, or sentences when unsure of how best to express them or the ideas underlying them. Tim’s oral fluency showed measurable improvement between 2009 and 2010, likely related to his recent study abroad in Taiwan, although he also produced more than double the number of Chinese self-repair syllables on that occasion; conversely, he resorted to English much less frequently in 2010 than the previous year. Besides Tim, Ella and Patsy also used numerous syllables of English words and fillers in their speech. Roma used the least amount of English (0 syllables in 2009 and 4 in 2010), which might explain why she had long pauses in her speech – because she was searching for the appropriate Chinese terms to avoid codeswitching into English. Although there was a decrease in the length of unfilled pauses in her second interview, Roma dragged out her words

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longer to act as filler while she was thinking of the next phrase, which resulted in a lower rate of speech (syll/min). According to the measures in the penultimate row of the table (item 8), which ignore the total length of (unfilled) pauses in the calculation of oral fluency, Ella was the most fluent, followed by Tim, Roma, Patsy, and then Elliott. In the last row (item 9), which accounts for unfilled pauses in the denominator of the calculation, rate of Chinese speech (syll/min) followed the same order, but with Patsy and Elliott changing places. Thus, on the “pure fluency” measure (8), Elliott scores lowest because his total pausing leaves less time for uttering Chinese syllables. Note, however, that these two overall measures, both of which are used in the literature, make somewhat different assumptions about the fluency construct itself; measure 8 assumes that fluency is impeded by any pauses, including pauses for thought, whereas measure 9 removes almost all unfilled pauses under the assumption that “not speaking” is unrelated to the rate of speech that is produced. Examining extracts of these 4-minute segments with the longest pauses for each participant helps to illustrate the relationship between fluency, accuracy, and complexity, and thus the likely functions of pausing and other markers of (apparent) disfluency as well. First consider Ella’s speech output when doing the cell phone picture description and discussion task (2009) in Example 1. Her longest pause (2.5 sec.) occurs in combination with other pauses and pause fillers as she was evidently searching for a way of expressing communication tool in Chinese. Eventually, she just used the English phrase and continued. (Pause times in seconds are shown in parentheses.) Example 1: Ella’s 2009 cell phone task13 (0.8) suŏyĭ wŏ juéde (0.8) yŏu zhèyàng (um) (1.2) (um) (2.5) communication tool? (1.0) kěyĭ (0.3) zhēnde bāng rén (0.2) (ah) ((0.8) So I feel (0.8) with this kind of (um) (1.2) (um) (2.5) communication tool? [we] (1.0) can (0.3) really help people (0.2) (ah) In contrast, in Example 2, from the same task, Elliott uses only Chinese instead of codeswitching to English but in doing so produces eight pauses of one second or longer each. Yet the Chinese utterance produced is rather sophisticated lexically and syntactically. (Note, for the English translations below, it is not possible to insert pauses in every instance because of the lack of structural correspondence 13 Note that tones in compounds in the transcribed interview speech represent production rather than standard Mandarin tones in cases where (a) Sandhi tones might have resulted, and (b) the produced tone differed from standard Mandarin.

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between the expressions; the largest pauses in relation to conceptual/linguistic processing and output are shown, however.) Example 2: Elliott’s 2009 cell phone task (1.4) nà (2.1) zhīqián nĭ yào kào (0.8) diànshì (0.9) (ah) (1.4) huòshì qítā (0.4) duì (um) (1.2) zhēnduì (2.2) (ah) gōngzhòng (1.0) de yìxiē (1.0) guăngbō fāngfă (1.2) (um) (0.2) dédào nĭ de xìnxī. Before that, you need to rely on (0.8) TV (0.9) (ah) (1.4) or other (0.4) broadcast methods that are targeted towards (2.2) (ah) public (1.2) (um) (0.2) to get your information. When describing his thesis project in another segment, shown in Example 3, his pauses allow him to formulate several strings of 5–7 morphemes such as yŭyán xuéxí de gōngjù (language learning tools). Example 3: Elliott 2009 describing his thesis project (1.0) (ah) ránhòu yào pínglùn (3.8) wŏmen yào pínglùn (ah) (3.0) yŭyán xuéxí de gōngjù (0.9) (ah) gēn [zhōng] zhōngyīng yīngzhōng (1.8) shènzhì (1.0) zhōngzhōng de (0.6) cídiăn, (1.4) xiànshàng cídiăn nàyàng de. (1.0) (ah) Then need to evaluate, (3.8) we need to evaluate (ah) (3.0) language learning tools (0.9) (ah) and Chinese-English, English-Chinese, (1.8) even (1.0) Chinese-Chinese (0.6) dictionaries, (1.4) [or] online dictionaries, things like that. This phenomenon of using pauses to plan and construct complex phrases and sentences becomes even clearer when he describes the photo in 2010 showing old and new housing construction in urban China, an extract of which is shown in Example 4. Here his command of the language is evident with even longer runs of speech syllables, including one string of 15 syllables (excluding a repeated syllable, shown in square brackets here and elsewhere) and one “four-character idiom,” luànqībāzāo (messy). The pauses and relatively slow rate of speech overall seem to free up cognitive resources to prepare and utter those constructions. Example 4: Elliott’s 2010 urban housing description (0.5) (um) (1.1) [tāmen de], (1.2) tāmen qiánmiàn (um) guàzhe yìxiē diànxiàn, diànxiàn luànqībāzāo de, (0.5) [de] (0.7) (um) guàzhe liánjiē suŏyŏu zhèxiē liăng céng lóu de [de] jiànzhùwù. (0.5) (um) (1.1) Their- (1.2) in front of them (um) hangs some electrical wires. The wires are hanging messily, connecting all these two story buildings.

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In Patsy’s narrative, in comparison, she produces various kinds of shorter pauses, fillers, and repair sequences (e.g., repeated words), which enable her to produce a long string of morphemes (more than 10), the core of which is a long noun phrase describing a girl’s problem when she was a child. Thus, although her overall pauses are shorter, the lexical and grammatical sophistication is lower as well. Example 5: Patsy 2009 talking about a book Yŏumíng, aha, [yŏumíng]. (0.5) (um) (3.3) tā shì (0.9) [wŏ] (0.2) wŏ xiăng nà gè nà běn shū shì (0.3) tā de xiăohái de shíhòu de wèntí, yīnwèi (0.5) tā mama bàba (0.7) dōu bú tài hăo. Famous, aha, famous. (0.5) (um) (3.3) she is (0.9), I. . . (0.2) I think that book is (0.3) the problem [is] when she was a kid, because (0.5) her parents (0.7) are both not great. When Roma describes a book she has read, in comparison, she produces a very long pause (5.5 seconds) followed by a pause filler and another long pause (2.2 seconds) and then produces quite a long construction (of 16 syllables) representing: “he wants to help one person, then that person will help him.” As we see, she does not resort to English. Example 6: Roma 2009 talking about a book (0.6) sŭoyĭ zhège rén (0.5) (um) (1.6) yào (0.2) zhăo (0.6) ér zěnme shuō (5.5) (um) (2.2) tā yào bāngzhù yí gè rén, ránhòu zhège rén huì bāngzhù tā (0.5) shénme zhèyàng de guānxi. (0.6) So this person (0.5) (um) (1.6) wants (0.2) to find, (0.6) how to say (5.5) (um) (2.2), he wants to help one person, then that person will help him, (0.5) this sort of relationship. Finally, an excerpt of Tim’s description of the changes in urban China exhibits many short pauses and fillers, plus the English word modernization. His longest string is 14 syllables (morphemes) after one 0.9-second and another 0.4 second pause, representing “especially in Asia, there are many. . .”. Example 7: Tim’s 2010 urban housing description [xiànxiàng] (0.4) xiàn (0.9) xiàng, (1.3) zhèlĭ zhège xiànxiàng (2.5) shì (um) (1.2) zěnme shuō? (1.7) [Modernization] (0.3) nàge (1.7) cháng wŏ juéde hěn duō, (0.9) tèbié shì, (0.4) [tèbié shì] zài Yàzhōu, yŏu hěn duō chéngshì, tāmen de (1.5) nàge chéngshì (0.5) găibiàn le hěn duō.

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[Phenomenon] (0.4) pheno- (0.9) menon, (1.3) the phenomenon here (2.5) is (um) (1.2) how do you say? (1.7) [Modernization] (0.3) that (1.7) often I feel many, (0.9) especially, (0.4) [especially] in Asia, there are many cities, their (1.5) that city (0.5) changed greatly. Although these samples represent just a subset of the 1.5 hours or more of interview data for each participant, and were chosen precisely because of the many long pauses included, they help contextualize a discussion of fluency measures that must also be interpreted in light of communication strategies and cognitive planning for linguistic accuracy and complexity, on the one hand, and conceptual complexity and clarity, on the other. This cursory analysis suggests that frequent (short and long) pauses should not necessarily be interpreted as compromised or poor proficiency more generally, nor should all cases of pausing be assumed to contribute to greater accuracy, complexity, or comprehensibility. Rather, a qualitative, contextualized analysis of usage can help illuminate the possible functions as well as possible effects on listeners of pauses in oral production.

2.4.3 Qualitative analysis of oral proficiency data: Grammatical variety analysis Another way to explore the participants’ relative proficiency is to illustrate the breadth of grammatical structures used, in terms of accuracy, range, functions, and complexity. With respect to grammatical variety and complexity, the participants all showed competence using some frequently-researched grammatical forms, such as basic conjunctions, negation, auxiliary or other (e.g., modal) verbs of intention and capability (e.g., 可以 kěyǐ ‘may; can,’ 能 néng ‘can; able to,’ 会 huì ‘will; able to,’ 想 xiǎng ‘be thinking of; would like to’), possibility (e.g., 如果 rúguǒ ‘if,’ 可能 kěnéng ‘possible; maybe’), and so forth. Although there are many ways we could have examined grammatical proficiency qualitatively, here we present one exploratory technique for the sake of brevity, namely the grammatical richness of the participants’ speech as approximated by the variety of meanings of some common grammatical/lexical morphemes. We look at the use of the morphemes 到 dào and 来 lái, associated with direction or motion, the morphemes 过 guò and 了 le, associated with the grammatical category of aspect, and finally the grammatical particles 把 bǎ and 被 bèi, used to re-position the direct object in the sentence (the focus construction) and to mark the passive form of a verb, respectively.

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2.4.3.1 Morpheme analysis: Semantic and grammatical functions and constructions 2.4.3.1.1 Directional and motion morphemes Here we have selected several examples of morphemes whose use varies across speakers. The basic meanings of the morphemes 到 dào and 来 lái derive from their intransitive verb directional/motion meanings 到 dào ‘arrive; reach’ and 来 lái ‘come.’ However, they serve many grammatical and lexical functions depending on their contexts, and the participants used them in different ways in their interviews. They can function like verbs or prepositions – the latter often known in the Chinese grammatical tradition as “coverbs” (Li and Thompson 1981). It seems to be a reasonable assumption that the more proficient Chinese speakers are, the more they are able to use the same morpheme for a variety of meanings and grammatical functions and in a variety of combinations. For instance, besides its basic verbal meaning of ‘to arrive’ (e.g., Ella: 到西方的荷兰以后 dào xīfāng de Hélán yĭhòu ‘after arriving in Holland in the West’), 到 dào occurs as a coverb denoting ‘to (a location)’ (e.g., Tim: 搬到那里去 bān dào nàlĭ qù ‘move (to) there’), as a coverb denoting ‘(up) to’ (e.g., Patsy: 十岁到二十岁 shí suì dào èrshí suì ‘ten to twelve years old’), and as a resultative complement (e.g., Ella: 得不到 dé bu dào ‘cannot get’; Roma: 看到 kàn dào ‘to see’). Table 2.7 shows the variety of meanings (functions) the participants produced during the interviews (indicated by grey shading and a check mark when that usage was observed); it is generally consistent across the group, with Elliott and Roma showing less use of this morpheme than the others. Similarly, in addition to its basic directional meaning of ‘come’ (e.g., Patsy 不知道他们什么时候来 bù zhīdào tāmen shénme shíhòu lái ‘don’t know when they’re coming’), 来 lái can be found in bound (or compound14) forms (e.g.,

14 We use the term compound somewhat loosely, following, e.g., Li and Thompson (1981), who concede that the definition of compounds in Mandarin is not always clear because differences between compounds and polysyllabic noncompound forms are not always evident. Their working definition of compounds is: “all polysyllabic units that have certain properties of single words and that can be analyzed into two or more meaningful elements, or morphemes, even if these morphemes cannot occur independently in modern Mandarin” (p. 46). Compounds can be nominal, verbal, or combinations (e.g., subject-predicate, adjective-noun), in their analysis. Our reference to ‘bound form’ in this section refers to a component morpheme in a compound. As we point out, these morphemes can often occur independently as words as well; in other cases, they cannot, as they they have lost their original meaning over time. Yip (2000) appears to describe morphemes in compounds as affixes (prepositions, infixes, suffixes, parafixes involving various classes of juxtaposed morphemes/mononyms) and notes that drawing distinctions between compounds and derivatives can also be difficult in Chinese.

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Table 2.7: Participants’ use of the directional morpheme 到 dào in the interviews Verb ‘to arrive’

Coverb (location)

Coverb (time)

Resultative complement

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Ella Elliott

Z

Patsy

Z

Roma Z

Tim

Z

Z Z

Z

Roma: 从来 cónglái ‘all along,’ 来自 láizì ‘come from’), as a directional complement denoting ‘to here’ (e.g., Patsy: 拿来 nálái ‘bring,’ 回来 huílái ‘come back’), as an abstract complement denoting ‘come up, come out, appear’ (e.g., Tim: 想不起来 xiăng bu qĭlái ‘can’t think of [it], can’t remember’), in a myriad of set phrases (e.g., Elliott: 对我来说 duì wŏ lái shuō ‘in my opinion;’ Tim: 越来越多 yuè lái yuè duō ‘more and more’), as a coverb used to link a preceding action with a purpose or aim (e.g., Ella: 中文是给我其他的东西来看世界 Zhōngwén shì gěi wŏ qítā de dōngxi lái kàn shìjiè ‘Chinese gave me more ways to view the world’), and as a particle meaning ‘since, continuing from’ (e.g., Elliott: 这两年 来没有很多机会 zhè liăng nián lái méiyŏu hěn duō jīhuì ‘haven’t had many opportunities for the past two years’). Table 2.8 shows the participants’ use of the morpheme 来 lái, giving an indication of the number of ways people employed the morpheme in their speech.

Table 2.8: Participants’ use of the morpheme 来 lái in the interviews Verb ‘to come’

Bound (compound) Forms

Directional complement

Abstract complement

Ella

Z

Z

Z

Z

Elliott

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Patsy

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Roma

Z

Z

Tim

Z

Z

Z

Z

Set phrases

Coverb (purposeful)

‘Since, continuing’

Z Z

Z

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2.4.3.1.2 Aspectual morphemes Examination of the use of the aspect markers 过 guò (experiential aspect) and 了le (perfective or completive aspect and/or sentence-final particle indicating that something has current relevance or marks a change of state) is also an interesting window into grammatical variety (see Li and Thompson 1981). Both morphemes are polysemous, depending on context, but as with 到 dào and 来 lái above, the participants did not uniformly produce their full range of meanings in the interviews. For instance, Patsy and Roma used 过 guò frequently in its aspectual sense (e.g., 没有去过 méiyŏu qùguò ‘have never gone;’ 看过四次 kànguò sì cì ‘have seen it four times’), but the morpheme did not appear in any other contexts in their interviews. Tim used it in its aspectual context, and also as part of compound word (adjective) 难过 nánguò ‘sad.’ Elliott used it as a verb (过河 guò hé ‘to cross or pass [a river]’), and as an element of other compound words, such as 透过 tòuguò ‘via,’ 过程 guòchéng ‘process,’ and 通过 tōngguò ‘by means of, through.’ Finally, Ella used 过 guò as a verb, similar to Elliott, and in yet another context, as a resultative/directional verb complement (e.g., 转过来 zhuăn guòlái ‘to turn around, turn over’). For a summary of these uses, see Table 2.9. Table 2.9: Participants’ use of the morpheme 过 guò in the interviews Aspect: experience

Bound (compound) forms

Verb ‘cross, pass’

Resultative/directional complement

Ella

Z

Z

Z

Z

Elliott

Z

Z

Z

Patsy

Z

Roma

Z

Tim

Z

Z

Patsy produced the morpheme 了 le in many contexts: marking completion of an action (e.g., 学了一点 xuéle yīdiăn ‘studied a little’), signifying a change in situation (e.g., 都没有了 dōu méiyŏu le ‘none of them are there anymore’), and as a sentence-final particle that serves as a kind of punctuation marker (e.g., exclamation: 有的人用太多了 yŏude rén yòng tài duō le ‘some people use [it] too much!’). In fact, all of the participants used 了 le in these three contexts, but there was more variety beyond these uses (see Table 2.10). For instance, some bound or “lexicalized” forms of 了 le were used in the interviews: Ella and Roma used 了 le in the term 为了 wèile, a bound form meaning ‘for, in order to’

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Table 2.10: Participants’ use of the morpheme 了 le in the interviews Aspect: completion

Aspect: change

Exclamation . . . 了！

Bound forms

Other patterns

Ella

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Elliott

Z

Z

Z

Z

Z

Patsy

Z

Z

Z

Roma

Z

Z

Z

Tim

Z

Z

Z

Z Z

(e.g., Roma: 为了外国人表示这是新的中国 wèile wàiguórén biăoshì zhè shì xīn de Zhōngguó ‘to show foreigners that this is a new China’), and Elliott and Roma used the bound form 除了 chúle meaning ‘besides’ (e.g., Roma: 除了大学 的学习还有很多生活的 chúle dàxué de xuéxí háiyŏu hěn duō shēnghuó de ‘besides studying in college, [I] also [learned] in daily life’). The morpheme appeared in common sentence patterns as well: Ella and Tim used sentencefinal 了 le as part of the sentence pattern 就 . . . 了 jiù . . . le ‘as long as’ (e.g., Tim: 你听得懂我给的就好了 nĭ tīng de dŏng wŏ gěi de jiù hăo le ‘as long as you understand what I gave you then that’s ok’), and Elliott used it in the pattern 有了 . . . 才 yŏu le . . . cái ‘only if’ (e.g., 有了手机才会 yŏu le shŏujī cái huì ‘only with a cell phone’). These trends in evidence of the command of various ways of using the morphemes 到 dào, 来 lái, 过 guò, and 了 le seem to give another indication of general oral proficiency. Patsy and Tim self-assessed in the A2 range, Roma in the B1 range, and Ella and Elliott in the B2 range (see Table 2.3 and Figure 2.1, earlier in this chapter); this spectrum matches up well with use of the particles 过 guò and 了 le in particular, where Ella and Elliott exhibited the largest variety of forms and functions, followed by Roma, Tim, and Patsy. Analysis of the categories of meaning produced for the morphemes 到 dào and 来 lái paints a similar picture, with Elliott showing the greatest variation, followed by Ella, Patsy and Tim, and Roma. 2.4.3.1.3 Morphemes 把 bǎ and 被 bèi The constructions 把 bǎ and 被 bèi 15 are relatively well researched in existing CAL academic literature (cited earlier), but the participants used them very 15 As noted earlier, 把 bǎ is part of a focus construction, occurring before the direct object when the object appears before a verb, typically to foreground what happens or should happen to that object; and 被 bèi is part of a passive construction and precedes the verb, generally

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sparsely in their interviews. For example, Ella, Elliott, and Roma each used the 把 bǎ construction on average just 1.5 times per 45-minute interview, while Patsy and Tim did not use it at all. The 被 bèi construction was even rarer in practice: Ella used it three times in her 2009 interview (when discussing someone/ something being discovered and being killed) and just once in her 2010 interview (to describe someone being beaten); Elliott and Patsy used it just once (when discussing being attracted by something, and an unfortunate event in a novel, respectively) and Roma and Tim did not use it in their interviews. Though the presence or absence of 把 bǎ and 被 bèi did seem to loosely correspond to their self-assessed oral levels, it is more likely that the choice of interview questions and the interview interaction itself did not encourage natural use of these structures, and therefore it is hard to draw any real insight from their scarcity in the interview data. In fact, in addition to its narrative use, 把 bǎ is often used interactionally in imperatives in which someone is asked to do something, such as open or close a window, a speech act unlikely to occur on the part of an interviewee; and the passive construction (the explicit 被 bèi passive in Mandarin, versus implicit passive, which is also possible) is much less commonly used than in English (Li and Thompson 1981). Traditionally known as an adversative passive, it is often associated with negative passive situations, hence would be uncommon in a short interview unless discussing unpleasant or adversarial situations or events. Thus inferences about grammatical competence or proficiency must always be contextualized within the discourse context in which the language (data) was generated, and indeed this data set seems to point to casual use of 把 bǎ and 被 bèi as poor indices of oral proficiency.

2.4.3.2 Issues with qualitative analysis of grammatical competency It is important to note here that we feel these observations, like the figures presented in Section 2.4.2, should only be taken as an example of how CAL learners’ oral discourse might be analyzed both cross-sectionally and developmentally. The interviews were not designed to elicit certain types of grammar (e.g., passives), and may have in some cases inhibited them because of the nature of interview discourse itself. A good portion of the interviews was given to question-answer format discussion about the participants’ experiences learning and using Chinese and free description of topics of the participants’ choice. Speakers when something negative has transpired, a bit like the “got verb + ed” passive in English (an adverse situation or meaning such as got robbed ), although its usage seems to be changing in Chinese grammar to less adverse situations as well, possibly as a result of translating English passives into Chinese (see Li and Thompson 1981).

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were encouraged to use the linguistic means at their disposal, allowing avoidance of more complex or less certain structures for example, or not lending themselves naturally to other, more frequently researched constructions such as 把 bǎ and 被 bèi. On the other hand, the interviews were intentionally planned to allow participants to use the structures and grammar they felt comfortable with in a way that could have been limited and undermined if certain structures were being elicited.

2.5 Summary of linguistic analysis of proficiency, development, and variation In this chapter, we have reviewed some of the commonly used approaches to the linguistic analysis of Chinese L2 data, and especially oral language production. These approaches include standardized tests, CEFR self-assessments, and various other quantitative and qualitative analyses of speech such as measures of lexical density and variety, measures of fluency, and lexical/grammatical variation in the use of morphemes of direction and motion, aspect-marking, and other uses of morphemes that can serve multiple functions in Chinese discourse. In general, the analyses confirmed learners’ self-assessments of their ability, but some paradoxical observations or trade-offs across accuracy, fluency, and complexity were also noted. Each of the tools or instruments used also has its shortcomings, however. The standardized tests continue to evolve, making them difficult to compare with each other (e.g., old and new versions of the HSK, and the new version of the HSK with the TOCFL). Clearly, if general overall standardized measures of proficiency are desired that can also be interpreted easily by researchers in other settings, the choice of just one instrument/protocol such as the new/current HSK or the ACTFL OPI might be appropriate, although the latter is not commonly used in Canada or in other institutional settings outside of American language education and focuses on oral language primarily and requires trained and certified testers.16 Lexical parsers, while convenient, also demonstrate some limitations, particularly because word boundaries are often difficult to determine in Chinese for both humans and machines. Hence, when comparing words as assessed by these computational tools to items on, for example, frequency lists derived

16 According to the ACTFL website (http://www.actfl.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3642) an online Writing Proficiency Test (WPT ) now exists for a number of foreign languages but apparently not Chinese as of the time of writing.

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from corpora or word lists created for pedagogical purposes, mismatches and differences in consistent application of word classification can result in analytical ambiguities. In terms of the measurement of fluency, the use of Audacity, while very accurate, is quite time-consuming. Furthermore, perhaps using 0.2 seconds as the minimum criterion for pauses, rather than a longer pause length such as 0.4 or 1.0 second, might actually underestimate fluency when all of these short pauses are tallied and counted in total seconds. In addition, we did not provide measures of the participants’ fluency in English to see whether some of the same observations could be made of their L1 English production on comparable speech tasks or whether native speakers of Chinese would exhibit similar ranges in fluency when responding to similar prompts in Chinese. With respect to including English (codeswitching) as a measure of disfluency as many other studies of foreign language production do, this measure unfortunately harks back to a somewhat conservative, purist view of SLA, bilingualism, and assessment that insists that speech flow is most fluent (and valid) when produced in one language exclusively. Yet bilinguals and multilinguals commonly switch seamlessly, effortlessly, and fluently between their languages (Kamwangamalu 2010), especially when interacting with others who share their linguistic repertoire, for a variety of reasons. Finally, the qualitative analysis of lexical and grammatical variation based on the interview data was necessarily restricted to just a few semantic, lexical, and syntactic domains, but offered what we consider to be a promising direction for future research (Yates 2012). Studies often include quantitative analyses of complexity and accuracy using length and number of error-free T-units (or equivalent, a T-unit being an independent clause and any dependent clauses, measured in length of words) but in this study we have tried to focus more on what speakers could accomplish with their linguistic repertoires rather than the errors they made (with the exception of the (dis)fluency measures). Although it was beyond the scope of the analysis in this chapter, examining discourse-level grammatical features such as markers of cohesion, topic-chaining, and other forms of topic-prominence (e.g., topic-comment constructions) would likely reveal meaningful differences across speakers at different levels and times as well (Li and Thompson 1981). The present grammatical and lexical analysis is mostly limited to sentence-level phenomena. As a guiding principle, however, we have sought to examine aspects of L2 use that could be examined across all the learners potentially, but could also reveal the increasing sophistication in lexicon and grammar (and to an extent fluency, when complexity of thought/ forms produced is taken into account) with increasing experience and formal instruction in CAL. (This same principle of seeking common ground for analytical purposes also underpins our literacy analysis in Chapter 3.)

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The CAL research participants’ Chinese learning journey will not stop with the termination of the research project. Instead, they will continue their relationship with Chinese despite all the frustrations, struggles, difficulties, and obstacles (as well as achievements) that they have experienced or are still experiencing. As Ella indicated in her first (2009) narrative (N1: 23): “My kung fu dream didn’t end up leading to kung fu, but it did send me on the rich, meandering journey [of Chinese language learning] that I am still on.” Therefore, given that the participants’ learning of Chinese is an ongoing journey, in this chapter we could only provide self-portraits and snap-shots of linguistic profiles during the two years of this study (2009 and 2010). We attempted to illuminate some of the issues related to the complexity of the Chinese language itself, language assessments, and learners’ linguistic development and performance. By providing a rich contextualization of the interview context, of participants’ perceptions of their performance as well as the interviewer’s observations, and multiple ways of describing oral proficiency, we have aimed to provide a strong contextualization and complement to the qualitative analysis of literacy in the following chapter and of the sociocultural and narrative data based on the English narratives contained in later chapters. In terms of implications for pedagogy, it is clear that if speakers have a better understanding of how their speech is interpreted or even understood – as comprehensible (despite tone or other pronunciation issues), or as fluent or disfluent, they might develop strategies for producing, for example, more Chinese-like pause fillers, or not seeking to translate into English what they want to say before attempting to utter Chinese speech. For lexical and grammatical aspects of proficiency, exposing learners (including research participants) to multiple uses of the same morpheme and thus raising their awareness of its multifunctionality, even if its totality of uses is still beyond their active use, may also help them see the way the language functions more generally.

3 Developing Everyday Chinese Literacies: Sinographic Choices, Practices, and Identities 3.1 Introduction Having examined aspects of oral proficiency in Chapter 2, we now aim to characterize participants’ literacy (or at least orthographic) choices and practices from a qualitative, social-practice perspective (e.g., Barton 2007; Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič 2000; Street and Lefstein 2007). We do not include measures of reading comprehension or composition, apart from self-reported practices, for reasons to be explained. We review the characteristics of Chinese literacy first introduced in Chapter 1 based on the many orthographic systems in use and then illustrate each participant’s literacy strategies evident in their transcriptions of the oral interview data. We also report on the everyday Chinese literacies each one reported being most comfortable with and invested in, at different points in the study. As we shall see, these literacy practices also reflect participants’ literate and textual identities in relation to Chinese, and particularly with respect to Chinese characters.

3.2 Chinese orthography and literacy: Investments, practices, and identities In Chapters 1 and 2 we introduced the many orthographic systems for Chinese, including Traditional and Simplified characters. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and some “overseas” (diaspora) Chinese communities; Simplified characters are used in Mainland China, Singapore, and Malaysia. There are also two phonetic script systems (or more accurately, phonemic or phonographic systems of representation; Chen 1991) used for describing sounds in Mandarin Chinese: zhùyīn fúhào (a non-Roman or alphabetic system, which is used in Taiwan, literally “sound-annotating symbols” (Chen 1991)) and hànyŭ pīnyīn, or pīnyīn (employing the Roman alphabet) used in most other contexts, including Mainland China and CAL instruction outside of Taiwan and increasingly in Taiwan as well. One of the central issues of CAL pedagogy and acquisition for Englishspeaking learners is the investment of time required to learn how to read and write in one of the Chinese character orthographies and, in particular, how to

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write. Until recently, writing Chinese meant being able to not only recognize, recall, and interpret meanings for characters, but also produce from memory legible characters by hand. Large variations in the numbers of characters required for competent reading have been advanced as indices of functional literacy in Chinese, with a common agreement on a level of roughly 2500–3500 characters (or 2400 in Chen’s 1999 estimate, cited in Chapter 1) for understanding 99% of the characters found in a given modern text (Zhao and Zhang 2007). These numbers oversimplify a complex process wherein knowledge of character structure does not equate to textual comprehension, much less composition, as characters represent (syllabic) morphemes which combine into words of astonishing variety, and often do not represent just one meaning or morpheme but multiple meanings attached to homonymic morphemes (i.e. some characters are polysemous). These numbers also neglect the further issue of whether or not a learner can produce those characters from memory based on his or her internal lexicon. Indeed, it is common for native speakers to “make mistakes” when producing characters by hand, sometimes merely by writing a homonym or visually similar character (much as native speakers of English might carelessly substitute there for their), and in more extreme cases by having no real idea of how to write a character. Ella recalled a Chinese teacher’s inability to recognize her Chinese surname in her first narrative, for example (N1: 14). Much research on Chinese literacy focuses on the acquisition and retention of characters as individual units – including radical and “component” analyses, character (stroke) “density,” morphemic processing studies (e.g., effects of adding spaces between otherwise contiguous Chinese characters so as to parse text into separated “words”), and metacognitive research such as orthographic strategies and language awareness (Everson 2008; Lee-Thompson 2008; Shen and Ke 2007). As both L1 and L2 Chinese learners are faced with a challenge in mastering character-based orthography, literacy instruction typically starts with pīnyīn or zhùyīn fúhào and gradually gives way to characters; the details of this shift (particularly the timing) for L2 instruction present another site for debate among language educators (see Allen 2008). To learn characters, students typically move through various stages: from developing micro skills (strokes that constitute characters, proper stroke order, spacing and proportion, stroke aesthetics) to acquiring the characters (including common components, radicals, dictionary use, strategies for memorization and mutual distinction), then phrase-level comprehension (as recognition of a given character in one context does not lead automatically to understanding it in all contexts) and sentence-level comprehension (putting various meanings together into lengthier, more coherent thoughts), and finally discourse-level considerations such as genre, format, voice, media, and so forth.

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3.3 Contexts for and commitments to acquiring Chinese character-based literacy Cognitive studies on Chinese literacy acquisition often focus on learners in tertiary instructed situations, typically in the U.S., and do not necessarily indicate motivating or demotivating factors besides cognitive difficulty. In contrast, members of our research group seemed to be motivated as much by aesthetic impressions or assessment of the utility of literacy in their daily lives as by their academic coursework. For instance, Tim stated that “I never needed to be able to read and write. In Taiwan, if I couldn’t understand something, I would just ask (orally) what it was, or would just ignore it and move on” (N2: 23). However, he followed that assertion with his motivation to return to his studies of reading and writing, namely to feel that he could operate independently in a Chinese world, and to ensure that he could be placed at more appropriate level in formal Chinese classes (instead of much lower than his oral proficiency due to his lower reading and writing proficiency). Patsy, too, mentioned that learning to read would be “helpful,” but that she had “never expected or needed to be able to write much Chinese” (N2: 4). Oral ability in the languages she had studied, whether European or Asian, had always been the priority for her because her primary purposes for language learning are social and interactional. In addition, her SLA research over time has mainly focused on oral language development, socialization, and use, not literacy. Another factor was that her experience of studying written Japanese revealed just how easily one can forget large numbers of previously-learned characters when not used, making it a cost-ineffective aspect of language learning for her, all the more troublesome when attempting to transfer that latent knowledge of kanji (as Chinese characters are called in Japanese) to a Simplifiedcharacter orthography in Chinese. Roma’s description of reading in her second narrative was very relaxed, without urgency, although she enjoyed reading Chinese a great deal; her greatest senses of loss and inadequacy appeared to come from tones (in school) and from asserting herself orally (e.g., during an incident at a hospital, although in that particular experience she also mentioned the difficulty of having to translate a legal waiver with a handheld dictionary). Ella mentioned many instances of frustration with being unable to read menus, a booklet at a speech contest, books in bookstores, etc., and stated that this was demotivating for her; however, she reported that the biggest demotivation was a defeatist attitude itself. Given the challenge that Chinese character literacy presents to learners of English language backgrounds, it is unsurprising that one of the trends in pedagogical research calls into question the overall goal of learning to write characters by hand. Researchers such as Allen (2008), He and Jiao (2010), and Xu and

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Jen (2005) explore alternatives to traditional Chinese literacy pedagogy, including whether or not to attempt to teach writing simultaneously with reading, and whether writing with the aid of computer tools such as now-ubiquitous input methods based on phonemic orthographies ( pīnyīn and zhùyīn fúhào) should be the new standard for non-native speaker literacy. We return to this point below. Many of our CAL participants expressed in their narratives their love for the aesthetic beauty of Chinese characters (see Appendix A). For some of them, characters even served as one of the major reasons why they chose to study Chinese. For example, Patsy had wanted to learn Chinese when she first noticed Chinese characters and heard about ancient China in elementary school. She even asked her Japanese penpal to send her a ring with a “character” on it. Ella’s N1 writing started with a sentence using the metaphor of characters – “The story I’ve always told about why I started learning Chinese is a simplified one, disconnected from its traditional roots just like the characters” (N1: 1). In addition, as someone who is constantly involved in language play both in English and Chinese, she worked with Rachel to redesign the characters for the word sīxiăng (思想 ‘thoughts’) in a way that represented heart, mind and peace; those two altered characters (see Figure 3.1) are now a tattoo on Ella’s wrist that she got during the first summer of this project, a choice which highlights her long-term relationship with Chinese and growing sense of legitimacy in using and even appropriating and manipulating the language to reflect her identity as both Chinese language learner-user and artist-poet. She intentionally chose those two characters not only because of their meanings, but also because they are the same in both Simplified and Traditional forms, indicating her relationship with those two orthographies.

Figure 3.1: Ella’s wrist tattoo: “thoughts”

Elliott was more strongly attracted to the challenges of learning Chinese orthography. After he arrived in Taiwan for the very first time, he spent his first two weeks practicing and learning the stroke orders for Chinese characters. To

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this day (in 2012), he has the highest proficiency in Chinese literacy among the CAL participants of this study and still reads Chinese daily. Although they considered it aesthetically beautiful, learning to read and write Chinese, as well as retain that knowledge, has been difficult for all five CAL participants in this study and many others (Bell 2007a; Tasker 2012). At one point before 2002, Tim estimated that he was able to read and write about 700–800 characters, but forgot most of them after years without practice. Patsy had learned to write several hundred Japanese kanji when she lived in Japan and subsequently took an advanced Japanese reading course in Hawaii. However, when she arrived in Changsha, she felt that she “had the wrong prescription in her glasses” (N1: 5); the previous knowledge of kanji not only did not help with her learning of Chinese but rather, like the local dialect she was exposed to, also added to her confusion. Even for an advanced learner like Elliott, during his master’s degree when he was assigned as a teaching assistant in Asian Studies for a first-year Chinese heritage language class, he found out that he had difficulty marking the students’ homework because he was confused about which characters were appropriate for the language program (Simplified vs. Traditional vs. Japanese kanji) or how the characters should be properly written and assessed. As heritage learners, many of the students had excellent abilities in the oral language, and demonstrated a wide variety of writing styles influenced by their home language use backgrounds (from different communities in the Chinese-language sphere). The students often employed “nonstandard” grammar, lexicon, and orthography; Elliott’s lack of a rock-solid base of comparison (given his exposure to three different Chinese-character orthographies, namely Simplified and Traditional Chinese as well as Japanese) meant double-checking his corrections of students’ work was a laborious and challenging task.

3.4 Developing advanced Chinese literacy When learners enter the stage of more advanced readings, they often face other hurdles. Published Chinese reading material for adult native speakers is usually composed of literary and formal expressions, metaphors that are connected to ancient stories or myths, and four-word idioms, which make it highly inaccessible to non-native language learners. Apart from that, the content of the reading can also be uninteresting to learners. Ella described her frustration in reading Chinese:

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. . . the more I was able to read in Chinese, the more frustrated I became with the uninspiring content I kept discovering. HSK [test] material aside, I asked everyone I knew for recommendations for magazines or short stories to read, but every lead I followed led me to pat, readers’-digest style tales that didn’t do a good job of hiding their moral or political agendas. I found reading incredibly labour-intensive and the pay-off to be seriously disappointing. (N2: 20)

Indeed, the frustration with available readings eventually led Ella to work on a project developing a website that seeks to provide interesting readings for learners of Chinese. Lacking the ability to read and write Chinese characters can sometimes even prevent learners from furthering their Chinese studies because most university Chinese language courses require students to be able to read and write. Learners with high oral proficiency and low literacy can find it difficult to fit into a particular language class. For example, Tim took an introductory Chinese class at his university when he returned to Canada from Taiwan after his initial stay between 2000 and 2001. In order to start literacy learning from the very beginning, he had to sit amongst a group of people with very little knowledge of Chinese. Apparently, having an intermediate-level speaker in class created challenges for Tim’s instructor, who told him not to speak Chinese in class because this might intimidate other students. This is a common experience for heritage-language learners as well who may be orally proficient but lack Chinese literacy skills (Li and Duff 2008). During the time of this study, Tim registered for his Chinese class in Taiwan and the discrepancy between his oral and written abilities was again an issue. He finally decided to go to a class that suited his speaking level and to catch up on the needed characters through self-study before the course started. It is important to note that Tim was not the only one who struggled with this issue; Ella and Patsy both had similar experiences at different times of their study. But beyond Chinese program placement and progress, being unable to read Chinese reduces opportunities to read Chinese independently and develop new vocabulary and other aspects of CAL, thereby also indirectly constraining oral language development, even for those who are not as committed to L2 literacy. Two of the learners also experienced learning different Chinese characterbased orthography systems. Elliott started with Traditional characters and encountered Simplified characters during his trip to Mainland China. He identified himself more with Traditional characters because it was: “1) a more direct path to classical Chinese (little did I know how hard that would prove to be regardless), 2) ‘pure’ and therefore more beautiful or descriptive (a brazen cooperation with language ideological forces in Taiwan), and 3) harder to learn at first, but

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allowing easier access to the simplified set (than the opposite direction)” (N1: 13). However, as he became more familiar with Simplified orthography, he found himself “enjoying writing these economical characters, but nurturing a strong feeling of solidarity with Traditional forms in text” (N1: 13). In both his narrative writing and 2009 interview transcription one can find a mixture of both forms of the characters (see Figure 3.4). Ella, conversely, started with Simplified Chinese characters and later learned Traditional Chinese characters in Taiwan. This shift was also indicated in her narrative writing. Her N1 prior to her Taiwan trip used Simplified characters, whereas her N2, written in Taiwan, only used Traditional characters. (Her N3 used both: Simplified, for the earlier part of her Chinese narrative, and Traditional for the more recent part.) She described making “an instant switch to Traditional characters” and found it “challenging but rewarding” (N2: 24). In order to memorize characters, Ella often played mnemonic games, and she found it easier when it came to Traditional characters. The following excerpt from her second narrative describes this learning strategy very well: For example, to remember the character 尋 [xún: to search, to look for] (which I’ve studied before in Simplified), I imagine my “I” (sounds like eye) is “O” for open so that I can search every inch (寸 [cùn: inch]) of the pig’s head (彐 [jì: radical meaning “pig’s head”]). Or for the word 叮嚀 [dīngníng], which means to urge repeatedly, or nag, I think that 叮 means to sting or bite (which is another meaning of that character but not the one used here) and 嚀 means the peace. To “sting the peace” is to nag. This is fun and playful to me and makes it easier to remember that thinking that 叮 means to say repeatedly and 嚀 means peace but together they mean to nag. And I figure if it helps me remember I don’t care if it is not exactly “correct”. (N2: 24)

This description of Ella’s literacy practices demonstrates a memorization strategy very similar to Tim’s (and very common in pedagogical contexts). It shows the learner’s cognitive awareness of character components and how that developed awareness helped them in character memorization. This learning strategy is also noticed and promoted by Chinese language educators and in some materials (Shen 2004, 2005; Shen and Ke 2007), and is among many other strategies that the learners mentioned for developing their literacy awareness, such as repetition for memorizing (Ella N2: 22; Elliott N2: 9), positive mental reframing approaches (Ella N2: 24), focusing on specific goals (e.g., the HSK, Ella N2: 17; enrolling in classes, Tim N2: 22), language play (Roma N2: 36; Ella N2: 22; Tim N2: 16), finding enjoyable and level-appropriate texts and other media (Roma N2: 37; Elliott N2: 21), and extensive note-taking (Elliott N2: 24). Two of our learners both reflected on the advantage of learning Chinese characters through cell phone texting. Elliott briefly mentioned texting his friends in characters when he started learning Chinese. Roma’s Chinese communication with a couple of friends in China was facilitated almost entirely by

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text messages in characters. She commented that it was the only arena in which she “felt fully like a legitimate speaker” (N2: 23). Unlike face to face conversations, the messaging process allowed her to read and write at the speed that she was comfortable with. In addition, texts provided her with “an initially confusing insight into Chinese culture” (N2: 23). On Chinese New Year, Roma received dozens of poem-like messages that she could hardly decipher. Later on, she realized that those were digital greetings for the New Year. This experience had allowed her to understand to a certain degree the festival culture in China.

3.5 Literacy as mediated social practice Increasingly in literacy studies related to European languages such as English, researchers focus not only on cognitive processes for decoding, comprehending, or encoding texts found in formal education contexts but also the various social contexts and purposes for which they willingly engage with texts of very different types, especially outside of school (e.g., Barton, Hamilton and Ivanič 2000; Bell 2007a; Street and Lefstein 2007). Literacy is seen not just as a skill but as a social and cultural practice. Current research focusing on “new literacies,” “multiliteracies,” and “multilingual literacies,” therefore, underscores the role of new, everyday, information and communication technologies in homes, communities, workplaces, virtual worlds, and other sites, as forms of literacy that people engage in more and more and which often involve reading and representational skills that are different from those traditionally taught in education (Baker 2010; Martin-Jones and Jones 2000). For example, Tallowitz (2008) described the kinds of literacies that L2 readers of German needed to develop to navigate German-language websites which are different from the linear text reading typical of print literacies. There are various kinds of mediation in literacy, from instructors, to books, to the Internet and dictionaries, but new digital forms of access to literacy are in marked contrast to those of a generation ago. However, these socially situated, constructivist, and digital perspectives are mostly missing from current applied linguistics research on Chinese literacies. Participants in this study differed greatly in the importance placed on literacy as CAL learners/users, whether in instructional contexts or not, as well as in current engagements with different types of texts, and the orthographies most accessible to them. In addition to the rough CEFR indication provided by group members about their own reading skills, in Fall 2009 and 2010 each was asked to reflect on recent Chinese reading activities, including specific texts recently read. The results are found in Table 3.1.

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Table 3.1: Self-reported recent reading activities

Name Ella

Reading Abilities

Orthographic Systems f f f

Traditional Simplified Pīnyīn

2009

children’s version of Journey to the West (西游记) f Chinese idiom tales (成语故事)

f

magazines kung fu fiction (武侠小说) legal papers short novels

f

Wikipedia articles news magazines (ft.com, 明报 , 争鸣)

f

minor translation work

basic street signs and instructions online instructional resources

f

ChinesePod some romanized books

f

f f

f f f f

Traditional Simplified Pīnyīn Zhùyīn fúhào

f

f f f f

Patsy

f f

Simplified Pīnyīn

f

f

Roma

f f f

Simplified Some Traditional Pīnyīn

f f

f

f

Tim

f f

Traditional Pīnyīn

Taiwan modern fiction with pictures short stories from a Chinese language learning website (translating) correspondence with friends and business partner in Taiwan

Chinese translation of English fiction Chinese fiction Internet surfing menu-reading bills, flyers, book jackets, etc.

f

Elliott

2010 f

f

f

f f f f f

mysteries for kids (大宇) English books for young adolescents in Chinese simple kids’ books in Traditional characters Chinese-language blog basic characters in Chinese textbooks road signs food packaging signs in elevators menus (some characters) recognition of 50 characters or less

f

f

f

f

f

academic articles short stories and essays in a 高中阶级读本

f

as before but more Chinese characters

f

textbook-based readings laboured reading of magazines or websites/ chat rooms

f

Of the group, Elliott was (and continues to be) the most avid reader of Chinese, followed by Ella and Roma, who both described sustained reading activities involving a variety of texts, including Chinese fiction, fiction in translation (English to Chinese), blogs, and personal correspondence mediated by the

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Internet. Patsy and Tim expressed a lower level of familiarity with the written (character-based) form of the Chinese language. In this study self-reported reading proficiency seems to correlate roughly with the amount of previous full-time study participants reported; while Patsy’s and Tim’s exposure to the language in terms of time spent learning actually represented the two extremes for the group, they also reported the least amount of full-time study. In 2009, before Tim had studied full time in Taiwan, he and Patsy assessed themselves at the beginner level for reading, and then mainly for pīnyīn. Ella, Elliott, and Roma all reported significant amounts of full-time and formal study and their selfassessed reading abilities reflect this (see Table 2.3 in Chapter 2). Ella, who for the previous many years had learned to read Simplified characters to what she considered to be in the B1–B2 range of CEFR, began intensive study of Traditional characters in Taiwan during Fall 2009. Her leisure reading during that time included Chinese translations of English (American) fiction, Chinese fiction, surfing the Internet in Chinese, including social networking sites, and reading other texts that were then part of her daily life in Taipei. She reported a general increase in her reading skills, though some of her full-time study was spent adjusting to a new mode of reading (Traditional characters); by 2010 her reading included Taiwanese fiction and personal correspondence with friends and colleagues. In class she was studying Tang Dynasty poetry, a genre that was accessible to her only with assistance (this is typically the case for native speakers as well, although poetry and other forms of literary Chinese are introduced to native speaking children early in their education). Outside of class she was working with a Taiwanese business partner on developing a website of story-based Chinese curriculum suitable for beginning and intermediate learners. Chinese Stories© rewrites authentic materials such as current media reports and classical stories into short, level-specific pieces, and provides supplementary materials including definitions, audio files, translations, comprehension quizzes, and discussion groups. Challenges commonly faced by CAL learners, such as parsing confusion, (place) name recognition, and unknown cultural or historical references are mitigated with colour, pop-up information menus (when reading online), and embedded links. In addition to design consulting on both the aesthetic and functional aspects of the website, Ella also translates the stories. Elliott, whose identity as a CAL learner was also integrally connected with his love of Chinese characters and literacy, was immersed in children’s versions of fiction, such as Journey to the West, Chinese idiom tales, magazines, kung fu fiction, and short novels; he also read non-fiction texts such as rental agreements and academic stipulations when in Taiwan. He reported engaging with all

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four orthographic systems: Traditional characters, Simplified characters, pīnyīn, and zhùyīn fúhào. Roma, another avid reader of Chinese fiction, reported reading mainly Simplified-character texts, preferring mysteries for children or adolescents written originally in Chinese (a particular series), English books in Chinese translation, children’s books in Traditional characters, or Chinese blogs on the Internet. Her reading selections in 2010 were similar to the year before, but she was exposed to more characters. Patsy and Tim were much less engaged with Chinese literacy, mainly because of their lack of formal instruction in Chinese characters (especially Patsy), Tim’s lack of recent residence in Taiwan at the start of the study, and the priority both gave to conversational Mandarin. When describing their capabilities, both of them focused on recognition of signage or packaging. Further, they both only used characters in their first written narratives when discussing their Chinese names. After the 2009 self-report, Tim returned to Taiwan for an intensive language study, where he focused primarily on reading and writing. Therefore, at the time of the 2010 survey, Tim listed his recent reading materials as either textbookbased readings or texts geared to language learners, and he assessed his skill at an A2 level. As the study progressed he reported feeling more comfortable using Chinese characters in non-academic settings (such as social media sites or email correspondence), although his exposure to Chinese literacy remained low compared to Elliott, Roma, and Ella.

3.6 Writing, technology, and literate/textual identities, choices, and practices For none of the five has the production of written Chinese texts been as important as speaking or reading Chinese. Nonetheless, we wanted to capture participants’ written production as another dimension of their literacies and preferences. As each person in this study had a unique CAL learning history, a component of the oral interview described in Chapter 2 was designed to elicit examples of participants’ literacy skills. Here we report on the participants’ abilities to transcribe segments of their own oral CAL narratives spontaneously into the written Chinese script they felt most capable of using. It was important to have an activity that would validate the widest variety of literacy levels (including both phonemic and character orthographies) and for which the source language was accessible (comprehensible); for this reason, participants transcribed only speech they

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themselves had produced, in order to ensure that the thoughts, language choices, and context would be familiar to the “writer.” The transcription task included two stages: one attempt without the support of a dictionary or online word-processor, to give an indication of unsupported recall and to demonstrate common issues when learners move from a known oral lexicon to a written representation, and a second attempt with the assistance of computer input methods, to show the difference in capabilities these resources enable (in this second version a dictionary was allowed, but none of the participants elected to use one). By providing written excerpts of their oral interviews, learners provided an indication of the relationship between their oral and written proficiency, and especially facility with Chinese characters. However, this task does not attempt to address the wider idea of writing as a holistic language skill, or as composition, which includes knowledge of genres, registers, specialized vocabulary, cultural norms, audience, voice, and so forth. The examples given below were taken from a picture description task: the participants were shown a photo of a person driving while using a cell phone, with a passenger grabbing the steering wheel. Then came follow-up questions regarding their own cell phone use and perspectives on cell phones in society. In the interest of space, we have included just three lines from each response (from July 2009). In general, the figures and descriptions that follow reveal that Elliott, Ella, and Roma were able to spontaneously produce a handwritten, character-based written version of their oral account, interspersing some English, Chinese phonetic symbols, and sometimes a mixture of Simplified and Traditional characters to represent the meanings they had expressed orally. In some cases (e.g., Ella), they used a character erroneously when it sounded like the oral version but looked quite different from the correct character; in other cases (e.g., Roma), they substituted characters that looked alike but had different meanings and pronunciation. Patsy and Tim produced phonemic transcriptions of their interview data. Ella, Elliott, and Roma knew how to type Chinese characters but did the task by hand initially to discount the effects of Chinese word-processing tools that assist with character choice, correction, or production. In contrast, Patsy and Tim used pīnyīn – Tim with tone markers and Patsy without – and did it by (English) word processor, in one step, as there was no interference or assistance from Chinese character input tools in their case. Patsy later, for the first time, also tried to convert her pīnyīn text to a character-based one using a word-processing tool that required inputting each syllable and choosing the correct character (see below).

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The short excerpts included here also demonstrate the different levels and range of vocabulary, syntax, and strategies each one used in their oral account to describe the situation depicted in the photo and their own personal reliance on cell phones. For the sake of space, we have included comparisons between 2009 and 2010 interviews only where marked orthographic differences were observed (for Ella and Tim especially), and have explored possible explanations for these differences; we give only a subset of the computer-assisted transcriptions for the same reasons.

3.6.1 Ella’s transcriptions In 2009, as Figure 3.2 shows, in the first line (fourth character) Ella wrote the character 並 bìng ‘and’ in Traditional form when she was trying to write 亚 yà in 亚洲 Yàzhōu ‘Asia;’ the former character has two extra “dots” on top. She also used characters erroneously when they were homonyms of those in her speech (which sounded similar but looked quite different). For example, the word 已经 yĭjīng ‘already’ in the center-right of the first line was written as 以经 yĭjīng; note that the character on the left side is different but the right side is the same (and is correct). In another example, on the bottom line (second character) the character she chose for the phoneme “sī” (marked “sì” by Ella in the hand transcription) was not the form that would appear in dictionaries (the dictionary form is 私 sī ‘private’). She also demonstrated that transcription for our research purposes was an interactive process with her intended reader, Rachel (who would analyze the writing), using a question mark under the character 羔 gāo ‘lamb’ (as the first part of the word 概括 gàikuò ‘generalize’) to indicate her degree of uncertainty in transcribing that word, and also providing a form of intersubjectivity by including the words “. . . more English . . . ,” an elliptical statement which was shorter than writing out verbatim the actual English words she produced in the interview itself (as the purpose of the transcription was to produce Chinese, not English).

Figure 3.2: Ella’s 2009 interview transcription

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English translation: “But in Asia, we Westerners have already formed this kind of opinion, it is a very general opinion, which is that in Asia, there is not much private [privacy]. Privacy, sìlì. I hope that’s right? Yĭnsī, ok . . . more English . . .”

In contrast, Figure 3.3 shows Ella’s transcription in 2010. Her writing had completely shifted from Simplified characters to Traditional ones, which was understandable as that was the orthography she had practiced regularly most recently, during her studies in Taiwan. She also playfully changed the radical (亻) for the character 們 (men, plural indicator for people) in the bottom line from “person” to “woman” (thus changing the character 們 into “女 + 門”, since 女 means female), indicating her feminist standpoint and even flagging that usage enthusiastically with English (“intentional!!”).

Figure 3.3: Ella’s 2010 interview transcription English translation: “From June 15th to last Sunday, there were guests staying at my home. So [I] have been very busy. [They are] from Taiwan. Yes, [they are] not [here]. They went to Banff and Jasper on Sunday.”

3.6.2 Elliott’s transcriptions

ㄧ

Elliott used Zhùyīn fúhào to replace the characters that he didn’t know how to write (e.g., ㄧㄥˇ 響 in the word 影響 yĭngxiăng ‘impact, influence’ in the first line of Figure 3.4; note that the initial vertical strokeㄧis written horizontally: ). His writing was a mixture of Traditional and Simplified characters, and in most cases he was able to produce the characters for the relatively sophisticated vocabulary he used to express his meanings. In Elliott’s version, he transcribed all three occurrences of the utterance shíshí (in line 2 and line 3, third occurrence not shown in figure) as 实时 (‘real time,’ from the realm of computers, a very specific, formal term). In comparison, when Rachel transcribed the same recording, she wrote the homonym 时时 shíshí ‘frequently.’ The word Rachel chose to transcribe was used more in oral conversations and she assumed that Elliott used the more colloquial word in his speech.

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Figure 3.4: Elliott’s 2009 interview transcription English translation (. . . refers to a short pause): “Cell phones . . . modern people . . . the impact that the cell phone brings . . . the alteration and change it brings . . . is to let people . . . to be able to contact their friends, family and colleagues in real time. Then you can know in real time. . .”

When Elliott transcribed the same stretch of conversation using a computer, there were notable differences (see Figure 3.5).

Figure 3.5: Elliott’s 2009 interview transcription (using a computer input method editor)

The syllables he represented with zhùyīn fúhào in the handwritten transcription were subsequently represented by characters electronically, and all characters were Traditional. Interestingly, some vocabulary was transcribed as different (but homonymic) words in the handwritten and word-processed versions. Elliott’s computer transcription choice for the first instance of shíshí (in line 2), ‘frequently’ (the same word Rachel thought he was trying to say when she transcribed the audio recording of the interview), was different from the word he transcribed by hand (‘real time’). It is possible that given the similarity in the meaning of the two words, their equal contextual plausibility, and the fact that they are homonymic, Elliott interpreted his original meaning differently when transcribing using different methods (handwriting versus computer-assisted input) at different times, and when Rachel transcribed it she guessed which meaning he most likely intended considering context and register. Characters written incorrectly (e.g., 广 guăng ‘wide,’ not shown in figures) or incorrectly chosen (e.g.,

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新 xīn instead of 信 xìn in 信息 xìnxī ‘information; message,’ not shown in figures) in the handwritten transcription were generally correctly represented in the word-processed version (representing a higher rate of accuracy based on the help provided by the input method editor and the phonetic input method). The computer-assisted transcription used entirely Traditional characters; Elliott switched readily between orthographies when writing by hand, using whatever was most familiar, quickest to write, or using the orthography that he learned a particular word in. When using a computer input method he found it quicker to retain a consistent orthography throughout the transcription. Interestingly, this decision overrode any allegiances he had to the “original orthography” he learned a particular expression in first (N2: 2). His transcription of the second interview data was comparable in terms of strategies and orthographic choice to the first.

3.6.3 Patsy’s transcriptions Unlike Tim, Patsy combined syllables into words as required by pīnyīn orthography (e.g., jintian ‘today’ instead of jin tian), which can be a challenging task even for Chinese native speakers. Chinese character orthographies do not distinguish word boundaries or indicate how the syllabic morphemes represented by individual characters combine into words; when writing in pīnyīn, however, one has to decide which morphemes should be combined together and which ones should not. Though there are official guidelines for determining word boundaries in Chinese (People’s Republic of China 1996), native speakers and CAL learners alike (and even the parsers described in Chapter 2) show considerable variation in making such decisions in practice (Bassetti 2005). Patsy was correct with most of the combinations except for one word, meiyou (do not have), in the second line, which she separated into two words. In her experience learning and often transcribing Chinese, she had had no particular instruction on how to do this (and Elliott mentioned he had not either, possibly because of the contentiousness of word boundaries in Chinese), resulting in some inconsistencies, and she did not mark tones. This was intentional as she did not know what tone markings to use or even how to type them, and had never transcribed Chinese with tones in her linguistic research or for other purposes. Her transcript could be viewed as a stripped-down linguist’s pīnyīn version. In other parts of her transcription, she confused “j/zh”, “q/ch” and “x/sh”, which are distinguished in pīnyīn as representing different phonemes in Mandarin but sound very similar to an L1-English ear.

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Figure 3.6: Patsy’s 2009 interview transcription English translation: “Ok. That question is very difficult! . . . That is the first one! The good parts and bad parts [of cellphone use], is that right? Ah . . . cellphones, I don’t use a cellphone much, today I brought it because my battery is dead, so I don’t know, because this is what I bought in China – it does not tell me when the battery is low . . .”

Patsy’s transcription for the interview in 2010 is very similar to the one in 2009 and again looks very much like a linguist’s (phonemic) transcript, without tones. In Figure 3.7 (below), she indicated what characters she was able to write by hand (with no assistance and no recent practice, and often incorrectly). However, with the basic Chinese Simplified character typing software on her laptop, she was later able to transcribe her interview with many characters (see Figure 3.8) – only the second time she had ever tried to do that. Although there are occasional mistakes with her typed character choices, Patsy was able to identify many more characters compared to the hand-writing method. This suggests that using computer-mediated software for inputing characters might make Chinese writing much easier and faster for second language learners.

Figure 3.7: Patsy’s 2010 interview transcription (typed pīnyīn and handwritten characters)1 English translation: “Right. They [my parents] really like it [living here]. Because we’re all living here. We – my younger sister, older sister and I – all live here. They also have my sister’s two daughters. So, for example, yesterday was my sister’s kids’ [birthday]”. . .

1 This transcription was actually produced in early 2011.

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Figure 3.8: Patsy’s 2010 interview transcription (using computer software to input pīnyīn from the transcript in Figure 3.7)

However, learners still must be able to recognize which characters to choose from when multiple homonyms are suggested or when the software program suggests the wrong character (especially in ungrammatical CAL sentences). For the expression bǐfāngshuō (‘for example’), there are well over 100 possible characters (homonyms, if one does not specify the tone) for the first part bǐ, including 比, 必, 笔, 逼, 币, and others (all with different meanings); the other syllables in the expression also have large numbers of homonymic possibilities. 比方说 is the one correct combination for the expression bǐfāngshuō (‘for example’); if another combination is suggested by the computer initially, the writer must select an alternate character for one or both parts. Typically, the computer input software can guess combinations of characters by their context: typing “bifangshuo” all at once is likely to bring up the suggestion 比方说, and no other threecharacter possibility. However, in Patsy’s case, she chose correctly for bǐ, but believed the pronunciation of the second syllable to be fān (according to Changsha dialect, not Standard Mandarin, and reflected in her speech and spelling of the word in the bottom line in Figure 3.7), not fāng, and thus the computer suggested a different set of characters, none of which were correct. (Had she input bi + fang, the correct characters and word would likely have appeared.) Though Patsy used the right pronunciation in her interview and transcribed form (and thus computer input), for the third syllable shuō (speak) it is possible that the computer recommended (defaulted to) 硕 instead of 说 because of the unusual context created by the preceding character, which was not the correct one for the expression. Another example of where character literacy would likely have alerted Patsy to a mistake in her transcription is the nonsensical phrase 妞还 niuhai, likely produced because of a spelling error (she intended to produce the word 女孩 nühai ‘girl’ but did not realize the first morpheme was spelled nü). In addition, because “ü” is not one of the available keys on the English computer keyboard, “v” is used to replace it. If Patsy had noticed the unusual choice the input software had made for her or had known the correct way of typing the letter “ü,” she would have had the option of correcting it.

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Though such errors occurred, based on alternate pronunciations for syllables and/or her low literacy level (which meant discerning which homonym should be selected to represent the morpheme she needed in a given word), use of the computer enabled Patsy to use Chinese characters entirely, with a relatively high rate of accuracy. Indeed, Patsy may be considered, at least in her writing, to be functionally literate at a low level with the assistance of computer tools based on a phonemic input method.

3.6.4 Roma’s transcriptions Roma sometimes produced characters missing a stroke or misusing similarlooking characters with different meanings; however, given the context, her original meaning could still be understood. For example, the characters 短 duǎn ‘short’ and 正 zhèng ‘right’ were both missing a horizontal line on the top (in lines 2 and 3 respectively in Figure 3.9). In another case, the character 较 jiào in the word 比较 bǐjiào ‘relatively’ was written as 校 xiào ‘school;’ these two characters share the same components on the right side but different radicals on the left. In one instance, to qualify a character she was unsure of, she wrote zhàng (a pīnyīn representation of the spoken word, although with the incorrect tone marker on top) below the character to clarify her intention. In another instance, near the end of the first line, she used pīnyīn, unmarked for tone (“weixian”), for the word ‘dangerous’ where she did not know the characters (危险 wēixiǎn). However, when Roma was given the opportunity to transcribe the same passage with electronic tools, she was able to type the entire sentence correctly (see Figure 3.10).

Figure 3.9: Roma’s 2009 interview transcription English translation: “Look at this, this (correcting the measure word) picture. Um . . . cell phones make people do rather dangerous . . . Look at this person driving, he seems to be writing a text message, sending a text message. Uh, the other person is . . . uh, I don’t know how to say it.”

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Figure 3.10: Roma’s 2009 interview transcription (using a computer input method editor)

3.6.5 Tim’s transcriptions Tim produced his 2009 transcript in typed pīnyīn2 (see Figure 3.11). Overall, Tim’s pīnyīn spelling and tone marking were accurate. However, there were some interesting divergences from standard pīnyīn orthographic rules; for instance, in cases of tone sandhi,3 Tim recorded tones in writing the way they sounded. In the excerpt above, suǒyǐ ‘as a result’ is correctly pronounced suóyǐ in the interview, but its correct spelling in pīnyīn would be suǒyǐ, while Tim wrote it as it sounded, “suóyǐ.” Also, Tim consistently spelled yīnwèi ‘because’ as “yíng wèi.” (Note: confusion of final –n and –ng is very common in Taiwanese Mandarin, as it is in several southern “dialects.”) In addition, Tim separated every syllable instead of combining them orthographically into words as per standard pīnyīn.

Figure 3.11: Tim’s 2009 interview transcription English translation: “It depends on the situation. It is not too important in Canada. Especially in Vancouver, it’s not too important because right now, this year, I don’t have many friends in Vancouver. Last year I had (many friends), so . . . now it’s not very [important].”

2 Although he studied Chinese in Taiwan, Tim recounted learning pīnyīn in his narrative, and listed it as the only phonemic orthography he was currently comfortable with (see Chapter 2). 3 Tone sandhi refers to the phenomenon in Chinese pronunciation in which a syllable’s citation tone changes in combination with other tonic syllables: the most common type of tone sandhi in Mandarin is where two 3rd tone syllables occur in succession and the first syllable changes to the 2nd tone when spoken. Pīnyīn specifies that the “original” tone be written (the reader must infer and produce the correct 2nd tone reading “on the fly”).

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Figure 3.12 shows Tim’s transcription in 2010. Compared to the pīnyīn transcription he provided in 2009, Tim was able to write out most of the Chinese characters this time in the Traditional form, a significant shift in literacy practices owing to his recent study abroad in Taiwan. The writing format is in line with publications in Taiwan, where writing starts vertically from top to bottom and in columns from right to left. However, the worksheet Tim was using seems to separate lines horizontally rather than using vertical columns, making his task a bit more difficult. When Tim did not know how to write one or more characters in a word he made an exception, combining all morphemes in that word into a single space (e.g., shíchā ‘jetlag’). Each letter of his name at the opening is in its own writing space/square, but in other places all letters of English words are written entirely in one space (e.g., “supervisor”). Punctuation had its own space in most cases, which is standard in printed Chinese materials, but there were many exceptions to this practice. Where punctuation would begin a new vertical line, Tim added it to the end of the previous one, in the margin, as is customary with Chinese printed or handwritten text. Tim also chose to squeeze some punctuation into squares occupied by Chinese characters (e.g., “. . .” + 不), and wrote some punctuation in horizontal configurations that would typically be arranged vertically when writing in vertical orientation (e.g., “. . .” instead of the standard doubled “. . . . . .”). These choices may have been influenced by English orthography, as well as a lack of experience with Chinese literacy. Tim wrote entirely in Traditional orthography. Some characters showed evidence of the same processes described above for other participants: substituting a different, similar-looking radical for the standard one (e.g., using 目 mù ‘eye’ instead of 日 rì ‘sun’ in one instance of the character 時 shí ‘time,’ in column 3). When asked later about his strategy for producing this transcription by Elliott, Tim responded via email: I’m kind of all over the map with this . . . I started off putting English letters in different spaces (“TIM”) but then switched to putting them all in one box because I thought it was more economic and aesthetic. As far as punctuation, I was taught to put the punctuation in a separate box (not sure if this is right or not . . .). With the pīnyīn, I put all morphemes in the same box just to conserve space. I have no idea what the rules are in terms of writing pīnyīn or English in these squares/spaces so I just guessed.

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Figure 3.12: Tim’s 2010 interview transcription

3.7 Summary In this chapter, we presented the various literacy preferences, desires, investments, choices, and practices of the CAL learners, demonstrating considerable diversity across all five but also dramatic changes over time in two cases (Ella’s and Tim’s). We also considered the importance and potential of computer mediation for less character-literate writers, such as Patsy.

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As noted earlier in this chapter, we did not include writers’ own unsolicited textual practices or compositions in Chinese – their ability to produce poetry, text messages, visual puns combining images and characters, other forms of language and literacy play, or blog comments, for example, for their own purposes, beyond brief transcriptions of their oral texts. We examine such everyday Chinese literacy practices elsewhere and recommend that more research be conducted in the same vein (Duff et al. 2012). Instead we have underscored the importance of Chinese learners’ differing levels of investment in Chinese orthographies and literacy practices, their identities as learners and users of Chinese, and the place of Chinese character knowledge and use in relation to those textual identities, areas ripe for further research with both heritage and nonheritage language learners. Whereas cognitive research on reading and writing has produced important insights about strategies for comprehending or producing Chinese characters and messages, less research has focused on how and why learners engage with different Chinese literacies and especially with new online digital literacies, or how and why these practices change over time. Nor has research investigated sufficiently learners’ deep-seated desires and attachments with respect to the aesthetics of Chinese writing or their creative, playful engagements with literacy, as we saw in Ella’s gender-sensitive versions (innovations or transgressions) of some characters or in the semiotics of her tattoo, blending Western and Eastern symbol systems to reflect her sense of self and her ideologies as well as the role of Chinese in her life. In addition, the perception of some learners that they are “illiterate” in Chinese despite being able to produce pīnyīn and even character versions of texts with the aid of computers suggests that more must be done to help learners write pīnyīn according to standard conventions. That knowledge will enable them to be not just more competent readers and writers of pīnyīn but also of characters, through various conversion programs that require correct pīnyīn input. Interestingly, those input systems normally do not require tone markings on pīnyīn, although that is an option, whereas standard practice requires it in stand-alone pīnyīn texts. Leveraging learners’ existing knowledge of oral and written Chinese versions to reach higher levels of proficiency in turn provides them access to a much wider potential range of language and literacy practices to engage with in print and online media. Becoming more literate, therefore, helps learners maintain and develop vocabulary, grammar, and other aspects of L2 knowledge as well as their connections with other Chinese users. Finally, because learners – heritage and non-heritage – often have very discrepant levels of oral versus written proficiency in Chinese when entering language programs, better efforts must be made to help accommodate such diverse profiles, needs, and interests. Rather than see such students as problems,

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instructors must find ways to validate their existing knowledge to help them maintain their motivation to develop in the areas in which they seek further growth, such as literacy. Developing age- and level-appropriate oral and written texts for such learners that are also consistent with their interests as readers is essential, and more attention should therefore be paid to this issue in the future. Moreover, whereas creative practices related to character mnemonics, stories, and etymology were helpful for some of the CAL learners, these were not typically part of instruction they had received. This observation signals another area for pedagogical and curricular intervention.

4 Sociocultural Approaches to Chinese Language Learning and Research: Negotiating Identities and Communities 4.1 Introduction: Exploring identity and community in socioculturally-oriented Chinese language learning research For this chapter, the research group undertook a thematic analysis of the narratives produced in English about their learning of Chinese, examining them both individually and in relation to each other, highlighting commonalities, differences, and other observations of their Chinese language learning experiences and achievements. To fully understand and appreciate the foundations and data for the analysis in this chapter, the reader is encouraged at this point to examine the narratives in Appendix A, which represent an abridged and updated (final) version of the series of narratives generated and analyzed by the research team. (The version of narrative, N1, N2, or N3 and page numbers are included in the following analysis and elsewhere in the book mainly for our own data-tracking purposes and “audit trail” (Duff 2008).) As reported in Chapter 1, these written narrative data were generated in English by the five learners at two different times – one year apart – providing accounts of how and why they had been learning Chinese, their reflections on those experiences, as well as their future desires with respect to Chinese language learning and use. Additional data were collected in Chinese for the linguistic and literacy analyses presented in Chapters 2 and 3, and other forms of self-assessment, especially the CEFR. The English narratives had originally been elicited by means of very general guide-questions that the group had decided upon in advance – although as Chapter 5 reveals, the actual narrative forms and strategies chosen varied quite considerably. Through a careful collective analysis of the data, salient themes related to current sociocultural theory and research in SLA emerged, which we review in the next section. Here we explain briefly how we arrived at those “salient themes” from examining the narratives. Following our review of the first narrative (N1, not shown in Appendix A but the essence of which is contained in N3, the final version), the group members individually and then as a group came up with 12 themes that had surfaced across the set – related to motivation, linguistic aspects of CAL, social and cultural aspects of the learning experiences, and

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other aspects of people’s identities as learners and users of Chinese. For this chapter, we focus on the two overarching and highly interrelated themes of identity and community that were dominant in narratives, with the factors of agency, positioning, and gender embedded within and across those two constructs. In what follows, we first describe how these themes have been theorized to date in SLA literature, and then how they relate to our study in particular. We also provide more details about how the narrative data was coded for these themes in the discussion of the themes and subthemes themselves.

4.1.1 Traditional and contemporary approaches to research: The sociocultural imperative in SLA Traditional SLA research, including research on Chinese as an additional language such as the work reviewed in Chapters 1 and 2, has been informed by (post)positivist epistemologies and methods. Much of that work has derived from cognitive and social psychology and functional linguistics. While that research has been both influential and illuminating, it has also been critiqued as an inadequate means of understanding and theorizing the language learner, the learning context, language learning processes, and language and literacy use in social situations. Lantolf (1996), for example, decried the “the positivist legacy that continues to pervade SLA research” (714), at a time when postmodern and sociocultural approaches to language acquisition and use were being introduced to SLA but were also hotly contested by the (then) SLA mainstream. He argued that language learning, from a positivist perspective, tends to be described in logical, generally quantitative terms which aim to represent essentialist truths, often involving the isolation of variables affecting SLA (or language learner traits, such as age, gender, ethnicity, L1, SLA motivation, and proficiency level), which are manipulated and studied by an ostensibly unbiased scientific method. One of the goals of that approach, consistent with the “scientific” methods it draws upon, is to not only describe but also make predictions or generalizations about learning based on universal laws or principles. A significant body of work in SLA research is still quite firmly rooted in (post)positivist inquiry, much of it very productive and important. To some extent, the quantitative and qualitative linguistic analyses we presented in Chapter 2 are a reflection of that traditional approach seeking developmental stages and the linguistic essence of CAL knowledge, plus differences in linguistic competence (performance), although we have tried to contextualize and individualize our descriptions and explanations to the extent possible. We

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certainly did not try to make predictions about future developmental trajectories, yet we suggested particular pathways that might involve having learners acquire and use particular morphemes (e.g., 到 dào and 来 lái, associated with direction or motion, or 过 guò and 了 le, aspectual markers), and then extend their uses to a much wider range of syntactic, discursive, and lexical contexts later. The HSK word lists and LCMC corpus analyzed for word frequencies also assume or imply a particular developmental pathway: from low-level words on HSK to higher ones, or on LCMC from the most common words (high in frequency in texts) to less common ones. Finally, the fluency analysis also has certain built-in assumptions: principally, that fluency is a central component – and index – of proficiency and that a faster rate of speech, with fewer pauses and English words and longer “runs” of uninterrupted L2 speech, correlates with overall proficiency in an L2 and is therefore reflected in cross-sectional and developmental data. Lantolf’s early critique, together with those from scholars whose SLA research was informed by communication and discourse analysis, the sociology of SLA, critical theory, (neo-) Vygotskian cultural-historical theory, and French poststructural theory (e.g., see debates in Firth and Wagner 1997, revisited in the Modern Language Journal ten years later in Lafford 2007), became an important signpost for subsequent new directions often described as “turns” in SLA studies and also often interpreted as “sociocultural” in nature (e.g., Block 2003; Norton 2000). The new “sociocultural” research, broadly construed, embraces more interpretive, critical, reflexive, narrative, and often poststructural approaches to epistemology and methodology (see Swain and Deters 2007; Swain, Kinnear and Steinman 2011).1 Researcher or learner/test-taker subjectivity in many of these newer traditions is not seen as a weakness in research but rather as an

1 The new “social turn” in SLA was not unique to, nor did it originate in, SLA research. In the 1990s, Trimbur (1994) observed a “social turn” in L1 literacy studies, referred to in the previous chapter in terms of new literacies and literacy as social practice. This observation has since come to be widely influential in both L1 and L2 contexts and came at a time when positivism and quantifiable approaches to language and literacy research reigned supreme. Trimbur identified a growing “post-process, post-cognitivist theory and pedagogy” (109) that was becoming evident in L1 composition and literacy research. This social turn recognized that factors other than cognitive ones played important roles in language learning and use. Other notable L1 literacy scholars quickly incorporated Trimbur’s classification and the social turn, as an explicitly defined concept, became widely influential across L1 literacy studies (e.g., Gee 1999), and then entered L2 literacy studies (e.g., as reflected in the then-newly established Journal of Second Language Writing).

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inevitable – and even valuable – part of interpretive inquiry and engagement with human research participants such as language learners/users. Personal engagement in the research process leads to important reflections and insights on the part of researchers (and sometimes participants) about their respective roles in research as well as their biases, stances, histories, and understandings of a phenomenon like SLA and in their role in “producing” data of particular types (and not just collecting it) as well as interpreting it, all of which typically evolve over the course of research. The field of SLA at the turn of the 21st century had begun to address aspects of language learning that positivism and investigations of individual cognitive or linguistic processes in SLA either could not account for or deemed to be largely irrelevant or overly subjective or ungeneralizable (e.g., Swain and Deters 2007). The importance of social and discourse contexts, for example, in all facets of language learning, assessment, and use, which was often minimized in earlier work, began to receive increased attention. Particularly important in the sociocultural approach has been the conceptualization of language learners as complex social beings with various kinds of agency, identities, aspirations, emotions, linguistic and cultural repertoires and forms of social/cultural and economic capital, and as members of particular social networks and communities (e.g., Norton 2000; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000). Language learning was understood to be influenced not only by those attributes but also by and through the learners’ interactions with their social world. Issues of power relations in opportunities to learn and use languages also entered SLA discourse. The contexts for language learning and use – not as a priori structures but also as fluid social and discursive constructions – and the coupling of social (and sometimes cultural) and cognitive accounts of learning came to the fore (e.g., Batstone 2010; Talmy and Richards 2011). Furthermore, the ecologies and interactions involved in language learning and use, and the dynamics and unpredictability of language learning processes and outcomes especially, have received widespread recent attention (see Atkinson 2011, for several such perspectives). This shift in orientation has provided important new ways of understanding the intersection of language, identity, and the communities learners inhabit or aim to negotiate access to and participation within, and have therefore been highly influential in our own analysis even though we did not set out to explore these themes explicitly at the outset. Some of these themes – agency, (textual) identity, and positioning, in terms of being (character-)literate or illiterate – were also relevant to our discussion of Chinese literacy(ies) in Chapter 3.

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4.1.2 Sociocultural theory and SLA Firth and Wagner (1997) addressed “a skewed perspective on discourse and communication” (285) in terms of the dominating presence that the role of cognition played in SLA. This perceived social-cognitive imbalance prompted Firth and Wagner, and a variety of scholars since, to critique ostensibly cognitively skewed approaches to L2 acquisition as perpetuating the idealized native (and non-native) speaker fallacy and inadequately recognizing the role of social factors in language acquisition and use. Lantolf (1994, 2000, 2006) and Lantolf and Thorne (2006) aligned the notion of the “social turn” more specifically with Vygotsky’s sociocultural (cultural historical) theory by arguing that a second language, just as a first, acts as a significant tool mediating human mental and social activity within a cultural and historical context. Interestingly, they also view the theory as psychological and cognitive, but give social and historical ontologies of learning primacy. Sociocultural theory has come to play a significant role in both language and literacy education theory and pedagogy more generally although SLA researchers often interpret or take up particular aspects of sociocultural theory differently, with some following the original work of Vygotsky very closely and others following neo-Vygotskian activity theory or community of practice theory (e.g., Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998) or social practice theory (e.g., Bourdieu 1977) to a greater extent. Added to the social/sociocultural turn in SLA has been the narrative turn in both conducting and reporting on research (see Chapter 5), which represents a tendency toward more interpretive and sometimes critical investigation of language development and use. This type of research shifts the focus from pure grammatical description and analysis with the desire to plot people on a known, predetermined, linguistic developmental trajectory. Instead, research becomes an exploration of the social, cultural, political, and personal meanings, contexts, and trajectories of SLA for a wide range of learners and the discursive practices used to represent them (in contrast to those used in Chapter 2, for example). These interpretive turns have had a clear impact on recent SLA scholarship (e.g., Atkinson 2011; Batstone 2010; Block 2007; Ellis 2008; Ortega 2009; Swain and Deters 2007; Swain et al. 2011). However, despite the increasing amount of research on English as an additional language informed by sociocultural perspectives, much less has been done in research on Chinese through this lens. Therefore, this chapter represents an attempt to address this gap by exploring a variety of non-linguistic factors involved in learning Chinese as an additional language. We begin by discussing the constructs of identity and community as they have been theorized and adopted in sociocultural SLA research (some of it on Chinese specifically), and

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then provide concrete examples of how the themes were articulated in the narrative data.

4.1.3 Identity 4.1.3.1 Identity(ies) as multiple, situated, fluid Identity has become something of a buzzword, even a cliché, in applied linguistics and many other fields over the past decade. However, its importance as a theoretical construct in both SLA and sociolinguistics (e.g., Block 2007; Duff 2012a; Norton 2000; Norton and McKinney 2011; Norton and Toohey 2011; Ricento 2005) and also as an emic category generated by people (including our group members) reflecting on their experiences learning and using other languages cannot be overstated. Norton (1997) defines identity as “how people understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future” (410). Norton Peirce (1995) also notes how identity is neither fixed nor uncontested, and is therefore “multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change” (9). In each of the CAL participants’ narrative accounts, and even in team members’ roles as annotators, discussants, and analysts in this project, as well as in their own longer-term CAL trajectories, identity emerged as a dominant theme in terms of both its salience and significance to the learners. It was central to people’s desires to learn Chinese, for persisting with Chinese over many years, and was also integrally involved in the tensions, struggles, and, in the best-case scenarios, in their feelings of great personal achievement and pleasure associated with Chinese. Before we progress, therefore, it is of value to consider how this concept of identity is used and understood in the context of the literature at large as well as in this chapter. An important principle conveyed above is that identity should not be conceived of as monolithic or static and cannot, as Duff (2012a) points out, be captured in simplistic terms either, although that is often inevitable in research reports. She writes that “People invariably have a variety of social roles, identities and characteristics, not all of which may be relevant or salient at the moment of description or easily captured in just one or two words” (410). It is therefore problematic to consider identity as a deconstructed or singular “thing” or fixed essence because as soon as identity has been defined for an individual (if it can be defined) it has likely evolved and has certainly not accounted for all aspects of a learner’s (i.e., person’s) larger sense of self and social roles in various communities of practice and other aspects of life. It is highly situated as well and

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co-constructed by social contexts, institutions, and interlocutors. In addition, acts of identity are performed in moment-by-moment ways and each new utterance or interaction may flag or index other aspects of identity, subjectivity, and competence (Kramsch 2009; Kramsch and Whiteside 2008).

4.1.3.2 Emic versus etic perspectives on identity It is also necessary to consider identity in terms of the source or analyst: who is discussing it and who is trying to conceptualize, understand, and label it? As Duff (2012a) notes, “How one is defined or described by oneself or by others, whether in research contexts or in life more generally, will of course always be partial, subjective, and situation-dependent” (410). The representational practices of researchers, just as our own practices in representing ourselves, invariably position research participants (or ourselves and others) in particular ways according to underlying perceptions, purposes, ideologies, and theoretical frameworks. If a researcher takes a more etic perspective as a removed observer of another, a person’s identity will likely be conceived of in different terms than that of the learner herself. There are valuable reasons for including both etic and emic perspectives on identity and its role in language learning. An outside observer is often better able to consider different complex variables that the learner may not be able to conceive of, particularly if the learner lacks the linguistic or (L1, L2) metalinguistic knowledge needed to contextualize his or her learning in a broader context. The learner may also not be aware of how his or her identity is being shaped by interlocutors, events, and texts. An emic perspective, on the other hand, provides an insider’s view of events and processes. This insider perspective can provide insight into deeper-seated issues or causes and reasons that shape a learner’s identity that might not be easily accessible to others as outsiders. Our study recognizes the benefits of both etic and emic approaches to understanding the role of identity in language learning. Of course, neither etic nor emic perspectives can be complete and in this study we are all “insiders” to different degrees in the research group. We share our personal perspectives but also attempt to objectify our experiences in order to facilitate various types of analysis (see Chapter 1). Thus, our accounts are observations, versions of reality or “truth,” constructed – even “crafted” – for particular purposes and shaped by different theoretical and social contexts and interactions and limited also by the specific data and experiences being examined and the readership of this book.

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4.1.3.3 Identity in heritage versus non-heritage learners of Chinese A great deal of research has been published on identity in SLA since the mid1990s in relation to the learning of European languages (e.g., Block 2007; Norton 1997, 2000; Menard-Warwick 2009) and an entire journal is now devoted to the topic (The Journal of Language, Identity, and Education). Although there has been very little discussion of identity in research on non-heritage learners of Chinese, a growing body of work looks at identity issues for heritage language learners and how that relates to their motivation to learn Chinese and how they feel about themselves as Chinese speakers and speakers of other languages (typically English) in a diaspora context (Duff 2008; Comanaru and Noels 2009; He 2006, 2010; Kelleher 2010; Li and Duff, 2008; see also Chapter 1, Section 1.9). We review some of that research briefly as a backdrop to our analysis of the experiences of the non-heritage CAL learners in this study to signal both similarities and differences across HL and non-HL learner groups in terms of identities, communities, and CAL trajectories. Chinese heritage language learners, unlike non-HL learners, generally have – or may once have had – considerable access to the target language and culture at home or in the local Chinese ethnolinguistic community, which may facilitate aspects of their tacit language and culture learning and socialization. The variety of language spoken in the home may not match the more standard variety taught in classrooms, however, and they may also have limited oral and written registers in Chinese (Li and Duff 2008). Chinese heritage learners’ desire to learn Chinese is often strongly related to their perceived relationship or identification with or affiliation to their ethnic backgrounds (i.e., integrative motivation), where learning Chinese is integral to their formation of a desired self-concept or identity (Comanaru and Noels 2009) and a connection with their past. Access to the heritage language in the home is often a major resource and factor supporting HL learners’ development, although one that over time may be contested, resisted, and rejected, rather than embraced, particularly with language shift to the dominant language of the wider community, such as English. Indeed, Shin (2009), in a Korean HL context, points to the identity conflict that heritage learners may face as they feel stuck or torn between two cultural and linguistic worlds, a common experience in immigrant and Generation 1.5 communities (see also He 2006, 2010 for Chinese HL learners). For many of Shin’s participants, part of this instability was rooted in the multicultural dynamics of their communities and home lives, where one parent was not able to speak the target HL and one was able, or another common scenario where both parents, even ones with HL proficiency, were reluctant to use a language other than English at home due to various social pressures to fit in with their communities.

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However, Kelleher (2010) notes that the broad label and identity of “heritage learner” may not adequately account for the (often) stark differences between the various dialects of Chinese (or how students identify with those) and further argues that Cantonese speakers learning Mandarin can encounter unique problems which can be demotivating compared with their Mandarin-speaking classmates. Agnes He (2006) similarly observes that despite the singularity that the label “heritage learner” may presuppose and the essentialism that may result in educational programs, for example, the target language/dialect, either spoken or written, may not have a notable presence at home and this can play a significant role in language – and identity – development as well. Li Wei and Zhu Hua (2012) argue that the recent focus on Mandarin in established diaspora communities, such as in Britain, is “othering” ethnic Chinese children, most of whom are Cantonese speakers. They are now positioned as “foreign” language learners, even though they have a much better (or at least different) understanding of the cultural contents of the teaching, thereby undermining aspects of their heritage and identities. Nevertheless, although heritage students cannot be uniformly categorized based on linguistic or sociocultural similarities, they have been shown to share similar features, in general, with respect to their histories, needs, desires, and even ambivalence as learners compared to non-heritage learners (Comanaru and Noels 2009; Duff 2008). Research investigating heritage learners’ Chinese learning has provided a rich contribution to our understanding of the differences between HL and non-HL learners of Chinese. It especially highlights the need for more investigation into the experiences and motivation of students who do not have the same sorts of cultural, historical, or ethnic/racial attachments to the language (initially) or as many potential opportunities to hear and use Chinese in their home communities as many HL learners enjoy.

4.1.4 Community The development, experience, and performance or enactment of self invariably occurs within a larger sociocultural and discursive context (Kramsch 2009; Lantolf 2000; Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000) or discourse community. In this study, as noted earlier, community emerged in tandem with identity as a theme of central importance to learners’ longer-term CAL trajectories, although in some narratives (e.g., Ella’s and Elliott’s) issues around community were considerably more evident and more explicit than in others. A commonality among some of the team members (Roma, Ella, and Elliott), discussed in greater detail below,

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was the lack of a fundamental sense of belonging to a Chinese-speaking community, whether in diaspora or in-country settings, despite having meaningful personal networks that might involve Chinese speakers. The irony of being simultaneously surrounded by target-language speakers (often during in-country sojourns) yet not finding that community accessible is familiar from studies of immigrant language learners (e.g., Duff, Wong and Early 2000; Norton 2000; Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller and Teutsch-Dwyer 2001) as well as in much studyabroad literature (e.g., Kinginger 2008). In our study, despite people’s weak identification with core target-language communities overseas in some cases, there has been a strong and persistent investment in the language over time regardless. Each of the CAL narratives describes a series of what Block (2007) calls “critical experiences,” those events that destabilize an individual’s sense of self and often lead to the creation of hybrid and third-space identities (cf. Kramsch 1993). These are also referred to as “critical incidents” in the literature (Brookfield 1990), or any “vividly remembered event which is unplanned and unanticipated” (84). Hornberger (2006) describes these sorts of reported milestones as “rich points,” particularly in qualitative research. Throughout the group’s time learning Chinese, these critical experiences or incidents helped shape their “language identities,” which Block (2007) defines as an “assumed and/or attributed relationship between one’s sense of self and a means of communication which might be known as a language, dialect or sociolect” (40). These language identities are inextricably tied to language learning and use, because, as Norton (1997) explains: “Every time language learners speak, they are not only exchanging information with their interlocutors; they are also constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they are and how they relate to the social world. They are, in other words, engaged in identity construction and negotiation” (410). This identity construction and, later, enactment or performance typically begins on the fringes of an actual target discourse community but often with an imagined or anticipated target community in mind. Communities have been theorized in various ways in sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education, with Community of Practice (CoP) being one of the currently most widely used constructs (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). For this study, after community was chosen as a theme for closer analysis, we considered the significance and direct relevance of CoP perspectives for understanding the experiences of the CAL learners and their narratives. Research on communities of practice explores the socialization of learners based on assumed similar and shared interests in a specific domain (e.g., activity setting) and the cultural and linguistic practices valued and inculcated within it. CoP researchers then examine how meanings and activities are co-constructed

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by participants and how oldtimers (experts) help guide newcomers (novices) so they can participate in increasingly proficient ways in important activities within a given culture. Normally a CoP represents a relatively stable, established group that meets regularly and works together toward the production of common goals. To that end, oldtimers are expected to help newcomers to become fuller, more capable participants and members of the community. But as Wenger (1998) explains, “in order to be on an inbound trajectory [to full membership and participation], newcomers must be granted enough legitimacy to be treated as potential members” (100). Wenger also emphasizes the nature of this participation, and its relationship with identity: “Participation here refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people, but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities” (4). In short, the premise of CoP is that as learners become legitimate members in various groups, they have better opportunities to practice and use the language because they feel like they belong. This feeling of belonging can have a profound impact on learners’ motivation to continue learning and using the language. Since in-group status positions the speaker (or member of the culture) as legitimate, he or she will have more confidence to use the language in a variety of situations. Group members in a CoP are at the same time all undergoing different forms of socialization, with the assistance of experts to novices but also vice versa through accommodation and negotiation of multiple types of practices, roles, and knowledge. This causes the inherent properties of the groups to be in constant flux (Lave and Wenger 1991; Duff 2007). This bidirectional enculturation or socialization between and among CoP members demonstrates that it is not only new members that have the responsibility to fit into prescribed linguistic or behavioural patterns, but older members may also encounter new customs or practices which have been introduced by new members (Morita 2004; Zamel 1997; Zamel and Spack 1998) or in which they themselves may lack expertise, and there may be accommodation and learning on both sides as a result. There may also be resistance to some practices or ambivalence, which also destabilizes norms and may lead to other outcomes and perhaps new cultural norms and forms of participation (Duff 2010, 2012b; Duff and Talmy 2011) In this chapter, community refers not only to a CoP in the classic, narrow sense, although certainly the research team itself was a dynamic and clearly defined, enduring CoP that was critical to the completion of this project and one that contributed to members’ ongoing Chinese language development and SLA knowledge in strong ways. But rather than depicting Chinese-speaking societies as one massive undifferentiated, essentialized Chinese-speaking CoP

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in which speakers sought membership, or Canadian home communities as another singular and generic CoP, we explore below the nature of both the Chinese-speaking communities and non-Chinese-speaking communities that were relevant to the CAL learners in terms of their experiences of learning and using Chinese and becoming legitimate members of their social worlds. Many of the core notions associated with CoP are thus still relevant to a broader discussion of participation in communities in which legitimacy, shared identities, and accommodation are found.

4.2 Thematic analysis of narratives: Procedures and priorities A number of themes were generated and analyzed individually by each team member and then collectively through regular group discussion meetings after going through the set of narratives. Later, each theme was assigned to a pair of analysts in the group who would independently search all the narratives for instances of the theme and quotations that might be used. From the longer list of themes that were discussed – ranging from motivation to identity, affect to Whiteness/race, and the stylistic features of the narratives themselves – we selected a set of five that were captured in many of our accounts and also related to current theorizing in applied linguistics regarding the social, linguistic, and personal experiences of additional-language learners and multilinguals (e.g., Block 2003, 2007; Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller, and Teutsch 2001; Pavlenko and Blackledge 2004). Those themes were: identity, community, agency, positioning, and gender. We later combined the themes into two clusters related to identity and community. Initially, the themes came from the narrative data itself; the guiding questions (see Chapter 5) did not address these themes explicitly (although gender was given as an example for one of the questions and identity was also referenced). Pavlenko (2007) warns that the production of “laundry lists” of themes in narrative research can be superficial, counter-productive and unhelpful, and we agree. The themes generated below resonated with all participants and, moreover, were highly interrelated (cf. Duff’s (2002) study examining identity, agency, difference, and community in the discourse produced by high schools students); in addition, all seemed to have a major impact on participants’ current CAL learning trajectories. Table 4.1 provides an overview of the themes examined in this chapter and some of the words, phrases, and concepts in the narratives associated with these themes. (In Chapter 5, Figure 5.7, we illustrate how we “workshopped” the themes.)

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Table 4.1: An Overview of Thematic Analysis from Narrative 1 (N1) Theme

Brief description (sample keywords, phrases)

Identity

Roles, transformation and negotiation of identity, self, persona

Community

Imagined community, friendships, participation, belonging, integration into target community and/or foreigner community, desire for community, culture, isolation, community of practice, discourse community

Agency

Power, personal investment, individual responsibility, (lack of) freedom, goaldirected behaviour, expenditure of resources/investment, sense of control, desire and perceived ability to attain goals through persistence, self-reliance

Positioning

Racial difference (visible minority), status as outsiders and/or native English speakers, as lǎowài (foreigners)

Gender

Gendered experiences (e.g., sexual harassment), romantic relationships, exposure to L2 and to L2 interaction/practice based on gender, observations of gender and CAL learning, gender stereotypes

4.2.1 CAL in relation to community engagements In the remainder of this chapter we discuss how learning Chinese shaped the communities and identities of the CAL participants in relation to agency, positioning, and gender. Each of these factors or constructs is examined with respect to three types of communities the learners participated in during their learning of Chinese: home communities (in Canada), target-language communities abroad, and groups of other foreigners (expatriates) within those target-language communities. This dialectic is illustrated in Figure 4.1. By home communities, we refer broadly to communities that participants belonged to before they began their study of Chinese. Often, but not necessarily, these communities are those of the participants’ family, home and peers, and the community to which participants returned, at least for a time, between their sojourns abroad. For our purposes, these are perhaps better construed as discourse communities than as highly structured individual local CoPs. Understanding participants’ relationships with individuals and societal discourses within their home communities is important because they often played a role in participants’ initial motivations for learning Chinese, and in many cases act as a point of reference against which participants tracked their personal growth and development of new identities. Although we refer to target language communities (TLCs) as a single category, the TLCs or Chinese social networks of each learner were very different and highly localized. The most obvious of these differences, at the macro-level,

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Figure 4.1: Overarching themes: Identity and community

are the contexts of Taiwan and PRC, which naturally have a long and shared history but have also evolved politically, economically, culturally, educationally, and even linguistically in quite distinct ways during the 20th century. In fact, even within the borders and geography of Mainland China, regional cultural and linguistic differences often have a profound impact on the experience of individual learners. The factor of historical context is also important, especially in Patsy’s case, as her primary experience of informal Chinese learning took place in the 1980s, before the others,’ in a social, political, cultural, and economic climate that was radically different than today’s (urban) China. In more recent years, for example, most major Chinese cities offer easy access to international telecommunications, the Internet, a wider range of international and national goods and services, and domestic flights, as well as a wider range and higher quality of resources for learning and using Chinese (digitally and otherwise). Further, each learner’s TLC (both macro and micro) has not remained constant throughout their journey of learning Chinese, shifting not only with location but also between modes of study, motivations, relationships, and employment. Naturally, the same phenomenon characterizes home communities as well, with mobility, maturation, employment, familial and other relationships, higher education, and new activities, priorities, and goals. Therefore, although we use the term target-language community to apply to all of these contexts in general, we attempt to contextualize each example and analyze it with relation to the specific TLC referred to. Finally, most of the participants clearly differentiated between the relationships they had with Chinese-speaking classmates, partners, coworkers, or friends,

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and those they had with other English-speaking expatriates while living abroad. Although this dichotomy may seem overly stark and polarized, participants often highlighted the different nature of the relationships with other foreigners, comparing them either positively or negatively with relationships with Taiwanese or Chinese friends. In many cases the learning of Chinese played an important role in shaping the identities that learners enacted during their interactions with other foreigners, just as it did with Chinese speakers in society.

4.2.2 Agency Agency refers to “people’s ability to make choices, take control, self-regulate, and thereby pursue their goals as individuals leading, potentially, to personal or social transformation” (Duff 2012a: 417). As Duff and others point out, agency is now being theorized in applied linguistics and related fields such as anthropology as very tightly connected with identity and power (Ahearn 1999, 2001; McKay and Wong 1996; Pavlenko 2007). Agency is an important factor in language learning that can profoundly impact how a person approaches learning and interacting in various target language communities. Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) note that agency never exists independently of the communities people are engaged in. In this sense, agency is a socially situated relationship with individuals and communities which is “constantly co-constructed and renegotiated” (148). The degree to which individuals can enact their own agency impacts their views of self, their positions in various communities, and, ultimately, their engagement with the language. Agency, therefore, is a doorway towards “selftranslation” (Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000: 170) or the power/ability learners have to shape their own language learning destinies. Those who have a strong agentive sense (and receptive interlocutors) will typically have better chances of success, although again it depends greatly on how that agency is negotiated in social situations and learners’ relative degrees of power based on their economic or educational attributes, for example, or personality, entitlement, gender, and social networks. The examples of agentive experiences in the CAL narratives exemplified below should not imply that the members of this study always had calm or even enjoyable connections with Chinese. The journey metaphor, a common one in language learning, was evident in some of our accounts and at times learning Chinese was discussed as “a series of unforeseen peaks and icy slopes” (Tim N1: 2) involving various failures and frustrations. As Morita (2004) asserts, “the co-construction of learner agency and positionality is not always a peaceful, collaborative process, but is often a struggle involving a web of power

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relations and competing agendas” (597). This sense of agency is more closely aligned with critical discourse perspectives and the notion that agency can be enacted by learners who encounter adversity and struggle (Canagarajah 1999; McKay and Wong 1996; Morita 2002), which might cause them to either rise above their circumstances through particular strategic acts to facilitate their success, or to disengage from learning and become passive or less motivated (Duff 2012a). Thus, learners’ agency does not necessarily lead to positive language learning outcomes. Agency has a growing presence in socioculturally oriented SLA theory precisely because of the socially situated nature of language use and the roles, affordances, and constraints that individuals have in asserting their identity and controlling their lives. Despite many struggles experienced by the participants in this study, the generally positive accounts expressing a desire to control their own learning demonstrate the important role that agency has in the language learning process. Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) underscore this importance in strong terms, noting, “ultimate attainment in second language learning relies on one’s agency” (169). In the following sections, we discuss multiple instances of how agency was invoked and enacted by learners across a variety of communities and how this impacted the language learning/use for the members of this study.

4.2.2.1 Agency, identities, and communities When coding the first narratives, we were individually and collectively intrigued by the superlatives used by writers as well as strong language related to agency, including words such as conquest, conquer, choose, control, and power (see Table 4.1). The concept of agency, in particular the ability to choose, control, and willingly undertake the study of a language in order to achieve particular goals, is most salient in the initial motivations of the learners, which are all strongly tied to the participants’ relationship with their home communities. None of the five CAL participants was in any way forced or compelled to learn Chinese, and thus their choice to study the language was a strongly agentive act in itself – often contrasted with other languages such as French (the most commonly studied L2 in Canada and a language most participants were required to study in school) and Ukrainian (Roma’s HL). This agency allowed learners to embark on the study of Chinese not only (or even) to gain economic or social mobility (although in some cases this was a happy byproduct), but purely out of interest and curiosity. In several cases group members reported being motivated, initially, by a strong desire to attain or fashion an identity of being or becoming unique, special, gifted, highly proficient speakers and writers of an exotic (for them, at

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the time) language. The uniqueness of this identity was based on a comparison with identities held by others in their home communities, and would not have existed were it not for the mystique associated with Chinese in these nonChinese Canadian contexts. None of the five had ever met anyone (highly) proficient in Chinese who had learned it as an additional language before undertaking their own study of Chinese and thus had no role models or rivals. This also opened up the possibility of being different from the mainstream of language learners in Canada and thus unique, special, rare, valuable. Whether contemporary new learners of Chinese around the world have the same almost starryeyed affective and agentive orientation to it deserves further research, given the tens of millions of people currently studying it, many to very advanced levels, and the number of highly proficient role models for them. Roma and Elliott were particularly motivated by this desire to be different. Elliott mused: “I was unaware of a single role model, or even acquaintance, for Chinese language learning. What great excitement in being such a rare species! . . . It seemed worth some sacrifice; it seemed unique, bold” (Elliott N1: 1). Elliott further expressed how integral being positioned as a “unique species” was to the value he attached to becoming a Chinese speaker (in the 2000’s). Of course, Canada, and indeed the world, is not lacking for fluent bilingual speakers of English and Mandarin. However, my family, my circle of acquaintances, and perhaps the media all seemed to be telling me that Anglo speakers [of Mandarin] were rare, and that this could command a high price on the market; it would certainly be advantageous in looking for competitive work in the future. (N1: 1)

Roma, likewise, recalled feeling intense pride in being viewed as different by learning Chinese, initially as a child in Singapore. As a foreign (i.e., “White”) learner of Chinese, there was, Roma felt, a special cachet attached to learning and speaking the language: “No one back home would ever even dream of studying Chinese, and that made me a hero. I used to fall asleep dreaming of the day I would be fluent in Mandarin, dropping jaws around the world” (N1: 2). This desire to be different is linked closely to agency because it is what led both learners to choose to study Chinese as opposed to (or in addition to) other languages. Although Elliott and Roma were in Chinese-speaking contexts for various time periods over the course of their lives, neither was forced to learn the language, and more importantly, both chose to continue their study after they had left these overseas TL communities. Certainly, part of the allure for some learners was the vision of foreignness, uniqueness, and mystique that China and Chinese conjured up. Tim, who grew up on the prairies, in Northern Saskatchewan, noted that his first exposure to

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Chinese culture in university, through an introduction to the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, was quite removed from his upbringing and the lack of exposure to Asian cultures and languages: In university I got my first taste of some cultural [Chinese] flavour and I was drawn to it immediately. I was introduced to the Tao and this started to pique my interest in China and its history. China was a whole different level of foreign for me: it had an exoticness that I was not used to. (N2: 3)

Similarly, Patsy recalled her early impressions of Chinese and how they contributed to her future interest in the language both as a learner and researcher. “I have wanted to learn Chinese from about the time I first noticed Chinese characters during elementary school and heard about Ancient China in Grade 5 (a picture of an ancient pagoda was enough to entrance me)” (N1: 1). Ella likewise expressed the impact that Chinese kung fu had on her, and the connection these early impressions had with her desire to learn Chinese: I imagined China the way I saw it in Hong Kong kung fu movies. I held in my mind’s eye a montage of stereotypical ideas that exoticised the East – silent footsteps; cat-like grace; small, strong bodies; mind over matter; tiny sips of tea. The Chinese seemed to me to be a people who could accomplish so much, but were sustained by so little. They even wore soft shoes to do all that kicking! There was no hard protective layer between attack and target, and I wanted to understand the trick of such power. (N2: 3)

These early impressions that were constructed of China and its history, idealized as they were, contributed significantly to their decisions to engage in the language from these (culturally, historically, philosophically) enriched positions. In other words, these were early agentive building blocks that formed the foundation for subsequent CAL learning and the desire to become legitimate speakers of Chinese despite many instances of adversity, challenge, and even ambivalence. As noted earlier, to be in a position to take agency, one must already possess (or imagine) a certain degree of confidence, power, and control over one’s circumstances and options in life. Further, being agentive and taking positive actions, strategies, and steps toward creating or sustaining language learning opportunities and engaging meaningfully with the language can also foster the conditions for future successes, leading cyclically to growing confidence and autonomy as learners, for example. Interestingly, the metaphors chosen to reflect individuals’ agency often related to war or battle or colonization – a very heightened, almost militant sense of agency. Because such metaphors naturally invoke a target community or culture or group of speakers of that

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language by extension, the discussion of agency here is in relation to learners’ target-language communities. The keen sense of agency expressed by most of the narrators in our study included the salient and highly charged words conquer or master, referred to in the previous section, or words reflecting the possession or ownership of the Chinese language, culture, or even Chinese regions. These vivid metaphors also invoke power, success (past and anticipated future success), high expectations, and privilege, as the following quotations reveal (emphasis added): I had conquered physics [my undergraduate degree], I was going to conquer Taiwan, why not also dabble in some infamously tricky new language? (Elliott N1: 1) Chinese language was just one of the many things I would have to master as I walked this path. (Ella N1: 1) I also had to convince people that I had done so [uttered Chinese words correctly] by first and definitively knowing that myself. (Ella N1: 7) I believed that if I became proficient in Chinese I would someday make China mine. (Roma N2: 9)

Roma also used the related metaphor of “the conquering hero” in her narrative, in two excerpts: I have a well-used collection of funny and disgusting stories that I tell as part of my act as the Conquering Hero returning from The Orient. (N2: 39) A large part of that dream [of mastering Chinese] was a grandiose image of myself as part of an elite group of foreigners who had conquered the complexities of Chinese . . . (N2: 10)

Importantly, this agency is expressed in relation to the very great challenge and complexity of learning – or mastering – Chinese; an undertaking that fed into the identity (real or imagined) of an elite, of necessarily high achievers, and of a very small minority of language learners worldwide (at that time) and particularly with reference to their home communities. Tim reported how he did not want to be viewed as an infant but wanted to be taken seriously as an adult sojourner in Taiwan. He acknowledged that with his growing knowledge of basic Chinese “I started to control my destiny a little more”. . . (N2: 5, emphasis added), again suggesting the importance of agency and self-reliance for him as well as for the others. He also remarked: “I did not want to be powerless, without a voice, where I was living. I wanted more than anything to be able to talk to people, and not rely on friends or translators (or wild hand gestures)” (N1: 5). With his positive efforts and strong sense of agency and responsibility for his own language learning, he conceded that learning Chinese was “an uphill battle and one I felt I was winning” (N1: 15, emphasis added). In some ways, these stances of agency, and thus of identity as learners

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and as high achievers as well, were also, as in Tim’s case, efforts not to fail, not to be infantilized, not to be viewed as powerless. They also seem to reflect the strong, independent, pioneering (even imperialist) outlook that is often attributed to Westerners in their own countries and in their forays into other parts of the world. Although some narratives had stronger or bolder expressions of agency than others, both female (Roma) and male writers (Elliott, Tim) used such battle metaphors. Participants were typically very goal-oriented and idealistic in their initial CAL efforts, again reflecting their agency, and they commonly expressed the “pride,” “thrill,” even “ecstasy” they felt when they met with successes (victories, triumphs), big and small: that is, when they had accomplished tasks effectively in Chinese, had been praised for their progress in Chinese, had clearly outperformed other learners of Chinese, or had been invited into the inner circle of local Chinese speakers. The pride and encouragement they felt further motivated and sustained their efforts and confidence to continue learning Chinese: I was praised by my colleagues at work for my accurate pronunciation . . . (Elliott N1: 4) . . . finally I yelled out “fúwùyuán” (waiter!) as loud as I could. A moment later a server came running out of the kitchen, heading straight for the table with the Chinese couple. They shook their heads and pointed at us. I was ecstatic, triumphant. (Roma N2: 31)

These instances of praise and encouragement by members of the target language community were key in sustaining motivation and agency for the members during Chinese speaking activities. Participants were not purely self-serving in their desire to learn and use Mandarin effectively. In fact, many expressed great satisfaction when their use of Chinese enabled them to act as agents for others’ successful experiences negotiating language, culture, travel arrangements, and so on, in Chinesespeaking regions with Chinese native speakers. Further, several participants explicitly discussed their desire to provide a good impression to their Chinese and Taiwanese interlocutors, specifically by showing Westerners living abroad as people who take an interest in the host culture, make an effort to learn the language, and are capable of accommodating to local customs. Sometimes this stance took the form of deliberately distancing oneself from expatriate communities that did not appear to reflect these values, as when Patsy chose to not spend much time with groups of other foreign teachers in China. Ironically, this seemed to reflect a sense of responsibility for the collective identity and reputation of “Westerner” or “expat,” and simultaneously distance oneself from other non-Chinese speaking foreigners. This idea will be developed in greater detail in Section 4.2.3.2.

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Thus, learning Mandarin enabled the participants to take purposeful actions on behalf of others and to serve as language or culture brokers for them and not just themselves. This in turn had an impact on their identities as capable and effective Chinese communicators and, indeed, enhanced their identities, especially when their growing expertise could be witnessed by their family members and friends. Patsy, for example, reported that six months into her first stay in China she was able to accompany her parents traveling, which “helped me use Mandarin not only for my objectives and comfort but for theirs too. It was fun” (N1: 14). Patsy wrote extensively of her relationship with a young local girl in Changsha, whom she discovered had been taken from her rural home to live with an uncle’s family very far away. She was abused, denied access to school, and despite being only nine years old she was charged with being the full time caregiver for an infant cousin. Ironically, given her own inability to read Chinese characters, Patsy spent many hours with her and began to teach her some basic literacy skills by purchasing primers and reading them with her. In effect, they learned together, Patsy reading the pīnyīn and the young girl learning the characters and teaching Patsy some oral Chinese (in a strongly accented local dialect). Eventually, with the help of some local Chinese friends, Patsy was able to help the girl return to her own family in another region and resume her education. Many others reported similar roles on behalf of visitors or even with strangers who required assistance involving Chinese, demonstrating that although self-development was a major motivating factor in learning Chinese, they were also eager to achieve other more concrete and immediate functional goals, including altruistic ones. Each member of the group discussed various accounts of relationships with other foreigners while living in either Taiwan or China, as alluded to earlier in terms of efforts to differentiate oneself from other expatriates. Since all spent significant time learning and using Chinese in these overseas contexts, there were a variety of instances where the narratives outlined these relationships with other expats living in either China or Taiwan and the impact this had on their lives in a more general sense and their Chinese learning more specifically. Patsy, Tim, and Elliott all began their time in China and Taiwan as English educators or teacher educators. For all three, working in an English environment involved considerable time interacting with a variety of expatriates from various backgrounds. As noted in Chapter 1, Patsy spent a year in Changsha in the south-central Hunan province of China in 1986–1987, where she taught graduate level applied linguistics/TESL courses at a local university. Patsy noted the challenges that existed to “break away from the English speaking expat group” (N1: 13) in order to improve Chinese speaking and learning opportunities. Elliott and Tim also worked as teachers during their initial times in Taiwan and, similar

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to Patsy, noted the desire to separate themselves from the “average” English teaching expat by embracing Chinese language study. Tim expressed the feeling of “standing out” in comparison to other English-speaking expats: “In a city (a country) filled with many non-Chinese speaking foreigners, many Taiwanese people I have talked to felt unease at this lack of commitment and, dare I say, lack of respect towards the country. I stood out, however inadequately, amongst a poor representation of ‘others’” (N1: 7). When he was praised (“applauded”) for not being like other indifferent expatriates in Taiwan who did not try to learn Chinese (or did not do it well), it “definitely helped sustain my motivation” (N1: 16). All three expressed the wish to differentiate themselves from other foreigners who, they felt, were not (as) concerned with learning Chinese or becoming part of their local communities, or at least not in the same ways. There was also a concern to be viewed as “conscientious sojourners,” foreigners who are sensitive to their privileged position and attempt to construct identities that reflect their desire to learn from or become part of their host community (Ilnyckyj 2010). In the context of foreigners in China or Taiwan, this identity – and sense of agency – is often built through an active attempt to learn Chinese in order to show respect, as Elliott aptly expressed in his narrative: As an English teacher, I felt I had inherited the yoke of certain prejudices stemming from what I perceived as a homogeneous society “opened” quickly to the West. As I was unable to communicate in Chinese, I felt very much outside of this local society, but I rallied against totally identifying with some imagined English-teaching foreigner society, and sticking with my studies may have helped me diverge from stereotypes about English teachers and find purpose outside of my work. . . Displaying some knowledge of Chinese was to me like saying, “here, see, I care about your culture too, I’m not just here to suck money out of your system and run!” (Elliott N2: 13)

The expat/foreigner communities that they participated in were not confined to other English teachers. Most had experience learning Chinese in formal contexts and had a vast array of relationships with other Chinese-speaking foreigners (language learners) who were fellow students at the universities or language schools where they studied. Ella noted that this relationship with other foreign students was at times helpful to her motivation, especially when her proficiency was measured against less successful peers: “I remember standing out among my classmates for having good pronunciation (even occasionally without wine), learning quickly, and communicating effectively outside of class” (N2: 11). Elliott also discussed the positive role that some of his classmates had in his desire to pursue Chinese at an advanced level: “We were friends in Chinese, respected and cared about each other in Chinese, and pushed each other to excel in Chinese” (N1: 12). Roma likewise reminisced about the casual bonding that occurred with fellow classmates regarding the day-to-day difficulty

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of learning the language and the frustrations at remembering apparently simple words: Later, I spoke to an Italian student who spoke gorgeous Chinese and was taking advanced language classes. She told me about how ridiculous she had felt earlier that day when she had been unable to ask for napkins at a restaurant. Coincidentally she said, “can you imagine that I know the word 颤抖 [to tremble] but I don’t know the word for napkin?” We speculated on what it might be: 餐厅纸 [lit: restaurant paper, napkins] maybe? Restaurant paper? We settled on that. (N2: 13)

Roma also noted some of the paradoxical frustrations, or demotivating experiences, of learning Chinese when being constantly compared to other students with more advanced proficiency. In an email to her mother, she wrote: In terms of language, I almost feel like the last four years were for nothing. I met this guy from Sierra Leone today who’s been here for a year. When he arrived, he spoke no Chinese, and now he’s better than I am. So on one hand it’s encouraging to think about how much I’ll improve in a year. But also I feel like I know nothing practical. (N2: 11)

These various instances of both motivating and demotivating experiences were formative in the maintenance and (re)creation of learner agency. Ella, Elliott, and Roma all discussed times when fellow students helped encourage and sustain their confidence and motivation. Other situations, like Roma’s example of feeling discouraged by another person’s (quicker) progression in Chinese, also provide insight into the impact different communities (at different times and in different situations) can have on language learning and use. Elliott’s attempt to make local friends by joining a soccer team (a local CoP) is a strong illustration of the difficulties of interacting within and negotiating memberships in multiple communities. He rejected the idea of joining a team composed of foreigners because they were too “snobby” and it involved the use of English (N1). He wound up joining a local team made up of heritage-language Chinese-speaking foreigners who had spent longer periods of their lives in Taiwan, and, he felt, “had a greater claim to a real life in Taiwan” (N1: 12). Their free usage of the Taiwanese language (Min Nan or Hokkien) as a common tongue mixed with Mandarin was a difficulty for Elliott and impacted his ability to bond with local communities, despite their heritage (“foreign”) status. He concluded that “try as I might, I never met a Taiwanese circle of friends I shared a sense of humour and camaraderie with; I always felt included out of a sense of obligation, or generosity. I was doomed to feel permanently on the outside of this culture” (N1: 13). This showed that even such a group, which he felt comfortable with in many ways, was lumped in with the “Taiwanese culture” he felt ultimately distanced from. The most notable local community Elliott mentioned were his classmates, other foreigners living in Taiwan who were studying

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Chinese. This community bonded over their study of Mandarin and life in Taiwan and built a community (another CoP) based on Chinese use and the importance of Chinese in their lives which, ironically, included no native Chinese speakers. There were clearly a variety of experiences that contributed to the sense of agency over one’s own CAL learning and evolving identities expressed by all members of this study. Living overseas, especially while teaching English, meant that there were many opportunities to engage with and have relationships with a variety of other foreigners (and local professionals, administrators, and students). For Patsy, Tim, and Elliott, their roles as English professionals introduced them to communities of expats and Chinese who primarily spoke English with one another and operated within English “bubbles” largely detached from local culture. A desire to differentiate themselves from non-Chinese speaking foreigners and English-speaking colleagues and students served as a great source of inspiration to study Chinese with increased rigour. Yet as language students in both formal and informal settings, all the members also discussed instances where relationships with other foreigners were comforting, beneficial, and contributive to their language learning identities and continued motivation to learn, as well as to their social life locally. Some aspects of this discussion of agency, identity, and different sorts of community engagements and difference recall earlier work by Schumann (1978, 1986) and others regarding the level of “social distance” (or conversely, contact) between learners and target language communities. Schumann theorized a relationship between SLA and social distance based on the sometimes minimal L2 gains demonstrated by expatriate residents in certain parts of the non-Englishspeaking world (e.g., the Middle East) as well as immigrant, non-instructed English language learners in the US. Indeed this pattern pointed to a negative correlation between SLA and social distance between community groups. Although in his Acculturation Model, Schumann claimed that learners’ SLA would only develop in relation to the degree that they became acculturated within the target language community, that strong position has been challenged (e.g., by Schmidt 1983) but looking at relationships between learners and their own and other ethnolinguistic communities is still highly relevant and important (for example, Kelly 2008).

4.2.3 Positioning By positioning, we refer to the construction, negotiation, and performance of social relationships, roles, and identities created dialogically through interactions in Chinese-speaking TLCs. Like many other aspects of social life, including

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language learning and use, positioning is also influenced by the perceptions and interpretations of people’s physical and behavioural traits. In general, the way in which language learners position themselves and are positioned by others is informed by several factors, such as (perceived) ethnicity/race, socioeconomic status, gender, age, and institutional requirements (e.g., as “resident aliens”). Here we focus mainly on race, in this case Whiteness, because of its salience in much of Asia, in which White foreigners stand out as visible minorities who often enjoy various privileges precisely on the basis of this difference. As Abdi (2009) explains, social constructionists have moved away from an understanding of identity as a fixed construct, and instead look to positioning as a way to understand how identities are constructed through interactions within particular contexts. Davies and Harré (1990) define positioning as “the discursive process whereby selves are located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in jointly produced story lines” (48). While they focus on how speakers are positioned within conversations, the concept of positioning can also be more widely applied in observing how individuals are positioned in any given interaction or “storyline.” However, we do not see coherence in subject positions as necessarily inevitable or in some cases even desirable. An analysis of positioning is particularly important for language learners who are attempting to be constructed as legitimate participants in storylines comprised of new linguistic and cultural elements. Davies and Harré (1990) differentiate between “interactive positioning,” which refers to how people are positioned by others, and “reflexive positioning,” whereby individuals position themselves. Naturally, the two are also interdependent – both types of positioning are directly related to the construction of identity, and reflect Buzzelli and Johnston’s (2002) distinction between identities that are “claimed” by individuals and those that are “ascribed” by others. It is important to note the difference between these types of positioning and their subsequent influence on identity creation because of how they also create, reproduce, contest, or reduce social distance between language learners and those they interact with.

4.2.3.1 Positioning and race Our approach to race is similar to our approach to gender (see below), namely that it is a socially-constructed rather than biological identity category, and that it is created through societal discourses, including everyday interactions (Kubota and Lin 2010). Racialized identities, both those that are claimed by learners and those that are ascribed by their interlocutors in the target language community, can have a strong impact on learners’ experiences. In some cases these identities

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can limit access to speaking opportunities or demotivate learners, while in other cases they can provide greater access, opportunities, and esteem. Various studies have investigated the importance of racial identity to SLA, including some that have focused specifically on the study abroad context. Talburt and Stewart (1999), through their examination of the experience of a female African American student on a study abroad trip to Spain, found that her experience differed greatly from both the male students and the White female students in her group. Her racialized treatment and harassment, a form of interactive positioning by local men, exerted a negative influence on her motivation to learn, and she subsequently stated that as a result of the racism she had experienced in Spain she had no intention of ever returning. On the other hand, in an example in which racialized treatment had a positive impact, Kumagai and Sato (2009) interviewed American students studying in Japan. White students reported using a technique they termed “gaijin smash,” in which they pretended to not understand Japanese speakers in certain cases when it would be beneficial to them. Their Asian American classmates, in contrast, were unable to employ such a strategy because their physical appearance led people to assume that they should be – and were – speakers of Japanese. In Siegal’s (1994) study of Western/White women learning Japanese in Japan, she recounts how one of the learners (a Hungarian) was given the honour of opening a new railway station in Japan, using her L2 Japanese for the official announcement as a kind of foreign ambassador, despite any other qualifications that would entitle her to such a role. In the specific context of China and Taiwan, social distance for foreigners is often experienced in relation to racial difference, as Whiteness in particular is often favoured over other racial identities. As Conceison (2004) explains, the marginalization that White foreigners in China experience is one of privilege, as this group often enjoys access to high-paying jobs, more attention, and sometimes even deferential treatment. She shares her own experience of being a White foreigner in China, observing that when she experienced special treatment, it was “as likely to be in the form of being pushed to the front of the line as to the back” (3). This notion is reflected in Roma’s account of a tree-planting ceremony, to which “Only foreign-looking foreigners were chosen to go. Asian foreigners stayed home” (N2: 20). The positioning of White foreigners in China is greatly informed by historical as well as current political, economic, and social factors stemming from China’s complex relationship with the West. However, given China’s increasing economic and political prominence in the world, this relationship, and therefore the positioning of foreigners in China, is likely to change dramatically in the coming years.

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4.2.3.2 Positioning, identities, and communities Because of the relative rarity of expatriates learning Chinese in China and Taiwan at the time they began their forays into the language and culture, some of the CAL learners in this study experienced feelings of uniqueness and intellectual prestige as they were positioned by others (and also positioned themselves) based on being, most notably, Anglo speakers of Chinese in both their target language and home community contexts. The processes of self- and otherpositioning were collaborative acts as members of the various communities and the learners themselves co-constructed the air of “uniqueness” and “prestige” which surrounded the CAL learners and made them feel special or intellectually distinct against the backdrop of other, less-engaged non-Chinese speaking, foreign expats in TLCs or friends, colleagues, or peers in their home communities. These feelings helped members to sustain their motivation to continue to develop their CAL proficiency and associated identities. For example, after returning to Canada from Taiwan, Elliott reported feeling a specialness and distance, a breaking away from norms, from fellow Canadians, because of his proficiency in Chinese: “I guiltily enjoyed the norm-defying, intellectual pride of pulling out a Chinese book on a busy Toronto subway” (N1: 9). Being a CAL learner/user, therefore, also had performative elements. He was gratified to be able to read at an advanced level in Chinese but perhaps even more gratified when others observed him doing so, thus showing the bidirectional positioning between self and other(s) regarding the creation and maintenance of a CAL identity. Similarly, Roma reported feeling special as a learner of Chinese, as it was more exotic and unique than learning Ukrainian as a heritage language or French as a subject at school. Ella noted that her development of Chinese shifted her relationship with her home community, which in turn had a positive impact on her psychological well-being. She reported feeling “rather invincible when speaking Chinese” (N2: 13), because her Chinese-speaking persona seemed so removed from her English-speaking one and from painful personal circumstances related to her family life in Canada: “Chinese gave me distance from the language of all my foundational and painful memories, and this distance was the safety net I needed to move towards them” (N2: 14). Thus, it was the position that she was able to occupy as a Chinese speaker – rather than the ability to speak Chinese itself – that allowed Ella to feel that she could build a more positive identity in relation to her community at home. Patsy highlighted the importance of a professional identity in her positionality in relation to her work in China and her experiences learning Chinese, coupled with her growing expertise in SLA as an academic field. These combined experiences in turn helped position her as a (somewhat) more seasoned

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applied linguist in North America when she returned to undertake her Ph.D. after living and working in China. Her directorship of a Chinese research centre in Canada (for the duration of this project) was also certainly connected to her early experiences in China, her ongoing attempts to learn Chinese, and her interest in Chinese applied linguistics, all of which have been secondary to her work in English applied linguistics. Although these academic appointments are essentially – and literally – “positions” or roles she has occupied in her professional life, they also reflect the ways in which she has, as a CAL learner, both positioned herself and been positioned by others over time based on her ongoing and ever-evolving identity as a Chinese speaker and her role in various Chinese communities, both at home and abroad. For Tim, becoming a Chinese speaker allowed access to a variety of previously inaccessible communities in Canada as a Chinese-language student and Chinese speaker and more recently as an aspiring applied linguist conducting research in Chinese L2 learning. Learning and using Chinese situated Tim in a minority class of Anglo Mandarin speakers and allowed for opportunities – both professional and personal – that would not have existed without becoming a Chinese speaker. Thus, each learner felt that learning and using Chinese impacted their subject positions in their home and target language communities, whether it made them unique and separated them from other non-CAL speaking foreigners, allowed them to gain distance from their past, or contributed to the development of a professional identity.

4.2.3.3 Positioning, lǎowài, and English Talmy (2008) describes how immigrant students in Hawaii, like many other transnationals, are often negatively typecast as “forever FOB” – Fresh Off the Boat (i.e., new arrivals), no matter how many years they have lived in the U.S. In much the same way, expatriate White learners of Chinese may be typecast as “forever lǎowài.” Dictionaries often translate the word lǎowài simply as “foreigner” (literally, ‘old [respected] foreign’), asserting that it has a neutral meaning, just as the word wàiguórén does, which literally translates as “foreign country person.” However, many foreigners themselves take offence to the word lǎowài, feeling that it is a derogatory term (Ilnyckyj 2010). Much of this sentiment is related to the attention that often accompanies the use of lǎowài in public life and thus it is the explicit othering that many foreigners object to, of which the word is a representation. While there is little scholarly work on the term, online blogs and discussion boards are rife with heated debate, often focusing on whether or not it is an expression of racism or a neutral term

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describing geographical origin (see McDonald (2011b) for further discussion of the history, usage, and cultural as well as political origins of these and comparable terms). While Ella and Roma both wrote of their negative feelings toward the term in their narratives, Ilnyckyj (2010), in her interviews with five other White learners of Chinese in Canada, found that none of them felt the term was particularly derogatory. Some participants reported feeling momentary annoyance at the use of the word, but none felt it was used with any malice, and was simply a matter-of-fact expression that pointed out their different racial appearance. In contrast to many of the CAL learners’ expectations in this study, learning Chinese did not necessarily result in a sense of belonging or attachment to the TL communities they were in – or in Schumann’s (1978) terms, decreased social and psychological distance from them. Most of her research participants felt that the acceptance of them by locals that should (or might) have resulted from their acquisition of Chinese was complicated and perhaps hampered by their obvious outsider status, which was indicated by their physical appearance (i.e., their race). Participants in this study shared many stories of discomfort and even anger at the explicit “othering” they felt as White foreigners. As Tim noted, “I quickly learned the words a tok a (“Caucasian foreigner” in Taiwanese)2 and mĕiguórén (“American,” the catch all term for all . . . white [people])” (N2: 26). Roma similarly stated that, “No matter what I achieved I was always only a lăowài” (N2: 18). Ella also reported, with some regret, that on the phone she could be taken seriously as a (near-native) Chinese speaker but if people saw her physical appearance, as a Caucasian, she would be perceived quite differently: “feeling so proud that I could be mistaken for a native speaker, convinced that my white skin was more of a hindrance than people would acknowledge” (N2: 18). We acknowledge fully that the awkwardness and annoyance experienced by otherwise privileged young White people in China pales in comparison with the more traumatic experiences of racial difference – typically with much more negative consequences for housing, employment, or other higher-stakes outcomes – particularly for non-White minority groups in Western cultures, such as ChineseCanadians in Canadian history and other minority group members fighting for their legitimacy and basic rights. Yet this form of labelling, positioning, and reference often arouses strong responses in sojourners abroad wishing to fit into their local communities.

2 /a tɔk a/ – Represented formally in Taiwanese as 阿啄仔 (literally meaning “sharp nose person”) and colloquially as 阿兜仔.

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Being a White foreigner in China and Taiwan is also often conflated by others with being an English-speaker whose identity and expertise related to English becomes coveted by others (a form of Anglo-White privilege), especially when in a minority situation (e.g., in China, Taiwan) where that knowledge is highly prized and many people want – and need – to learn English. Thus the identity of CAL learner becomes fused – or confused – with the identity of English speaker or English teacher, leading to tensions and power struggles over the right to practice Chinese rather than to help others practice English. Moreover, the research participants, for various reasons, often questioned their own legitimacy or validity as speakers of Chinese and worried that they might be discovered to be “imposters” – not as advanced as they wanted to be (Elliott) or not Chinese enough. In fact, the lament that “I would never be Chinese” (Ella N1: 33) shared by Roma and Ella implies that they initially felt learning Chinese would somehow allow them to “be Chinese,” a desire that they re-examined in their narratives in light of their realizations that it is both impossible (in terms of race and ethnicity) and may, in fact, be undesirable after all, when trying at the same time to retain a strong sense of one’s own cultural roots and even the value of a more hybrid cultural and linguistic identity rather than something more monolithic. McDonald’s (2011a, 2011b) discussion of the tensions and desires inherent in becoming sinophone are relevant here. These same strong longings and illusions of being “ultra-special” and highly successful in Chinese (for some) also led to frustration and impatience when the learning process and acculturation or socialization did not proceed as quickly or as seamlessly as hoped. To become differentiated from the masses of language learners and to fulfill personal dreams of bilingualism and romantic ideals of unique people cultured in (mysterious) Chinese traditions had two associated consequences: (1) if learners did not attain such high goals in Chinese proficiency, or not within their own expected time-frames, they became deeply disappointed and frustrated; and (2) being “different” in the context of CAL also means being part of a minority group both at home (as a sinophile/ sinophone) and in Chinese-dominant societies (as an Anglo White speaker of Chinese). Thus, positioning as a lăowài (or identification as English language “experts”), which can have many positive rewards (personal, social, economic), brings to the fore one’s status, or identity, as an outsider, an Anglo learner, and a temporary, White sojourner. Although the learners enjoyed being different from their home communities, at times they resented their perpetually reinvoked difference(s) from the TL communities. Many of the participants referred to a negative characterization of foreigners in China as a diverse group of people deliberately taking advantage of their unique positions, particularly (for many of them) their knowledge of English.

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However, while they reported feeling that they were resented by some members of the target language communities (sometimes related to the privilege they enjoyed as paid employees or teachers, often with reduced social responsibilities), none of the narratives actually presented concrete evidence (examples) of anyone expressing these negative feelings. Rather, it appears as though the participants themselves ascribed this identity to other foreigners (i.e., positioning them in this manner), and then worked hard to ensure that they did not reflect these same characteristics. The learning of Chinese became one important tool in achieving this goal. As discussed earlier, this deliberate self-positioning was a highly agentive act and reflects the learners’ sense of control over their identities and thus their interaction with members of the target language communities. Roma and Tim both noted that they were conscious of their roles as “linguistic imperialists” because of their use of English and, more so for Tim, his work as an English teacher. Tim writes, I had questions about teaching English overseas and wondered if it was, essentially, an imperial act. I justified my decision to live in Taiwan, rightly or wrongly, in several ways: I vowed to give as much as I took linguistically, and I tried as much as I could to be respectful of the space I was living in, both physically and otherwise. (N1: 2)

Roma was more assertive in her antipathy towards falling into the stereotypical role of English teacher and firmly situated herself as a student of Chinese instead of an English teacher: Nothing irked me more than people, upon hearing that I was going to China, asking if I was teaching. It seems much more unsettling to tell people that I was going to study, not to teach. I thought it was a reflection of the general Western public’s inability to imagine a white person travelling to Asia for any reason other than to spread the word of English. (Roma N1: 10)

For Tim, Roma, and Elliott, learning Chinese became a tool to resist negative stereotypes of foreigners. In other words, they emphasized Chinese learner as an aspect of their identities that either superseded (in Roma’s case), or neutralized (in the cases of Tim and Elliott), other potentially problematic identities. The study of Chinese was actively used by participants to contribute to the development of their identities as foreigners who were conscious of their privileged position in the TL communities. These identities were illustrated in the narratives by way of contrast with other foreigners who were disrespectful of or indifferent to the TL culture. Again, as with other contexts, these identities were created by the participants but none of them shared specific examples of any other foreigners or members of the TL communities acknowledging this respectful behaviour. Some told of being praised for their Chinese skills, but whether

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this was an implicit expression of respect for effort or simply an expression of surprise or curiosity is unclear. Therefore, it appears that the reflexive positioning practiced by the learners had a greater impact on their perception of their identities than any interactional positioning did. This suggests a sensitivity to the privileged positions they held, as well as a desire to reject that privilege.

4.2.4 Gender With the social turn in the study of SLA described earlier this chapter, approaches to considerations of gender also changed to adopt a more postmodern and poststructural perspective, much as they have in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and women’s studies (e.g., Kyratzis and Cook-Gumperz 2008). Pavlenko (2001) states that this approach “views gendered subject positions as socially constructed whereby gender is inscribed on the body through socially, culturally, and historically shaped discourses of gender” (218). Thus, gender is not considered a fixed biological category, but rather a product of social discourses and linguistic interactions that shift depending on context. Although it was tempting to include our discussion of gender in the previous section on positioning, the discussion of gender was varied enough to warrant separate treatment. As Pavlenko and Piller (2008) observe, many contemporary studies of the relationship between gender and language learning suggest that it is not the essential nature of femininity or masculinity that shapes language learning trajectories of particular individuals, but rather the nature of gendered social and economic relations, as well as culture-specific ideologies of language and gender that mediate these relations and assign particular symbolic values to linguistic forms and discursive practices. (61)

Thus, these scholars warn against studies of language learning which make assumptions such as that males are always dominant in a classroom or that females are always better language learners, but recommend focussing instead on the social context that may “gender” particular learners in particular ways (see also Gordon 2008; Kyratzis and Cook-Gumperz 2008). Pavlenko (2001) also points out that gender does not operate in isolation, but is one of many social categories that can comprise an individual’s identity and is performed in various ways in interactions with others, to different effect. Norton’s (2000) study of immigrant women in Canada demonstrates the importance of the socioeconomic status of each woman, their other responsibilities (e.g., in the home), and the ways they were positioned by interlocutors in the workplace and other settings

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in understanding their language learning. Here we do not explicitly discuss the participants’ socioeconomic conditions for CAL, apart from the opportunities for study, travel, and employment that were connected with their language learning, because although these differences certainly existed and did impact participants’ choices they were not comprehensively addressed in the narratives. Instead, we focus on gender and its relationship to opportunities to learn and use Chinese and to become more ingrained and legitimate members of local Chinese-speaking communities. Tasker (2012) describes gendered constraints on several of the mature, female, Australian, longtime learners of Chinese, including their domestic and parental duties and the need to accommodate spouses’ decisions regarding the men’s work and travel, that did not appear to be factors in the (younger) male learners’ opportunities for continued Chinese study and use. However, unlike younger women in study-abroad contexts (such as Roma in this study), she also noted that the middle-aged or older women in her study who were able to bring their families with them to China to Chinese university communities while they pursued their language learning objectives had “rich access to domains of language use and personal connections with [Chinesespeaking] individuals and community networks. They would look back on those sojourns as challenging and empowering experiences for identity development and personal growth as well as linguistic and cultural understanding” (251). This suggests that age and stage of life as well as the kind of residential community one is part of, together with gender, are important and related factors. Ehrlich (1997) suggests that the role of gender in language learning should be investigated with respect to specific communities of practice and that individuals do not have gender, but rather do or perform gender, a widely held perspective now in sociocultural research. For example, Siegal (1994, 1996) shows how certain Western women studying Japanese in Japan chose to not use grammatically correct forms of address that they felt were signifiers of submission or deference, despite this being the expected behaviour in their particular CoP. In this way, choosing to (not) perform gendered identities in a certain way was a means of resisting what they considered to be sexist and unacceptable modes of behaviour. Important also is the consideration of how gender can systemically affect individuals’ access to language learning opportunities. In the ESL context, Norton (2000) showed how certain factors can block immigrant woman from accessing educational opportunities. These factors may come from the woman’s home, such as cultural traditions that require her to stay home and take care of children, or they may come from the target society, such as difficulties in public transportation or paying for classes. On the other hand, in certain cases women in these

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situations may have more access than their partners to language learning opportunities (or at least more potential social interaction) as they are more likely to communicate with their children’s teachers, school staff, and doctors. In the study abroad context, Ehrlich (1997) points to the role of gender and sexual harassment in shaping the experiences of women in language exchanges, such as the American student in Spain described earlier. Polanyi’s (1995) study of American students in Russia shows that while the male students in the group had highly positive experiences and enjoyed interacting with Russian women in social settings, many of the female students reported being harassed and feeling very uncomfortable with Russian men. Not only were their opportunities to converse with native speakers thus highly constrained, but the social and linguistic dexterity they did acquire in learning how to rebuff the advances of these men was in no way assessed, and so it appeared that they did not progress as much as the male students had.

4.2.4.1 Gender and communities Although many studies have observed that females are more likely to undertake the study of foreign languages in general (Pavlenko and Piller 2008), none of the participants in this study addressed the factor of gender in relation to their initial motivations to study Chinese. Neither Ella nor Roma, who both took a university-level Chinese classes (a major for Ella and a minor for Roma) in Canada, made any note of the gendered makeup of their classes or of their construction as language learners or users in relation to gender, focusing instead on other factors such as teaching methodology and the inclusion of heritage learners in their beginner classes. On the other hand, the initial impetus for Ella’s desire to learn Chinese was her commitment to learning kung fu, which is often portrayed as a martial art practiced by males. Similarly, neither Tim nor Elliott observed that they felt unique as males studying Chinese, highlighting instead the relatively small numbers of foreigners – regardless of gender – undertaking Chinese study at the time. The absence of discussions of gender in the early portions of the narratives is significant because it highlights how important considerations of gender became for certain participants once they had entered Chinese-speaking TL communities. The emphasis that Ella and Roma placed on explorations of gendered interactions in China (reported below) in contrast to comparable interactions in Canada reflects a major difference in how they perceived their gendered identities in these two contexts. Although this does not mean that their experiences at home were not gendered and performed in various ways, in relation to learning Chinese, gender seems to have become a salient factor primarily

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in the TL communities. No doubt, such experiences were also compounded by the cultural prescriptions and norms related to gender in society in Chinesespeaking Asia. Perhaps not surprisingly, the manner in which their experiences were gendered was different for the (two) male and (three) female participants, and appears to have been related to language learning interactions and outcomes as well as general feelings of comfort and well-being within the TL communities. Both Tim and Elliott reported having many opportunities to interact with Taiwanese females in Chinese. They both felt that it was easier to meet females than males in the TL communities, as most of their co-workers, teachers, and language partners were female. In general, these opportunities benefited their learning and had a positive impact on their identities as speakers of Chinese and legitimate, valued members of the TL communities. For example, Elliott described family dinners with a female Taiwanese friend and the role this had in legitimizing his place as a Chinese speaker: During our dinners at home I was nervous, quiet, but able to express myself and listen without feeling judged; during our dinners out they made me feel as though part of the family, as if it were a regular meal, not an unusual event with a foreigner, and this helped me feel in some small way a part of Taiwanese society, a valid speaker, a real person. (Elliott N1: 12–13)

Although they formed many relationships with females, Tim and Elliott both noted that neither was ever able to make a good male (Taiwanese) friend while in Taiwan, despite the various years they each lived there. They explained that because the majority of their Taiwanese coworkers were female, and much of their social networking began in the workplace, they had little opportunity to meet potential male friends. Tim noted that: “I can’t say that I tried or didn’t try to make Taiwanese male friends, but that’s just the way it worked out. My social situations were largely embedded in the expat community or were superficial (parties or clubs)” (N2: 8). Elliott similarly expressed the difficulty in finding non-female friends or conversation partners, and discussed accounting for the gender disparity: . . . by noting that every one of our [Elliott’s and his roommates’] fellow English teachers (work being our only natural interaction with Taiwanese our age) was female, that women interested in improving their English seemed less pushy than men (who came off as aggressive . . . and less culturally or socially sensitive), and that as young men who were conspicuously foreign (and whose language and cultural background had social cachet) we attracted bolder interest from women than men. (N2: 16)

This “bolder interest” from women suggests the possibility of romance, and Elliott does note that one language partner did eventually express feelings for

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him. However, he insists that “aside from my male identity, I believe that an interest in building a lasting relationship with a foreign, English-speaking peer played a role in all of these cases” (6), meaning that in his opinion the women he met were at least in part motivated to form relationships by the potential of language practice and cultural exposure. Tim and Elliott’s self-organized language exchange partners were almost exclusively female. Tim stated “There was a time when a friend’s wife, who was studying Chinese linguistics at a local university, posted an ad on the school’s message board looking for a language exchange partner for me. All the respondents were women and none men” (N2: 8). In contrast to the male participants, Ella and Roma did not become close friends with members of the opposite sex while in China. Ella (N1) stated that “As for local [Chinese] men, they did not approach me romantically and I never met any I was interested enough in to initiate connection” (14). While this statement refers to romantic relationships, it also reflects a different reality than Ella had anticipated and sought in her initial motivation to learn Chinese, in which she portrayed herself and her quest for martial arts mastery in very gendered, patriarchal, and paternalistic terms (but in a different “romantic” sense): “Against all the odds I embodied as a young, white, inexperienced girl, I would prove myself and be taken under the wing of a kindly old man who would come to regard me as both his daughter and his best student” (Ella N1: 1). Roma attempted to form a relationship with a Chinese male, called JL, a bartender at a local pub. She recounted the night she met him and the initial feelings this potential relationship evoked: “He spoke no English, but with our Chinese, some paper, and some actions, we managed to piece together a fantastic conversation about China, politics, our lives, and our dreams. It felt so good to talk to someone young and cool and not looking to use us for our English” (N2: 21). This feeling of not being used for her knowledge of English led her to feel more comfortable with the burgeoning friendship, but eventually, due to his aggressive pursuit of a romantic relationship, Roma actively avoided developing the friendship further. She did note, with regret, the consequent loss of (potential) benefits of having a valid speaking partner through which to gain access to another Chinese speaking community. This perspective also reflects the apparent hypocrisy of resenting people for wanting to speak English with her, and yet lamenting the failure of a friendship formed with the purpose of improving her Chinese. Distance from Chinese men did not always result in closeness with Chinese women, and Roma and Ella both highlighted differences and incompatibilities in same-gender interactions. Roma quoted an email message to a friend in which she struggled with her feelings towards Chinese women, emphasizing what she perceives to be their “sheltered and naive” nature as a reason she

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cannot connect with them socially. Similarly, Ella recalled “repeatedly feeling the need to compete with (predominantly the women of) that very culture for social success” (N1: 14) in dating, and cited examples of being “replaced” by local women or “stood up” by a man only to see him out with another woman the same night. This perception that Chinese women were somehow fundamentally different from themselves, of which neither Roma nor Ella provide clear examples although they both mentioned it, had a detrimental effect on their feelings of belonging to Chinese society because it impeded their ability to establish satisfactory social networks and friendships with local Chinese people the way they might expect to elsewhere. Further, rather than allowing them to build identities as legitimate speakers of Chinese, their attitude towards Chinese females resulted in the development of identities as foreigners who were highly critical of the TL community. For both Tim and Elliott, the friendships they made with mostly Taiwanese women had a generally positive impact on their identities as Chinese speakers, as this allowed access to new communities, genuine speaking practice, and valued friendships. While both noted that they did not develop lasting relationships with Taiwanese males while in Taiwan, this did not appear to have a negative impact on their learning or on their identities as CAL learners. Roma’s and Ella’s relationships were also gendered, although in their case they did not make strong connections with either males or females in China, largely due to feelings of disconnection and lack of common experiences and interests. Both noted with regret the loss of potential language exchange due to this lack of relationship building in the TL communities. Notably, Patsy did not emphasize gender as an important factor in her earlier relationship building, focusing instead on her position as a teacher and the relationships she forged with her students, both male and female. While none of the narratives focused extensively on relationships with other foreigners in Chinese-speaking regions, the stories that did so often took on gendered and sexualized themes. Both Ella and Roma shared accounts of feeling uncomfortable or unsafe in interactions with certain foreign males. In fact, Ella claims that one of the reasons she left China was because of the difficulty of building a close romantic relationship in China, with either foreign or Chinese men. She stated that “The foreign men living there were in huge demand and most would cycle through women quickly and with much overlap. More than once I watched the man I was dating head drunkenly home accompanied by a local bar girl” (N1: 13). Roma mentioned feeling uncomfortable with the male acquaintances she lived with in the foreign students’ dormitory, citing instances of sexual harassment. Roma also detailed a disturbing account of

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being assaulted in a nightclub by a local staff member “dressed in a tuxedo and a mask” (N2: 14) after being dragged on stage in front of a large crowd. In contrast, Roma’s relationship with an American man gave her a sense of security and peace, which she referred to as “my western oasis” (N2: 24). She also recognized that spending time in this oasis, however beneficial for her mental health, removed her from her target language community and had a significant impact on her stalled learning. Thus, relationships with other Englishspeaking (foreign) men, even those in China to study Chinese, did not have Chinese language practice as a central goal. For Roma in particular, the difficulty of building close relationships with Chinese women drew her closer to other foreign females, bonding with them over negotiating life in China. Without these sister-like friendships, noted Roma, she would have left China early. However, as with the American boyfriend, these non-Chinese friendships further isolated her from the target language because they were conducted primarily in English with little regard to Chinese language study or use. In terms of their impact on CAL identities, relationships with other foreigners that were initiated or maintained based on considerations of gender often had a negative impact in that they removed the learners from Chinese-speaking communities and opportunities. However, the importance of these relationships in the mental and social well-being of participants cannot be discounted, and their positive effects should be taken into consideration.

4.3 Summary In this chapter, we have demonstrated how the factors of agency, positioning, and gender influenced the identity construction and enactment and community membership and negotiation of the five learners. Our attempt to disentangle or tease apart the themes of identity and community and then examine agency, positioning, and gender in turn reveals the many areas in which these constructs intersect, not only in the narratives but also in terms of current sociocultural theory and research. Although each participant placed varying degrees of emphasis on each of these aspects of their CAL experience, it is clear that their acquisition and use of Chinese has deeply influenced their identities and their engagements, roles, and status within a variety of communities, whether mediated by Chinese, English, or other languages. Initially, the learners undertook Chinese language learning in order to achieve some level of distance from peers or relatives in their home communities, and as a result of their knowledge they are all continuing to build identities

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strongly influenced by Chinese, both professionally and personally. While interacting within their TL communities, the learners felt some degree of ambivalence about their identities as White, Chinese-speaking foreigners, and some were surprised to find that their learning of CAL did not result in greater acceptance by local members of these communities. However, in relation to other foreigners within the same TL communities, the learners found that their knowledge of Chinese allowed them to create identities that countered the stereotypes of “ignorant” or culturally and linguistically less-engaged foreigners, and thus were unexpectedly able to find membership in a community of culturally sensitive sojourners.

5 Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives on Learning, Researching, and Theorizing Chinese as an Additional Language 5.1 Introduction: Narrative inquiry in second language research Narrative research has played an important role in education, the humanities, social sciences, and other fields for decades (e.g., Chase 2005; Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Creswell 2008; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Polkinghorne 1988; Riessman 1993; Schwand 2008; Schaafsma and Vinz 2011; Toolan 2001). Entire journals, such as Narrative, Narrative Inquiry, and Journal of Narrative Theory, are now devoted to aspects of narrative research and inquiry. Although there are many kinds of narratives, big and small, they generally contain some kind of chronological or temporal storyline, although the story itself may not unfold in a strictly linear time sequence. And, while perhaps most often based on past events, narratives can also take place in the present and may capture future and possibly imagined events as well. Regardless, the importance of storytelling or recounting significant temporal events in eliciting or reporting lived experiences is not only central to various kinds of research but is presumably a universal mode of communication across cultures. Narrative is often the means (in terms of method of data collection), subject, and outcome of research. Although narrative research is typically qualitative, it can involve quantification – as we demonstrate in this chapter – in order to ascertain trends and patterns in data. Narrative research may examine fictional accounts of events in oral or written compositions by students, for example, but in applied linguistics more typically it explores representations of the lived experiences of language learners, teachers, writers, and speakers (as retold), as in Benson and Nunan’s (2005) edited collection of (auto)biographical narratives, Learners’ Stories, of the experiences of second language learners. This representational or realist approach is also taken in the present study. However, even nonfiction narratives are constructions (or recollections and partial reconstructions of the past), accounts of events that are elicited and produced by individuals for particular purposes within a real or imagined social context of listeners or readers and therefore crafted accordingly. Thus, they involve considerable “identity work” as well, as narrators attempt to portray themselves and their lives in certain ways, all the more so when the narrators have agreed to be named publicly in the narratives, as in this study.

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Narrative inquiry has been especially fruitful in applied linguistics and discourse-based studies in developing theoretical insights concerning the teaching, learning, and use of languages and literacies (e.g., Bailey and Nunan 1996; Belcher and Connor 2001; Bell 1997a, 1997b; Benson 2005; Brockmeier and Carbaugh 2001; Bruner 1987, 1990; Casanave and Schecter 1997; Chafe 1980; Cortazzi 1993; Johnson and Golombek 2002; Menard-Warwick 2004; Ochs and Capps 2001; Pavlenko 2002; Swain et al. 2011; Todeva and Cenoz 2009). One of many approaches to narrative research, narrative inquiry has become more common and more widely accepted in applied linguistics and thus more visible in journal and book publications in the past decade (Barkhuizen 2011; Benson and Nunan 2005; Kalaja, Menezes, and Barcelos 2008; Nunan and Choi 2010; Pavlenko 2007, 2008). It places importance on reflexivity, (multiple) voicing, literary style (in narratives themselves), and the situated nature of knowledge (Gergen and Gergen 2000). In collaborative narrative participant-research of the sort undertaken in this study, relational processes are also paramount, since researchers/narrators write both for themselves and for one another, and then respond to each other’s work to achieve different objectives, not least of which is a community aspect. In the present study, the process entailed reconstructing and representing ourselves and our experiences in relation to Chinese. Narrative research and narrative inquiry are both broad cover terms that can result in quite distinct kinds of research and reports. For example, narrative research can examine the structure of narratives (e.g., in terms of story grammar) in a variety of ways but might not involve a narrative report (or “story”) of the research process itself. Narrative inquiry, on the other hand, often involves storytelling, vignettes, diary studies, memoirs, journaling, and (auto)biographical and life-history writing to generate insights about the complexity of language learning and people’s socio-affective experiences (Richardson 2001). Full-length narratives in SLA generally document the experiences of immigrant language learners, rather than shorter-term sojourners on work or study visas (but long-term language learners nevertheless, as in this study). The resulting written research “report” might also take the form of a narrative – a story about the research process and insights that emerged. Alternatively, the research may be reported in other ways, involving more visual, non-print-based representation and even dramatic performance (e.g., Goldstein 2003). There are many other combinations of narrative as object of study, as genre of reporting, and as a means of understanding teaching and learning. This study combines all aspects as we examine the written narratives produced by each CAL learner, on two occasions, the narrative genres and styles used, the role and use of metaphor, voice, critical incidents, Chinese, and other figurative and

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analytic uses of language. Furthermore, we examine the metanarrative comments generated by others and grafted or laminated onto the original narratives, creating a new multivocal, multi-authored, highly textured, and collaborative narrative for each writer. In what follows, we report on the narratives themselves (see abridged final versions in Appendix A), the themes that emerged in them, and then the annotation process and what might be construed as the resulting “supernarratives.” We combine a narrative of our inquiry process as well as a more expository presentation of findings. In narrative SLA research, it has been uncommon to combine or compare linguistic, sociocultural, and (meta)narrative dimensions of research, and even a cross-case analysis of narratives has sometimes been lacking. Yet the triangulation permitted by the use of these multiple methods for understanding language learners’ development and trajectories offers multiple lenses through which the learners’ experiences can be viewed and interpreted. Theorizing is then based on a highly inductive process that offers a form of validation resulting from the inclusion of multiple cases (observations) and cross-case analysis, multiple analysts, coders, epistemologies, methods, critical collective investigation of the constructs used in the study (e.g., identity, community, agency), and certain types of negotiation and consensus-building when co-authoring the written reports. In some respects our own project also embodies aspects of auto-ethnography. Personal narrative, reflexivity, attempts to achieve membership status in a culture or sub-culture, and a sharing of our own involvement in the research as participant-researchers, as selves and others, are features that align closely with auto-ethnographic research, although much of the ethnographic aspect in our research was retrospective, not field notes “in the present” (Ellis and Bochner 2000). However, because we also take a more conventional approach to data analysis in some places (e.g., Chapter 2 and parts of this chapter), the (meta)narrative aspect of this study goes well beyond traditional auto-ethnography. Therefore, our approach is probably best described as (auto)biographical narrativebased research (see Benson 2005, for a review).

5.1.1 Purpose and procedures of (meta)narrative analysis In keeping with narrative traditions and (some) narrative epistemologies, the research reported on in this chapter is more purposefully self-reflexive than the previous three – the linguistic, literacy, and sociocultural analyses presented in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. Here we offer a metanarrative description and analysis of

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the narrative inquiry process itself. This analysis (and narrative of the research process) involved attending to all that transpired in the main texts, the margins, the footnotes, and the subtext (both literally and figuratively) of the original two written narratives that were produced (N1, N2), and of the entire research process. Unfortunately, the richness of the narrative research process and its relationship to theory building is generally not included in written reports of research, as it is considered ancillary or even incidental to the stated purpose. Furthermore, cross-case analyses and the linking of narratives to existing or emerging theory are often omitted, giving more prominence to the stories themselves. Yet narrative research in all its facets represents a compelling and vibrant area of exploration and another window on collaborative research and on understanding second language learning, not only as an individual process but one that is social and takes place within various communities of practice. Indeed, we suggest that the metanarrative description is a facet of the scientific process of theory-building itself. Prior to analyzing the entire narrative inquiry research process, it is useful to revisit our original purpose and research questions for the project. We essentially set out to explore the personal experiences of five learners of Chinese as an additional language using written autobiographical accounts (approximately 25 pages each and mostly in English), in conjunction with these learners’ selfreported assessments of their linguistic proficiency as well as more objective descriptions of proficiency. We wondered about the similarities and differences that would emerge across the five cases, and about the factors that might account for these similarities and differences. We were curious about the themes that would be salient both in the individual and collective accounts of Chinese language learning (as reported in Chapter 4), and about how our findings would relate to existing research on L2 learning in linguistic and cultural contexts other than Chinese. As the study progressed, however, there was increasing interest among the group about how the very process of engaging in such collaborative and participatory narrative research was having some unexpected impacts, affecting people’s trajectories as language learners, researchers, and teachers, for example. Initially participants expected to learn something about their own and others’ individual experiences with Chinese but we also sought to learn more about conducting narrative research. Moreover, Patsy saw the study as an opportunity to build rapport and community with the (former/current) graduate students and fellow Chinese learners, and as an occasion to explore narrative research methodology, which was not her specialization. Together, we saw this project as an opportunity to contribute a collection of L2 stories or accounts of a language

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that has not received nearly enough attention in the SLA literature in comparison with reports about it in the media as a growing educational phenomenon. But we did not explicitly set out to consciously “try out” new identities, experience significant personal and professional growth, interrogate our values against the comparative backdrops of the Chinese and Western cultural and linguistic contexts we move between, or find renewed purpose and place for Chinese in our lives. We did not necessarily expect to write a book, although as the study progressed we did anticipate one or more publications of some sort. Now, at the time of writing, we have the luxury of hindsight. We have been coming to realize, viscerally, the importance of Leggo’s (2005) words: “We need to compose and tell our stories as creative ways of growing in humanness. We need to question our understanding of who we are in the world. We need opportunities to consider other versions of identity. This is ultimately a pedagogic work, the work of growing in wisdom through education, learning, research, and writing” (115). Looking back, we see with greater clarity what transpired, both explicitly and implicitly, in the research meetings and in the sometimes charged conversations in the corridors beyond those formal settings, and both in what we wrote and what we omitted from the narrative accounts. Pavlenko (2007), too, has highlighted the importance of “consider[ing] not only what was said or written but also what was omitted and why” (174). She even suggests that “what is excluded may potentially be as or even more informative” (166) to the thematic analysis of a narrative – although, we found, much harder to analyze precisely because of its textual absence and possible privacy issues. As participantresearchers, we are in a unique position to be privy to at least some of these omissions. A particularly salient example is how others’ curiosity, questioning, and commenting around Narrative One resulted in additions – and deletions – in Narrative Two. In some cases, such as Roma’s N1, where she failed to mention her first trip to China, the omissions were surprising even to the author.

5.1.2 Becoming participant-researchers in a CAL community of practice Connections between the themes of identity and community foregrounded in our analysis of the written narratives (as discussed in Chapter 4), and the salience of those same themes in the narrative inquiry process itself, add a further dimension of complexity and insight to this research. Our unique positions as individuals comprising a group of participant-researchers allowed the research to unfold on two levels. First, we needed to balance our individual

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roles as participants, narrators, research analysts, and writers, roles that were constantly in flux as we moved through various stages of the research and developed different, deeper relationships with one another, and accepted new possibilities for understanding our own and others’ stories. In addition to these specific roles, we each also juggled various other identities, such as teacher, student, learner, woman, man, Chinese, White, and “legitimate” language user (both Chinese and English), scholar, and writer. The concept of legitimate language user, of course, varies greatly by context. For example, among the entire research group, given that Rachel is an experienced CAL teacher, and the only native speaker of Chinese, she naturally became the de facto “expert” on Chinese. Further, that positioned her as the authority on any questions or issues that arose relating to Chinese language use and many cultural norms. However, several factors also served to mitigate Rachel’s default position of authority, such as being under the supervision of Patsy in the Chinese research centre (and a university employee in that role, as well as being a recently admitted doctoral student in the department), and being more closely connected to the other grad students because of age and career stage. Therefore, even when providing linguistic expertise on Chinese, Rachel was inevitably conscious of the importance of register and sociolinguistic norms in her communications. Equally complex contexts relating to legitimate language use exist for other combinations of people and languages, such as Rachel’s use of English as a non-native speaker, the other group members’ use of academic English as newcomers to an applied linguistics discourse community, as well as their use of Chinese as CAL learners. Second, when bringing our shifting individual identities to an ever-changing group dynamic, it was also necessary to navigate connecting in multiple ways – sometimes as co-researchers, language learners, mentors, or peer reviewers, and sometimes simply more as friends. The opportunity to watch how our relationships, attitudes, and behaviours with Chinese continued to change over time, as a function of different contexts and particularly in connection to being researched, was valuable and comprises a key part of the discussion in this chapter. Indeed, as we later learned, the importance of relationality, positioning (vis-à-vis interlocutors or readers to whom narratives are directed), and identity in narrative inquiry and narrative production and analysis has been underscored by many scholars in this area (e.g., De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012), who also emphasize the role of “self-presentation” in narratives to construct a particular (generally positive, ethical, morally engaged) self-image for hearers/readers and some manner of personal and textual coherence. At the start of this project, aside from being a group of individuals gathering around our shared interest in learning Chinese, we had no personal histories with one another (with the exception of Rachel, who had a certain professional

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rapport with Patsy as a former graduate student and research assistant, and then employee at UBC). All four of the current graduate students had taken SLA courses with Patsy though, and three (Roma, Ella, and Elliott) had taken a course with her the previous semester in which they had produced short analyses of their own L2 learning biographies. That initial contact also coincided with the opening of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education (CRCLLE), which all but Rachel (who was working in Korea at the time) were involved in, at least as volunteers, from the beginning, and Ella was CRCLLE’s first (paid) coordinator. For most of the graduate student members of the group, it was also the first opportunity to participate in a research project with a professor, more as colleagues than as students (although most of the participants’ own research was also – or would be – supervised or co-supervised by Patsy as well), and there was a certain amount of hesitation and nervousness as they dabbled with this unfamiliar role. In addition, three of the members were first-year graduate students without prior backgrounds in applied linguistics and thus were still settling into the discipline. These three have subsequently completed their thesis research and graduated. Many of those initial meetings involved reasonably long stretches of time where Patsy provided information about academia, research, and the norms of working in applied linguistics, the university, and publishing contexts. This expository talk in effect socialized the graduate student members of the group into participation in a new community of practice (as they reported later), treating students as legitimate (initially) peripheral participants and providing the encouragement and knowledge necessary to move toward more central participation (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). But the “expert-novice” (or mentor-student, employer-employee, oldtimer-newcomer) relationship would be too simple a description given that all of the participants were more proficient in Chinese than Patsy, more experienced in aspects of contemporary (e.g., youth, art) culture in Taiwan and China, and better schooled in narrative literature (and in creative writing), in some cases, than she was. We all therefore had our unique sets of experiences and expertise to share. Some had, moreover, lived in Taiwan and had relatively little experience with Mainland China; the converse was also true.

5.2 Stage 1: Narrative generation process It was in the context of this type of relating to one another that in the first stage of the project, which lasted several months, we discussed the prospect of writing autobiographical narratives. As we discuss below, these narratives took different shapes; the following five snapshots (see Figures 5.1–5.5) of their opening lines (N1) are presented to give the reader a short preview:

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Figure 5.1: Ella’s N1

Figure 5.2: Elliott’s N1

Figure 5.3: Patsy’s N1

Figure 5.4: Roma’s N1

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Figure 5.5: Tim’s N1

These figures, as screenshots from the beginning of the N1s, are presented in their original form to invite the reader into the metalevel of the project. Note that Ella, Patsy, and Tim included a title, while Elliott started directly from the first section without any obvious opening statement. Roma, on the other hand, began her narrative with an introduction, followed by clearly delineated chapters (not shown in the screen shot). That there was room for such diverse opening strategies was a function of how we came to begin writing the narratives. First we set parameters by consensus, which, being quite loose, were perhaps a reflection of the tentative and early stage of connection we had at the time, both to one another and to the project, but also representing aspects of CAL we wanted to reflect upon ourselves and learn about from others. Moreover, all of the narrative writers were volunteers in the project, not paid research assistants over a sustained period (although occasional research stipends were given), and it was established early on that all would have joint ownership of the project and would be co-authors of any resulting publications. Therefore, consensus-building was essentially about what procedures people thought would be of interest to them personally and would warrant the investment of their time and the sharing of their experiences, and not just what would be academically defensible or ultimately publishable. Together we decided that the accounts should be approximately 25 doublespaced typed pages each, and could address the following twelve topics that had been generated by the group: 1. Why you started studying Chinese 2. Why you continued/how your motivation changed over time 3. Literacy issues in your Chinese language learning journey 4. Critical incidents/milestones 5. People you have met in the course of learning Chinese and how they have affected your learning

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6. 7. 8. 9.

Emotions you associate with your language learning Interrelationship between learning Chinese and identity Social factors such as gender, race, class, age, role, etc. A metaphor that captures a key aspect of or can fundamentally represent your Chinese language learning journey 10. Theorizing your experiences 11. Appendix: a portfolio which will potentially include self assessment, CEFR benchmarks, a recorded narrative and/or other ways to give a sense of your Chinese level to the reader 12. Implications for theory and pedagogy Importantly, these twelve items were not just a random assortment of ideas but they also have theoretical merit in SLA, which often addresses issues of affect, identity, social variables, motivation, and critical incidents or opportunities (e.g., study abroad) of one sort or another that may affect learning experiences and outcomes (Ellis 2008). However, for the project to be successful and for all to engage in it, we needed to identify potential aspects of SLA that people would want to spend time reflecting upon based on their own histories. The twelve initial ideas are intentionally presented here in the same unpolished state they were in when we first generated them, both to give a sense of the evolution of our ideas about writing and working with narrative data, and to appropriately frame a discussion of the varied ways the task of writing an autobiographical narrative was taken up by different members of the group.

5.2.1 Approach, genre, voice, and style in Narrative One (N1) For Ella, writing was primarily an opportunity for creative expression and constructive re-narration of her history. At the time of writing N1, she was simultaneously enrolled in a narrative inquiry research methods course as part of her graduate studies, which afforded her the opportunity to explore alternative modes of crafting a narrative, and resulted in a DVD of images, text and oral narration in the author’s voice which she submitted as her N1, along with a plain text version for annotating. For Elliott, writing N1 was essentially an exercise in data production – both narrative data and evidence of his learning strategies – as well as metalinguistic exposition. He provided great detail about his internal cognitive processes in learning Chinese, along with evaluations of these processes. For Patsy, being a busy professor juggling multiple commitments, including overseas travel, teaching, supervision, and program administration, time was a major factor in writing

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N1. Hers was therefore the last narrative to be completed. Not only was she reflecting on and chronologically organizing over 25 years of intermittent exposure to various dialects of Chinese, she was also working to meet deadlines for multiple academic projects in a way that none of the other group members were, especially during the summer months. As a result her N1 focused primarily on her earlier years of learning Chinese (as well as other languages), and was written in a narrative style that reflected her awareness of the academic purpose it would (or could) be used for. Roma and Tim, who both had academic backgrounds in English literature, took a more literary approach to their writing. Roma organized her narrative around language, that is, around specific Chinese vocabulary items that hold significant meaning for her because of the contexts she remembered them from. Each entry was a rich vignette, and the collected vignettes string together to present her full narrative. For Tim, literary flair was seen in the way he considered his audience (understood to be a professional, academic one), and systematically used the questions we had collectively brainstormed to produce a narrative that was thematic rather than chronological. Rachel, being a teacher and not a learner of Chinese, did not write a narrative. These differing approaches to understanding what the autobiographical accounts were supposed to be (or could be) are noteworthy because of how each one prioritized different aspects of the narrative inquiry process we engaged in. For some group members, a relatively strict emphasis on producing data comprised mainly of insights into L2 proficiency development took precedence; for others it was the creative, aesthetic aspects of writing and grappling with recent experiences, frustrations, and desires with respect to CAL. Differences also emerged in how the authors navigated their desires and concerns around personal disclosure; some narratives were intentionally confessional (Ella, Roma), while others were more focused on how their contribution would fit into more traditional academic discourse on L2 learning (Elliott, Patsy, Tim). The five narratives also differed in terms of voice, use of Chinese, mixed modes/genres and method of organization. For example, Roma was the only one who included dialogue in her narrative, a feature which contributed to the literary flavour and immense readability of the account. Her story was populated with beautifuly crafted descriptions of people and events that “came to life” through her engaging prose. She made use of Simplified Chinese characters throughout her account, both as part of her reflection on language learning and as a critical organizing feature of the narrative. Roma’s writing was personal, evocative and self-reflexive, characteristics which are all exemplified by this excerpt from the end of her N1, “I am acutely aware that the preceding narrative is little more than a collection of miserable experiences” (40).

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Ella incorporated highly personal journal entries, poetry, multiple voices, and photographs along with the prose of her story. She was fundamentally seeking to discover new insights about herself and about SLA by writing, and doing the work to realize new understandings, epiphanies, and revelations. She wrote most explicitly “from the heart,” paying little attention to expectations around genre, content, or what might be considered appropriate to include in “academic” research. She even articulated this choice directly – perhaps seeking to justify it – in the introduction to N1 when she said, “I write from the premise that even academics, beneath all our analyzing and critical thinking and deconstructing, have the capacity to connect to knowledge from both the heart and the mind. And that one is not trump over the other” (1). Her explorations in N1 also influenced the narrative orientation and tone she would ultimately take in her M.A. thesis (Lester 2010). Patsy and Elliott both organized their narratives chronologically, and presented their content in rigorous, systematic ways. Elliott’s writing in particular was full of linguistic detail, such as the strategies he used for memorizing vocabulary, grammatical patterns, and the written forms of the characters he was learning. He was also very self-reflexive about his language learning, and included a running commentary of self-evaluation about his linguistic progress, both in comparison to others, and in connection to the time and effort he has invested in learning Chinese. His analytical approach to both language learning and narrative writing was very evident. He also peppered Chinese throughout his predominantly English narrative, using both Simplified and Traditional characters, and even Japanese katakana (non-romanized syllabic forms); and their use was mixed, due to the fact that his narrative was compiled over time from various phases of writing. Patsy simultaneously used humor and authority as she drew on her rich linguistic, academic, and personal experiences involving Chinese and other languages.1 She included graphic images, figures, the Simplified Chinese characters for her name, as well as pīnyīn interspersed through the narrative. In an earlier draft of her N1, she had included more images but the file became too large and was therefore trimmed to a more manageable, text-based form. She completed the first half of her N1 in spring 2009, followed by the second half in summer. The two segments focused on different phases of her exposure to Chinese, loosely divided into distant past and recent past. Her writing also conveyed the irony – and her misgivings – about not being literate in Chinese characters, even as (then) newly appointed director of the Centre for Research in Chinese Language and Literacy Education, despite the word literacy appearing in the name of the Centre itself. 1 For reasons of space, she deleted the humourous bits from her N3.

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Tim’s N1 was written in a matter-of-fact voice; he was the only author who addressed all twelve of the initial themes systematically and relatively comprehensively (apart from #11, the portfolio, which none of the others did either). His writing demonstrated a balance of including personal anecdotes and maintaining a professional, or somewhat detached, tone. In terms of orthography, he interspersed some pīnyīn into the account, but aside from this linguistic variation, his N1 was written entirely in narrative prose (i.e., no dialogue, journal entries, poetry, images, etc.), although his revised N2 did contain images of both his life in Taiwan and past Chinese-language notebooks. Tim also used humour to maintain reader engagement. A particularly charming example was when he wrote, “I have trouble on the phone, and I still get upset (because it’s their fault) when people misunderstand me” (Tim N1: 35). The distinct voices of each author naturally reflected individual differences in writing style and personality. In addition, they were a reflection of how the authors understood the purposes – both of writing the narrative and of doing this (narrative) research. Further, the narrator’s “voice” highlighted elements each author chose to focus on, certainly in the way they told their CAL stories, and potentially in their experiences of learning Chinese and relating this to SLA theory or to extending existing theory as well, especially in light of mainstream approaches to and objects of study in CAL research. The use of various forms of Chinese in the different narratives provided examples of each author’s working relationship with the language. As mentioned above, Elliott’s adoption of various orthographies and languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters, pīnyīn, Japanese katakana, and French) highlighted the foregrounding of his identity as a polyglot. In Roma’s case, the way she used Chinese was distinct from the other authors in that it was seamlessly interwoven into the very fabric of her narrative. As opposed to merely codeswitching to include specific words or concepts in Chinese, Roma’s language use played a more critical role in her writing. She wrote her chapter headings in Chinese, and framed entire sections based on a Chinese lexical item. A particularly salient example of this was the section entitled 颤抖 (chàndǒu: to shiver or tremble). She first described learning this word, then told a story that explained the emotional impact of using it in context, and ended with this powerful metaphor: “I still think about it sometimes, and when I do, much more than sunflower seeds scatter through from in between the 颤抖 of my fingers” (Roma N1: 9). Besides orthographic choice, the influence of Chinese in English writing was also evident. Ella wrote that she “was fascinated by how ideas in Chinese could consist of building blocks that English would never imagine, such as putting 矛 máo, the character for spear, and 盾 dùn, the character for shield, together to

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mean contradiction” (Ella N1: 15). Roma used metaphors that are a literal translation of Chinese words in her English prose to describe how she worked to memorize Chinese: “I named myself in words so elegant in their construction I felt my body poeticize beneath them: My hymen is a virgin membrane, tiny but capable of so much revelation. . . Each of my ovaries, a nest for eggs, a child’s house. . .” (N1: 18). All of these writing strategies can also be understood as narrative strategies and in some cases as strategies for learning and practicing language as well as for understanding L2 learning and interculturality. As the authors tried to make sense of their experiences through narrative writing, the use of metaphor, highly-analytical linguistic approaches, or codeswitching emerged as tools to give this process structure and to act as a container to hold the finished product (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

5.3 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives By this stage, roughly five months into the project (Summer 2009), the group members had relaxed into greater familiarity and comfort with one another and the project as it evolved. The five narrative authors were eager and nervous about writing and sharing their stories. Rachel, as a Chinese language teacher, was excited to read first-person accounts from learners’ perspectives. Participants did not read or comment on others’ narratives until they had done their own initial drafts. In no predetermined order, we began to annotate one another’s drafts using the Microsoft Word Comment feature and then posted the annotated versions to the project wiki site. There were no prescribed guidelines otherwise for commenting in terms of content, format, manner of annotation, or the order in which people would annotate a given narrative. Most narratives, in the end, had multiple sets of annotations on the same draft from other team members. However, drafts being reviewed simultaneously by two or more participants resulted in more than one annotated version, which were eventually re-incorporated into one document. As noted earlier, Patsy composed her narrative (N1) in two parts, each focusing on different phases of her life. However, owing to the timing of the research process, only the first half was commented on. To our collective surprise, an average of 180 annotations per narrative resulted in the margins of the pages, functioning as an interactional space for readers to view and respond to the questions and comments made by previous readers and not just comment on the original text. An annotation here refers to a comment box in Microsoft Word. What became clear was that a narrative with a series of comments in the margins, some of which were comments on others’

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comments, became a kind of focus group or running discussion in the margins of narratives. The result was a new multi-authored narrative of sorts and one that was very colourful as well, since comments appeared on the screen in different hues, according to the author (pink, turquoise, blue, etc.). To illustrate this intertextuality and interactivity, Figure 5.6 provides a snapshot of Roma’s N1 (the first completed) after everybody had added their comments, although not everyone commented on this particular page. Two comments each were provided on these first two paragraphs of the narrative by Patsy, Ella, and Tim (Tim’s commenter name was Valued AC). The comments noted (1) the importance of providing a title and name (Patsy); (2) appreciation for the metaphor and introduction (Ella, Patsy, Tim), (3) a reflection on the difficult choices about what to include in such narratives (Tim), and then (4) the challenges for a 10 year old to move to Singapore, as Roma had done (Tim, Ella). This image is also a good example of the un-glossed (i.e., untranslated) use of Chinese and chapter headings in Roma’s narrative.

Figure 5.6: Snapshot of Roma’s Narrative One (p. 1) with comments

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The richness and sheer volume of the comments on all the narratives, which had not been anticipated or planned as a dimension of the research, led us to explore the functions of such annotations, as discursive and interpersonal moves, and in particular how socialization and identity negotiation were enacted and indexed through them. That analysis is presented in the following section. It is worth mentioning that during and even after the month-long period of annotating, many of the research group members also had passionate discussions about the narratives outside of the formal research meetings through individual emails and personal conversations that were therefore “off the record.” Further, we wondered how the process of writing and reflecting on one’s own learning process would influence us and our language learning and use in the long run. A detailed analysis is provided in the final section of this chapter. Table 5.1 shows the length of each narrative, the amount of Chinese used, and the number of comments generated. We ended up quantifying some of these features to gain an understanding of patterns within and across narratives. As the numbers indicate, Elliott included the most Chinese characters in his writing (followed by Roma) and received the highest number of comments, although when calculated in proportion to word count he actually received the least. This likely simply reflects the fact that his first narrative was the longest. However, although Patsy’s narrative was only slightly shorter than the rest, it received considerably fewer comments. This is noteworthy considering the relationships between Patsy, a professor and researcher, and her current and previous students. As novice researchers, the five current or recent graduate students seemed more reticent to comment on Patsy’s story or give critical or corrective feedback. The types of comments Patsy gave and received also illustrate her role as group mentor attempting to socialize less experienced academic writers in applied linguistics into particular types of written discourse – and the others’ reluctance to assume the same kind of role (as expert or even peer, initially) with respect to her writing. (She was, nonetheless, influenced by their narratives, the group discussions, and comments not just on her writing but on others’ narratives, and later revised her N2 and N3 quite significantly.) As we discuss in detail below (see Table 5.3 and its discussion), most of the comments on Patsy’s narrative were relatively conservative and measured, such as requesting extra information, positive appraisal, sharing experience, and expressing empathy. She was the only author who received no comments in the “critical (negative) appraisal” category. Her own comments on others’ work, as shown in Table 5.6, were somewhat more instructional – about providing a title and name on the narrative, including English glosses for Chinese, or relating observations to SLA theory.

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Table 5.1: Narrative One: Quantitative descriptive features

Name Ella

Words

Chinese characters

# of comments (by others on own narrative)

# of comments per 100 words

8,291

52

190

2.29

Elliott

13,804

271

229

1.66

Patsy*

6,793

3

114

1.67

Roma

7,043

211

152

2.16

Tim

7,210

2

201

2.78

* Part 1 only

In addition to the individual commenting process, the research group met to brainstorm about themes and thematic clusters that had emerged as salient across the first narratives – which served as the basis for the analysis in Chapter 4. Each person then chose three of the themes for in-depth analysis across all narratives, resulting in some intentional overlap, such that each theme was separately examined by two people. We also created a large conceptual map (see Figure 5.7) using coloured felt pens that helped us to visualize the multiple relationships among the themes, such as Whiteness, identity, agency, and community.

Figure 5.7: The conceptual map of themes in narratives

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5.3.1 Coding comments on Narrative One In order to understand what factors influenced the range of comments and how those comments in turn influenced the preparation of Narrative Two, the research group established a system for jointly coding all the narrative comments by their apparent discursive functions after both narratives had been produced. First, three of the research team members read through all the comments on two N1 narratives and coded them according to their perceived discourse/interpersonal function and purpose. Because a single comment box often contained several utterances2 or propositions, each possibly serving different pragmatic purposes, utterances within comments (rather than each box as a whole) were coded individually, resulting in more functions than comments (boxes), typically. After the first round of coding by all three and discussion about any differences in coding (based on a fairly large number of inductively generated categories), which continued until agreement was reached on coding, two researchers then reorganized and collapsed certain codes into more streamlined thematic categories (see Table 5.2), assigning each category and sub-category a specific definition. Thereafter, each narrative was coded in its entirety by the two coders and differences of opinion were discussed and resolved. Finally, the original coding was re-examined with the refined themes in mind, and salient examples were highlighted. As indicated in Table 5.2, twelve main coding categories or themes were identified. (Because these were just conceptual and pragmatic “shorthands,” they do not all represent the same part of speech.) These are briefly described in the table and then exemplified further with more detailed definitions of each category. Figure 5.8 also shows the subcomponents of each. 5.3.2 Analyzing comments on Narrative One It is important to highlight that some comments served multiple purposes, in part because they might comprise a number of different sentences or propositions (utterances) in the same comment bubble, and we therefore coded for all the themes that were contained in one comment. Each instance of a specific theme was tallied to provide the data presented in Tables 5.3 and 5.4. Table 5.3 organizes this information by narrative, showing how many of each type of comment appeared on each author’s N1. The shading corresponds to the overall function of the various comment categories which are further illustrated in Figure 5.8. Table 5.4 organizes the same information by individual author, and 2 Normally, “utterance” is a category used for oral language. However, given the conversational nature of the comments, we use the term here.

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Table 5.2: Coding categories for Narrative One annotations/comments Categories f subcategories

Meaning

Examples

Metanarrative format f style f grammar

Related to the structure or form of the narrative

“Nice rhetorical strategy . . .” ( Tim N1: 1, comment by Patsy)

Intertextual other readings f other comments f other narratives f Ella’s DVD

Referring to another text, such as another narrative

“Interesting how opposite this is from Tim’s experience of not thinking teachers really affected his learning much.” (Roma N1: 7, comment by Ella)

Commenter to Commenter (C-C)

Providing a comment related to another annotator’s comment (in the margin) more so than the narrative text itself or to its author

“You’re right, Rachel – more often than not, they’re judged for being inadequate in the L2 – unless they’re highly proficient.” (Tim N1: 29, comment by Patsy in reply to Rachel’s comment)

SLA f general f CAL

A comment (or question) about an SLA principle, construct or process more generally

“Did you find that you tried to teach learners of English how to apply your strategies of learning Chinese to their learning of English?” (Elliott N1: 7, comment by Patsy)

Metaproject

Comments (or questions) about the research project itself

“Does that test report part scores on the sections or just a total score? I’m thinking that it could be helpful in the assessment phase of this study – as one objective measure.” (Elliott N1: 23, comment by Patsy)

Informing f explanation/ background f correction/ clarification

Providing additional information or correction about some aspect of CAL

“Sometimes Chinese native speakers are confused with those accents as well. In a way, only the news reporters have the ‘standard’ pronunciation. Teachers have to take national oral tests to show that their pronunciation is standard enough to teach.” (Tim N1: 23, comment by Rachel)

f

f

“Maybe with Chinese, e.g. in my experience in China, politeness is more connected with guanxi – not language itself so much. It’s a kind of reciprocity that involves action often more than words? (and then some little token gifts, thanks, polite words, etc., but not grammaticalized to the same degree as in Japanese. . .)” (Elliott N1: 31, comment by Patsy) Requests f for information f for elaboration f for clarification

Questions seeking additional information, explanation, or elaboration

“How did you convince yourself to continue? Where did the motivation come from?” (Tim N1: 10, comment by Elliott)

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Categories f subcategories Interpretation

Meaning Reader’s/annotator’s own interpretation of writer’s experience or point

Examples “It seems you felt interacted with as an individual and not as a representative of a nation or language, not as an essentialised identity.” (Roma N1: 15, comment by Ella) “Just a comment, in connection with Elliott’s point [#8] below: perhaps because you originally also wrote this for a narrative course you have approached it somewhat differently or honed it differently, in that metanarrative reflexive sense?” (Ella N1: 1, comment by Patsy)

Appraisal positive f critical f

Positive or negative (critical) comments about the content, agreement or disagreement.

“OOOO interesting! More please!!! Competing identities. . . I love it.” (Patsy N1: 7, comment by Roma) “Luckily there seemed to be plenty of Taiwanese “girls”3 eager to step up to the plate. . . I wonder what my Chinese learning would’ve been like if, when I felt challenged/frustrated, there were an abundance of strapping young men dying to talk to me” (Elliott N1: 10, comment by Ella).

Shared experience same experience f opposite experience f related experience f

Expression of same, opposite, or related experience from the perspective of the annotator.

“Very similar to me. And I sometimes have these feelings in the same week!” (Patsy N1: 1, comment by Tim) “It’s interesting that on your arrival to Taiwan, you were learning basic Chinese writing instead of studying the most commonly-used phrases to communicate (like other learners).” (Elliott N1: 5, comment by Rachel)

3 In the comment, Ella uses quotations for “girls” partly in reference to Elliott’s use of this term to mean women, but also as a somewhat sarcastic critique of the advantages many expatriate male learners seemed to have, from Ella’s experience, with respect to finding willing (female) Chinese language partners and friends, in comparison with some female learners’ opportunities to find willing male interlocutors (see Chapter 4).

5.3 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives

Categories f subcategories Empathy

Meaning Expressions of understanding or sympathy

161

Examples “I understand that frustration: learning all those complicated grammar structures and patterns that you cannot apply in real life” (Tim N1: 9, comment by Rachel) “Again, I know how you feel! I didn’t mention it in my story, but the first month after coming back to Canada was spent wondering how quickly I could go back to Taiwan. It’s strange – this disconnection with our “own” country.” [Patsy’s addendum to this comment: “yes, but when you come back to Canada, you’ve changed, Canada’s changed, and friends who haven’t experienced life abroad seem not to have changed – although they have just changed in other ways maybe. . . ]” (Ella N1: 7, comments by Tim and Patsy).

Humour irony f joking f

Expressions of irony, joking, etc.

“Did you succeed [at conquering Taiwan?]” (Elliott N1: 1, comment by Tim) In response to Patsy’s description of her “unremarkable [elementary school] teacher, a disheveled alcoholic approaching mandatory retirement,” Elliott commented: “You had Mr. X. too?! Did he live in his car when he was teaching you?” (Patsy N1: 1, comment by Elliott)

shows what types of comments were made by whom. With the exception of appraisal, where the subcategories of positive appraisal and critical appraisal are distinct enough that including them both was warranted, the following tables show only the main thematic categories. Here we note certain trends and anomalies apparent in the data in the table. For example, Tim’s N1 received the highest percentage of both intertextual and interpretation comments. His writing seemed to trigger connections to other people’s narratives in particular. For example when he wrote that he wanted to “set [his] own learning agendas and control [his] own lessons” (Tim N1: 4), Ella commented: “A quest to be unique is a theme that has come up in Roma’s and my narrative as well.” The high number of narrative (format/style/grammar) comments on Roma’s N1 is likely due to the fact that she frequently used Chinese without providing a gloss, with the result that certain parts were inaccessible to some of the group members. (Patsy’s narrative had just two such comments, in contrast.) Both Roma’s and Ella’s narratives got the highest percentage

19 14 57 55 52 14 40 18 3

Intertextual

Comment to Comment

Request for Information/ Elaboration/Clarification

Interpretation

Appraisal–Positive

Appraisal–Critical

Shared Experience

Empathy

Humour

190

22

Informing

Total # of Comments

8

SLA

316

3

Meta-project

Total # of Instances

11

Narrative–Format/ Style/Grammar

100%

0.95

5.70

12.66

4.43

16.46

17.41

18.04

4.43

6.01

6.96

2.53

0.95

3.48

229

319

6

7

46

17

49

39

73

6

15

18

22

7

14

#

100%

1.88

2.19

14.42

5.33

15.36

12.23

22.88

1.88

4.70

5.64

6.90

2.19

4.39

%

Elliott’s N1

%

Ella’s N1 #

Table 5.3: Comment themes (codes) on narratives

114

168

4

5

29

0

27

21

49

4

9

8

9

1

2

#

100%

2.38

2.98

17.26

0.00

16.07

12.50

29.17

2.38

5.36

4.76

5.36

0.60

1.19

%

Patsy’s N1 Part 1

152

232

4

16

33

6

32

27

51

2

11

15

10

2

23

#

100%

1.72

6.90

14.22

2.59

13.79

11.64

21.98

0.86

4.74

6.47

4.31

0.86

9.91

%

Roma’s N1

201

306

2

9

50

4

40

64

69

5

25

16

13

3

6

100%

0.65

2.94

16.34

1.31

13.07

20.92

22.55

1.63

8.17

5.23

4.25

0.98

1.96

%

Tim’s N1 #

886

1,341

19

55

198

41

200

206

299

31

79

79

62

16

%

100%

1.42

4.10

14.77

3.06

14.91

15.36

22.30

2.31

5.89

5.89

4.62

1.19

4.18

Total

56

#

162 Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

5.3 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives

163

of empathy comments; this seems concordant with the content of these two narratives disclosing a considerable amount of highly personal information. This may also have a bearing on why Ella’s N1 exhibited the lowest number and percentage of request for information/elaboration/clarification comments, while Patsy’s had the highest. Perhaps readers were less comfortable probing for further details about Ella’s already quite intimate writing, whereas on Patsy’s N1, which in addition to being less personal, was also only partially complete at the time of commenting, there was much more room to inquire after more information. Further, the disclosing of personal information, particularly the kind that exposes how one is making sense of their experiences and perceptions, was also simultaneously an opening for others to weigh in with alternative interpretations of the situation. This was often the case on Ella’s N1, where the majority of the critical appraisal comments were also coded as interpretation comments. In these instances, the way Ella described her experiences seemed to elicit critical responses from other members, whose comments simultaneously suggest that those experiences could be understood in quite a different way. For example, when Ella wrote that two American men won the speech contest she participated in, Tim commented “Is there a special meaning here? I assume so. Separate sentence, very short, powerful. Are you implying they won because they were white American men?” (18). While these types of comments initially resulted in a certain degree of tension, they were ultimately fundamental in facilitating the development of more balanced perspectives among the entire group. The quality of the critical appraisal comments on Elliott’s N1 – the narrative that received the most comments in this category – were most often connected to discussions of Chinese language and the communities he interacted with. For example when Elliott wrote “I had an image of young Taiwanese as boring and sheltered, loving karaoke, eating, and drinking tea – whereas many of my Western friends enjoyed getting together at a bar or somebody’s apartment and drinking alcohol” (17), Rachel commented “You call that boring?,” indicating the exception she took to how Taiwanese people were being framed, rather stereotypically. Elliott’s narrative also received the highest percentage of both SLA and metaproject comments, presumably connected to how much explicit description of his language learning process and linguistic understanding was present in his account. The fact that the majority of the metaproject comments came from Patsy seems to demonstrate a resonance between Elliott’s approach to writing his narrative and Patsy’s vision for the analytical shape of the project. Patsy’s N1 also received many SLA comments, second only to Elliott’s, a detail which supports the idea mentioned earlier that comments on Patsy’s narrative remained firmly in the “safe” (academic) zone, rather than the personal sphere. The complete absence of critical appraisal comments on her narrative further corroborates this.

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Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

In our experience, the sharing of autobiographical accounts among a group comprised of women, men, native English speakers, a native Chinese speaker, a professor and young scholars created a setting which tended to elicit strong responses from members about particular topics. Alternative interpretations of one’s experiences, sensitivity to how one’s language and/or culture was being represented, as well as self-perceptions of linguistic achievements and proficiency were all evident in the way people chose to comment on the narratives. They also highlighted the various roles people took throughout the process of commenting, a feature that was even more evident when we look at the comment themes by individual annotators. This data is presented in Table 5.4. Table 5.4 reveals how group members variously foregrounded and backgrounded different aspects of their personalities, experiences, and expertise as they read and commented on others’ N1s. The different roles taken up, such as friend, critic, mentor, or researcher, were alluded to or indexed by people’s commenting styles. For example, Tim and Patsy wrote the most narrative (format/style/ grammar) and metaproject comments, suggesting their keen eyes for structural detail and early awareness of positioning this research in a wider academic context. Patsy in particular made consistent links among the five narratives, flagging similarities, differences, and thematic trends, resulting in the most instances of intertextual comments. In her role as professor and mentor, Patsy also naturally made many informing comments, second only to Rachel, whose position as authority on Chinese language and culture in the group afforded many opportunities to provide an emic perspective on related issues. Rachel also supplied the highest percentage of empathy and critical appraisal comments, both of which tended to be related to her identity as the only Chinese person – and Chinese teacher – in the group. She expressed empathy when reading about the negative experiences the CAL learners had reported on in relation to Chinese language and culture, such as frustration with memorizing characters or pronouncing tones, and challenges around the culture shock people experienced upon arrival in Chinese-speaking regions. From this brief discussion of the data in these tables it is evident that the commenting process was a complex, non-linear, and highly intertextual and interdiscursive activity. In some cases, the margins of a narrative became so dense with comments that it was not always clear who had commented first, or what was being commented on (i.e., the narrative itself or another’s comments). For those annotators who were the last in line to comment, it was as if they were joining an ongoing very animated “discussion in the margins” or perhaps a focus group that already had a history and momentum of its own. In fact, in some cases it seemed that the narrative had become the sidebar and the rousing discussion accompanying it the main focus. A special case of this is when Patsy commented on Elliott’s narrative, which she did in two sittings several weeks

12 6

260

Empathy

Humor

Total:

2.31

37

Appraisal–Positive 6

45

Interpretation

59

51

Request for Information/ Elaboration/Clarification

Appraisal–Critical

1

Comment to Comment

Shared Experience

14.23

15

Intertextual

100%

2.31

4.62

22.69

17.31

19.62

0.38

5.77

1.54

4

Informing

6.54

0.38

17

1

Metaproject

% 2.31

Ella

SLA

6

#

Narrative–Format/ Style/Grammar

Comments

165

2

6

26

1

14

44

48

7

9

4

4

0

100%

1.21

3.64

15.76

0.61

8.48

26.67

29.09

4.24

5.45

2.42

2.42

0.00

0.00

%

Elliott

0

#

410

4

4

26

13

50

74

104

11

30

36

17

12

100%

0.98

0.98

6.34

3.17

12.20

18.05

25.37

2.68

7.32

8.78

4.15

2.93

7.07

%

Patsy

29

#

180

0

18

31

9

24

12

28

4

10

27

14

0

100%

0.00

10.00

17.22

5.00

13.33

6.67

15.56

2.22

5.56

15.00

7.78

0.00

1.67

%

Rachel

3

#

181

3

4

34

5

46

17

42

6

10

3

5

1

100%

1.66

2.21

18.78

2.76

25.41

9.39

23.20

3.31

5.52

1.66

2.76

0.55

2.76

%

Roma

5

#

Table 5.4: Comment themes offered by individual annotators (commenters) on others’ N1s

145

4

11

22

7

29

14

26

2

5

5

5

2

13

#

%

100%

2.76

7.59

15.17

4.83

20.00

9.66

17.93

1.38

3.45

3.45

3.45

1.38

8.97

Tim

3.06

1341

19

55

100%

1.42

4.10

14.77

41 198

14.91

15.36

22.30

2.31

5.89

5.89

4.62

1.19

200

206

299

31

79

79

62

16

% 4.18

Total

56

#

5.3 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives

165

166

Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

apart. In the interim, other people had added their comments, and the net result was a rich and layered annotation book-ended by her comments into which multivocal exchanges had been inserted. It is interesting to consider how this interpretive and annotation process would have been different had we all commented on separate copies of the same narratives without seeing others’ comments. How might this lack of written interaction among commenters have changed the intertextual aspects of the analysis, or even the way individual perspectives on the narrative content were shaped along the way? 5.3.3 Metanarrative activity as community building and theory building Figure 5.8 depicts how we conceptualized our narrative inquiry process – based on the analysis of the annotations – and how our commenting process, though not designed to do so in any explicit way, itself mirrored the fundamental goals of the larger project: (1) to undertake a collaborative project about CAL (SLA); (2) to create a community of practice related to shared experiences and research on CAL; and (3) to generate, share, and assess knowledge about second language learning, and Chinese in particular.

Figure 5.8: Narrative inquiry process as reflected in coded functions of annotations

5.3 Stage 2: Reciprocal and collective annotation of narratives

167

The triangle in the figure with the word “Project” sits like a hat on top of all the research activity, signifying the research group members’ constant awareness of the metanarrative (metaproject) component. The two circles underneath indicate two simultaneously ongoing and interacting sets of activities and processes during the entire research project – CAL/SLA theory building (on the left side) and CAL community building (on the right). These were at the heart of our narrative production, annotation, and metanarrative reflection. As discussed earlier in the chapter, initially we expected to learn something about our own individual experiences with Chinese in relation to those of others in the group, and we also expected to develop our capacities to conduct narrative research. In addition, we saw this research project as a longterm process, in which we expected to build a community that shared a common interest in the learning and teaching of the Chinese language. Our narrative commenting process validated and deepened those initial intentions, as well as foregrounded a variety of other issues as discussed throughout this chapter. Importantly then, this chapter, like the rest of the book, is not simply about self-indulgent “navel gazing,” as some narrative research has been described. It is, at its core, about building theory, being self-reflexive, and building communities of scholars and learners. Over 10% of the comments on narratives were either discussing SLA principles or providing information related to Chinese language and culture. These comments, in addition to the Chinese language learning components in the narratives, imply how this narrative generating and sharing process encouraged group members to further explore SLA and CAL theories and knowledge. Four comment themes, appraisal (both positive and critical), shared experience, empathy, and humour, representing 38% of the total comments, contributed to community building and created interpersonal connections among group members. Although the critical appraisal comments (3.06%) triggered a certain level of unease or strain between members, they also indicated some sensitive but common and important issues that arose through the process of Chinese language learning. Consequently, those comments led us either to be more critical of our own interpretation of certain situations or to explore certain issues further in areas where the tension was more intense than others (as salient themes in Chapter 4). Such tensions were only possible because of the level of investment of each team member in the larger project goals, in the community, and in the exchange and pursuit of knowledge about Chinese language learning and acculturation. It is also important to note that the CAL/SLA theory building and the community building processes were not separate, which is why those circles intersect in the figure. Instead, they were interconnected with comments that

168

Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

facilitated both information gathering and community building. Such comments, which made up nearly half (46%) of the total annotations, included interpretation, intertextual, request for information, and commenter to commenter functions. These sorts of exchanges mediated and sometimes provoked further community- and knowledge-building. It was the idea of starting a narrative inquiry project that brought all of us together into a CAL community, and this community facilitated generating knowledge and furthering understanding CAL/SLA theory, which in return nourished the whole narrative project. The process of commenting on and thematically analyzing N1 prompted the narrative writers to contemplate how to change, improve, and edit their stories for N2, their revised and updated narratives. In the next section we introduce how the research process thus far influenced the way N2 was shaped.

5.4 Stage 3: Writing, analyzing, and theorizing SLA in Narrative Two (N2) Based on the feedback and comments on N1, as well as the conceptual map that group members produced during Stage 2 (Figure 5.7), the five CAL learners wrote a second, revised version of each of their narratives. The group decided that N2 would be a more up-to-date version, with full recognition that language learning is never in fact complete and would continue long past the writing of this narrative, potentially across each one’s lifespan. Writers would address the salient themes identified after the first group analysis reported in Chapter 4 more comprehensively. Having by then also read one another’s first narratives, group members were motivated to refine their earlier accounts. In order to indicate the differences between N1 and N2, the authors added a one-page preface that reflected their writing process, including what changes they had made and the reasons behind these changes. To a certain extent, this preface served as a short narrative of the writing and revising process as well as a metanarrative that provided insights into the authors’ reinterpretation and composition processes. Some research group members’ lives had changed considerably before or during the writing of N2. Ella had moved to Taiwan on a government scholarship to study Mandarin and was spending an average of five hours a day in Chinese classes at the time of writing. Tim was accepted for the same scholarship program as Ella and was making plans to marry his Taiwanese partner the following summer. Elliott had moved to another city to take up full-time work and dedicated his non-working hours to N2 writing. He had also started learning Korean and was therefore spending less time and energy on Chinese. Roma was in the process of gathering data for her M.A. thesis, a study that focused on

5.4 Stage 3: Writing, analyzing, and theorizing SLA in Narrative Two (N2)

169

another group of Anglo learners of Chinese. Her interviews with her research participants were leading her to rethink her own experiences of Chinese language learning and deconstruct the term lǎowài (‘foreigner’). Patsy, in the meantime, was making more trips to China – involving more opportunities to use Chinese – connected to her research on English language education there and also in connection with her Centre activities regarding the teaching and learning of Chinese as an additional language. CAL was therefore becoming a more dominant aspect of her life and career. All these changes in the narrators’ individual lives, together with the comments they received on their N1s, were reflected in their N2s. Ella made substantial changes to the structure of her N2. She did not continue with the DVD format, opting for the written format the group found more convenient, and adding a new section describing her recent experiences living and studying in Taiwan. Tim, on the other hand, included a section on how being in a relationship with a Chinese speaker impacted his learning, information requested by other members after his N1 was read and commented on. Roma deliberately chose to insert previous email excerpts from her time in China into this new version to more accurately reflect her feelings during her sojourn there; she also appended an example of her Chinese writing ability in the form of a composition homework assignment. As she stated in her preface, “I have attempted to be more honest and [self-]critical, a sentiment that I feel is most evident in my choice of email excerpts” (Roma N2: 1). Similar to Roma’s, most N2s appear to be more critical and self-reflective compared to their earlier counterparts, especially for the four graduate students. As Elliott pointed out at the end of his preface, “In looking back. . . I see how much frustration and confusion is mixed with feelings of growth, and I am reminded that I wish to remain positive and hopeful in looking towards a future for my language skills” (N2: 2). The narrative writing process really prompted the CAL learners to discuss their language learning, to reflect on it, and to project future growth. Patsy’s N2 was quite different than her N1 and much longer, in that it brought her CAL story more up to date and addressed the relevant research constructs that arose from N1 very explicitly. Instead of comprising two sections written several months apart, as was the case for her N1, Patsy’s N2 is a much more cohesive account of her over 25 years of exposure to and learning of Chinese. It is also a much thicker, multicoloured (in the original), and multimodal account in that she includes considerably more supplementary materials, such as images, figures and even pīnyīn excerpts from her early sojourn in Changsha in 1986–87. Figure 5.9 is a collection of pages from Patsy’s N2 documenting the rich variety evident in that piece.

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Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

Figure 5.9: Composite of four pages in Patsy’s N2

5.4.1 Narrative Two prefaces as personal metanarrative reflection The N2 prefaces also reflected different authors’ understanding of the project and their unique approaches to writing. Patsy wrote in detail about how she examined all the comments on N1, decided which ones to respond to, and drafted her N2 (much like one would write to a journal editor about the revised version of a paper). She also noted her consideration of the wider readership

5.4 Stage 3: Writing, analyzing, and theorizing SLA in Narrative Two (N2)

171

that N2 was intended for. Ella expressed disappointment that the multimedia version of N1 she had carefully crafted was largely dismissed by the group because it complicated the commenting and analysis process. She also explained what the experience of writing, as a creative, cathartic process, involved for her. With a background in English literature, Roma wrote that she felt happy with her N2 as research “data,” but not as a literary piece, reflecting her competing desires to both provide solid data for this narrative research and to create a good piece of writing. For some authors, the preface also shed light on their process of identity negotiation among this particular, small research community. For example, when issues of gender arose, Tim and Elliott, as the male members of the group, occasionally found that their experiences with Asian women were given undue attention by their female counterparts. Both of them indicated in the preface that they subsequently felt self-conscious about discussing such issues. Elliott, being the one who received the most critical appraisals on N1 wrote, “I also felt very confused as to how to approach the narration of male-female interactions, and wondered how to keep defensiveness about perceptions of intercultural dating issues separate from issues of language learning, and whether or not they can indeed be kept separate” (Elliott N2: 1). Indeed, narrative research into language learning foregrounds the blurriness of the boundaries between, in Elliott’s case, the roles of researcher, research collaborator, author, co-author, CAL learner, and young White man interacting with his female Taiwanese peers. If and where one role ends and another begins is in constant flux and negotiation; we found that merely acknowledging these issues and the awkwardness sometimes associated with them in such a collaborative process was a valuable step in continuing to move both the group and the project forward.

5.4.2 Analyzing Narrative Two: Focus group discussion vis-à-vis written annotation After all N2s were written, we subsequently had 1.5-hour-long discussions of each revised narrative, in turn, over a two-month period, rather than replicate the annotation process we had engaged in on N1. Apart from desiring a fresh approach, some writers felt that, although getting comments from other readers on aspects of their pieces was gratifying and useful, the commenting process was a bit atomistic and they sought a more holistic and coherent discussion of each person’s experiences and new narrative. We therefore discussed how and why each narrative had changed and what the other group members thought

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Narrative and Metanarrative Perspectives

about the new narratives and the new information and themes, and then noted the recurring points that arose in these discussions in relation to CAL. Due to the fact that some research members were located in different parts of the world (three based in Vancouver but sometimes out of town, plus two in Taiwan, and one in Ottawa), we used Skype to conduct and record these discussions. Managing the discussions then became very different from, say, a writing group or focus group discussion where all are in the same room and turn-taking can be freer. During the discussion sessions, the authors first introduced their N2 writing process, and then other group members were invited to give their comments or questions in turn. One of the Vancouver-based team members was nominated to moderate each session, ensuring that the Skype participants had access to turns and that overlapping speech was minimized. The Skype communications had both strengths and weaknesses. Ella indicated in her N2 preface: “the feedback process on version one [N1] was somewhat disjointed, no doubt largely owing to time and scheduling constraints. We commented (in private) on the narratives and came together to discuss themes – important activities that I am not suggesting we abandon – but we did not take time to collectively receive/acknowledge/analyze the narratives one by one” (Ella N2: preface). Therefore, the N2 discussions invited broader responses and provided an opportunity for concentrated focus on each narrative and learning experience by the entire group together. In addition, this type of oral, synchronous discussion made it possible for the author (CAL learner) to directly answer the questions that readers had. In comparison, the N1 evaluation process allowed readers to leave questions and messages for the authors through the commenting process, but no immediate reply was expected from the author or even feasible (and at that stage we had not planned to produce a revised version of the narrative), much the same as comments and questions on student assignments show an engagement but do not normally anticipate or require a response. Interestingly, some of the questions were not directly related to N2; instead, they were general questions about the author’s Chinese learning experience – particularly for those not currently in Vancouver but rather actively involved in Chinese study and use abroad. For example, during the discussion of Ella’s N2, Elliott asked about her opportunities to speak with native speakers during her early days of studying Chinese in Taiwan, where she was at the time. Sometimes such questions led to passionate discussions or debates on Chinese language learning strategies, pedagogy, or linguistic aspects of the language. Table 5.5 below summarizes and compares the advantages and disadvantages of each approach of discussing narratives produced through narrative inquiry.

5.4 Stage 3: Writing, analyzing, and theorizing SLA in Narrative Two (N2)

173

Table 5.5: Approach to narrative analysis: N1 vis-à-vis N2 Narrative One (commenting approach) Via Word Comment

Narrative Two (discussion approach) Via Skype Discussion

Atomistic

Holistic

Detailed and specific

Broad

Time-delayed (asynchronous) or no response possible from writer

Immediate (synchronous) response required from writer

Quickly accessible post-analysis with written data

Time-consuming to access post-analysis because of required transcription of discussion

Turns at producing written annotations by group members not in predetermined sequence

Sequential response required in predetermined order for ease of communication

Compared to N1 commenting, where personal issues were often shared in writing but left palpably untouched during in-person group meetings, the direct verbal format of the N2 discussions afforded different opportunities, most notably for a new level of intimacy among the group as a whole. For example, at the end of the discussion of Ella’s N2, Patsy asked about whether Ella was still struggling with depression, which Ella had written about in her narratives but had never discussed with Patsy. This kind of interaction marked a new depth of relationship building within the group, and gave validity to individuals’ experiences as language learners and research group members/collaborators in a caring, holistic way. On the downside, the Skype meetings also constrained our interactions in multiple ways. First, the occasional technical problems, such as poor Internet connection or microphone quality, and the inability to have video images for two off-site Skypers at once in 2010 made it almost impossible at times to hear what a “remote” group member was saying. Aside from that, group members were required to report their findings and questions in orchestrated succession, reducing more natural turn-taking, which can be difficult for remote participants without video to follow, and did not allow for the same quality of spontaneous input that tended to characterize our in-person group meetings. In addition, those who offered comments first often pre-empted observations that others had wanted to make. Finally, the discussion data, although recorded, was more ephemeral and somewhat less tangible than the comments and thematic analysis of N1, perhaps because we had become more familiar through N1 with people’s backgrounds and experiences and some N2s did not diverge in major ways from

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those. In all, we felt that despite the shortcomings, the discussion process for N2 enabled us to approach the writing holistically and allowed a different perspective compared to N1 commenting.

5.5 Stage 4: Collaborative research and writing with digital aids While it is not the aim or within the scope of this chapter to detail the metalevel process of collaboratively authoring a book, it is worth acknowledging that this is a rich area for exploration, particularly in the current digital age when group members were variously in Canada, China, Taiwan, and often other places as well. The use of a range of tools such as Skype, PBwiki, and Dropbox as collaborative aids in many senses, made this project possible, while at the same time producing constraints on participation; for example, there was reduced access to PBwiki and Dropbox for group members in China during some stages of the study. In addition, working with multiple versions of documents, different software, and variable access to high-quality Internet connectivity all posed challenges at times to keeping the project on track. Aside from these logistical factors, the more stylistic aspects of collaborative writing, such as creating cohesion while using multiple theoretical perspectives and texts written in different voices, are also relevant to such an inquiry. Like our original thematic analysis that was done in pairs, drafts of chapters (with the exception of the first and last chapters that had one initial author and then input from all others) were originally written by different pairs of researchers, according to their interests and availability, who also undertook the preliminary analyses in that chapter, sometimes with a third co-researcher. The chapters were then circulated for feedback, revision, Skype discussion, and workshopping by the other team members and original authors. It was an iterative process of “member checking” – an approach to interpretive research that seeks participants’ views of researchers’ interpretations for confirmation (or contestation) – in every sense. As part of the broader process of research that we were engaged in, the collaborative writing of this book was a profound method of community building and bidirectional learning that could have wide pedagogical applications and itself warrants greater attention in research.

5.6 Creation and inclusion of Narrative Three (N3) in this book The original narratives (N1 and N2) were written first and foremost for members of the research team and not for the general public. The group debated the advantages and disadvantages of including a version of their narratives in this

5.7 The benefits and limitations of the (meta)narrative research

175

book and agreed that since it had been the original impetus for the research and also conveyed a more holistic version of CAL learners’ respective experiences, narratives should be included. However, because of issues related to differences in length of narratives (some being much longer than others) and then a desire to protect individuals or sites mentioned in earlier private pieces, and other ethical concerns related to privacy or confidentiality, a third truncated version of narratives was produced nearing the conclusion of the book-writing process to be included after the sixth chapter. Another consideration had been whether to intersperse narratives between the analytic chapters as a way of diversifying the genre of reporting, but in the interest of greater coherence of the overall volume, we have appended these narratives as a set, while conceding that they are at the heart of the project. In reducing the length of narratives and deleting parts of our earlier pieces, however, we recognize that not all examples cited in the book can be found in the appended N3s. In addition, the ellipsis of some material may have changed some of the aesthetic, literary, or rhetorical aspects of narratives, but this was inevitable. Nevertheless, we believe that it is in the interest of promoting research and reflection on Chinese language learning and the individuality of each one’s experiences and ways of conveying those that the narrative pieces are included. However, it is beyond the scope of this chapter or book to again analyze in detail how or why these N3s differ from earlier versions.

5.7 Some final reflections: The benefits and limitations of the (meta)narrative research In this chapter we have highlighted, using a mostly narrative genre, some of the key metanarrative aspects of this study. Given the longitudinal and collaborative nature of this research, more comprehensive coverage at this metalevel is not realistic. However, we have tried to tease apart those elements that can shed light on applied linguistics research in general, Chinese learning more specifically, and also learning to conduct and participate in narrative research and writing. In what follows, we briefly highlight some of the benefits and limitations of the methodological approach and reporting found in this chapter.

5.7.1 Benefits Engaging in this project has had a generally positive impact on all the participants involved on a number of levels (cognitive, social, linguistic, and professional). For some group members, it even substantially altered their Chinese

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learning trajectories (e.g., Ella’s and Tim’s Taiwan scholarships in particular). Just prior to beginning this study, Tim had decided to change the focus of his M.A. thesis from Chinese language learning in bilingual programs to English as a second language, for a number of practical reasons. In early conversations with Tim, he often lamented his frustrations with using, speaking, and learning Chinese. However, a year into this research project, his perspectives had shifted a great deal. When Roma and Ella met in Patsy’s SLA course in their first semester of graduate school, Ella remembers hesitantly avoiding Roma’s initial attempt to connect over their shared experience of having studied Chinese. It was a story she was tired of living, and she gave only vague, generic responses as a result. Yet shortly into the research project, Roma and Ella sat for hours in the meeting room after everyone had gone, passionately discussing all manner of politically incorrect topics related to living in China and studying Chinese. The two bonded over stories of expatriate men dating local women, trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to navigate friendships in what was to them a foreign culture, and shopping in a country where extra large is still too small. To use Reason and Rowen’s (1981) concept, this study therefore had a kind of catalytic validity – it catalyzed engagements with Chinese and SLA, made certain personal transformations possible, and engendered opportunities of various types. For Patsy, the project was an inaugural, exploratory study housed in the Centre and part of her attempt to attract and support students and other researchers in a network and community of experienced and novice scholars. Her goal was to take stock of current directions in CAL but also to spearhead innovative research in directions and using methods not typically found in the Chinese applied linguistics research. Those same methods, especially those described in this chapter, are still relatively novel within applied linguistics more generally and represent what we hope is a contribution to knowledge in the field, and in this chapter to narrative research specifically. By participating in this project and in her other Centre activities and duties, her interest in delving into the research literature on CAL and into her own and others’ experiences learning and using CAL over many years was reignited, though finding time to produce her own learning narrative was more difficult than it was for the others, some of whom were able to do parts of it for course credit as well. In comparison, she was much more proactive in her role as a commenter on others’ narratives and in organizing conference presentations, the book contract, and other project-wide details from beginning to end. Many of these anecdotal accounts are about conversations that happened outside of the formal research meetings, yet they transpired specifically because the people involved became connected to one another through the project in

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ways that were different than simply being a classmate, student, teacher, or researcher. Further, they were instrumental in helping group members make sense of their experiences in constructive and cathartic ways. As the group met and discussed our various frustrations, achievements, and perspectives in relation to CAL, the sense that our choppy, incomplete attempts at Chinese were perhaps more the norm than some embarrassing exception to an otherwise successful rule, rippled palpably through the conversations. Referring to this work, Ella wrote that “The opportunity to engage in [this] research was a strong hit of external validation from a powerful source – the academy – and it validated not only the activity of learning Chinese, but me individually as a person who had chosen to devote so much time and effort to doing so” (Lester 2010: 10). Applying this pedagogically, understanding the way validation works to shift people’s motivation can go a long way toward generating enthusiasm and momentum in (language) learning contexts as well as in joint research enterprises. Writing the narratives was a process of self-reflection: the comments allowed the authors to re-examine their life experiences through many other pairs of eyes and thus points of view(ing) (Bell 1997; Goldman-Segall 1998). This research process supported Ella and Roma in contextualizing their experiences with culture shock and depression in relation to learning a foreign language, living abroad, and forging interpersonal relationships. It prompted the participants to further reflect on their highly privileged identities as Caucasians in relation to CAL, as well as their gendered experiences, and their Chinese literacy uses. It provided Rachel, a teacher of Chinese, with an intimate cross-cultural and multiperspectival understanding of the experiences of at least these five learners. Rachel subsequently embarked on doctoral studies in Chinese language education in the same department pursuing some of the issues generated in the study and Elliott also changed the focus of his M.A. thesis research as he became more engaged in the linguistic analysis using computational tools. The six researchers were able to bring in different perspectives, and collaboratively generate explanations about sociocultural issues as well as about CAL learning and teaching. Furthermore, the project inspired “Mandarin Circle,” a self-organized Chinese learning group that met weekly to use the language together – not to discuss research but other topics of shared interest mediated by Chinese.

5.7.2 Limitations and constraints Our ongoing community building outside of the formal research activities, as well as the occasional tensions that surfaced around sensitive issues of gender and race, were potential factors that inhibited the authors from expressing their

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thoughts more freely. For example, Elliott strongly identified with the words he chose in writing the first draft, but the critical comments he received made him “fix up” what he could. As a result, he felt “less attached to the final product [N2]” and did not feel it represented “the truth” about him (Elliott N2: 1). Indeed, choosing what to share and what to omit in the context of writing personal narratives for academic research is not only a common struggle but also often an ethical dilemma in autobiographical and other forms of research because of issues of confidentiality and the need to protect others’ identities. Patsy was aware from the outset that against the backdrop of relatively conservative cognitivist and linguistic traditions in mainstream CAL, narrative and sociocultural inquiry of this sort was already breaking new ground, but that narrative accounts and analyses that veered too far from the discussion of language, culture, and learning into romance, interpersonal conflict (e.g., abroad), or critiques of particular Chinese communities and values might have repercussions affecting the perceived legitimacy and usefulness of the project beyond purposes of in-group community-building and sharing. It might also have consequences for publications. While it was frustrating for some in the group that such holistic aspects of language learners’ lives are typically deemed extraneous despite their substantial impact on learners’ linguistic trajectory, the practical necessity of tailoring research towards the interests of the publishing and research communities influenced various editorial decisions. As a professor and mentor, furthermore, Patsy felt that the significant investment of time and other resources on each member’s part in the collaborative learning exchange also needed to yield some tangible and meaningful “results” from the perspective of the university and Centre funders (which provided our research space, a research coordinator, and assistance with conference travel, research stipends, and other support), especially in the form of publications. These were not initially of particular importance to certain members of the group for whom the research and inquiry process was primary. However, engaging in a major publication could only transpire if every member of the group saw the benefits – and possibilities – of prolonged engagement in the project for that purpose and could maintain an active role in the analysis, writing, and revising, possibly well beyond their time as graduate students. The fact that each group member – whether in Taiwan, China, Vancouver, or Eastern Canada – remained invested in the project to the extent possible given other responsibilities, resulting in a major monograph, speaks to the power of collaboration and community and the goodwill and loyalty of all involved. Ella, for her part, expressed her disappointment that most of our discussions related to CAL were, like our N1 and N2 narratives, mediated by English and not Chinese. She suggested on different occasions that Chinese should be

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used. Patsy resisted this notion on several grounds, not least of which was that she did not have sufficient proficiency in Chinese to discuss the issues meaningfully in Chinese. She also felt awkward participating in the Mandarin Circle (Chinese discussions) with the others, discussing pop culture in Chinese for example, when she had so many other pressing responsibilities and when she also felt inferior to the others in both oral proficiency and literacy. Partly in an attempt to compensate for the lack of Chinese in the narratives, we added the proficiency assessment interview and transcription exercise (see Chapter 2) but that is a far cry from the kinds of data generation recommended, for example, by Pavlenko (2008), who suggested that studies of SLA and bilingualism should also involve bilingual narratives. Some of our personal narratives were captured in the oral Chinese interviews but these were not self-directed accounts of the sort we crafted in our written English narratives. Elliott, coming from a science and engineering background, felt that thematic and narrative analysis, and even some of the linguistic and literacy analysis based on such a small n-size, was not sufficiently precise or conducive to measurement (e.g., inferential statistics) of the sort he felt most comfortable with, a perspective that was compounded when we realized just how flawed or inadequate some of the computational freeware programs and Chinese corpora or word lists were as well (at least for our purposes). However, as with many aspects of the project, we managed to reach consensus in the project through compromise and discussion throughout, with the ultimate goal of stimulating more research in CAL in the future involving greater refinement and sophistication, consistent with the epistemologies, traditions, and new directions associated with different avenues of research.

6 Conclusion: Reflections on Research in Chinese as an Additional Language 6.1 Exploring diverse approaches to research in CAL In the preceding chapters, we have examined the teaching, learning, and use of Chinese from a number of different perspectives, those found in previous research in applied linguistics and those developed in and for our own study. Here we review some major areas of research covered in this book, important findings, and reflections on the strengths and limitations of various approaches to research, including our own. Possibilities for future research are considered along with implications for both language pedagogy and language policy. The book began, in Chapter 1, with a discussion of China and Chinese “rising.” In addition to providing some factual evidence of the surge in interest in the Chinese language internationally, we examined the discursive construction of Chinese language learning and the Chinese learner in contemporary media, government, and nongovernmental initiatives and rhetoric, in scholarly communities, and in the public imagination both historically and currently. Some of these same themes were later examined in the narratives of the five CAL learners featured in the study (especially in terms of sociocultural themes in Chapter 4). The changing contexts for Chinese language education globally and in North America (particularly the United States) were also discussed. Other research on the teaching and learning of Chinese (e.g., Tasker 2012; chapters in Tsung and Cruickshank 2011) has explored how CAL is being taken up in many other contexts – by ethnolinguistic minority groups (Korean, South Asian, Uyghur) within Mainland China or Hong Kong, for example, or by local students and teachers in Singapore, and in teacher education and distance education programs in Australia, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Aggregated, the research conducted to date offers possibilities for a much wider multiperspectival examination of CAL ideologies and practices as they continue to spread, and as interesting new issues and challenges arise. What also becomes clear is that in each geographical and social site where Chinese is being taught, learned and used, each new learner’s experience with CAL is unique. Therefore, discussions about CAL without reference to these larger sociopolitical, economic, educational, linguistic, or personal contexts strip away much of what makes CAL most intriguing, in our view. Although we have foregrounded several types of analysis in the preceding chapters, each with its own theoretical and methodological traditions, some of

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which are still evolving, many others being undertaken were not addressed here. Indeed, more research of all types is needed in CAL. With a critical mass of researchers and with greater momentum and exchange of insights and findings about CAL, the field can begin to rival research in applied linguistics involving other languages and also offer significant and innovative contributions to that work as well. Our study was a pilot study of sorts – an opportunity to survey existing research and consider current knowledge, research methods, and opportunities. The study evolved over three years and enabled us to consider multiple approaches to CAL data generation and analysis. Although the participants in this study represent just a small sample of contemporary (Canadian) Chinese language learners and users, the experiences reported on, we hope, point to many kinds of issues, choices, and constraints that may confront CAL learners in other contexts of sustained Chinese language learning and use. Research is now being conducted on both non-heritage learners and heritage learners of Chinese. However, of the former group, the majority, as in this study, have been Anglophones. Far too few studies examining the language learning processes, narratives, experiences, profiles, and achievements of learners have involved participants (learners) from other ethnolinguistic, racial, cultural, social, and socio-economic backgrounds. This situation, we hope, will begin to change with the expansion of the CAL research agenda and the international research community investigating Chinese. More research with different research populations exploring similar research questions would be very informative. As we noted in Chapter 4, moreover, the experiences of Chinese heritage-language learners are equally important to understand, given their personal (ancestral) histories with Chinese and their personal and familial stake in the development and maintenance of the language. But heritage language learners in other locations, such as in the Mauritius, Indonesia, or South America, would provide other insights into their experiences and investments in Chinese and “Chineseness” as well.

6.2 Recurring themes in CAL and in our study 6.2.1 Descriptions of language proficiency Chapter 2 provided an overview of existing descriptions of Chinese proficiency and linguistic development but also revealed that much more research is needed in this area. At present, there are no comprehensive scales that we know of

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related to Chinese language acquisition and developmental stages, for example.1 Even finding equivalencies among the standardized proficiency tests that currently exist or earlier versions of those tests was like putting together pieces of a puzzle, some parts of which seem to be missing. Furthermore, the individual structures typically chosen for analysis are often selected more because of how they illuminate the inner workings of a particular linguistic structure or construct – aspect marking, fluency, or passivization, for example – or as a way of analyzing development over time. They do not capture the relationships in development across different areas of language, showing interim stages, U-shaped learning curves, and other sorts of linguistic development widely reported in the learning of certain European languages in the 1980s (Ellis 2008; Ortega 2009). While some might argue that it would be retrograde to return to such descriptive studies, there are so few foundational “performance-analysis” studies or benchmarks of that sort for Chinese that tracking development becomes difficult. Discourse-level grammatical features, lexical sophistication (e.g., the use of four-character idioms), and metaphorical uses of verb complements and other aspects of language are all promising areas for further study. These same areas constitute points for possible pedagogical attention as well to raise the awareness of longtime Chinese users whose language has not yet encompassed such forms. The group found the “can do” orientation of the Common European Framework for Languages (CEFR) to be a very non-threatening and, indeed, possibly motivating rubric for assessing one’s own or others’ abilities in Chinese, for documenting performance, and for considering the next steps for functional language growth. People’s own assessments also seemed quite consistent with

1 We are grateful to Liam Doherty (personal communication, Nov. 2012) for bringing to our attention two promising resources that might begin to fill this void. The first resource is by Shi Jiahui (1998): 外国留学生22类现代汉语句式的习得顺序研究 Wàiguó liúxuéshēng 22 lèi xiàndài Hànyŭ jùshì de xídé shùnxù yánjiū [Research on the order of acquisition of 22 Modern Chinese sentence structure types of foreign overseas students], from 世界汉语教学 Shìjiè Hànyŭ Jiàoxué [World Chinese Instruction], 46, 77–98. The second is a document by Shu Zhaomin and Wang Jiale (2005) of the National Taiwan Normal University Mandarin Training Centre and Chinese Language Instruction Research Institute: 英语为母语者来台学习华语的中介语语料库与运用 Yīngyŭ wéi mŭyŭzhě lái tái xuéxí Huáyŭ de zhōngjièyŭ yŭliàokù yŭ yùnyòng [Interlanguage corpus and usage of English native speakers studying Mandarin in Taiwan]. The paper reports on research conducted in 2004–05 by Dr. Deng Shouxin in Taiwan. Retrieved Nov. 12, 2012 from http://chinese.mtc.ntnu.edu.tw/ moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=210 Both resources evidently use corpus tools to document developmental (interlanguage) patterns of international CAL students in either Beijing (the first study) or Taipei (the second). Data for the latter study came from (Anglophone) students’ homework, essay questions, short assignments, test papers, textbook exercises, diaries, etc.

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our other more “objective” measures of grammatical, lexical, and fluency performance. However, given the wide disparities in participants’ oral and written proficiency and also the wide latitude within any one level or designation of CEFR, it is best seen in research projects such as this one as a rough estimate of ability – but one that captured quite well differences within the group. The ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview is commonly used in U.S.-based research on language learning but is not commonly used in Canadian research or institutions and trained Chinese language testers are therefore not easily found. Analyses of the CAL data in this study indicated that learners whose own self-assessments and levels of formal Chinese study were higher typically made greater use of particular verb complement structures, lower-frequency (more difficult) vocabulary, had higher fluency ratings (with one exception), and were able to expand the use of some grammatical or lexical structures to more metaphorical meanings. However, certain target structures such as the focusconstruction or passive occurred with such low frequency in the interview discourse generated in this study that they were not useful measures of development. Another challenge for researchers in L2 Chinese research is whether – and how – to use syllable/character vs. word (one or more syllables/characters) as an index of lexical or literate knowledge and in fluency calculations. In this study we opted for words (based on lexical concordance tools and parsers) as an index of lexical variety, density, and sophistication; characters (or pīnyīn syllables) and words for a discussion of literacy practices; and syllables for fluency calculations. The use of existing databases such as HSK vocabulary lists (by level) and LCMC vocabulary lists with attested frequency of usage were helpful in some respects but seem to be biased toward written language, and especially character usage, and thus did not correspond as well as hoped to oral lexical usage. Furthermore, the parser used its own set of reference data and algorithms, whereas people choose different ways of breaking up Chinese into words or concepts (e.g., in the case of HSK wordlists, chosen for a specific pedagogical purpose), meaning that the parser does not always correspond perfectly with our intuitive sense of correct language or overlap perfectly with a set of reference “frequency data.” Although we explored other corpus and parser options, most are not publicly or freely accessible or as well known. Finally, in our discussions of fluency we raised the issue that a faster rate of speech might not always correspond with greater grammatical proficiency (or overall proficiency), especially when pausing or other measures of disfluency were used to help speakers plan and utter more grammatically or lexically sophisticated phrases or helped them express more complicated ideas, which lower-proficiency speakers would be highly unlikely to attempt and might therefore choose to convey in English instead.

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6.2.2 Literacy Processes, priorities, and problems in learning to read and write Chinese characters came up in many sections of this book, first in terms of the perhaps undue importance – even “fetishization” – of characters among the Chinese educational elite (see Unger 2004; Lurie 2006; McDonald 2009) and then in terms of prior research and our own experiences with learning Chinese and performance on the transcription and computer-mediated writing task. Exceptionalism, exoticism, and Orientalism related to character mastery and use were also described, since character proficiency has historically distinguished the highly educated (even among Chinese) from less educated or uneducated commoners. In this study, too, participants sometimes reported their embarrassment about being – or being perceived as – character-illiterate, in that it reflects an imbalance in oral and written proficiency, suggests a lack of formal cultivation in the L2 and in traditional Chinese culture, and also denies the same learners opportunities for more efficient input and autonomy as CAL learners. A lack of Chinese literacy also prevents individuals with intermediate or higher conversational ability to take classes that cater well to their development in the two modes – typically requiring that they regress to elementary classes in order to learn basic characters or otherwise experience very steep learning curves in courses with many more characters a day or week than are in fact learnable. For many heritage-language learners this is also an issue and forms the basis for obstacles the students may encounter in being seen as legitimate language learners, since it is often assumed that students’ literacy levels will roughly parallel their oral proficiency and that if they are already conversant in Chinese they are overqualified for university credit courses (Li and Duff 2008).2 However, for more of the learners in the study than not, Chinese character-based literacy was a strong inducement to learning the language in the first place, an intellectual and literary hook. And reading texts with characters continued to intrigue and delight them, so much so that two (Ella and Elliott) had sought to master a second orthographic system after having already attained a high level of proficiency in another (Simplified to Traditional for Ella, and vice versa for Elliott). This phenomenon also underscores intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic aspects of CAL that are

2 Ed McDonald (personal communication, September 2011) also notes that the “mixed script” employed in many textbooks, i.e., basically pīnyīn with known characters “inserted,” because of the strong ideological “requirement” that learning Chinese must involve characters from the start, but mixing word-based and character-based scripts in the one text, he argues, confounds two very different kinds of reading strategies, and in any case these “mixed script” types of texts are never found outside textbooks (cf. McDonald 2011a).

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easily downplayed in linguistic or even sociocultural accounts of SLA that give prominence to oral proficiency alone. Yet rather than play into the fetishization of, or preoccupation with, character-based literacy critiqued in Chapter 1 and above, we wish to emphasize that both oral and written aspects of Chinese affect people’s sense of language identity in Chinese in different ways. We included Chapter 3 in this book precisely to address such issues. What we were not able to capture sufficiently in our discussions of literacy here was about learning to communicate in Chinese using new media, websites, online tools, blogging, visual and verbal humour, language play, and texting, and the hybrid forms of literacy usually engendered by those same media and practices. (Duff et al. 2012 offers more examples of this aspect of CAL from data subsequently provided by the study participants.) Moreover, functional tests or systematic measures or evidence of literacy, including favoured everyday literacy practices, were not included in this book. Therefore, in addition to presenting reasons why Chinese literacy can be so daunting for learners, a more indepth analysis of people’s strategies for producing or comprehending character-based texts of different types is a direction for additional research. A “social practices of literacy” perspective seeks to provide greater contextualization of the multiple purposes and types of literacy people engage with in their everyday lives, a perspective that is largely missing from current CAL literacy research. In addition, the role of digital technologies for mediating literacy practices must be examined much more, as this also has concrete pedagogical implications, akin to recent debates about whether children should continue to learn English cursive script at school or, rather, keyboarding.

6.2.3 Negotiating identities and communities Chapter 4 provided a theoretical overview of issues connected with identity and community in SLA and in CAL specifically, aspects of Chinese development that have not been addressed much in the past either by means of narrative-based research or other approaches. Critical incidents and accounts produced by the participants (e.g., in relation to agency, positioning, and gender) in some respects mirror research reporting on (Anglophone) learners’ perceptions of their language learning and socialization in other L2 contexts (see studies cited in that chapter). Common points include, for example, a sense of entitlement (to opportunities for L2 language practice and access to L2 social networks), privilege, and optimism about one’s language learning and future opportunities and acculturation, at least initially, followed by disappointment about social or cultural barriers, or cultural dissonance, alienation, or marginalization vis-à-vis the target-language community, either by choice or by circumstance.

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Narratives based on immigrants’ experiences rather than those of migrant sojourners or transnationals such as participants in this study often are characterized by themes related to loss of self, loss of one’s L1, or other aspects of life before emigration (e.g., Hoffman 1989; see Pavlenko and Lantolf 2000). With study-abroad students or sojourners abroad or in other L2 contexts, that sense of loss (i.e., of one’s former self) is not reported to be as acute or prolonged nor is as much at stake for the learner generally. Loss of one’s imagined, desired, or projected self as an L2 learner and user is often an issue though, particularly because people frequently have unrealistic expectations about the progress they will make. Study-abroad literature has shown that learners may be disappointed with their language achievements or acculturation or social networks related to their L2 practice while away (e.g., Kinginger 2008), not so much in terms of the selves they had imagined they might become but, rather, the kinds of meaningful cultural, interpersonal, and other experiences together with the L2 proficiency they had anticipated achieving while away. In comparison with the amount of research conducted over the past decade on study abroad and SLA on (mostly) White Anglophone Americans of continental European languages such as French, Spanish, or Russian, or Asian learners of English, relatively little qualitative research has been conducted on study abroad or other forms of sojourns or immigration by learners of Arabic, or south and east Asian languages, such as Chinese (although we are aware that some very promising work is currently underway). Exceptions include research on L2 Japanese and a small amount of research on L2 Indonesian, framed in terms of socialization into particular speech acts or grammatical forms (e.g., politeness markers in Japanese; leave-taking or food-appreciation routines in Indonesian) (see Cook 2008; DuFon and Churchill 2006; Jackson 2008). Perhaps some of the themes reported in this study pertaining to agency (the desired “conquest” of a new language and culture) and positioning (as exotic outsiders learning a “difficult” language) might be similar to what would be found in these other ethnolinguistic SLA contexts. In addition, with some of those less-commonly-researched L2s (e.g., Arabic, Punjabi), similar issues might arise in terms of the multiple oral or written varieties of the target language (Egyptian Arabic vs. Moroccan or Iraqi Arabic; one of many varieties of oral Punjabi spoken in India or Pakistan and represented in various different written scripts – Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, or Devanagari – and the distinct cultural identities and social status they index). The oral or written dialect chosen by students or other users of the language marks them sociolinguistically, possibly in conflicting ways and also possibly as outsiders to the region where they are sojourners. The link between agency, positionality, and identity became relevant in our study when the research participants’ apparent reasons for exerting and expressing agency were so they might be seen as special, “unique,” unlike (and

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indeed, superior to) other foreigners/sojourners in China and Taiwan by virtue of their CAL learning, and also distinct from peers in Canada. The same motives could underpin the desire of non-heritage-background learners of Arabic or Punjabi (or other languages) to distinguish themselves from their own peers as well. On the other hand, given the economic and social opportunities, visibility and perhaps mystique associated with Chinese at present, there might arguably be more perceived prestige associated with that language choice and possibly more tangible economic benefits as well. One could easily imagine, though, that for female learners of various other non-European languages in more conservative or traditional cultures, given the cultural politics related to gender often found in communities where those languages are spoken, similar or perhaps even more polarizing issues related to gender in comparison to those reported here might arise. Then again, there might be greater male-male bonding among learners with local males than occurred in this study, and proscriptions against male relationships with local females, even for language exchange purposes. Furthermore, there might be greater restrictions on females’ social interactions and movement in public (depending on the country and community) and limited opportunities for them to relate to local males (or even expatriates) as well, thus reduced opportunities for their L2 use. These comments are based on speculation, however, and further research is needed to make intercultural and crosslinguistic comparisons in terms of the social and cultural positioning of language learner-sojourners, issues of gender and access to language practice, and opportunities for or desirability of community membership. Just as learners might have unreasonably high expectations regarding their L2 language and literacy acquisition either abroad or at home, they might also have unrealistic expectations about gaining access to and acceptance and full participation within target-language communities. Both aspects of SLA were observed in this study, in which none of the participants were in homestay situations within the Chinese-speaking communities in which they lived. Indeed, it is only a relatively recent development that exchange, study, and scholarship programs in China have allowed students to participate in extended homestays, a situation which may offer international students other kinds of family and community memberships than programs without homestays do.

6.3 Triangulating, reconciling, and interrogating diverse perspectives, experiences, and methods for analyzing CAL One aspect of the project referred to in earlier chapters was our collaborative, team-based approach to examining the authors’ own and others’ CAL experiences,

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drawing on linguistic analysis, sociocultural thematic (content) analysis of narrative data, and (meta)narrative analysis. Beyond the practicalities of working together in this way on different kinds of analysis and writing about the research is the fundamental question: Just how compatible are these three approaches to SLA? The first approach, evident in Chapter 2 especially, is based on a more or less (post)positivist assumption that you can pin down and objectively describe aspects of what a person knows or “can do” in another language based on a test or certain prescribed tasks, and in doing so can make meaningful comparisons across speakers and between the same speaker’s performance at two points in time. Such comparisons naturally lead to inferences about differences in proficiency among learners cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Allowing for our earlier acknowledgement that the interview is a particular kind of speech event and that interview discourse elicits certain kinds of language and “performed proficiency” (as well as affect, identities, and interactions) and not others, used for assessment purposes and not communication for its own sake, there are still constraints when trying to capture what people “can do” with language based on self-reported (retrospective and current) data and linguistic analysis of L2 production. For example, because the interview was not meant to be highly interactive (although some, like Tim, opted to make it more so because it seemed more natural that way), it did not reveal the participants’ ability to use some of the ordinary conversational gambits or speech routines that are part of everyday interactions with peers or other interlocutors. But even with a wider sampling of natural conversational interaction and an interview based on a wider range of tasks and topics, assessment of this type, especially for longterm learners, is bound to be very partial. It is not easy to reconcile, on the one hand, a “can-do” and a “want-to-do” (or “like-to-do,” or “need-to-be-able-to-do,” or even “refuse-to-do”) orientation and epistemology in meaningful natural interactions using language as resource and, on the other hand, the kinds of deficit models implicit in most linguistic assessments (e.g., fluency, grammar, lexis). Another approach would have been to examine all the creative and resourceful means by which particpants tried to express the same idea, for example, by comparing their output on just one task and seeing what they came up with, and how or why they chose those means, and ways in which they used language for the sheer pleasure of experimenting with self-expression in Chinese, effecting their sinophone identities. Our discussion of participants’ literacy development and use in Chapter 3 (and the global analysis of the English-based narratives in Chapter 5) takes exactly this approach by seeking a task that all participants could engage in by using their own utterances as a foundation for their writing (therefore words and meanings they understood and could express orally), then drawing on and displaying the orthographic

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resources and strategies that are part of each one’s unique literacy repertoire (in Chinese for Chapters 2 and 3, and in English for the written narratives). These literacy artifacts also revealed a kind of interactivity or interdiscursivity with the intended reader, Rachel, with word and character play, expressions of doubt, the use of English and mixing of Simplified and Traditional characters. The sociocultural analysis presented in Chapter 4, informed by sociocultural theory and constructivism, has at its foundation the notion that narrative is performative and dialogic, both in self-generated written narratives and in interview-based narratives. Further, given that the CAL narratives were generated in English primarily, the group’s L1, assessment was not the goal. Even so, by trying to define notions of identity and community – and how these played out in each one’s experience – we also tried to categorize and code, and look for similarities and differences across experiences that were themselves narrative reconstructions that were also changing from one narrative to the next. Recognizing the inherent fluidity of identity and community relations and participation, and trying to document a manageable number of common themes involved some of the same challenges as the linguistic analysis – being highly selective, partial, and looking more for what is common and shared, perhaps, than what is unique, in part because of the nature of reporting and the need to be parsimonious and intersubjective. That is, the analytic approach emphasized the shared social and semiotic resources the participants had access to, and the common ideological framings which gave individuals variable access to those resources.3 The third methodological lens through which we analyzed data, using a metanarrative approach, again involved using inductively-generated codes and categories representing the interactions occurring in the margins of our narratives and deriving common themes in terms of rhetorical features, such as narrative style, metaphors, approaches to revision, and the communicative moves taking place among participants with respect to their narratives and their Chinese learning experiences. Yet some narrative researchers might find this practice of coding, counting, and presenting data in charts too positivist, too far removed from the richness of language, from interactivity, or from the essence and nuances of the narratives (both in the texts themselves and in the margins); similarly, the role of the human interlocutors commenting upon one another’s narratives and on others’ comments might seem to be stripped away in such reductive analyses. (Other qualitative analyses of the narrative data are planned for separate publications.) Yet to understand the types of interactions taking place in those narrative, electronic textual spaces, and to extrapolate 3 We thank Ed McDonald (personal communication, September 2011) for providing this Systemic Functional Linguistic interpretation of this concept.

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from those the nature of the theory-building process, data reduction was a helpful tool to ascertain patterns and trends. Here again emic and etic perspectives became relevant, however, as it was easier to interpret our own comments in margins, for example, and what motivated them, the intention behind the comment, or whether the tone was meant to be humorous, teasing, cynical, or corrective (or all of those things), than it was another person’s. A single such annotated comment might involve numerous meanings and functions and a more Bakhtinian analysis of the implicit multivoicedness and dialogism would be very fruitful (e.g., Ball and Freedman 2004; Hall, Vitanova, and Marchenkova 2005). Again, our representation, although done with the sorts of reliability checks common in positivist applied linguistic studies for the sake of consistency, is still an (inter)subjective reading of highly intertextual and relatively high-inference data. Being co-researchers, member checking was carried out throughout but could not be done at the level of each coded element or fluency analysis or narrative description. A degree of trust on the part of researchers was necessary about our joint analyses and writing, although each participant and co-author had multiple opportunities to revise and correct drafts of the chapters as it was a highly recursive process. In turn, the “trustworthiness” and credibility of the analysis as far as readers are concerned or whether it is interesting and informative must be judged in light of the evidence or data provided, including samples of our narratives. Thus, all three types of analyses, although based on quite different research traditions and even epistemologies, aimed at coming up with themes, labels, descriptors, and explanations or interpretations for very dynamic, organic processes that may not be best analyzed thus but are better looked at holistically as stories (albeit evolving ones), in the stand-alone narratives in Appendix A, precisely where the project began. We acknowledge some of these tensions and perhaps contradictions yet still feel confident that the three sets of analyses, plus the everyday literacies analysis which is more aligned with sociocultural research, helped capture not only the different aspects of CAL learning and performance, but also the nature of a project such as this, based as it is on narrative co-production and reporting. The richness and texture of the final result, although it cannot easily be summarized in one chapter, provides complementary ways of viewing and trying to understand SLA and being users of Chinese.

6.4 Limitations and reflections Some limitations of the study, including the analyses we conducted, were referred to earlier in this chapter and elsewhere. One obvious additional shortcoming is that our review of existing research has for the most part excluded

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publications not written in English although some publications in Chinese were consulted. As a result, we may not have adequately (re)presented interesting and relevant new research coming out of China or Taiwan or published in Chinese or other languages elsewhere. One reason for this major omission was limited access to such source materials and limited academic literacy in Chinese for several of us. However, whereas cognitive, psycholinguistic, social-psychological, and linguistic research has very strong roots in China, narrative and sociocultural CAL research appears to be much less common than in North America judging from international conferences and publications. It is our hope that this research might inspire colleagues in other contexts to undertake work similar to ours and that our publication might be a springboard to finding out more about comparable work being conducted elsewhere. A final point relates to sampling and generalizability (cf. Duff 2008b). The CAL participants in this study were a relatively homogeneous, small pilot group of Anglo-Canadian learners of Chinese, affiliated at the time with a university on the west coast of Canada, the so-called Asia-Pacific Gateway, at a particular historical moment. All of these factors – the nature of our respective experiences and interests, both past and present – has necessarily driven the types of writing and analysis done for this study. We cannot generalize from our experiences to other CAL learners at other times, in other sites, or from different sorts of backgrounds. However, what we tried to do was contextualize and theorize CAL (i.e., produce analytic generalizations) based on the five cases and our cross-case analysis of the group’s various experiences (Duff 2008b). We also provided examples of structures or aspects of proficiency that might be examined by others with other types of subjects, discussed themes that have currency in other applied linguistic research, and suggested directions for meta-analysis or synthesis of narrative data of the sort generated here.

6.5 Pedagogical and policy implications Some recent recommendations for CAL language pedagogy and teacher education are presented by Duff and Lester (2008), Everson and Xiao (2008), and Tsung and Cruickshank (2011). As Orton (2011) reports, based on research in the UK, United States, and Australia, one of the factors impeding the improvement and growth in Chinese language education internationally as well as the retention of students in CAL is the supply of well qualified teachers whose teaching methods are appropriate in the context of local pedagogical standards and cultures. Strides are being made in that direction but supply is unable to keep pace with demand. A number of principles and standards documents have

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been produced for Chinese language instructors as a result (e.g., Duff 2008a; Everson and Xiao 2008; Orton 2011). However, as this book has revealed, the complexity of the Chinese language itself and the many purposes for which it is being learned nowadays, combined with the vast array of program types and demographics and institutional contexts internationally, inevitably places heavy demands on teachers, students, and programs. Key features of the language that continue to stymie learners are, from Orton’s perspective, the tone system, grammatical particles (e.g., aspect markers) and verb complements, the abundance of homophones, and the reading and writing of characters, all of which were discussed earlier in this book. Not only is the choice and sequencing of orthographies (e.g., pīnyīn vs. bopomofo vs. Simplified vs. Traditional characters) an ongoing bone of contention in many programs, but often lacking within character teaching is the development of learners’ meta-awareness of how characters function: that is, an awareness of the relationship between radicals and whole characters to provide learners access to a greater understanding of character composition and morphological/ lexical structure, which makes learning more efficient than learning characters holistically as unique items; or the awareness that a character-based orthography (a “charactery”) involves very different reading strategies from an alphabetic orthography. For teachers who learned characters relatively intuitively as children, this kind of “radical” [sic] knowledge may not be apparent either. In addition, programs need to find better mechanisms, both for curricular and extracurricular practice, to integrate learners with vastly different oral and literate L2 profiles in courses that for the most part assume students have roughly equal competence in both. Since for many learners, such as HL students or non-HL learners who have resided in Chinese-speaking regions, such a balance is often their desire but their experiences have given them a much stronger foundation in one mode than another. Having students return to instruction on basic greetings or vocabulary, in order to learn to write them, when they are already able to discuss more cognitively and linguistically advanced topics in the L2, can be so demotivating that they withdraw from formal instruction entirely. Alternatively, requiring them to start in beginner courses in order to become literate in Chinese yet insisting that they remain silent, as was Tim’s experience, denies them the linguistic achievements they have already made and can be equally invalidating. Similarly, having adults read materials written for young children so the written texts are less difficult than age-appropriate ones deprives them of access to suitable, cognitively stimulating texts (that should probably be modified anyway) and, likewise, can be infantilizing and demoralizing. A growing number of programs, based on having sufficient enrolment numbers and finances, can offer separate tracks for people with prior (mostly oral) language

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learning and CAL cultural experience and those without such a background, whether that background derives from Chinese ethnicity and familial exposure or other kinds of prior experience. Even so, the aspects of language and culture of greatest interest to HL learners might be quite different from the interests of non-HL learners. More attention needs to be paid to this curricular conundrum. In this study, some of the CAL learners reflected directly on the types of formal instruction they had received (e.g., character instruction) and their perceptions of its overall effectiveness or relevance. Perhaps more common were reflections and misgivings about post-instructional opportunities to continue to learn and use Mandarin in engaging social networks with peers and opportunities to use enjoyable and appropriate language materials and media for their purposes. Finding suitable reading materials was a major source of frustration for some of the learners. One of the current priorities in Chinese language education internationally is the development of better instructional materials (e.g., Hanban, personal communication, April 2011) but there is still much room for the development of stimulating extracurricular materials for personal development and enjoyment. One observation, for example, is that many language textbooks introduce far too many new lexical items per chapter – items that are never revisited or recycled later and are often low-frequency expressions – which flies in the face of conventional wisdom about vocabulary learnability and acquisition and therefore is not the best form of either instruction or practice (e.g., Nation 2011). When each lexical item, moreover, is represented by a unique character or combination of characters, the demand on learners is all the greater. Furthermore, based on his review of Chinese L2 textbooks (particularly those produced in China and Taiwan), Doherty (2005: 4) remarked that CSL textbooks and their authors must become aware of the issues that impact the foreign learner in studying and using Chinese. They ignore these issues at their peril: the rise of Mandarin as a global language will necessitate a complete overhaul and reassessment of the way in which CSL is taught outside of China, and of those materials that are used to teach it.

Similarly, there is an acute need for accessible materials that are not designed as textbooks but can extend, enhance, and support people’s enjoyment, knowledge, and use of (L2) Chinese across multiple modalities.

6.6 Future research directions and possibilities However innovative this project may have been, the claims we can make based on it are naturally constrained by the subject/participant pool and the status of participants as not only CAL learners and users but (current and former) students

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and practitioners in applied linguistics. All are, or have been, language educators as well. Future research building upon this research would ideally add to the first languages (and types of languages) of learners and increase the ethnic, racial, and geographical composition to include a wider variety of sociolinguistic contexts for language learning and use. Furthermore, because of the way the study evolved, no international standardized tests of Chinese proficiency or widely used oral proficiency protocols and descriptors were used for reasons explained in Chapter 2. However, with a much larger subject pool, and with more inclusive forms of tests available now (such as the revised HSK) that enable speakers with intermediate-level proficiency but limited character-based literacy to take multi-skill tests, there might be some merit in including measures of proficiency that could be interpreted more easily by researchers elsewhere. Naturally, the use of such measures depends greatly on the purposes or goals of a given project and researchers’ notions of proficiency. Interestingly, with the aforementioned revision of the HSK test and its greater accessibility, we found that benchmarks for vocabulary knowledge seemed to have been lowered, presumably to encourage a wider range of potential test-takers to take the test and to give them more credit for the vocabulary they have. We see in such a shift a changing ethos in CAL assessment, at least on that widely used test, perhaps comparable to the “can do” spirit of CEFR. A similar reduction in expectations was observed by group members in older versions of Taiwanese CAL tests, such as TOP as it evolved to TOCFL. Just as clothing size labels are sometimes adjusted by manufacturers to flatter those wearing larger sizes (calling what was formerly a size 14 a 12, for example), there seems to have been some resizing and recalibration of Chinese assessment measures to reward and encourage learners.

6.7 Conclusion: Learning Chinese as a global and cosmopolitan language There is no question that Chinese is ascendant as a global language, given the size and influence of the Chinese economy, the growing diaspora, and China’s active internationalization efforts in other spheres. CAL learners, once considered ambitious and unusual for their attempts to study what used to be considered a “less-commonly-taught-language” to an advanced level, will soon be commonplace. The politics of teaching, learning, and assessing Chinese will continue to loom large as well, especially in light of sensibilities and histories surrounding language planning and language policies in different regions and competition among ethnolinguistic groups and languages for recognition and

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scarce resources. The same kinds of issues long associated with the English language in colonial and postcolonial contexts, such as “hegemonic” policies promoting or legislating the use of English (particular high-status varieties of English) at the expense of other languages and other varieties of English, have already surfaced in relation to Mandarin Chinese, both in mass media and academic critiques (e.g., Li Wei and Zhu Hua 2012; McDonald 2012). However, while Chinese may be global, it may not yet be perceived as cosmopolitan because the “ownership” of Chinese continues to be associated with native speakers and especially speakers and writers of Standard Modern Chinese in Chinese-speaking regions, and typically those writing from positions of conventional institutional power (e.g., universities, publishing houses, governmental agencies). For Chinese to be identified with greater cosmopolitanism, a greater sense of linguistic and cultural ownership would need to be shared with sinophones worldwide, native and non-native. Similarly, the content of material in both formal instructional curriculum and extracurricular materials would not need to be so strictly related to traditional Chinese cultural themes and places, but rather to issues and voices around the world related to human experience more generally. The notion of “soft power,” a concept developed by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye (1990), is frequently used by China watchers – and now by Chinese officials too – to describe China’s feverish promotion of Chinese language and culture through educational programs and exhibitions worldwide. The “soft power” campaigns and their significance are also attracting attention as Confucius Institutes and their curricula, materials, volunteer teachers, programs for teacher development, assessment tools, and the showcasing of Chinese culture spread around the world, and as hundreds of thousands of foreign students choose to study in China – all strategies the British Council has used for generations to spread British cultural influence, the English language, and commercial and political interests worldwide (Orton 2009) and which they are also watching carefully vis-à-vis Chinese (Graddol 2006). But the success of the Chinese cultural, linguistic, media (e.g., the internationalization of CCTV programs), and economic soft power initiatives, according to Nye (2012) in a recent Wall Street Journal article, are confounded or tempered to a large extent by an emphasis on the cultural and historical greatness of China (“the Middle Kingdom”) rather than a celebration of the contempory Chinese “heroes of today in civil society, the arts and the private sector” (A12). The substance of this observation and critique is in part found in Chinese language curricula, materials, and approaches to teaching Chinese as well (McDonald 2012). Nye claims that without cultivating an international taste for Chinese contemporary culture or enacting various kinds of reforms, for example, China will not in fact be able

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to fulfill its soft-power potential, which may have implications for Chinese language education as well. Given the surge in interest and opportunities for students of all ages to learn Chinese over the past decade, the next decade will be very important in revealing the arc, demographics, and future of CAL learning and its interdependence with other kinds of changes taking place in the Chinese-speaking world and globally. It is therefore a very exciting time for “China watchers,” Chinese applied linguistics, and sinophones, alike. Finally, since CAL research is still at its infancy, we look forward to the growth and development of applied linguistics research to the point where Chinese applied linguists are not simply writing for one another but are contributing important insights to wider discussions in applied linguistics, language education, and possibly other fields that are relevant to other languages and communities of scholars, and for the general public as well. This book has been our modest exploration into possibilities for doing precisely that.

Appendices

Appendix A: CAL Learners’ Narratives Preface The narratives presented here have been adapted for publication from the original narratives (N1 and N2) written by the five research participants and presented in alphabetical order by first name, following our pattern of presentation in the rest of the book. As with the initial narratives (N1) and the subsequent rewriting of their second versions (N2), few guidelines were given for the preparation of these final texts (N3), aside from a page limit of 25 double-spaced pages. Some discussion took place about potential aspects to address in this version, such as protecting the privacy of people discussed in anecdotes as well as reconsidering the sharing of information that could have a potentially detrimental effect on the writer’s professional image. In short, the overarching purpose of adjusting the narratives one final time was to allow each writer to present their personal story in a manner with which they felt comfortable and also to shorten some of the longer narratives so that the set were more consistent in length. Some of the visual material included in earlier versions was also deleted for reasons of space. In the case of Ella’s N3, there is also a change of orthography for the Chinese characters she incorporate. In N1 she used all Simplified characters, but after studying in Taiwan switched to Traditional characters for N2. Revising for N3 after being back in Canada for some time, it retroactively made sense to her to use Simplified characters for the portion of her narrative that covers her earlier time in China, and Traditional characters for the later time in Taiwan. As a result of the revision process, not all quotes and examples analyzed or cited in the preceding chapters are found in these final (N3) versions of the narratives. However, key components and stylistic elements of each narrative have been preserved and presented in order to allow readers the option of experiencing the data in its original form as much as possible as a complement to our analysis. Along with being the impetus for this book, each of these narratives can stand alone as a personal history of language acquisition, contributing to the growing body of work related to the study of Chinese.

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Ella’s Narrative (N3) Chinese, An Acquired Taste what language do you laugh in? * what language do you cry in? what language do you dance in? * make romance in? what language do you make love in? * pray to the above in? what language are your fears? * what language are your tears? —lyrics from the song “Is love enough?” by Michael Franti

The story I used to tell about Chinese was a simplified one, disconnected from its traditional roots just like the characters. Now, after years of telling and retelling this story – after experiencing, perceiving, interpreting, mulling over, remembering, sharing, reacting to, and evolving with it – I am finally ready to offer this, more integrated, story. Of course, a story of union must first begin with a chasm.

History of here, theory of there (1993–1999) I grew up in a strict Jehovah’s Witness (JW) family in British Columbia, Canada. At age 17 I was exploding for want of freedom. As a sanctioned way to move out of my parents’ home and gain some of the freedom I longed for, I married a JW man. Being under the headship of a young, fun-loving husband seemed like a much better choice than the contentious paternal control in my nuclear family. Plus, I thought I was in love. My husband was not as devout as my parents; he bought me alcohol and let me party, and he introduced me to (Wing Chun) kung fu. For the few months that we were married, we lived that infamous “double life” – going to JW meetings as required, and spending our free time engaged in unacceptable activities.1 But for me, for my sheltered 17-year-old-self, kung fu was the sun coming out after a long, dark winter, and I blossomed from its practice. Soon I began going to kung fu classes instead of JW meetings; I loved the sweat and the militancy and the ‘foreignness’ of it, and I loved the growing sense of power it was generating in me.

1 In addition to strict rules about drinking and drugs, JW’s consider kung fu to be both a dangerous spiritual practice and a breeding ground for violence.

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The explosion towards freedom that had been rumbling in me like an unpredictably dormant volcano did indeed erupt. The reality of living with a man I had previously only known through participation in common religious activities and chaperoned dates set in, and my young heart was quick to change. It didn’t take long before the kung fu teacher, a married Caucasian man ten years older than me, and I fell in love. I left my husband, the kung fu teacher left his wife, and the two of us began our story (a story, like so many others I have had, that would end with me searching Life of Limited Color for something I had not yet found). I did not hide my behaviour from my religious commuSex made me a sheep nity, and naively, I did not fear their punishstrayed from the fold and ment. I was 18 and I was invincible. blackened, as instantly as Need it be said that divorce because you orgasm squirts its fall in love with somebody else is not allowed liquid love-dye. in the JW religion? I understood that my choices The fold collectively gasped would leave the elders in the congregation no and shrank away choice but to disfellowship me, but I was paslest black be a color that sionate and stubborn and, like many 18-yearbleeds in the wash olds, wanted to blaze my own path. After the tie-dying the congregation. closed door meeting with three old white men in suits who grilled me about my sex life, there And so I’ve been was the requisite public announcement of my copulating on hilltop disfellowshipping to the congregation. And then after hilltop, my curly black there was the shunning. Before the announcefur penetrated by all the ment I was firmly, forcibly even, part of that wolves. They inject community; after it no one, including my family, their worldly ways and was permitted to speak to me. I was now solidly wild words into my on the other side of the chasm, while my family formative years, and I continued to stand, resolutely, on their religious collect the experiences ground. The shame and grief the event of my like pennies in a pig disfellowshipping brought to my parents was (and continues to be) their greatest disappointuntil I am this stuffed ment, and of course, the lack of their fundafraying animal, the faded mental approval has scarred and profoundly black and white shaped my life. answers of my childhood Temporarily, kung fu replaced everything. running grey through my life. I practiced hard, five nights a week for five years. I needed it like a drug – the endorphins, the dopamine, the oxytocin – they were all stabilized by those punches and kicks and kung fu movie nights.

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As long as I pushed hard and kept my mind a slave to bodily demands, I would never be still long enough to feel the earth quake from all that had passed. Not even a tremor. Back then during those five years that I practiced kung fu in B.C., I imagined China the way I saw it in Hong Kong kung fu movies. I held in my mind’s eye a montage of stereotypical ideas that exoticised the East – silent footsteps; cat-like grace; small, strong bodies; mind over matter; tiny sips of tea. The Chinese seemed to me to be a people who could accomplish so much, but were sustained by so little. They even wore soft shoes to do all that kicking! There was no hard protective layer between attack and target, and I wanted to understand the trick of such power. I dreamed of going to China and practicing kung fu with a wise old master. But the China of my dreams was a mythical place, with sacred mountains where wise old kung fu masters lived writing ancient scripts on eastern philosophy in austere but beautiful temples. This was a China that had been filtered, flavoured and packaged for the Western taste bud – all the wisdom of ancient sages and none of the corruption; all the allure of the elite Chinese aesthetic and none of the concrete. I, through years of meditative toilet scrubbing and feet washing, would be granted access to that mysterious world. Against all the odds I embodied as a young, white, inexperienced girl, I would prove myself and be taken under the wing of a kindly old man who would come to regard me as both his daughter and his best student. Chinese language was just one of the many things I would have to master as I walked this path. My initial goal was never really language in and of itself; language was simply something I needed in order to become the girl in this vision. So it happened that at age 21 I set off, alone, from my hometown, with the very rough plan that I would travel around southeast Asia and go to China as my final destination. I was all adventure and curiosity and youth, and I left Canada on a high of excitement and possibility. Of course all that I hadn’t tangibly felt from the experience of being disfellowshipped was also there, agitating me, manoeuvring to work itself out. I had grown up with the story that this is how the world is, that is what had happened, and this is what will happen – Jehovah’s Witnesses have been expecting the end of the world via Armageddon any day now since the late 1800’s. Members euphemistically call their religion “The Truth” (I think they capitalize every letter, not just T). For me the certainty of that worldview had disintegrated into a vague and restless agnosticism. But the hunger for certainty, it hadn’t gone anywhere.

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China, a curious appetizer (1999) After roughly 9 months of backpacking around southeast Asia, I landed in Shanghai. The first thing I noticed about China was how much everyone noticed me. In Canada I had been a quiet girl who didn’t really stand herself out in a crowd – at least not in a loud, hey-everybody-look-at-me way. It’s true, I practiced kung fu and had an unusual personal history, but I was pretty shy and understated in most social settings. And travelling in southeast Asia I was on a backpacker trail with heaps of other young Westerners doing the same thing. But in China, I stood out simply for being there; there was no option of fading into the background. I was a foreigner before I was anything else, and there was no face I could make that would be poker enough to hide it. The only thing I remember about language from this brief stint in China was repeatedly trying to pronounce the word 可以2 after hearing it spoken, but not being understood by a single Chinese person. Ever. I was there for maybe two and a half weeks and couldn’t pronounce one word accurately. (I think I could say 你好3 but even when you butcher that one, context makes it almost impossible for you not to be understood). I arrived in China precisely as NATO was bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – an event NATO claimed was accidental but that many Chinese felt was not. I had made my way to the northern city of Shenyang, and was set to begin work as an (unqualified) English teacher. I didn’t think about linguistic imperialism or soft power or global English dominance – I doubt I could have even adequately defined those terms at the time. I was 22 and had no money left. Because of the NATO bombing and China’s subsequent suspicion of the West, the government in Shenyang had suddenly stopped issuing working visas and was holding foreign passports. Without proper paperwork, I couldn’t start work or rent an apartment. The school put me up in a hotel while we all waited to see what would happen. That’s when the owner of the English school that had hired me – a rogue American who had majored in English and turned into a business man – started phoning me. Late at night. Asking to “visit.” I had zero Chinese language skills at that point and could do very little for myself. I was grateful for the pay advances he was giving me while Chinese bureaucracy made it impossible for me to start working, but I had no idea what to do about these other advances. I deflected and stalled, and I kept my door locked. Then I got news that the man I’d been seeing during my travels and subsequently in Shanghai was not dating only me. 2 kěyi: can, to be able to 3 nǐhǎo: hello

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I was angry and exhausted. The cumulative strain of endless self-reliance in so many unfamiliar places, having no safety net of home or family or community existing for me somewhere in the world, and feeling financially and culturally helpless while cooped up in that tiny, cold hotel room, had left me utterly lost. I had free-floated through seven countries, and when I finally made it to my terminus destination there was no shore, no dock for me to anchor to. I fled back to Canada.4

Canada, liquified (1999) Back in Canada I spent a season working at a winery in the Okanagan, feeling thoroughly dismal. I was consumed by shame that I had left after such a short time in China, after dreaming about it for so long. No doubt the public shaming foisted on me when I got disfellowshipped was mixed in there too, especially now that I was back in that same town. I fell into my first serious depression, though I didn’t understand it as such at the time. I was constantly liquid; the solidity in me submerged by that dreadful abyss that is depression. Despite my bleak state, with the help of a kind mentor from a previous job, I managed to pick up a consulting gig which earned me a nice lump sum payment at the end. (It always amazes me how I consistently manage to cognitively excel while experiencing the internal torture of depression. Perhaps because over- and misused cognition is intrinsically related to depression. But, that’s for another story.) Slowly, with the help of friends and circumstance, I solidified somewhat. I was like glass – fragile and transparent, and actually still liquid, but viscous enough that I could function as solid. Immediately, I prepared to return to China. I had come to marginal terms with falling off the horse, but there was no way I wasn’t going to get back on. With renewed excitement, I promised myself that this time would be different; as per my journal, I even got downright optimistic:

4 Elliott asked if this trip to China was a flight, as in a “taking off,” or as in a “running away.” I think it was both, because sometimes (and I think this is true in my case) you have to run away from something that isn’t working before you can take off towards something new. A journal entry from the early days of that southeast Asia trip says: Time moves slowly on a crowded boat. Slow time lets you think. A lot. I was beaten with this thought: this trip, the one I’d dreamed of for so long, was entirely less glamorous the instant it began. I thought I was traveling to “take off,” but once I was on the road, I started to realize I didn’t have the foundation necessary to do so, and it started to feel much more like I was running away.

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These days, most things just slid off my smile, high as I was on the endorphins of a dreaming mind. I was going to China for the year 2000. Year 2000: millennium. Year 2000: year of the dragon. Year 2000: my year. Horoscopes described it as an auspicious year; my gut told me it would be epic. I could imagine nothing more perfect. Being in the motherland herself, birthplace of kung fu, for the dragon’s welcome.

China, binge and purge (2000–2001) I returned to Shanghai in late 1999 when I was 23. Besides the basic act of going to China, I had no plan for what I would do when I got there (note the unfinished journal entry: “I am within SH – she is beautiful and perfect and outrageous and defiant, and I am in . . .” ). Arriving in such a foreign place (and one that I’d already retreated from once) was like being forcefully shoved back inside the womb – an adult-size fetus curling round and round itself. My comfort zone had abruptly vanished; there was suddenly so much I didn’t know or couldn’t do for myself. I depended on a little scrap of paper with a few indecipherable lines on it to get me home. It took me ages to cross the street. I ate the same thing every day (西红柿炒蛋; 扬州炒饭; 西兰花, 蒜的5 ) because I was afraid I would mistakenly order pig intestines or dog meat or monkey brain – all things I was not adventurous enough to want to try. I couldn’t concentrate during the day or sleep at night because there was always the noise of a jackhammer working on concrete that sounded like it was coming from the other side of the apartment wall (the sound and dust of constant construction was definitely one of the lessglamorous realities of China’s burgeoning development). In these circumstances, finding a kung fu teacher got relegated to the back burner; I struggled to learn survival Chinese and simply acclimatize. That first year in China was pretty much terrible. I had no job, no community, no direction and very little ability to take care of day-to-day life. I was floundering in that first-serious-move-away-from-home way, but also because I didn’t really understand what home was for me anywhere. Could it be here? Could it be with you? My fragile solidity was liquefying again. I remember cycling around Shanghai, unable to stop crying, but trying to get myself groceries or whatever fundamental need had driven me to attempt an outing. Paradoxically, I felt both anonymous (no one was there to help despite my overflowing distress) and stared at like a creature in a zoo (people would often point, stare and call out 老外! 老外! 6 when they saw a (white) foreigner). I didn’t understand what 5 xīhóngshì chǎodàn: fried tomato and egg; yángzhōu chǎofàn: Yangzhou-style friend rice; xīlánhuà, suànde: garlic sautéed broccoli 6 lǎowài: old (a common polite term of address) foreigner

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was happening to me – I interpreted everything I was experiencing as character flaws or maybe culture shock, but I refused to really consider that I was depressed, that depression was a legitimate disease, and that willpower was not the only factor in healing. During my time in Shanghai, but especially that first troubled year, I wrote extensively, and, despite my misery, secular successes materialized. I got freelance gigs writing in English for city magazines. I first got a salaried job at an environmental consulting company and subsequently an even better position as an English copyeditor for a national newscast. I worked doing voice-over recordings for English teaching materials, taught ‘boxercise’ fitness classes, did a few modelling gigs, acted bit parts in Chinese movies, and was both an extra and a stunt double for an American TV series. I started meeting people, enrolled in a beginner’s Mandarin class and eventually found martial arts being practiced around the city, but not in the way I had imagined. The only group classes I’d been able to find were for kids, children who had been hand-picked by the state to go to special wushu schools where they would train to be on competitive teams. There was no place for the adult practitioner with no hope for competition. Instead, I paid exorbitant fees to go to upscale gyms and practice with foreign teachers. And I had private lessons with a young Shanghainese man who smoked cigarettes while he taught me 长拳7 on the roof of his apartment building while the polluted city buzzed below. I trained sporadically, off and on – maybe once a week, and not very intensely. Certainly nothing like the five-nights-a-week-addiction I had been used to with Wing Chun. And also nothing like my dream of practicing in some secluded monastery. But of course, I was in Shanghai, not Shaolin. I don’t think I had the wherewithal at that time to leave the frail safety net I had begun to build up in Shanghai, where at least I knew a few people, and had a home where I could hide away on bad days. I didn’t practice martial arts outside of class, and I didn’t really progress much. Long Fist was a completely different style of kung fu than the one I’d devoted years to, and the fundamentals were different enough that it really was like starting from zero (or maybe starting as a heritage learner . . .). Compared with the intense training I had done in Canada, I fell into a very different lifestyle in Shanghai – trading kicks and punches for vodka and tonics, and kung fu movie nights for underground head-shaking raves. Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, the connections between my Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, that religion’s view of kung fu, and the instrumental role kung fu played in drawing me towards China and Chinese language 7 chángquán: Long Fist (a style of kung fu)

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is a key part of what began to unravel those years in China. Kung fu had set me on a certain track, but China was de-railing me into an entirely new mindscape. Somewhere in between all of that, apparently, I learned Chinese. My journal claims that I was at the top of my class, “despite all the partying I’ve been doing and classes I’ve been missing and studying I’ve been not doing.” Curious that. Perhaps I have an aptitude for language. I remember always asking lots of questions and trying to use whatever I knew, but I think language was very much secondary to the other things I was grappling with at the time – love, belonging, their lack, etc. The few meager references I have dredged up from my journal and email archives read to me now as incredibly naïve, essentialising and ignorant. But they’re all I’ve got, besides my suspect memory. So, I apologize as I quote: There are an extravagant amount of synonyms in Chinese. As foreigners, we think everything sounds the same, but that’s because it really does. The Chinese are forever using their finger to trace characters onto the palm of their hand because none of them can tell the difference either. Great. Encouraging for the struggling student. Did you say shi or shi? Shi. Right, thanks.

I do remember having an epiphany about language learning, after being in Shanghai for a couple of months and having no one besides my teacher understand anything I said in Chinese. When that magic moment came, I attributed it to being drunk. I was heading home from a party, got into a taxi, and said the name of my street in a voice that was, to my ear, exactly the same as I had been saying every other time I had unsuccessfully tried. And then the most amazing thing happened – the driver simply nodded and said “好的!”.8 There was no “听不懂”9 or “什么?”10 or repetition of the question, there was just conversation, albeit a very short one. That simple event made me realize that it wasn’t enough to merely say the words correctly; I also had to convince people that I had done so by first and definitively knowing that myself. That knowledge was audible in my speech, and could make the difference between un/intelligible speech. The experience of being understood also gave me more linguistic confidence, and this cycle of drinking and speaking Chinese became one of positive reinforcement. I wouldn’t totally recommend drinking as a primary language learning strategy (there are probably healthier ways), but as it happened, I did

8 hǎode: Ok 9 tīngbùdǒng: I don’t understand 10 shénme?: what?

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drink a lot in China. I rolled that new, strange language around on my tongue along with sips of Qingdao beer, and together they washed my shyness away. I don’t think I actually understood the heavily accented words of Chinese on the street any better than the next learner, I just took that assertiveness lesson I’d learned early on and over-applied it. I quickly found that simply by mirroring body language, interjecting a few well-placed syllables of agreement, and paying attention to the form of people’s speech I could respond intelligibly without necessarily understanding the conversation. A simple example of the latter is noticing that questions with “有没有11 . . .” could always be answered with either “有”12 or “没有”.13 I didn’t get too hung up on actually knowing what the item was (I would usually find this out as the conversation progressed anyways). Instead, I focused on what would keep the conversation going, what would create a sense of uninterrupted connection. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, it’s clearer to me now that I did this because I wasn’t trying to learn meaning as much as I was trying to access a community. And I saw language as the key. If people thought I was on the same linguistic wavelength as them, then, wasn’t I? This strategy had some unexpected language learning advantages. It gave me access to conversations that were beyond my current linguistic repertoire. I would often pick up words or phrases, use them in the correct context, and apparently be understood by native speakers without actually knowing exactly what I was saying. I learned language by observing and copying the speech and non-verbal habits of native speakers. I often felt like I understood the subtle, indirect meanings more than the face-value ones. Since the majority of communication is done through body language and tone of voice, it seems entirely possible to “read between the lines” without actually being able to read the lines themselves. I remember being praised by my classmates for having good pronunciation, learning quickly, and communicating effectively outside of class. I noticed how quickly people seemed to give up when they weren’t understood, and I noticed myself blundering on with more and more words until I had exhausted all the possibilities I could think of – the shy, quiet girl who didn’t stand herself out in a crowd testing a much more brazen identity. As a foreigner, I was constantly stared at anyway, so I think the spectacle of awkwardly trying a new language became less significant for me. I was already the bull elephant in the china shop, why not break into unfamiliar phonemes as well? 11 yǒu méi yǒu: literally “have not have” = do you have. . . 12 yǒu: have 13 méi yǒu: not have

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In conversations with native speakers of Chinese, my foreignness has nearly always been flagged, and more often than tends to be the primary topic of conversation (Oh, you speak Chinese?! Wow, your Chinese is so good! Why do you want to learn Chinese? etc). I have been almost invariably positioned as a ‘laowai’ speaking Chinese, and not simply as a Chinese speaker. The few instances where people have smoothly moved beyond the ‘laowai’ topic and actually had genuine, content-driven conversations with me were like subsistence droplets of sunshine in an Arctic winter. In class, the foreigners clung to each other in little enclaves of non-native Chinese speech. We used the Practical Chinese Reader series and learned ‘practical’ vocabulary, such as how to say 祖国14 and 以身殉国.15 I knew next to nothing about Chinese history and, given my own narrow educational foundation, the idea of seeking out relevant social, cultural or historical information on my own simply did not occur to me. My early intellectual development had been profoundly shaped by my JW upbringing, during which I had been explicitly discouraged from thinking for myself, and especially from thinking critically. Higher education was viewed as a risky activity that brought one further away from “godly pursuits” and closer to dangerous “worldly” ones. At that point I hadn’t gone to university yet – I was at that stage where you don’t know much, but you don’t realize that you don’t know much (it’s much better now that I still don’t know much, but at least realize I don’t know much). Discovering Chinese from that mindset was an exercise in mental demolition. Both China’s and my own language and culture and religion and history were all deconstructing within me; I couldn’t tell what bit came from where and I had no idea what to reconstruct out of all the pieces. I remember looking at China’s crowded population and thinking how absurd it was to believe that all of these people were scheduled to die at Armageddon just because they were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. It simply couldn’t be true, could it? So for me, learning Chinese in China was largely about seeking exposure to different world views than I had grown up with in the anonymous safety of being far enough from the influences of any one or any place connected to my past. By choosing a language with as much distance from English as possible, I could experience another end of the human spectrum of ideas, allowing me to see, at minimum, how wide the range was. I now see this as a necessary initial step in creating a world view that would work for me – one that was neither as fundamentalist as my family’s religious one, or as foreign as Chinese ones were to me. But at the time, speaking Chinese simply let me explore different aspects of my personality. The newness of Chinese and the Chinese-speaking environ14 zǔguó: motherland 15 yǐshēnxùnguó: to die for one’s country

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ment I was in gave me freedom to act new roles and engage in “personality play.” I could reinvent myself with each new grammatical pattern, every new vocabulary item, and each new friend I made. I often felt rather invincible when speaking Chinese – like it wasn’t real, like I didn’t have to be accountable for what came out of my mouth because after all, I wasn’t a native speaker and could always plead misunderstanding. As I gained confidence in speaking Chinese, I did it more and more. I noticed myself saying things I would never say in English – it just felt like random syllables coming out of my mouth, even sensitive topics didn’t pack an emotional punch. Plus, I didn’t have the nuanced vocabulary to say things eloquently or tactfully, so my choices were to either be silent or be blunt. In Chinese, I chose to be blunt.16 Silence was for English, where I had all the vocabulary yet there was so much I didn’t even realize I couldn’t talk about. For example, it took me about eight years from the time I was disfellowshipped to be able to say the words “Jehovah’s Witness.” Eight years! I would call it “the religion” if I had to refer to it. But in Chinese, I could talk about anything.17 I don’t mean I had the vocabulary to talk about anything, or that it was acceptable to talk about anything, I mean I had enough emotional distance from my “real,” “primary,” “English-speaking” self that taboo subjects were no longer taboo. Chinese took me away from the language of all my foundational memories, especially of getting disfellowshipped, and that distance was the safety net I needed to move towards them. Once it got comfortable to discuss emotionally sensitive things in Chinese, I could try it in my mother tongue, and maybe even eventually with my mother (because speaking with a mother who compromises her faith by talking to you doesn’t exactly facilitate an ideal situation for easy communication). Slowly, effort and circumstance were coaxing me out of the abyss. My second year in Shanghai was significantly better. I had made great friends (mostly European expats), was in an exciting new relationship, could speak Chinese comfortably enough that I felt confident navigating my life in Shanghai, and had a great income-to-expenses ratio. I got cocky. I felt like I’d made it through Dante’s inferno and was now blessedly on the other side. I partied and travelled and 16 Part of this approach was likely an incomplete understanding of when being terse and blunt was appropriate in Chinese, such as when using much day to day speech, versus when the sociolinguistic and cultural norms require speakers to be diplomatic and vague, such as in more formal settings or when speaking about certain topics. 17 Paradoxically, as my confidence in speaking out grew, I become more aware of how often it was culturally inappropriate to say what I wanted to. I began to feel like speaking “good Chinese” required me to bite my tongue so often that if I did I soon wouldn’t have a tongue to speak with at all. Perhaps this bothered me so much because Chinese was helping me find my voice, and I didn’t understand how it could simultaneously take that away.

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spoke more and more Chinese. I remember incessantly asking my Chinese coworkers language questions, and feeling very confident speaking and understanding Chinese. When people didn’t understand me or I didn’t understand them, I assumed it was because they could only speak Shanghainese, but rarely blamed myself. I started talking back to the people that stared at me: “別盯着 我!”18 The invincibility of being a foreigner in China at that time was like nothing I have experienced before or since. It was the topic of many journal entries (I hope my earlier apology for essentialising is still valid . . . ): I never used to like red. Until the year of the dragon, I consistently avoided wearing it. Then I learned that in Chinese astrology, your own birth year is the hazardous one. I had thought a fire dragon experiencing the millennial year of the dragon in the motherland herself would be auspicious. Nope. In fact, it was rich with risk, a danger-infused adventure. Dangerous for the character, that is. When you are pushed towards your limits in an environment where there is almost no accountability, you explore all the crags and crevices of your personality. To clarify, there is only almost no accountability if you are foreign, or more accurately western. The Chinese must deal with more bureaucracy and redder tape than any other people. But at the same time as China knows it cannot extend that controlling attitude to foreigners, it doesn’t know quite what attitude to extend. At this moment, when China is begging for foreign expertise, relations and capital, yet has little set up to really accommodate those very things, the country is at the same time the child who wants the candy in the store and the owner of the very store. Foreigners living here are like the customers caught in the middle, cashing in on the confusion and the distraction to get away with all they can. We become used to a lifestyle where we are in demand. Work is easy to find, we are experts before our time, holding high-level positions with fat salaries and finding out just how inflatable our egos are. Speaking of inflated egos it is always best to speak of one’s own. I am as guilty as the next of letting my status shift – from bumbling backpacker to Shanghai expatriate – carry my ego to a higher place than it needed to be. During my first month in the country, I walked into Shanghai’s leading English-language magazine, had a few words with the young British editor, and walked away with my first commissioned story. Not bad for a wholly inexperienced aspiring writer. In the months that followed, I often met people who said they’d read an article I’d written. Socializing became a series of ego-stroking conversations and I soon realized I had to return the favor. I came to know all the right people (luckily this is not hard since everyone in the expat scene is the ‘right people’), and got at least slightly caught up in the idea of myself as an international freelance writer. 18 Bié dīngzhe wǒ: Don’t stare at me!

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I’m sure we all know what happens when someone gets too cocky. I was that crane sticking its head out above the crowd,19 and the sniper was there, waiting. I went away on a week-long holiday to Thailand during which my boyfriend swiftly and deceitfully replaced me. A week later the Huangpu River flooded badly, submerging my garden-level flat in water that came up past my knees. I remember trying to take a taxi home and having to climb out the car window because the water was higher than the floor of the car. When I finally waded through the water to my door (a very unpleasant experience with unimaginably gross-feeling things floating in the brown water and rubbing up against your legs every step), I found the majority of my journals and photographs floating around my apartment. I rescued what I could, but most of those irreplaceable items were lost, and I now had something else to mourn. Then, the third tragedy: shortly after the flood, my copyediting work came to an abrupt and unanticipated end. It was a seriously bad month: August, my birthday month, the year I turned 25. I felt like the niche of a life I’d painstakingly created for myself in Shanghai had been eliminated nearly overnight. I felt wild despair, but this time I had friends who caught me as I struggled to regain my footing. I was determined not to leave China feeling like I’d had to flee with my tail between my legs for a second time. I resisted the tremendous urge I had to avoid parties where I would see my ex; I still went, but only managed to keep re-breaking whatever tiny piece of my heart I’d managed to heal since the last time. As so often seems to happen when I’m feeling rotten, work picked up. I got more freelance work and actually ended up making more money than I had at my previous job. I wrote a short story. I went travelling, taking a couple of months to go overland from Shanghai to Bangkok. And eventually, I admitted to myself that after months of sticking it out past that awful August, I still wasn’t happy in Shanghai. I was tired of living a binge and purge lifestyle, of idealistically throwing myself into something – a place, an idea, a relationship – and then being 砸碎了20 when it didn’t come to fruition. I was tired of constantly feeling squeezed out of the places I tried to make home. I felt like my soul was starving, and decided to come back to Canada and study creative writing (because that’s soul food isn’t it?).

Canada, soul food (2002–2004) By the time I returned to Canada, my parents were so happy that I was back safely in the country that their tenacity about strictly following the JW shunning 19 鶴立鸡群: hèlìjīqún 20 zásuìle: pounded into tiny pieces

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requirements for disfellowshipped family members21 had softened. I could now live with them and eat with them and they welcomed me ‘home.’ But it was an awkward reunion. I had nothing to say; the voice I had discovered in Chinese was again silent in English. Over the years, the awkwardness has become less profound, but the fundamental chasm of disapproval and different belief systems hangs heavy over our attempts to relate. Back in school, I loved university, and university loved me. As I sat in classes full of 18-year-old first-year students, my 26-year-old self grieved not having had parents who nurtured me academically. I had skipped grade 2 and my teachers wanted me to skip grade 7 too, but my mother had held me back. She thought the social gap of an 11 year old starting high school would be too great. I always wonder whether or not she was right. Considering I graduated from high school at 16, but didn’t start my B.A. until I was 26, and my M.A. when I was 33, I sometimes daydream about what my life might look like had I not spent that fertile decade wandering around Asia, lost. Initially, I took Chinese courses to fulfill the school’s language requirement. But after taking a year of creative writing courses I realized I enjoyed Chinese much better than workshopping bad poetry; in fact Chinese appeared to be the only subject I enjoyed in both academic and applied settings, so I took it on as my major. My foundation in spoken Chinese was very helpful, but I lagged way behind in reading and writing (I might have known 100 characters). Had I not experienced those two years in China, I’m not sure I would’ve made it past the intimidating “beginner” level of my first classes. I was one of two non-heritage students in a class of mainly Cantonese speakers. Many of them knew how to read and write Traditional characters, spoke Cantonese fluently, and spent class time chatting both in person and through their mobile devices, so in a sense it felt like my Iranian-Canadian friend Farhid and I were the only true beginners. Early on, when I still thought I could speak Chinese, I began tutoring a beginner-level non-heritage learner (Alec) – a linguistic connection that eventually became romantic. Initially I enjoyed this role of teacher, but I wasn’t in Chinese classes very long before I realized how fuzzy my understanding of the language was, how much there still was to learn, and how challenging it would be to learn it well. I found the challenge incredibly enticing, and the more I was learning about Chinese characters the more fascinating I found them. Discovering the meaning of pictographic characters, such as 休,22 where the radical for 21 permitted to inform the disfellowshipped family member of significant events such as death, illness, marriage, birth, but not permitted to share meals, or discuss religion (so as not to be corrupted by any apostate beliefs) 22 xiū: to rest

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person beside the radical for tree results in a character that means “to rest” inspired disproportional delight in me. I was enthralled by how ideas in Chinese could consist of building blocks that English would never imagine, such as putting 矛23 (spear) and 盾24 (shield) together to mean contradiction. I still can’t believe that the word for obligatory (义务25) can also mean voluntary, such as in “voluntary labour” (义务劳动26). And I continue to be amazed at how learning Chinese language shifts my way of seeing the world, often in ways that are simultaneously subtle and profound. For example, where English is frequently about a subject acting on an object, Chinese is all about the causes and effects of processes. Verbs are frequently two step processes;27 the first expresses the initial intention and the second clarifies the result of the action. In Chinese “to find” is literally 找到,28 where 找29 means “to look for” and 到30 here means “find” since it represents the successful completion of the preceding action. Learning to frame sentences with two-phased verb processes required me to pay more attention to what the effects of various actions were. And this increase in process awareness shifted me away from the individualistic ideology that is embedded in English, where it is enough to frame a sentence in terms of what a subject did to an object, without having to consider the effects of that action on its surroundings. This subject emphasis is also highlighted by their essential nature in English (sentences without subjects are grammatically incorrect) compared with the Chinese habit of omitting subjects altogether. For me learning such grammatical patterns has meant that learning Chinese language came with implicit lessons in communalism. No character is an island. I felt intellectually and creatively challenged, and it was just the soul food I needed. I don’t recall feeling like I studied hard in my Chinese classes, but I enjoyed language learning so perhaps the lines between work and play were blurred. I got good grades but, aside from my tutoring gig, didn’t use Chinese outside of class. Curiously, the excitement and sense of challenge I felt in Chinese class or when studying on my own didn’t seem to carry over into real-life situations. I would go to Chinese restaurants in Vancouver and feel flustered and frustrated because I couldn’t read the menu (in addition to the cryptic flowery language that menus tend to use, they’re typically written in Traditional characters, which, 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

máo: spear dùn: shield yìwù: obligatory/voluntary yìwù láodòng: “voluntary labour” resultative complement zhǎodào: to find zhǎo: to look for dào: verb complement signalling successful completion

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at that point I couldn’t read). I would watch Chinese movies but relied on the English subtitles. I browsed in Chinese bookstores but always felt fraudulent, because anything I picked up was full of characters I didn’t know, or characters I knew but didn’t understand in the context they were used. I grew very shy with my Chinese in Canada, and reverted to English in the few contexts where I could’ve used Chinese. Living in Vancouver I was away from my old kung fu group in the interior and instead began practicing Brazilian capoeira. My training in Chinese martial arts had essentially morphed into an interest in language learning, but my mind and body still craved the physical demands of a martial discipline. Despite being surrounded by lively Brazilians, I resisted the urge to learn Portuguese. I thought if I not only traded kung fu for capoeira, but also Chinese for Portuguese, it would mean I was fickle. First, I should “finish” learning Chinese, then I could move on to other languages, and Portuguese would likely be next. Things didn’t quite turn out that way, and I’m now quite certain language learning, least of all Chinese language learning, is never “finished.” By the middle of my degree (2004), I was really missing China – missing the normalcy of speaking Chinese every day, and feeling restless to travel. Alec had also been studying Chinese for a couple of years by this point and was eager to go to China as well. I decided to take classes by distance education and return to an immersion context for language practice and travel. I was inclined to return to Shanghai where I still knew people, but Alec was set on us going to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. I agreed, in that impulsive, 随便31 manner of decision-making I often have about travelling, thinking it would be good to try something new.

China, feast and famine (2004) For the first two weeks back in China, I thought I couldn’t speak Chinese anymore. I didn’t understand people and people didn’t understand me. I was no longer in the habit of speaking Chinese and I was unfamiliar with both Kunming dialect and Kunming-accented Mandarin. Luckily it didn’t take long for Chinese to come back, and I felt it did so rather spontaneously. One day the language plug-in for Chinese just got re-installed in my brain and I could speak again. I got a job teaching English, found a great tutor to study Chinese with, and focussed on preparing for the HSK, Beijing’s Chinese proficiency exam. I had been encouraged to take the exam by my university professors, and was curious 31 súibiàn: to “follow convenience”, i.e. casual, random, easy-going

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how I would rank. Since my listening and speaking skills were stronger than my written, I focussed my studies almost exclusively on reading comprehension. Later, I realized I’d been studying out of the intermediate level test prep books, even though I only took the basic test that year. It certainly calls into question the validity of the results if I couldn’t distinguish between “basic” and “intermediate” but still did well on the exam. About a month after I’d been in Kunming I was invited to participate in the international speech contest being held in Beijing – the next level of a contest I’d participated in at UBC. I received a phone call about my participation in the event (I can’t totally remember why), and after about five minutes of conversation I asked the caller to repeat something I hadn’t understood, and mentioned that I wasn’t a native speaker. He responded with very sincere-sounding shock to this news and then praised my Chinese for the rest of the conversation, repeatedly saying that he thought I was a native speaker. I remember hanging up feeling so proud that I could be mistaken for a native speaker, convinced that my white skin was more of a hindrance than people would acknowledge. Of course after I hung up and had a moment to think about it, I realized he must have been exaggerating his praise to be polite. After all, why would a native speaker be participating in this contest? It was a critical incident though, in that since then I have often wondered how many compliments on my Chinese ability or smooth conversations where I think I’m saying the right thing are really just me being given “face” by my Chinese interlocutors. Naturally the encouragement is nice, but if you really want to improve, you have to know what you need to work on, and being given years of face does exactly jack shit towards that end. The contest itself was organized around a game-show style competition filmed for television in front of a large audience, but also involved being escorted on a 10-day trip. All 75 contest participants – students of Chinese from all over the world – went on the tour, and for many of us, definitely for me, it was a first experience socially connecting with so many other non-heritage Chinese speakers. With some of the people I spoke with, Chinese was the only common language between us. This made using Chinese as a lingua franca both necessary and more meaningful than the unnatural conversations I’d been used to avoiding with other native English speakers. The range of Chinese levels among the participants was vast; it felt rather unfair to have a person who had only studied for 6 months in the same contest as people who were doing graduate degrees in Chinese (it was not grouped by level at all), but I did get the sense that the spirit of the contest was much less about Chinese proficiency per say, and much more about China’s PR campaign towards the ‘outside world.’ Many of the participants discussed feeling that it was more of a propaganda tool than anything

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else. Of course, feasting on banquet style dinners at expensive restaurants every day, touring famous historical sites in Beijing, Hangzhou and Suzhou, and staying in very comfortable hotels, we managed the best we could . . . I had very little time to prepare for the contest, and didn’t really consider trying to win, which is probably a good thing because I didn’t really stand a chance. I couldn’t even read the booklet they gave us to prepare for the contest, and I didn’t understand the formal language being used during those relatively high-profile cross-cultural exchanges. I returned to Kunming feeling glad that I had participated, but especially glad that it was over. The year in Kunming was a wildly different experience than Shanghai had been. I hated the English teaching work I was doing, money was extremely tight as I was paying UBC tuition for a distance education course on Kunming wages, and Alec was going through all the things that come with one’s first experience living abroad, and one’s first experience of trying to cope with life in Chinese/ China. Because of our difference in language level at that point, the role of primary communicator for both of us always seemed to default to me. I felt responsible for getting both of us settled in a new, foreign city, and I found it taxing. My studies were going well enough, but as I was able to read more in Chinese, I grew more frustrated with the uninspiring content I kept discovering. HSK material aside, I asked everyone I knew to recommend magazines or short stories for me, but every lead I followed led me to pat, readers’-digest style tales that didn’t do a good job of hiding their moral or political agendas. I found reading incredibly labour-intensive and the pay-off to be seriously disappointing. I felt like I was wasting time, delaying graduation and not gaining much for it. My disillusionment made me realize I had the expectation that after enough years had passed, say five or six, which they had, or after I became fluent enough to be conversationally comfortable, which I was, or at least after I could ‘read’ the 2000–3000 Chinese characters needed to comfortably understand a newspaper, which I ostensibly could, that linguistic understanding would magically equal successful enculturation. I would stop walking around China feeling like so much was unrecognizable or unintelligible. I would be able to walk into a grocery store and confidently know what had meat in it and what was vegetarian. I would be able to take a Chinese friend out for dinner and actually get to pay the bill. When someone said something vague, I would know what they really meant. That year in Kunming I grew frustrated with what I perceived as my failure in Chinese. I definitely had enough language ability to have a social life in Chinese, but I didn’t; I had foreign friends and English was still dominant, comfortable, easy, while Chinese was hard, elusive, confusing. I felt like I had expended so much effort, only to discover that now, as always, I would never be Chinese. It’s not like that hadn’t been obvious all along, but

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knowing something intellectually is a whole different beast from knowing it experientially. Knowing it even in your toes. My foreignness had been pointed out to me again and again in many explicit and implicit ways, but realizing it for myself was still an epiphany. I think this is largely because of the reverberations that epiphany had through my own personal history of being ‘different.’ My strict upbringing meant that there were many, many things I’d never been allowed to do or even be exposed to. As a child I’d been required to selflabel as different, to be “no part of the world” – John 17:16, New World Translation), setting myself apart from my classmates by non-participation in all holiday-related activities (Christmas, New Years, Easter, Halloween, Valentines Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s/Father’s Day, Remembrance Day, birthdays (mine and anyone else’s), sitting silently when everyone else stood to sing the national anthem, disregarding curriculum that offered competing perspectives to the JW world view (i.e. evolution, history), or that covered anything deemed ‘spiritual’ or ‘demonized’ (i.e. Wizard of Oz). Being constantly attended to in China for being racially ‘different’ therefore exacerbated an already sore spot on my psyche. Before, as a young Anglo-Canadian I was invisibly different (from a WASP-dominant society) until behaviours set me apart. In China I was visibly different while I strove to assimilate behaviourally. It was soul famine again. Impulsively, I registered for the winter semester at UBC (beginning Jan 2005) and tried to change my plane ticket at the last minute. There were no seats so I was on a wait list until two days before the semester started. At the last minute a seat opened up and I left China for the third (and final) time (to date) the next day, leaving Alec behind amicably if rather abruptly.32

East Vancouver, raw and organic (2005–2009) I was thrilled to be back in Vancouver, and felt good about deciding to come back despite having to do so on my own. I completed the last year of my degree, wrote the basic HSK exam, and fell wildly in love. I found myself in a community where I finally started to feel like I belonged; I developed deep friendships with like-minded people and noticed, again, that none of them were native speakers of Mandarin. I played capoeira, discovered more and more of Vancouver, and enjoyed life immensely. I felt like I could finally stop searching; whatever it was I’d been looking for, I had found it. 32 My leaving turned out to be great for his language learning as he began speaking much more, and has since gone on complete advanced studies in Chinese and marry a Shanghainese woman.

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After graduating from my BA, I struggled to keep Chinese in my life, personally and/or professionally. I tried all the standard things – hired a tutor, participated in language exchanges, bought Chinese reading material, volunteered as a host partner for new immigrants, and looked for jobs where I could use Chinese. Despite these efforts, my connection to both Chinese language and people seemed like it was doomed to fade. I doubt it is a coincidence that the period when I felt most disconnected from Chinese was also the time when I finally felt accepted into a social community. My restless seeking, and with it some of my drive to demand that Chinese hold a dominant position in my life, had diminished. To make ends meet I worked at the university bookstore, which had been my part-time job during school and was now full-time. I was suffocating in student loan debt and felt frustrated that I was working at a job that didn’t require the education I was desperately trying to pay for. As time passed, my relationship – the one that had introduced me to my community and that I felt so certain was destined to work out – was starting to crumble. It was a reality I was both unprepared for and resisted fiercely. Depression was knocking again. It was happening at exactly the time I was studying for the intermediate level of the HSK. I remember not being able to stop crying – the blurry characters kept shaking senselessly on the page. It was the only time in my life I have ever experienced test anxiety. The exam started with listening comprehension, but shortly after the invigilators began the recording several latecomers were allowed to enter, creating noise that interfered with my ability to hear the dialogue. I got flustered and annoyed and couldn’t believe they didn’t pause the recording. I didn’t feel like I had enough time for each section, and the constant disturbances of people getting up to go to the washroom, and asking questions to the invigilators over my head were continuously distracting. My relationship finally came to a spurious and nebulous end shortly after both the exam and my 30th birthday. The biggest casualty was my ability to trust myself. Never had I felt so certain about something, and never had I been so wrong. I was lost in liquid uncertainty, and stopped being able to make decisions, gripped by fear that my choices would again lead to disaster. The cumulative transience of my life – geographically and interpersonally – sat like a putrid thought in the crucible of my expectations. I saw the last decade of my life as utterly lacking in continuity. I had moved in and out of so many groups of friends, so many different cities, so many different relationships.33 I yearned for solidity, for life to offer just one thing that I could count on, something to 33 From age 17 until 33, I have moved 20 times, an average of once every seven months for sixteen years, and this doesn’t include about a year and a half of time spent travelling.

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ground me long enough to grow the roots I needed. In that sea of transience, the only thing that existed as a relative constant in my life was Chinese. Even through times when Chinese was less active in my life, I had still invested so much in it that I knew I had to find a way to keep it alive. It was almost like a symbol of my ability to succeed, or maybe of my capacity for stability, and I needed to prove to myself that I could do it. I began to think of Chinese more in terms of career choices. I was drawn to using my language skills in a helpful culture-crossing setting. I was also becoming intensely curious about what other people who had studied Chinese were doing. How were they making Chinese fit into their lives, both personally and professionally? What were they doing that I might not have tried yet? I applied for a job working with travelers and new immigrants, and also for graduate school. Luckily I got accepted for both and have been able to balance the two. My job does allow me to use some Chinese, and is flexible enough that I could pursue my studies simultaneously. I still do not need my degree for my job (welcome to Generation X), but it is slightly more relevant than my bookstore job was, and allows a great work-life balance. As for grad school, it has been like 24 hours of daylight in an Arctic summer. I have never felt so supported, appreciated, challenged, productive, creative and pulsing with potential in my whole life. Much of what I’ve written about here has been unraveled in this first year of study. It is as if my tangled and oftdespairing psyche has zoomed out and become witness to the vista I could not see I was a part of – a vista of wildflowers and wild life. I am finally finding a social and professional niche as a non-heritage Chinese speaker. I joined a group called Mandarin Circle where non-heritage learners meet to speak Chinese, invent “老外话”34 and build a community where non-native speech is normalized. I recently presented at an academic conference where not one person I met was surprised that I spoke Chinese. I am part of this research group, where we have been exploring the intersections of our individual and collective linguistic autobiographies with motivation, pedagogy, and each others’ experiences. I am claiming legitimacy as a user of Chinese, and playing with the language in linguistically creative ways – modifying characters to incorporate symbolic meanings from globally diverse contexts, creating hybrid puns with English, pīnyīn, and Chinese characters, and writing song lyrics with bilingual rhymes. And I was awarded a scholarship to study Chinese in Taipei for six months.

34 lǎowàihuà: foreigner-speech, or Chinese as it is used by foreigners – characterized by a lack of “local flavour,” codeswitching, as well as bilingual humour, logic and word choice.

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Taipei, 好吃35 (2009) I’ve been in Taiwan exactly a month now. I feel mostly anonymous and it is heaven. Last night I was on the back of a scooter being driven by a Taiwanese woman and when we stopped at a traffic light she said that she felt like everyone was staring at her, presumably because she had a foreigner as her passenger. But to me, I feel so much less conspicuous than I did in China, or than I did in my mid-20s, that I feel mostly anonymous. I am terribly excited to be experiencing a Chinese-speaking place that is tropical, modern, democratic and internationally aware. I started classes a week after arriving and have been juggling studying Chinese, planning my thesis, and continuing to work with the group on this research project. I have three hours of Chinese class a day and a minimum of 2 additional hours of homework. The class is small – six students – and I am the only non-Asian. There are two Japanese women, one Korean man, one Vietnamese man, and one Vietnamese-German monk. The teacher is a middle-aged woman originally from Shanghai who is married to a Taiwanese man and has been living here for many years. After a brief placement test I was assigned to use book 5 of the 實用視聽華語36 series. I am making an instant switch to Traditional characters, which I’m finding challenging but rewarding. My first impression of actually trying to use them is quite positive – it may be too early to say with certainty but I think I like them better. The mnemonic games I play with Chinese seem easier to do with Traditional characters, perhaps because there is more to work with. The routine of studying I’ve developed involves a lot of repetition. That seems to be the only way that new vocabulary sticks. I write new characters out over and over, but if I don’t return to them after a couple of weeks, they are already starting to fade. Experiencing the new vocabulary in context soon after learning it also helps it to stick. I am very aware of my social and linguistic choices this time, and aware of their implications and consequences. So far, I’ve been able to spend at least 5 hours of every day using Chinese. I’m making conscious efforts to establish friendships with locals (as opposed to falling into the expat community by default), and am finding it easier to meet people that I have something besides language in common with. I have been spending time with two new Taiwanese friends – they are both single women close to my age, can speak English at approximately the same level that I can speak Chinese, and we share common interests in martial arts, hiking, etc. There is an easy flow to our communicating – 35 hǎochī: “good (to) eat” = delicious 36 shíyòng shìtīng huáyǔ: Practical audio-visual Chinese

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we codeswitch between English and Chinese without a sense of competition in choosing what language to speak. Last night I was invited to participate in a 中秋節37 BBQ where I was the only foreigner, and for the first time ever, I felt comfortable and natural in such a setting. Chinese was the default language, but people threw in English at times and I didn’t feel pressure to speak one or the other. I was able to add to the conversation naturally and appropriately, cracking jokes, contributing to the meal and the event just like any other member. Thankfully, I wasn’t treated like an honoured guest, restricted from lifting a finger or focused on as the centre of attention. Instead of being this thing that I’ve been staring directly at for so long, Chinese became background to the ideas we were exchanging, and, for certain chunks of time, I even forgot about it altogether; I was in the 得心應手38 zone. So, I’m feeling optimistic about the social aspect of living in Taiwan and using Chinese. It’s almost ironic because just before coming here I had decided that I would focus predominantly on reading, since I didn’t think I would ever feel truly socially comfortable in a Chinese-speaking environment. I am reading a lot these days, probably more than ever. In the self-reflexive way that I’m approaching this episode of studying, I realize that I’ve had something like stage fright or a mental block when it comes to reading. When I look at a page filled with characters, my brain immediately says, “No, I can’t read that, those aren’t Roman letters.” Trying to read from that mindset, especially when there is any hint of time or comprehension pressure, is like putting a straightjacket on to go rock climbing. I hadn’t noticed how much cognitive capacity I was wasting with these defeatist thoughts. Lately, I’ve been making a point of appreciating how frequently I do understand what I’m reading, or in cases where I can’t quite follow the meaning, I still try to focus on acknowledging the part that I did understand. Every time I finish a page in the novel I’m reading, I say to myself, “See, I can read Chinese,” even though there are many characters I don’t recognize and nuanced meanings that I’ve likely missed. Also, instead of reading late at night, I’m trying to read earlier in the day, when I’m more mentally alert. I notice that passages I try to read when I was tired seem terribly complicated, but when I try again in the morning, they are not so hard at all. It’s probably a bit early to tell, but I do think I’m improving. Finally, Chinese is tasting good in my mouth. It might be the delicious flavour of satisfaction.

37 zhōngqiūjié: mid-Autumn Festival 38 déxīnyìngshǒu: when your hand responds to your heart/mind’s request; when you are proficient at something

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Chinese, more than a mouthful Whatever the current flavour, Chinese has always been more than a mouthful for me. It has filled my stomach, my heart, my psyche and my soul with an unlikely sustenance. In retrospect, I realize that Chinese is a tool I’ve been using to see how deeply and how permanently I can transform myself. Writing this account now, in 2009, it is a full decade since I first landed in China; I can think of nothing else from 1999 that continues to exist in my life the way Chinese still does (perhaps because of the longevity symbolized by all those 9’s39?). If a language can be said to have tenacity, and I think it can, then I would say that Chinese does. Despite many odds, it has stuck in my life like a powerful glue, keeping me attached to at least one thing while so many other things have come and gone. The paradox of something so foreign existing in my life as a tool for so many personal epiphanies is not lost on me. Everyday I discover more of how studying Chinese compels me to adopt new ways of perceiving, understanding and engaging with the world, with language, and especially with myself as I exist in relation to multiple communities. I wrote this in my journal in the early days of living in China, but reading it now, I am struck by how likely it seems that I wasn’t talking about China’s need for red at all, but about my own: The first thing I understood about China was the colour red. Not all the symbolic stuff, about power and money and luck, but a more practical understanding. When everything around you, the sky, the skyscrapers, the streets, the scenery, is gray as sickly mud, people grab for the strongest colour they can find. They paint it on their buildings, they wear it next to their faces, and they flag it in their skies. I’ve never heard it said, but there is the unspoken knowledge that red is the national vaccine against depression, for it is too often the only colour in an otherwise bleak field of view.

*** Chinese, digestif Revising this story for publication in 2011, about a year and half since I’d completed N2 in Taiwan, I am acutely aware of how the story would read (and especially end) differently if I were writing it now. Chinese has again fallen into disuse in my left-coast Canada life, but I’m not feeling the need to keep it on the 39 Because 九 jiǔ, number 9, sounds exactly like 久 jiǔ, for a long time, it symbolizes longevity.

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centre stage of my biography. Now that I have considerable clarity around what I was really doing by learning Chinese for all those years, I also feel increasingly comfortable with the way its prominence in my life waxes and wanes . . . and this time, as I watch it fading while so many other things are boldly blossoming, I think I just might have enough love to let it go.

Elliott’s Narrative 3 (N3) Who was I? Circa 2002 I had always dreamed of traveling and growing beyond the space I was consigned to as a child. After learning that a good friend was thinking of moving there, I saw Taiwan as an amazing opportunity. I could not have placed it on a map with confidence even at the age of 22; it represented the exoticism of the Far East, there were plentiful jobs teaching English which required no experience or training, the pay was good, the hours few, and it was in a good location for further travel in Asia. In addition, it presented an opportunity to acquaint myself with the sleeping dragon that was Chinese culture and language, possibly giving me some advantage in the increasingly global marketplace for technology careers, but also appealing to a deep sense of transcendent, ancient wisdom codified in Chinese script. Mandarin had a further draw: it was intellectually demanding, it seemed to signify erudition and dedication. I had conquered physics [my undergraduate degree], I was going to conquer Taiwan, why not also dabble in some infamously tricky new language? I was unaware of a single role model, or even acquaintance, for Chinese language learning. What great excitement in being such a rare species – a native English speaker, who had lived in a Chinese-speaking country, who could speak the language, and who could navigate the culture. Of course, Canada, and indeed the world, is not lacking for fluent bilingual speakers of English and Mandarin. However, my family, my circle of acquaintances, and perhaps the media all seemed to be telling me that Anglo speakers of Mandarin were rare, and that this could command a high price on the market; it would certainly be advantageous in looking for competitive work in the future.

Who am I? 2009 I am a native English speaker, who grew up white in an upper-middle-class suburb of Toronto, with some exposure to French throughout school. I have

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since studied Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. I believe my additional languages are complementary: Mandarin informs my Japanese and Korean and vice-versa, due to historical borrowing amongst the language communities. Linguistically, Mandarin’s main challenges for English speakers seem to be firstly the tonal system – I often imagine lacking a memory ‘cubby-hole’ for the tone of each lexical item – and secondly the orthography, which demands a great deal of practice and begs for associative strategies. It is the latter challenge that is fathomless and thought-provoking for me. I believe my personal expression is affected by my language choices. When speaking Chinese I am often bolder, cruder: playing with language is both a means of learning and a goal, so jokes and experiments are less calculated, and I’m more likely to play drinking games or drink quickly or to someone else’s pace. I feel generally less aware of how to speak in different situations (to the old and the young, formal and informal), so I’m uncomfortable identifying as a proficient speaker. I still strive to be polite, but I’m unable to really grasp the pragmatic aspects of, say, giving and receiving gifts, or sensitivity to 面子 face. I struggle to avoid characterizing Chinese as ‘less polite,’ in that the language itself doesn’t seem to formally encode ideological hierarchies like Japanese, or beg for frequent use of marked politeness phrases present in English such as “please” or “I wonder if I couldn’t maybe . . .” I have a particular fondness for reading. I believe I avoid working on my oral skills because forward progress is so hard to measure, and yet backsliding acutely obvious. While reading, I can absorb at my own pace, and I can get a sense of a text’s worth and difficulty just by skimming, thereby determining whether or not it is worth pursuing; listening is unidirectional and its pace is fixed, so I have a hard time committing to listening practice (it is more often than not either too easy or too hard). Reading allows me to question the text and make connections in convenient ways, whereas listening to speech without being able to interrupt, paraphrase, ask questions, or seek clarification is bewildering, frustrating, and unnatural. I recognize areas of stabilization/fossilization in my Mandarin, perhaps through complications arising from multiple semantic sections put together (e.g., uncertainty in word order in complex sentences), and also in stabilized forms of words with the fifth tone (轻声 fifth tone) or tones that in Taiwan differ from the Beijing standard dialect. I fall back on words I learned early on and used over long periods of time, and on basic sentence patterns, and I have already forgotten many once-favourite uber-precise lexical items and turns of phrase. I call myself an experienced speaker, but find it hard to classify or grade my fluency; I can read, write, converse, debate, teach, learn, joke, dream, and play.

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Although I have tried all these things, I have issues with seeing myself as a competent user of Chinese. I have always strongly identified as an eloquent, highly literate English speaker; speaking a second language out loud is a stimulating and fulfilling mental activity, but also a site of extreme anxiety and insecurity, as I am painfully aware of my deficiency in expression and lexicon in comparison with my native language. I picture myself sounding like a child, a stuttering, shy child incapable of joining grown-ups in society. Furthermore, I have seen a common stigma imposed on non-native speakers of English by native-speakers (especially in the Taiwanese context, where English-speaking friends are a rare resource for language practice), that of being inconsiderate, annoying, or shameful (“His English was awful, but he insisted on pestering me! I hate that.”), and feel that my choice to speak Chinese must be viewed the same way. If I opt for Chinese in a discussion, I walk on eggshells, as mistakes or misunderstandings evoke the same fear: “He always wants to speak Chinese, but he sucks at it.” So why do I bother? I love learning new 字 characters (an accumulation of experience, a link into etymology and history, a way to access a story-telling culture through 成語 idioms and 谚语 proverbs, the pleasure to write like you might sketch, the thrill of recognition, some characters like best friends: 永、龍、月); I love the tonal nature (speaking it, interpreting it, seeing the flow of words as a flow of tones, hearing the song of a phrase, recognizing the extra depth in speech); I enjoy being different as a proficient Anglo learner (having been able to spend dedicated time studying in and living in a 中文 Chinesespeaking community); I imagine it one day distinguishing me professionally (but I am not interested in studying “business Chinese,” paradoxically); I enjoy deciphering the world around me (passing conversations, street signs and other environmental textual material); I envision Chinese as a springboard towards access to a pan-Asian textual culture ( Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese); focusing on improving the language, as an end in itself, provides ways to explore aspects of my personality that have not yet found expression in my English-speaking social circles, and gives me a justification for trying things I might otherwise skip; and, ultimately, I have already invested so much time that it would feel I wasted years of my life if I did not continue studying it.

The beginning – 2003–04 I bought my first DIY Chinese book perhaps before leaving for Taiwan; maybe I bought it once I arrived. I can’t recall, but I remember spending each night before bed in my first two weeks on a leaky air mattress trying to learn the stroke order for 一二三四五六七八九十 numbers one to ten. I would write these

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characters out, trying to remember them in my head, and began to look for them around town on my errands. On moving into an apartment, I bought a book called “1000 most commonly-used Chinese characters,” and used this as my guidebook for the next year. I would scan the road for signs while driving, pick up menus at restaurants, look at all the printed materials I could get my hands on. At some point, a particular character became so familiar that I could draw it in my mind; I would look it up in my book and write it on a flashcard. Occasionally, I would review these flashcards, testing myself for pronunciation and tone, maybe even for manual (writing) memory, but as the number of characters grew, this review became less frequent, seeming more like wasted time (vs. just reading more and looking up newer characters). I see this drive to learn characters as the starting point, the foundation, of my Chinese language learning, and to this day my character recognition remains my strongest skill, my proudest achievement, and yet at the same time my crutch, as I am content to lean on it as my preferred mode of ‘communication’ rather than develop my oral skills. After the first month in Taiwan I began lessons at a language centre called the Taipei Language Institute (TLI). Since my roommates (a Brit and a Canuck, both males in their early 20’s, teaching English in the same school system as me) didn’t want to invest the time and money right away, I chose to take individual (one-on-one) classes. This was probably also motivated by some nervousness in my learning abilities, and some trepidation around the efficacy of group learning of pronunciation and basic grammar, versus intense personal instruction. I attended on average three hours a week of class for the next year. This type of one-on-one instruction meant I moved at my own pace, could ask questions, received lots of focus on form (sometimes an infuriating degree of criticism as regards pronunciation), and avoided any performance pressure in comparison with peers. The first six weeks were only focused on reading out and properly identifying phonetics (sounds) and phonology (tones), with some examples of common words that used those sounds – but without any tests on these semantic associations, I focused on phonological distinctions and production. I did not actually find this very difficult, perhaps a credit to my instructors (and certainly to the intensive nature of the class); among the challenges, the third tone was definitely the trickiest, along with the phonological changes of tone sandhi. At first I strongly emphasized tonal differences while speaking to facilitate their recall. I found myself moving my head up and down with tonal pitch, a habit that took years to subdue. I find it much easier to recall tones when a morpheme is connected to other adjacent morphemes to create multi-syllabic words, rather than speaking characters by themselves for instance.

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The most challenging phonemes were ri, ji/qi/xi differentiation, and n/ng differentiation. I chose to learn the 注音符号 zhùyīn phonetic alphabet instead of pīnyīn due to its social pervasiveness in Taiwan. However, I believe it is also an excellent choice for any learner whose native language uses the Roman alphabet, as for me it reduced cognitive dissonance between English-like pīnyīn spelling and the oft-times wholly different Mandarin pronunciation: I was forced to associate this new set of phonemes with a new orthography, minimizing interference from English-like representations. Learning the sound system separately worked well for me, I believe, because I think of language as abstract forms in combination, and trying to learn what each combination of sounds actually meant seemed like cognitive overload at the time. When I moved on to syntax and vocabulary, I had already spoken aloud every morpheme in the Mandarin language, and had practiced many tone sandhi combinations. This gave me immense confidence in distinguishing new words, as I was now aware of the possible phonetic boxes a new word might fit into. There were still many aspects of Mandarin phonology that were stumbling blocks: misremembering tones to sometimes comic effect, for instance, or disjunction between auditory discernment and correct reproduction (Me: “泡 tan 了!” Make soup [soup pronounced incorrectly], Teacher: “You mean 泡汤 [ pao tang].” make soup, Me: “Yeah, that’s what I said: 泡 tan!” [again mispronouncing soup]). In response I developed many techniques to refine my understanding of the sound system: I nodded my head along with the cadence of the tones, mentally noted other non-English-L1 learners’ difficulty in purging L1 phonemes from Mandarin speech (though it’s hard to say whether or not this translated into actually producing them better myself ), and visualized tone and intonation as waves through a line of text, like a hidden layer lying under but connecting the naked characters. I began to develop a feeling that misremembered tones were grating or confusing; I’m not sure whether or not I was simply absorbing the ideologies of established speakers of Mandarin or Chinese teachers, but proper tonal speech became easier, fluid, beautiful; speech in which tones were not clear or misspoken was harder to parse, and sounded less ‘refined,’ less ‘educated.’ To this day I have a hard time purposefully misspeaking tones (for instance, in imitation of a ‘tone-deaf’ nonnative speaker of Mandarin), such that I’m unable to change the tones of the words I’m pronouncing and simultaneously think of the words coming up in a sentence. I moved to basic grammar and lots of rote drills, which I enjoyed; they seemed cognitively fun, like puzzles, and seemed to be giving me lots of practice with common sentence patterns and tonal shifts. There was no expectation of learning characters, and no formal teaching either, but characters were included in the textbooks (with 注音符号 zhùyīn [phonetic alphabet]), so I used my 1000-

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character dictionary to look them up. There were CDs for listening practice; I hated them, and stopped not long after starting, as the dialogues were boring and simple, a torture to listen to more than once. By the end of that year I was reading characters without any great difficulty, and lapped up the “face” my colleagues were giving me at work for my accurate pronunciation (“很标准” [very] standard – which I now take to mean “you don’t sound Taiwanese, but I understand you just fine”). I found it incredibly useful, in comparison with my later, less structured acquisition of Japanese, to first practice new grammar in the controlled, repetitive environment of one-on-one tutorials, where I was not self-conscious of any misuse, and could play with the constraints and recombinatory possibilities with social impunity. However, for the first six months I was loath to speak outside of class, even with the language centre staff. Using Chinese with other English speakers seemed absurd and awkward, but using it with Taiwanese people was even more difficult: there seemed to be cognitive dissonance when a foreigner tried to use a language that didn’t belong to him, and any attempt I made to order goods or otherwise express myself was more often than not countered with “huh?” and a wrinkled-up face. I felt as though my utterances were always expected to conform syntactically to those of a mature native speaker, in that one mispronounced morpheme would render an entire thought opaque to the listener. Unlike first language learners, who are constantly building proficiency in an interlanguage that is demonstrably immature, but still considered native, as a second language learner I felt I was judged all too often not by the content of my interlanguage but by its deviation from a mature version of the target language. Even once I began to string together real, comprehensible sentences, I was hopeless in any sort of exchange that required understanding the response I was getting from my interlocutor (who never spoke “很标准” [very] standard). It was incredibly frustrating, and demotivating; I think that my love for learning characters (a sort of ongoing measure of progress and index for pride) was all that got me through this period, as absorbing the syntax wasn’t especially addictive. I wore the pages of my dictionary thin that year. Part of me enjoyed the rote, familiar, patterned methods needed with paper dictionaries, pens, and notebooks, and felt this mechanical work helped my character recognition; another part of me hated the hassle of indexes and non-phonetic ordering, the unfamiliar lookup strategies (“What’s the radical for this character?” “Why isn’t this character here? Ah! I counted the strokes wrong. . .”), and the poor glosses (“What does ‘auspicious’ mean anyway?”), and felt much of it was a waste of time that should rather be spent reading.

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This period of time was my first exposure to people who spoke Mandarin, both native and non-native speakers. My closest Taiwanese friend, who trained with me to become an English teacher in the same school system, welcomed me into her home occasionally to spend time with her family. This was a monumental encouragement for me in language learning, as most of the family members were not fluent in English, giving me many opportunities to joke with them in Chinese, bask in praise for my efforts, and observe interactions I could never imagine in class. Through them I was introduced to Taiwanese pronunciation, to the views of different generations, to domestic life in another language. During our dinners at home I was nervous, quiet, but able to express myself and listen without feeling judged; during our dinners out they made me feel as though part of the family, as if it were a regular meal, not an unusual event with a foreigner, and this helped me feel in some small way a part of Taiwanese society, a valid speaker, a real person. Not all of these invitations were comfortable and easy – I spent a day with my 干爸 ‘adoptive’ father and his two friends in the mountains, and though it was an amazing event for me from a cultural and linguistic point of view, it was exhausting (no English whatsoever), reminding me that I was not yet able to take part in society, as I could not follow all the conversations (which were half 台語 Taiwanese dialect anyway) and found it impossible to engage at the intellectual / discursive level I wished to. Notwithstanding my discomfort in social situations, I strongly identified with the family. I asked my friend while at a party to help me come up with a Chinese name, which took a whole two minutes. I asked her family if I could adopt their surname for my name as well, and this combination is what I use to this day. I have had my name engraved on chops and emblazoned on my work visas. It is what has identified me to all further friends I made in Taiwan, including most other foreigners with whom I studied Chinese. It is a name I use, more than I name I feel I am, particularly after I began learning Japanese and Korean, and teachers and friends used transliterated versions of my English name. My Chinese name remains attached to the few years I spent in Taiwan. As an English teacher, I felt I had inherited the yoke of certain prejudices stemming from what I perceived as a homogeneous society ‘opened’ quickly to the West. As I was unable to communicate in Chinese, I felt very much outside of this local society, but I railed against totally identifying with some imagined English-teaching foreigner society, and sticking with my studies may have helped me diverge from stereotypes about expat English teachers and find purpose outside of my work. There were other issues with this English-Chinese divide and the English-teaching industry in Taiwan, but at least displaying some knowledge of Chinese was to me like saying, “here, see, I care about your culture too, I’m not just here to suck money out of your system and run!”

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Owing to my distaste for my work, a gradual shift from an English teaching identity to “I am here to learn Chinese and travel (and I teach to get by)” occurred. I began to see myself as having some ‘higher calling’ than some of the other expat teachers I met, who seemed to have little direction or ambition, and who I thought of as misfits. I saw parallel signs in their study of Chinese, clearly highlighting my prejudices at the time: one co-worker (5+ years in Taiwan) had a strong Taiwanese accent (versus what I had internalized as “proper” or “standard” Mandarin, with its strong retroflexed sh/zh/ch phonemes), another did not produce tones though he had lived in Taiwan for almost 10 years, and many others seemed unwilling to even try to engage with the Chinese language, preferring businesses and services that catered to their English-only lifestyles. I developed a sense of (arrogant) pride in comparing myself to these examples, and used them as a way to measure the value of my investment in language learning. A few friends would meet me once every week or two for a language exchange; the bulk were with one of three good friends, all girls, who seemed eager to practice their own English, and who were patient with my relatively simple Chinese conversational ability. One eventually expressed her romantic interest, but aside from my male identity, I believe that an interest in building a lasting relationship with a foreign, English-speaking peer played a role in all of these cases. We often met at a coffee shop or tea house, where I would grimace my way through some basic conversation. I needed lots of encouragement and hand-holding (“哇, 很棒! Wow, [you’re doing] great!” and from strangers: “外国朋友不常会讲中文 Foreigners can’t usually speak Chinese”). I truly hated myself during some of those sessions – I was thick-tongued, slow-witted, extremely self-critical, and pitifully dependent on moral support. Despite such growing pains, I was maturing, blossoming from a dull student of Chinese into a ‘speaker’ of Chinese. My efforts at using the characters continued; I began texting friends in Chinese using my phone, typing short missives at Internet café computers. Both of these activities required learning the 注音符号 zhùyīn phonetic keyboard layout, and were too slow to really enjoy, but I nevertheless tried to integrate Chinese into my literate life in some way. I began writing some characters in my travel journals for names and places, started writing the date in Chinese characters, and would use a Chinese term when I found it more salient to my daily thoughts and experiences than the English one (for instance, 茶 tea or 西瓜 watermelon). Street signs were now comprehensible, at least for daily necessities. Menus were getting easier, but still littered with strange, flowery names and complex characters with 肉 [meat] and 艹 [plant] radicals. I couldn’t

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‘read’ yet, just recognize characters; after about a year in Taiwan I began looking, ponderously and laboriously, through Taiwanese Mandarin 國語 language school textbooks (for native speakers of Mandarin) collected from my helpful English students. I would spend a few hours every weekend by myself at a tea shop grappling with these books. I began to think in terms of “I can read at a grade 3 level,” though in reality my lack of exposure to narrative works meant that although I might recognize as many characters as a third grade student, I certainly couldn’t read with anything like native speed or fluency. I mainly enjoyed studying on my own, outside or at a café, and would try to speak some Chinese with the workers, especially if they saw my books and asked me questions in Chinese. I liked this environment – I was in ‘a real place’ where I could be simultaneously alone and absorbing at my own pace, but surrounded by Chinese speech and Chinese characters. Workers and fellow patrons would often beam at me and speak to me in Chinese – which affirmed for me the validity of my Chinese language identity. I delighted in refusing the English menu with a smile, or responding in Chinese to some conversation shared openly between two workers. I felt it my duty to dispel myths about foreigners as unwilling or unable to learn Mandarin. My roommates, who also began learning Chinese, also met with only female language exchange partners. I accounted for this by noting that every one of our fellow English teachers (work being our only natural interaction with Taiwanese our age) was female, that women interested in improving their English seemed less pushy than men (who came off as aggressive to us, and less culturally or socially sensitive), and that as young men who were conspicuously foreign (and whose language and cultural background had social cachet) we attracted bolder interest from women than men. Despite playing pick-up soccer regularly at a local park, I found it tough to maintain conversations with these groups of men I played with (for whom Mandarin was often not a first language anyway), who I perceived as gruff and tight-knit, and recall no male Chinese-speaking friends from this period. I had no close ‘foreigner’ friends to practice with, and so this period was characterized by lots of private study (memorizing characters, simple reading) and language exchange. I also had a short relationship with a Taiwanese woman, and I quickly discovered that I could not speak a single sentence in Mandarin without making some mistake or another. This was embarrassing and deflating, and I chose to speak only English with her. When I finally decided after 16 months of teaching that I was coming to the end of my journey in Taiwan, I became unsure of my connection to the original world of ‘home.’ I was aware when I first moved to Asia that I would certainly change, though at the time I only saw one year abroad ahead of me; a year and

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a half later I recall knowing that I had indeed changed, but not knowing how to accept that. I was not ready for feeling like an outsider in multiple places.

First fruits of my labours, and carrying the seeds home – 2004 Throughout the spring and summer of 2004 I was backpacking through parts of Asia. After a week in Hong Kong, where I felt pretty out of touch with daily life and did not find much use for my Mandarin, I traveled to 云南 Yunnan province and 四川 Sichuan province, where the local accents took a few weeks of adjustment to parse properly. This period of travel was blissful for me: I was recognized as a speaker of Mandarin, could arrange with little difficulty my own life as a traveler, and could connect with ‘real people’ using Mandarin. It was during this time in mainland China that I became fully cognizant of some salient differences between Taiwanese Mandarin and mainland standard Mandarin, including stronger retroflex affricates (zh, ch) and fricatives (sh, r), and differences in finals (儿 er, 子 zi), some tones (认识 rènshi, 研究 yánjīu), and lexical items (厕所 toilet / 洗手间 washroom, 自行车 bicycle / 脚踏车 bicycle). Use of pīnyīn in China was far more consistent than Taiwan’s Wade-Giles system, but rarely used in the areas I visited, so I had to become familiar with Simplified characters (I specifically recall confusion over common ones like 当 dāng, 与 yǔ, 义 yì, as they looked very abstract and unrelated to characters I had become familiar with). I remember the discourse in Taiwan surrounding Traditional character learning, and rationalizing it as (1) a more direct path to classical Chinese (little did I know how hard that would prove to be regardless), (2) ‘pure’ and therefore more beautiful or descriptive (a brazen cooperation with language-ideological forces in Taiwan), and (3) harder to learn at first, but allowing easier access to the simplified set (than the opposite direction). Up to this point in my language learning journey Traditional characters were king, and were taken for granted, but now orthography became a choice and a dilemma. As I became more familiar with Simplified orthography, I found myself enjoying writing these economical characters, but nurturing a strong feeling of solidarity with Traditional forms in text. Throughout my further travels in Asia I sought out familiar surroundings, neighbourhoods with Chinese signs and ethnic Chinese faces; I felt comfortable interacting in these environments, and identified with them more now than I had thought I would. I also had opportunities to act as an informal guide and resource for other Chinese-speaking travelers. Before leaving Asia for ‘home’ I purchased a hefty pile of books from the bookstore in a mall in Kuala Lumpur. I specifically remember a linguistic biography of Lee Kuan Yew (former Prime

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Minister of Singapore), a book called 我如何學會9種語言 How I Learned 9 Languages by Steve Kaufman, some reference materials (thesauri, etc.), and part of the Practical Chinese Reader series by Beijing Language and Culture University Press, which I bought in order to start familiarizing myself with Simplified characters, knowing that one day I would need familiarity with China’s vast publishing empire.

Whither my future me? 2004–05 My return to North America was to a new home, in a new state, in a new country (Minnesota, USA), and was devoted to my family. I did not take work, nor enroll in school, and found it hard to maintain my Chinese. I did some volunteering at a local after-school / weekend Chinese language academy (I worked with the adult class as a conversational partner) and continued my slow progress in reading. I also found myself positioned as a new resource for my community – for instance, I met an Anglo friend a few times to tutor her in Chinese before she traveled to China with her two adopted ethnically Chinese daughters. This was rewarding in a new way – feeling like my efforts were something valuable, something I could share, something harder to come by in North America. However, this was not frequent enough or at a high enough level to maintain my skills, and it seemed clear through tutoring sessions and work with the Chinese school that I did not enjoy teaching Chinese per se. The few Taiwanese I met during this period formed bonds over our shared Taiwan experiences, but we rarely spoke Chinese together as we often met in the company of other Englishspeaking friends. I applied for a number of future possibilities during this time, but eventually decided that I had to give myself a real, serious chance at learning Chinese; in order to do so, I moved back to Toronto and my old (pre-Taiwan) life for a time. Despite returning to my former job and lifestyle, I recognized that the exoticism which drew me to Chinese in the first place had not disappeared: I guiltily enjoyed the norm-defying, intellectual pride of pulling out a Chinese book on a busy Toronto subway. I did not want to intermingle with the Canadian society I came from: I wanted to distance myself from it, and associate with a “rarer breed” of international journeymen. My investment in East Asia had become an identification with East Asia, and I was no longer happy putting my Chinese aside as a curio; it was integral to my persona. This time in Canada saw a further regression of oral ability, as it was a real challenge to find conversation partners in everyday life; I had no Chinesespeaking friends, no discussion group, no learning circle, no classes. To compensate for this loss, I focused on acquiring reading and writing fluency in

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the Simplified Chinese characters not used in Taiwan. I devoured my set of Practical Chinese Readers, which were written and glossed entirely in Chinese. I began to jot notes in Simplified Chinese as a way to reinforce the orthography and simultaneously increase my writing speed. Once I had acclimatized myself to reading the Simplified character set, I felt a true sense of accomplishment: I could now access the accumulated writings of the modern Chinese mainland diaspora, which repositioned me as an international participant in a much wider Chinese community. However, I still identified with Taiwan, its political identity, and its romantic defense of the Traditional Chinese orthography. In reality, I recall never wishing to live in China, so learning Simplified characters had more to do with being a comprehensive, well-rounded learner to me than facilitating any imminent move; it seemed clear already that working in an international community of Chinese language meant being familiar with mainland Chinese writings.

Triumphant return, purposeful study – 2005–06 My next phase in Taiwan, as a dedicated student of Chinese, solidified my commitment to a life involving East Asia, and provided the linguistic and cultural exposure that would facilitate my quest to feel like a real speaker and community member. I wanted to be a competent user of both the written and oral forms, and I wanted my education and ideas to be transparent via the medium of Chinese; ideally, I wanted my Chinese at the level of my English, in which I found little difficulty expressing complex, abstract ideas, and in which I took great joy in reading and writing. I chose to study at a university language centre as I considered it a more authoritative and serious option than unaffiliated language centres, and I moved away from the city centre, closer to campus, hoping to mingle with more Chinese speakers and avoid the foreigner social circles of the city proper. I expected to place high on the language placement test for the university language centre, but found myself considered lower intermediate, because I was not a comfortable speaker. I wished desperately to speed through the intermediate phase, thinking it was a waste of time, but in the end I developed greater fluency speaking, and was forced to memorize characters I would have skipped, which I believe has since served me well in acquiring new characters on my own (from practicing their constituents). I attended two to four hours of class a day in Chinese, spent two or three hours a day at the library, and passed most of my social time with other international students communicating in serviceable Mandarin. I met a range of new friends: young Taiwanese Chinese teachers, newly immigrated Japanese teachers

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studying Mandarin, exchange students from Asia and Europe, Western and Eastern professionals taking Chinese for kicks or for career development, American-born Chinese (ABCs) and Canadian-born Chinese (CBCs) claiming their cultural heritage. I did not make any Taiwanese friends during this time, outside of the teachers at school. I had an image of young Taiwanese as boring and sheltered, partly because that’s how I characterized some of the events I was invited to. I was not as comfortable or interested in the pastimes I associated with Taiwanese college-student culture (karaoke, eating, and drinking tea), whereas many of my Western friends enjoyed getting together at a bar or somebody’s apartment and drinking alcohol, something I was already very used to as a framework for social interaction from my high school and undergraduate days. I was embarrassed that drinking was a social glue for me, and thought of it as in opposition to some other external (pure? innocent?) culture, but nevertheless my friends during this time period were a mixture of the old Western compatriots who remained from my first period living in Taiwan and the group of English-speaking foreigners I met at my new language centre. I made half-hearted efforts at joining clubs, and settled on soccer, where I could generally earn respect for my athleticism without needing to exhibit social skills or speak much with my teammates. I found that I had little in common with my Taiwanese language exchange partners at this time, and though I am indebted to them for my growth, I believe this period reinforced for me an image of incomprehensible or incompatible cultural chasms and the image that crosscultural friendship sometimes took effort and lacked humour. My learning in this phase was a focus on mechanics, with a comparison of grammar patterns, adverbs, and verb forms. I rarely prioritized memorizing nouns, names, or cultural references; I was convinced that developing different ways of speaking, and comfort with parsing complex sentences, was more important than acquiring vocabulary. Class sizes were small, so this was a perfect environment for joking and attempting to use new grammar, forms, and registers. The case was very different outside of class, where communication required pragmatic knowledge like politeness, pleasantries, set phrases, and an acute ability to discern intention and emotion, wide lexical knowledge such as a command of colloquial expressions and slang, and social knowledge like names, TV, music, and cultural history; needless to say my successes in class did not translate as clearly into ‘real life.’ My favourite pastime was solitude with my books. I went through various phases of interest, including 成語 idioms, which brought me great joy as they felt bigger, more connected, more interesting; they were not only little grammatical and lexical puzzles, but made me feel I was studying Chinese culture, an activity that seemed deeper and richer than simply learning new vocabulary (ironic, as I avoided the Chinese

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culture of the people all around me). I would organize my notebooks sometimes by phrase translations, sometimes by semantic sets, sometimes in great review lists ordered by parts of speech. I enjoyed this process, feeling perhaps like an etymologist: if it was in my notes, that means I had studied it, it was within my grasp, I might one day be able to use it. I did not often ever look at my notes a second time: the writing itself, the collection, was enjoyment and accomplishment enough. Cognitive and strategic challenges to language learning during this period showed some similarity to earlier phases of learning. For instance, I still hated opening my mouth and feeling like a small child, especially with those who could speak more comfortably and more in-depth using English, and often avoided conversation outright if I felt I might present myself as a poor speaker. There were also new challenges in this new environment: 1. I could no longer afford one-on-one classes, so was moving at the pace of my classmates, which sometimes frustrated me; 2. As my textbooks were changing from focus on structured lexical and grammatical practice to more open-ended texts, I had to develop ways to measure my increase in vocabulary and grammatical variety; 3. Although I was beginning to read print media comfortably, other media such as TV, movies, and academic or political speech presented huge problems for me in their speed, higher-register conventions, and even use of language from other time periods; 4. Past the lower intermediate phase, there were few students or classes on offer, and they only required reading and speaking in class. The teachers were happy to let students dictate course structure and material at this level: consequently, there was no testing, no corrected homework, no need to take notes in Chinese, no concrete product of my week-to-week work. In short, it felt as though there was no ‘academic rigour’ to my studies, and while virtually stress-free, I wonder to this day if I could’ve learned much more with more tangible requirements. Looking back, one of the more significant influences on my long-term language identity was initiating a lifelong relationship with languages beyond Chinese. I studied Japanese in a class with other Taiwanese students, which was fun for the exposure to the new language but also for practice of Chinese. I began a language exchange and a romantic relationship with a Japanese classmate (also learning Chinese). I felt wonderful about this: I am teaching Chinese! Chinese was always our chosen medium of communication, as we had both come to Taiwan to immerse ourselves. I also enjoyed connecting with the younger Taiwanese students in my classes as peers in Japanese learning, and using Chinese in class with them. Chinese remained my priority; my reading knowledge, in particular, was the base on which I built my Japanese ability.

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Learning Japanese reinforced my use of topic sentences in Mandarin, and Japanese particles were a great way to review Mandarin concepts of coverbs and directional phrases. Mandarin’s relatively straightforward morphological processes compared to Japanese verbal inflections foregrounded the importance of context and adverbial usage. Perhaps more importantly, Japanese pedagogy’s emphasis on politeness expressed in word choice and inflection seemed suddenly wholly lacking to me in Mandarin, and I have since been uncertain of how to address speakers of different statuses, something I had not worried much about previously besides the quaint lexical item 您 nín [polite form of second person pronoun]. I observed that referring to people by their titles/relationships was also a common way of showing respect in Chinese, but I don’t recall this ever being explicitly taught to me. As I was exposed to more Japanese culture, my willingness to speak, and therefore my learning, was affected by my awareness of the consequences of mistakes: I was intensely anxious not to offend my interlocutor, and thus cautious with my Japanese. I am also more conservative now in my Mandarin use as a result of this sensitivity to and uncertainty with politeness. I lived in a quotidian rhythm of Mandarin, and Taiwanese life surrounded me. I began to forget common English nouns like ‘washing machine.’ There were times when I wished to express something that felt distinctly Chinese (没办法 nothing to be done; 原来如此 so it’s like that), or when I could elucidate a concept in Chinese only (吧啦 guava; 暧昧 ambiguous; 做客 be a guest). I found I had adopted many phonologically ‘foreign’ outbursts (哎哟 [Taiwanese] “aiyo”; エーー [Japanese] “eh”) and had formed deep affective associations with them. Life wasn’t normal or interesting without exposure to the languages I had come to love, and that made me feel distanced from my family and friends back in North America, who did not speak these languages or identify with them. At the same time, I felt like a part of me was atrophying, that the bulk of my intellectual and social interactions revolved around very basic themes, and that my actual life patterns were becoming constrained by my limited Chinese vocabulary.

Scholarship year in Taiwan: Bonus lap – 2006–07 Back home in North America, my girlfriend and I were not able to sustain a long distance relationship, and my mindset at the time had me wondering if anyone from such a faraway place, such a vastly disparate culture, could ever fit well with future images of my family. Where would I live, if we were to be together? How would I earn a living? What would we do about our language barriers? I

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began to wonder if my investment in Asia was setting me up for as much hardship as opportunity. Mid-summer I received word that I was to be awarded a language scholarship by the Taiwan Ministry of Education. I was honoured at the chance to ‘deepen my knowledge’ and flew back to Taiwan. I justified this extension of my studies (versus the career-oriented choice of higher education, or the workaday world) by appealing to this idea of investing early in intensive language training, with the hope that it would pay off mid-career (as it certainly wasn’t going to pay off in the short term). I still dreamed of becoming some international, jet-setting professional, coveted by some world I couldn’t quite put my finger on, traveling for work and having some fuzzy home situation on multiple continents. When I first moved back to Taiwan I stayed with a good Japanese friend. We spoke entirely in Chinese, and it was my first solid friendship entirely mediated by the Chinese language – notably with another non-native speaker, just like my ex-girlfriend. That year I participated in advanced classes, reading novels, newspaper stories, and magazine articles picked and presented by my classmates: a translator, a law student, a Japanese teacher, an Asian Studies major, and a university student from Hong Kong. Class was still primarily line-by-line readings, with discussion of unusual terms or concepts. There was very little grammatical ‘practice’ or focus on form, so review was up to us, and we really just held discussions and exchanged ideas about our cultures. I hid somewhat behind the idea that I was ‘advanced,’ and avoided anything that might call me out as an impostor or promote mingling with newer students (who I feared would not provide me with a good language learning environment), including speech contests, plays, etc. I moved out on my own, and I found it difficult once again to make good friends. My acquaintances formed a loose social circle for speaking Chinese: Japanese graduate students, the few Taiwanese friends I managed to meet, my classmates. In this small circle, conversations began to exhibit effortless codeswitching between Mandarin, Taiwanese, Japanese, Cantonese, and English. It became a social practice to flaunt poor puns, butcher and twist words into places that only made sense in light of their relationship to other shared languages or experience, etc. We were friends in Chinese, respected and cared about each other in Chinese, and pushed each other to excel in Chinese. One of my strangest feelings of belonging at this time was the ‘school’ soccer team. I had known these fellows for over a year, and I saw them as misfits, like me, but misfits who had a greater claim to a real life in Taiwan. Soccer is not a popular sport in Taiwan, and thus we had no field to practice on or any support from the school social community. Only about half the team

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were born and raised in the country. The rest were 華裔 ethnic Chinese from 印度 India, 印尼 Indonesia, 泰国 Thailand, friendly guys who were fluent, but not always highly literate or native-level in Mandarin, and who often visited family in other countries. I did not become close friends with any, but I spoke to them more often during practice, and could finally joke and feel a part of some group of peers that spoke only Chinese. Towards the end of that academic year, my classmates banded together to prepare for the national Mandarin language exam, the CPT (aka TOP).40 We studied by gathering lists of colloquial expressions and 成語 idioms, developed jokes and silly associations, and used the discussions as touchpoints on cultural understanding. I enjoyed this immensely, and scored well on the test. I felt in some way that the years I had spent were not for naught; I had a piece of paper with some proof of my ability, that would last far longer than my actual fluency might if I returned to North America. Adding to this feeling of accomplishment, one of my Taiwanese friends gifted me Chinese books, a warm testament to her faith in my commitment to the language and the culture. It was a time when I felt I could maybe, just maybe, become a fluent member of Chinese-speaking society. It was, however, too little too late. These two years I spent in Taiwan as a full-time student were relaxed and satisfying, but try as I might, I never met a Taiwanese circle of friends I shared a sense of humour and camaraderie with; I always felt included out of a sense of obligation, or generosity. I was doomed to feel permanently on the outside of this culture: I despaired that I might not identify with the people I met, while my love of their language deepened daily. I experienced first hand a version of the idea that learning in a natural native environment is not by definition ideal. I found it all too easy to commiserate with my fellow international students, instead of spending a day groping to make awkward conversation in Chinese. While I did not experience overt discrimination due to class or social situation, I was at times beset by the difficulty of negotiating a right to speak Mandarin with eager interlocutors determined to practice their English on me. I enjoyed my time with my various circles of friends, but it was always a guilty struggle trying to create ‘more opportunities’ to speak, to wonder if my social decisions would help or hinder my Chinese learning. I couldn’t picture a future in Taiwan. I questioned why I was even bothering to learn Chinese. When my scholarship ended, so did my Taiwanese experience.

40 Chinese Proficiency Test (CPT), now known as the Test of Proficiency in Huayu 華語文 能力測驗.

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Transition: From leisure student to professional student – 2007–09 Back in North America, I was not the independent jet-setter I’d hoped to be. After a lack of success finding work ‘in Chinese,’ I felt dejected, and began to question the wisdom of my choices. There were a few bright lights in my struggle to maintain my ‘Chinese identity.’ Through a language exchange with a Taiwanese graduate student we became good friends, and I often met him for coffee or attended dinner parties at his house. His friends were all Taiwanese, and though none of them were close, I still felt I could share an identity with them, with them and with no one else I knew in North America. This was perhaps the first of my true male native Chinese-speaking friends outside of my soccer teammates. I eventually decided on graduate school, hoping that Asian Studies was broad enough to give me room to figure out how to apply my love of Chinese to something worthwhile. I chose a grad school in Vancouver for many reasons, one of which was the fabled Asian community in the city, which I dreamed would finally embrace me as the international misfit I truly was. In my new identity as a graduate student in Chinese applied linguistics in the department of Asian Studies, I moved from the language learning life into the world of meta-learning. I created few opportunities to nurture my Chinesespeaking identity in Vancouver. As an incoming student, I applied for and was assigned to teaching assistant work for first-year Chinese language classes. This was my first exposure to formalized writing practices, and I was extremely nervous with the responsibility of marking other learners. I found myself confused about which characters were proper for our language program (Taiwanese vs. Cantonese vs. Japanese characters in place of Mainland Simplified Chinese), whether or not a certain stroke should be extended past its connecting line or not, whether or not a certain grammatical structure was flexible or acceptable. I no longer felt I was an ‘advanced learner,’ and I bowed out quickly with support and sympathetic understanding from my department, feeling I had let everyone down. In truth, as I never wanted to teach Chinese, I was not disturbed by my unfamiliarity with pedagogical precision; I was, however, conscious foremost of failing my benefactors, and secondly of how little I really knew. After this I briefly worked on the university’s Chinese character database, an online dictionary and corpus for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean uses of Chinese characters. I enjoyed this work, and because of it decided I should learn Korean to supplement my knowledge of how different learners of Chinese characters approached the task, how they used technology, and how Chinese characters continued to remain in use in so many different geopolitical and cultural contexts. I also acted as a teaching assistant for a Chinese film course taught entirely in English. The professor was Chinese, but somehow I could

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never bring myself to speak Mandarin with him, already feeling inadequate, as though I would be imposing on his time by doing so, another non-native speaker struggling to discuss difficult concepts when English would suffice. I found myself unwilling to engage in Chinese events on campus and around town. I joined the undergraduate Taiwanese students’ club, but did not participate or make any new connections. When prominent Chinese-speaking personages visited, I did not take advantage of their presence; despite having read one visiting author’s most famous work, when he sat one table away from me at dinner I was paralyzed by my inability to think of anything interesting to say to him. I felt I wasn’t “being a good student” or “supportive of Chinesespeaking culture.” I stopped reading Chinese on a daily basis, and worked on my Japanese reading skills instead, justifying this as necessary for future research. I stopped listening to Chinese language podcasts. I made no attempt to cultivate Chinese-speaking friends. It all felt old, affected, effortful. I began to wonder what point there was in striving to maintain some identity that didn’t come naturally, that didn’t seem validated by the world around me. As school continued, a few things combined to help raise me out of despair for my Chinese identity. New research projects were proposed that I could contribute to; a social circle emerged that supported my unique position as an experienced non-native speaker of Chinese; I found my Chinese-speaking identity tacitly supported, without explicit dialogue, by new and old friends; and I accepted work that I hoped would leverage my international experiences, giving some economic and professional merit to those questionable years of further study in Taiwan. One research project, an experiment in cooperative peer learning dubbed Mandarin Circle, was a weekly meeting of experienced Anglo learners of Mandarin, where we could share our language interests and talk about our histories and evolving identities as Chinese speakers. Most importantly, we did so entirely in Chinese, both as a way to maintain our conversational fluency and as a way to support each others’ desire to make Chinese a part of real life and our non-Asian cultural identities. We tried many activities I would not otherwise have pursued on my own, which enriched my connections with modern Chinese-speaking culture and acted as a much-anticipated social break in my week. Meanwhile, the ‘Chinese me’ was quietly delighted that it had a voice, a community it finally needn’t justify itself in or constantly scheme to insinuate itself into. Chinese found a new equilibrium in my life. I met many times with a Chinese-speaking colleague to discuss our research; we fell into switching back and forth between Chinese and English at a comfortable pace. I started a new language exchange. I spoke Chinese sometimes when out with Anglo friends, and it felt real, useful, fun, and appropriate. My Korean teacher even noted

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that my Korean accent sounded ‘Chinese’ and not ‘English.’ I used Chinese in email correspondence from time to time. Finally, it was during this period that awareness of literacy as an academic entity emerged. Some of my colleagues in the Mandarin second language acquisition research group had never had the chance to learn how to read or write in Chinese. The gigantic Chinese language program at the university catered to a large cohort of heritage speakers whose literacy skills were far behind their oral abilities. My coursework touched on subjects such as language as identity, language as power, scriptism, cultural imperialism. I was given new frameworks with which to see ‘my Chinese’ in relation to a wider community of speakers.

Who will I become? 2010 and beyond What role will Chinese play in my future? I see myself actively seeking Chinesespeaking friends and wider communities to participate in, no matter where I live. I picture myself one day working in multilingual text environments, especially in computing, where text can be manipulated and played with. I enjoy immensely the site of a document with mixed orthography; it is like a triumph of human communication to me. I will continue to strive to deepen and extend relationships with Chinese-speaking friends and colleagues. I will continue to feel that bizarre mix of emotions: despair at my attrition, pride in my accomplishments, arrogance in my difference, detachment from other English native speakers, ‘flow’ when reading or speaking, unpredictable moments of elation, hope and determination when dazzled by 文言文 classical Chinese or 书法 calligraphy, disappointment on grappling with an unintelligible movie, anger at my failure to understand casual speech, warmth towards those communities I have invested myself in, frustration with the effort it all takes. . . Will I find a place in some future ‘Chinese society’? I have agonized, alone, through the night, lying on hospital beds; I have paid taxes, attended an 80th birthday party, chased my friends’ children around their houses, taught schoolchildren, bought gas, ordered ‘the usual’ from shop owners, negotiated rental agreements, all in Chinese. . . but do I belong there, in ‘Chinese society’? It seems I have always had doubts about my validity as a Chinese speaker, and I fear that I will always have to create this society, instead of being included by virtue of my skill or background. Through my study of Chinese, and the inevitable crosscurrents of culture I was exposed to via that study, many conflicts have arisen in my life that remain unsolved. I have had to ask myself whether we should make friends to serve our language, or use language to make friends, or indeed whether or not we have a

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choice. Am I a ‘good learner’ for seeking friends with certain language skills or cultural backgrounds, or am I essentializing and commodifying people by treating them as resources? I continue to feel alienated from ‘Chinese culture,’ and thereby find it difficult to address the question of why I continue to study Chinese. Strangely enough, despite feeling outside of Chinese-speaking culture while living in Taiwan, I view myself as an even-less-valid speaker back in North America. In Taiwan I could identify as a learner, and as someone who made sacrifices for precious linguistic exposure; consequently, persisting in negotiating life in Chinese seemed less an imposition, more expected and understood. Here in Canada, where society is viewed as being open, inclusive, and multicultural, I find it embarrassingly difficult to engage with people in a language that I do not have an ethnic connection with.

Patsy’s Narrative (N3) Within Earshot but Out of Focus: (Still) Learning Mandarin After all these Years! Preamble I have had many types of exposure to Chinese over the years, including my first truly meaningful immersion in Chinese language and culture in 1986–87, and on many subsequent visits to China, and interactions with Chinese-speakers elsewhere. I have resided with a Chinese speaker (and often others) in Vancouver for several years and have had occasional interactions with Chinese learners in courses I have audited and in other Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. And I now co-direct a Chinese language education research centre. My learning process reflects other research on learners’ second language socialization and variable trajectories in relation to their identities, roles, priorities, and opportunities (Duff 2010, 2012b). Oddly enough, my experience also mirrors that of many heritage-language (HL) learners, although I am obviously not a Chinese descendant and had a much later start with Chinese than HL learners usually do. Like them, however, and like many other naturalistic (mostly uninstructed) L2 learners, my oral communication skills are mostly restricted to everyday informal communication and my written skills are nascent although I can recognize some characters. Many L2 learners experience bursts of language use and development and then periods of disuse and ambivalence. My experience has been no different. In some ways, in terms of fluency and vocabulary, for example, I was more

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proficient in 1987 than I am today, although I have learned various new highfrequency formulaic expressions and grammatical structures since then. I’m sure that good formal instruction and more concerted study on my part would have improved and leveled out my overall proficiency. Given my longheld desire to “someday” become proficient (at an advanced level) in Chinese, I’m certainly not “there” yet and may never be. But why have I not devoted more resources to acquiring it and done so more single-mindedly? A major factor, as I explain in more detail below, is that Mandarin has coexisted in my linguistic repertoire with many other languages, and the activities, cultures and destinations associated with each, often taking me in quite opposite directions (Asia vs. Europe). The linguistic ecology or “landscape” of my Chinese learning experiences also includes French, Spanish, German, Korean, Korean Sign Language, Japanese, and Hungarian, in order of my exposure to each. Learning Chinese was second last in the series, and represents a continuing project for me. Learning and teaching (about) English has been the first and dominant linguistic activity in my life. Therefore, my core composite identity relevant to learning/using Chinese is something like “multilingual, cosmopolitan, lifelong L2 learner/user, ethnographer, applied linguist, and ESL professional.” Of course, that’s only part of the story but it’s the one that is most relevant here. Most rewarding with respect to Chinese has been interacting with others in Chinese and learning new ways of communicating and being in Chinese cultures – expressing and gaining an understanding of different stances, identities, ideologies, affect, and other meanings, to use language socialization terminology, through Chinese (Duff 2010). In turn, I have gained a degree of legitimacy and mutual understanding within those Chinese-mediated social networks. Using Chinese, particularly in informal contexts with Chinese monolinguals or bilinguals, is simply a pleasure for me, under the right conditions. I occasionally need to speak or understand Chinese in formal academic or professional contexts, which is stressful and well beyond my ability. Thus, learning Chinese has not been without its attendant cognitive, cultural, social, and linguistic challenges, but it has also given me access to amazing friendships and opportunities, both personal and professional. Scholars influenced by feminist poststructural thought often refer to “sites of struggle” and “multiple, conflicting identities” in social life, with language being one of the most powerful symbolic resources and sources of tension (e.g., Norton, 2000). My attempts to learn and use Mandarin have, like those of others described in this book, certainly seen some of those struggles and frustrations, with shifting subject positions and social and linguistic identities and roles, language politics at play, and dismay at the quality of educational instruction and materials – and my own inability to engage more with learning Chinese.

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Being an English language education specialist, moreover, has meant that my interlocutors, employers, colleagues, and students usually have expected me to interact with them in English. I have exercised some agency as a language learner/user in seeking out opportunities to practice or learn Chinese, but perhaps not consistently enough or with enough conviction. For whatever reason, I tend to compromise rather than be overly assertive, to dwell in “third spaces,” liminal spaces, even within my own culture.

Ancient history: My early interest in Chinese Let me explain how my longstanding relationship with Chinese began. I had no classmates or friends from Chinese backgrounds when going to school in Calgary, Canada, although the small grocery store in my neighbourhood was owned by a Cantonese-speaking family, who kindly offered me unsaleable lettuce leaves for my guinea pigs but few cultural or linguistic insights. The main community of Chinese people and services locally was in Chinatown. Like many children growing up in Anglo-Canadian homes in the 1960s, the first modern language I studied, from childhood through university, was French, long before French immersion was a program option on the prairies. Later in junior high school and high school, I would add Spanish and German, respectively. I loved learning and using languages. I wanted to learn Chinese from about the time I first noticed Chinese characters in Grade 5 during a lesson about Ancient China and I never forgot the black and white image of an ancient pagoda we were shown using a dusty old opaque projector. Ironically, what originally captured my imagination most in relation to the Chinese language and culture, Chinese characters (and imagery), have remained the most unattainable aspect of my proficiency over the years. . . In Grade 6, volunteers in my class at school were paired up with penpals in Sendai, Japan. We exchanged blue aerogram letters in English and within a year or two I had also accumulated a team of penpals in a number of other countries: Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, and Trinidad. But this Japanese penpal came from a linguistic and cultural background that was much less familiar to me. After some months of correspondence and growing friendship, I sent her a modest gift I had handcrafted for her in my art class: chocolate-brown suede moccasins sewn with her initials beaded in yellow on top. When she wrote to thank me and ask what she could send me in return, I suggested a ring with a “character” on it, anticipating an exotic and perhaps inspirational Japanese [Chinese] character, a literary symbol capturing the allure of the mysterious Japanese language and the wisdom of this ancient culture. At the time, I didn’t

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actually know any Chinese characters but I must have been influenced by signage in Chinatown and by my sister’s trip to the World Expo (1972) in Japan. Months later, and with uncontainable excitement, I received a small packet in the mail bearing a silver ring in a small orange and white cotton pouch. But it contained not the character for greatness or courage or wisdom or true and undying friendship I’d longed for, but a fearsome Japanese devil mounted on top, a Japanese “character” shouting at me! My shock and horror at seeing that symbol perhaps foretold what would become a longterm love-hate relationship with Chinese “characters.” Fear and awe! Fortunately, the sweet friendship with my penpal continued for many years to come, despite the cross-cultural misunderstanding. Needless to say, I never wore the demonic ring but it continued to glare at me from the top drawer of my dresser for years to come. I do not recall knowing any English speakers in Canada who could speak Chinese, although I had read about missionaries or their children (e.g., Pearl S. Buck) who had lived in China or Taiwan in the early 20th century who were apparently fluent Chinese speakers. Nor did I really imagine an exotic “Orient” or Far East as far as China was concerned. It was referred to as “Red China” or “Communist China” then – and was depicted as anything but romantic in the 1960s and 70s, during and shortly after the Cultural Revolution. Following my university graduation in the summer of 1980, which coincided with the beginning of China’s new openness toward the West, I met the first visiting scholars to arrive at the University of Calgary – skinny men dressed in ill-fitting black suits – and still remember the hopefulness I felt, imagining new possibilities for myself in China as well. I wanted to understand a place that had been forbidden, off limits, and to try my hand at improving education there, especially in rural regions, not by teaching English, I thought, but by working directly with Chinese teachers who themselves could collectively have a much greater impact than I ever could. I hadn’t read about Chinese culture or literature, although images from The Good Earth (the Pearl Buck movie, filmed mostly in California) revealed poverty and difference from all that I knew from my suburban life in Alberta, a relatively affluent province in western Canada. I did know several people whose parents or themselves had lived and worked in China before WWII, however. Well before opportunities to travel to China materialized, I went to Quebec and France on short-term language study or work programs and was an avid Francophile. I was a complete novice with respect to Asia and Asian languages, in comparison, which were not offered at the time at schools, universities, or colleges in Calgary. My first trip to Japan in 1979 opened the door to that part of the world. A discount-fare Asian itinerary included stops in Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and I also spent two months in a classmate’s idyllic hometown, where her father was a Japanese haiku poet. During that exhilarat-

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ing and life-changing summer, I learned conversational Japanese and saw much of East Asia, traveling on a shoestring and staying with wonderful local people at every destination. Most of all, I loved Japan and its language and culture, and my honours thesis therefore focused on Japanese and, to a lesser extent, other topic-prominent languages (especially Korean and Mandarin), although that was unfortunately not an area of expertise for any of my professors (who were, nonetheless, very supportive). As a linguistics major, my attachment to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the common currency of linguistic transcription, made my learning of Japanese through romaji, the romanized Japanese script, seem perfectly natural. Romaji was also used in a Japanese textbook I had acquired for self-study on my first trip to Japan. As a result, although I found the etymology of characters tremendously interesting, I developed an aversion to literacy involving more than just phonetic scripts. Not surprisingly perhaps, characters seemed too far removed from the spoken word, whereas phonetic scripts, romanized or using other syllabaries, seemed very efficient for my purposes. Any linguistic accounts of Japanese or other Asian languages also typically used romanized fonts or IPA. Since it was still impossible in the late 1970s or early 1980s for the average Canadian to travel or work in China, the closest I got was the lookout point at the border of the New Territories (Hong Kong) and China in 1979. (A one-day tour would have cost $100, well beyond my budget then.) I remembered gazing across the expanse of verdant rice fields at the border longing to find a way into the country and into the language and culture – to traverse impermeable borders and breach bureaucratic political walls or, better yet, to be invited into the country. China’s recent international isolation from the Capitalist West coupled with my tantalizing experiences in Japan and other parts of Asia further stoked the flames of my desire to work in China. It’s not that I wanted to be a hero-conqueror as some others have mentioned. China was terra incognita for me but I hoped to experience something akin to the sweet rural life and deep culture I’d experienced in Japan. However, since I wanted to make a meaningful contribution to China’s development as a teacher or teacher educator, I suppose some of that heroism did exist. I returned to Asia in January 1981 in search of a job teaching English and, I hoped, an opportunity to learn Chinese, possibly in Singapore, where the “Speak Mandarin” campaign was in high gear. Instead, I ended up in Korea, my first stop, for nearly a year and Japan for two additional years, followed by graduate school in Hawaii, where I continued to study Japanese and applied linguistics. From my experiences in Korea during the oil shock and political turmoil of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and then my time in Japan, I had become accustomed to being the only White foreigner wherever I went (apart from work), constantly reminded that I was tall, white, hairy, red-headed, single,

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childless, adept at chopstick use or at eating kimchee and slurping noodles, squatting, and so on. Fortunately, being Canadian in Korea (and not American, like the local military community) and later in other countries positioned me quite positively from a political and cultural standpoint. In Japan, I taught English at a junior college for two years, studied Japanese in my spare time and during summers, and travelled widely. I learned several hundred Japanese kanji and became reasonably proficient in conversational Japanese and also became very involved in local community organizations offering language, cultural and sports activities. However, my role as an English instructor, while enabling me to get a decent job, housing, and perks such as money to travel, did define and constrain me and my language learning possibilities to a great extent while in Japan (and, similarly, earlier in Korea, and later in China). Devoting myself to Japanese language study really wasn’t an option though because I needed to support myself and wanted to develop professionally. I was already anticipating further graduate studies in Japanese sociolinguistics or English applied linguistics.

China In January 1986, I returned to a linguistics position in Canada following the completion of my master’s thesis in Hawai’i on the syntactic development in (L2) English of Japanese and Mandarin learners. Maybe it was the biting cold (–30 degree) Canadian winter after my two years in balmy Hawaii that was the impetus to travel again, or maybe it was just the continuing call to China and to new opportunities, but either way I soon began to apply for educational positions in China. One of the jobs would have placed me in Beijing, another in a remote area of western China, but not at a university, and a third in a more academic university position in Hunan Province. I opted for the third placement, with timely advice from a Cantonese university friend whose father was originally from Changsha, the capital of Hunan. She suggested that it would increase my opportunities to engage with the Chinese language, culture, and people compared with living in Beijing where the expatriate community was much larger. That decision was a harbinger of many things to come and that academic year remains the most significant for my learning of Mandarin, which is why I devote so much space to it in this piece. I was being socialized through Mandarin (and English) into post-Cultural Revolution life in Changsha and China. The books China: Alive in the Bitter Sea (Butterfield 1982), Iron and Silk (Saltzman 1986), and Chinese Lessons (Pomfret 2007) capture some of the vexing yet captivating social issues and conditions of that period. Furthermore, Changsha and the lush

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mountainside where the university and our program were housed and where we also lived had been part of Chairman Mao’s revolutionary base earlier in his career, so the local culture was steeped in political history and lore and, for many people, considerable personal drama.

Being a “Foreign Expert” My position in China, which began in September 1986, involved graduate-level course development and teaching as a “Foreign Expert” (a waiguo zhuanjia), an inflated title for someone who had only just earned her master’s degree, but certainly a welcome step up from being designated an English teacher or lecturer. Also inflated was my salary – about $200 a month – in comparison to the salaries of our graduate students, who as English teachers earned less than a tenth of that amount ($10–20 a month) yet often had young families to support. Preparing and teaching four new graduate courses was wonderful work but within less than ideal infrastructural and physical conditions. Our teaching building had no heating and had concrete floors from which the winter cold and dampness radiated up one’s legs and throughout the body, swelling limbs and appendages. Temperatures routinely dipped to near freezing and windows were always kept wide open to let in “fresh air.” Hunan is clammy year-round, and being south of the Yangtze River central heating is not permitted. To make matters worse, it is also one of the hottest places in China in summer, one of several infamous national “furnaces.” Additional stressors in the workplace included frequent power outages, no photocopier, missing textbooks, and just two shared computers for all instructors and no Internet. . . Not surprisingly, my early Chinese was shaped by such experiences and the need to try to rectify problems that made life and work difficult. Compensating for the austere conditions were 50 high-achieving teachersturned-graduate-students from different parts of China with excellent English proficiency, who had taken competitive national entrance examinations to enter the program. They wanted to learn everything about applied linguistics and represented an important community for me on many levels. As a result, however, I had limited direct and sustained interaction with Chinese speakers who didn’t also have the goal of mastering English or English applied linguistics. Changsha then had more than four million residents in a region with fertile agricultural land (especially fertile rice fields), a gritty industrial city core, and a grand, oversized train station to receive pilgrims from around China paying tribute to Chairman Mao and his legacy. I lived in a comfortable room in a somewhat secluded Russian-built red-brick residence that housed half a dozen foreign teachers on the side of a beautiful mountain on the edge of campus.

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Our back yard included thick bamboo groves, mighty choirs of cicadas, and picturesque little pagodas up the side of the mountain leading to a Buddhist temple that had suffered terrible damage during the Cultural Revolution, much as the local Confucian academy had. Being quite isolated on the side of a mountain in our little sanctuary, on a university campus separated from the city by a wide grey river and two bridges, and an island with orange orchards in between, meant that opportunities for daily Chinese use or for basic interaction with citydwellers were quite limited. The one shared phone in the house didn’t work reliably and there was no one to call locally anyway, because most homes and dormitories didn’t have phones. Several teachers with academic interests and backgrounds in English or American literature lived in the same house. The six of us ate together for the first half of the year in a small dining room for foreign teachers a few buildings away. Eventually most of us gave up on the communal dining, which proved a bit too regimented in terms of the schedule and also because the food, prepared with generous amounts of oil, posed digestion issues. Besides, progress in learning Chinese hinged in part on breaking away from the English speaking expat group (which was nice enough, but obviously Anglophone), and from other people, often strangers, wanting to practice English with us – often waiting for us outside our residence or rooms in the evening hoping to score a conversation and possibly some tutoring for themselves or a relative. Entertainment options were very limited. I started to read Russian literature in English translation (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky) to occupy my free time. When the “AntiBourgeois Liberalization” campaign swept through the country in the spring of 1987, many books in circulation at universities – and particularly in student dormitories – went underground again. Apart from reading and working, there wasn’t much to do on campus in the evenings except go for leisurely walks. Shopping was typically an exercise in frustration given the surly indifference of the underpaid workers in the government-controlled shops who were preoccupied with eating sunflower seeds. Forays into the city in search of language, culture and, occasionally, bread and Mongolian butter involved booking a school vehicle or riding bicycles we had acquired with great difficulty along partly unpaved and unlit roads. The public buses were dangerously overcrowded. Occasional trips out of town provided the best opportunities to chat with local people, other travelers, and service providers but such trips were not without their complications because train or bus tickets were hard to come by. Yet touring all over China during the Spring Festival in 1987 with my parents and later to Tibet and western China with my sister was a cultural and linguistic triumph. Taking others traveling enabled me to use Mandarin not only for my personal objectives and comfort but for theirs too, which was incredibly rewarding and motivating.

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Several local Chinese people were important to me during that year, helping me with difficulties, introducing me to their families, and inviting me on occasional excursions. I became quite close to several graduate students, male and female, who would come visit me from time to time, share simple meals, or accompany me to the city for a movie or performance. We invariably used English together. A few good-hearted Chinese monolingual workers were part of my daily life as well (cooks, cleaners, custodians), and I was invited to the young cook’s wedding in the countryside by mid-year. I spoke Chinese with these service providers although they spoke Changsha dialect primarily. I also befriended some amazing, resilient, multilingual Chinese professors whose life stories and often suffering were deeply affecting, but most of our discussions were mediated by English.

Researching and reflecting on CAL: Linguistic chaos and complexity Although I had made a couple of attempts to learn some Mandarin before going to China in community language programs, I had more metalinguistic than practical knowledge of Mandarin based on functional linguistics (e.g., Li and Thompson’s (1981) book, Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Grammar) from my undergraduate and graduate research on grammatical topics and subjects in Japanese and Chinese. Thus, even though I didn’t know how to speak Mandarin before going to China, I had a linguist’s arms-length, analytic knowledge of some parts of the grammatical system. However, shifting from linguistic knowledge to an internalized functional system that I could communicate with would prove challenging. Learning Japanese first should (or indeed, might) have helped me with Chinese but it didn’t seem to. Simplified characters were used in China and I couldn’t recognize them since most of my reading about Chinese had involved phonetic scripts. To make matters worse, the disjunction between the Japanese kanji that I had learned and the Simplified characters I now encountered, coupled with the language presented in textbooks and on tapes versus the oral language I heard around me (Changsha dialect, or Hunan-accented Mandarin) was bewildering. Not even the word for “Chinese language” was a constant in the materials I had: Putonghua vs. Zhongwen vs. Guoyu (see Chapter 1, this volume). Later I could add Changshahua (Changsha dialect) and Hunanhua (Hunan dialect) and other terms to the set although the actual differences between them were not clear to me. Looking at Chinese characters, it seemed that I had the wrong prescription in my glasses! I just couldn’t seem to make sense of them even though I had learned them in a Traditional-character

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version. I knew as a linguist that Chinese was a completely different language from Japanese, of course, but the oral language posed its share of obstacles as well. I was unschooled in tones and, although I knew they were phonemic – carrying meaning – I didn’t have a systematic way to learn tones well on my own, especially embedded within pragmatically meaningful units, which was the unit of study I was interested in. As a very auditory learner, I needed deep exposure to the spoken language so I could internalize it, and especially high-frequency formulaic expressions. That way I could keep intonation contours intact at the phrase level and not have to worry about syllable- or word-level tones so much. Formulaic chunks, moreover, could be put immediately to practical, efficient use in my interactions, which in turn would generate more input for me and more chances to (potentially) understand or negotiate the language and local culture. As not just an aspiring Chinese learner but also an applied linguist, I set out to document my development and use of Chinese from early in my stay. As a student of SLA, it seemed professionally and personally relevant to do so. The language spoken in my new community, I soon learned, was a very strongly accented southern variety of Chinese. Much later I learned that Hunanese is not even Mandarin at all but is part of the Xiang language group. This language (dialect), nearly as spicy as the famously spicy Hunanese local cuisine, is well known because of Chairman Mao’s political oratory, which he delivered in Hunan-accented Mandarin. Mao’s teachings would apparently not have been as widely accessible or comprehensible if they hadn’t also been written in a vernacular version of Standard Mandarin (occasionally quoting from his poems in Classical Chinese). Hunanese has different vocabulary, more – and different – tones, different phonemes and even different syntax than standard Mandarin. Hunanese-accented Mandarin, on the other hand, is simply an accented version of Mandarin with rule-governed phonological shifts and variants typical of southern Mandarin. Thus, in addition to my initial exposure to the Changsha/Hunan dialects, I soon found that the Mandarin I was exposed to was strongly accented, even when interlocutors insisted they were speaking Standard Mandarin (Putonghua). Fei jia, which I commonly heard and said that fall, was actually hui jia (go home); at the time, I tended to write these morphemes separately in pinyin. I’d often look up words that I’d heard outside in my Chinese pinyin-English dictionary but simply couldn’t find: e.g., Fai le! (Huai le! It’s broken!). What I was hearing and then internalizing and reproducing as “s” and “ts [ pinyin c]” and “z” was actually “sh,” “ch,” and “zh” in Putonghua. The sonorant consonants l and n were in free variation in Hunanese and in Hunan Mandarin, and I was perplexed by hearing the same word potentially uttered in three or more ways (e.g., Hunan, Fulan, Funan but never, it seemed, Hulan) and this n/l

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also transferred into people’s English: Nancy ! Lancy. I picked up some basic chunks or expressions quickly and had phrase books and textbooks that also helped with greetings, asking directions, and making small talk. However, adding to my linguistic troubles was that when I went to say something in Chinese, Korean or Japanese forms would pop out and sometimes I couldn’t remember which language was which either for words with cognate (Chinese-based) forms or for completely different ones. When I spoke Chinese, especially to people not from Changsha, they usually looked at me quizzically because of my strong southern accent. My students, not all of whom were from Hunan, were amused when I demonstrated my newly-acquired, locally-accented Chinese in my SLA or sociolinguistics classes to exemplify a concept. They also observed, correctly, that the most memorable first chunks of Chinese I’d learned were mainly connected with the frustrations in my daily life (issues that were certainly much more acute in their own lives), which I’d needed to get assistance with. Why was there no water or electricity (Mei shui le! Ting dian le!) on campus and in our housing on Saturdays, for example? Weishenme? (Why?) Fortunately, I was soon able to use more affirmative and positive expressions as well. Within a month, I was producing short, simple, often ungrammatical narratives with ample support from interlocutors, about a sightseeing trip to Guilin, for example. In the first weeks, I could utter basic phrases relating to eating, coming and going, noun phrases (referring to a few friends, foreigners, Canadians, Chinese), conjunctions (suoyi, so), and verb complexes: qu le mai piao (went to buy tickets), women qu kan kan. . . (we went to see. . .). I also used multiword or multi-character chunks and expressions, sometimes ungrammatically. The syntax was jointly produced with the assistance of others. By the six-month mark, I was still negotiating unclear meanings quite a lot with the same interlocutor in our recorded conversations and in my dealings with others. In a discussion about a recent trip to Burma, for example, some of my recurring chunks and longer constructions included: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Wo bu zhidao weishenme. . . (I don’t know why. . .) Ta xihuan mai dongxi (She likes to buy things) Dao Miandian luxingde ren dou bing le (The travellers to Burma all got sick) Zai wo de pengyou de fangzi, ta mama zhunbei le duo cai, hen hao chi, yihou, bu shufu, bu shi yiyang de [oil]. . . (At my friend’s house, her mother prepared a lot of food, really good food, but afterward I didn’t feel well because the [oil] wasn’t the same. . .)

My word order for directional/locational adverb placements was often wrong: e.g., Wo Guilin qu le, instead of Wo dao Guilin qu ‘I went to Guilin.’ A Hunanese friend recently commented on my Chinese back then, noting my strategy of

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mimicking others and trying to learn productive chunks. By mid-year I started spending time with students in the lunch canteen and eating rice, like them, in giant cold square bricks in an aluminum bowl. Of those meals, my friend (now a professor of Chinese) recalled my strategy to order dishes whose names I didn’t know: When [Patsy] first went to the students’ cafeteria with us, she didn’t know how to name the dishes. So she usually asked for “yiyangde” (the same) after we ordered our dishes. . . . But soon she was making rapid progress in her Mandarin. Many times I was shocked to hear her saying . . . mamahuhu (so-so), re de budeliao (extremely hot) or mei shenme haochide (nothing good to eat). . . I found her especially good at catching “chunks” of expressions. (Email, Feb. 6, 2010)

Pragmatically, the elderly grandmas and grandpas watching over their young grandchildren – and the foreign teachers and everyone else – along the pathway to the university building constantly asked where we were going, whether we had eaten yet, and such. Although I was bothered initially by their nosiness and used to just smile and ignore them or feel compelled to answer honestly with too much detail, I later learned that I could just say I was going to work or going to buy something or had “things to do,” whatever my real purpose. The content of the answer wasn’t really important; it was simply a ritual interaction (greeting) in the communal setting. I also got used to the usual personal (for us, inappropriate) questions one gets asked throughout Asia, and tried not to get too annoyed by the many daily situations that confront a newcomer to a culture, particularly in a developing economy where privacy and sociality are understood or practiced differently. I have always fancied myself as an amateur anthropologist. Perhaps from earlier stints working and living with families in France, Japan, and Korea and from other travel in Asia I try to adjust to local norms and rhythms and to figure out how local people and societies operate. That means not imposing your own will and values on the host culture (too much), and not resisting or complaining too strenuously when things are not the way they are “back home.” Being a participant observer is a natural instinct for me. I really wanted to understand Chinese culture and the language, too, from an insider’s (emic) perspective, part of my rationale for going to China in the first place. In that respect, living in a small community on the mountainside and getting to know students and colleagues and their complicated lives and histories provided a fascinating window onto Chinese society and culture. It also presented me with poignant case studies of the fallout of modern Chinese history – especially the tumultuous

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Cultural Revolution, which had ended just 10 years earlier. People were still trying to rebuild their lives in its wake. Yet I have never felt as strong a “Chinese language (speaking) identity” as I did when speaking Japanese in the 1980s. For the latter, the prescribed honorifics, politeness and gendered language and culture norms seemed to entail projecting a different kind of “me”: deferential, reticent, polite, sweet, apologetic, higher-pitched, performing the required bodily gestures (bowing, mouth-covering, sitting in an appropriately feminine manner on tatami mats, even with numb legs) as well. And that was even without any systematic mastery of keigo (the formal, elaborate, honorific language variety). With Chinese, although I frequently use expressions like Buhaoyisi (I’m embarrassed/thank you!) and Shi wo yinggai de! (That’s what I should do/it’s my obligation/you’re welcome!) both to compensate for my inadequacies and to convey politeness when giving and receiving gifts and services, I don’t feel that I need to perform in quite as conspicuously feminine, apologetic, and formal a way as seemed optimal in Japanese, at least in that era. I really appreciate that about Chinese. Indeed, the lack of social stratification codified in language, the seemingly more equal gender roles in both language and society in 1980s China (compared with Japan or Korea), and the then-relatively unmaterialistic culture of everyday Chinese in Hunan were refreshing. However, this apparent sociolinguistic “flatness” was more than made up for by the (seemingly) arcane bureaucracies and regulations (You guiding! There are regulations!), red tape, and government control over goods, services, ration coupons, policies, speech, media, residence, movement, books one could read, and education.

Role models, cultural differences, and positionings Living and working in Hunan and learning more about Chinese language and culture widened my horizons, my worldview, and transformed and crystallized my sense of who I was (or am). While there I also learned about another Canadian, Norman Bethune. Previously unknown to me, Bethune’s name was intoned reverentially by almost every Chinese adult I met when they learned that I too was Canadian. A Canadian physician, field surgeon, and staunch communist, Bethune’s seemingly selfless role and solidarity in Chinese revolutionary history in the late 1930s and in medicine were deeply appreciated – his many personal vices having been well concealed, apparently. Canadians in China for decades to come would benefit from that association – and propaganda. As a side note, the Canadian hero for the next generation was “Da Shan,” a bilingual (Caucasian) talk-show host, comedian and businessman, who still lives in China

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(see Chapter 1). One of his more recent roles has been that of Chinese language teacher and cultural ambassador of sorts.41 My contact with Canada and with living Canadians during my first year in China was very limited, as was access to English news media and mainstream (non-academic, off-campus) Chinese society. The usual vacillations in cultural adjustment – ranging from euphoria to utter frustration – came with the terrain and still surface with each new visit. For example, I don’t sing well or enjoy it, so being required to sing publicly at big events is a veritable nightmare. The lovely western Canadian folk song Four Strong Winds, which I led the foreign teachers in singing, under duress, for one large university celebration, was a complete disaster! Nor am I a willing or capable ballroom dancer (this should surprise no one), but that didn’t stop the suave university president from asking for my hand in toe-crushing formal waltzes center stage at the New Year’s gala party. My initial refusals were interpreted as polite modesty rather than as true, and well-warranted, face-saving pleas. Public positionings and performances such as these left me feeling humiliated, uncomfortable, and quite powerless. Furthermore, frequent requests for assistance or advocacy on behalf of others who needed help with English, international university applications, advice, foreign currency, or other interventions also left me feeling somewhat under siege. I simply couldn’t accommodate all the requests for favours based on personal connections (guangxi) – then or now. It’s not that I haven’t tried to reciprocate to the extent possible the kindness, support, and relationships I have benefited from in China. However, I learned that belonging to a Chinesespeaking community fundamentally entails precisely these forms of mutual assistance within and across extended social circles.

Seeking out Chinese practice: Strategic behaviours My opportunities to use Chinese were enhanced that year by a number of activities, including joining a conversation class in the second semester of my stay with a couple of foreign friends; meeting with a young girl in the neighborhood who had time – and troubles – on her hands; my self-study and later work on a Chinese language textbook; and meeting weekly with a friend for company and for conversational data collection about the acquisition/use of Mandarin.

41 Over the past decade, he has also helped produce a Chinese language learning series on Chinese national TV (China Central Television/CCTV 9) for foreign residents in which he is the teacher (usually wearing an ornate silk brocade jacket) reflecting on the skits performed by Chinese actors. The books and DVDs of the series have also been widely marketed.

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Conversation class: Creating a community of practice Only two of my housemates wanted to learn Chinese but we had quite different workloads and experience with prior Chinese instruction. They had lighter schedules and fewer responsibilities than I did and had studied Chinese previously. The three of us started Mandarin conversation classes with a local teacher who had never tutored Mandarin before but was willing to try. The teacher’s input was not particularly helpful but she had a sense of humor, which was necessary given the dialectal confusion we experienced. She claimed to speak Standard Mandarin but we were constantly bewildered and amused, in turn, by her pronunciation, requiring us to translate her utterances to Putonghua for one another in order to understand what she said. Most helpful for me was hearing the other two speaking Mandarin about things that were already partly shared knowledge. Rather than feel jealous of their abilities, I found the situation very motivating. Their language use was highly comprehensible, an ideal learning situation and also a chance for social interaction and peer-to-peer language socialization. We came up with our own topics and activities for an hour or 1.5 hours at a time, once or twice a week, for a few months. I seemed to fare better with the Chinese classes than with our shared Taiji (Tai Chi) classes in front of our residence, which were much more public and generally commanded an audience of curious neighbours and other passers-by. . . The babysitter: Grassroots language, literacy, and advocacy A young girl, then 9 years old, lived in a tiny unheated two-room brick house that I regularly passed by on my way to work, across from the communal outhouse. The front door of her house was always open and more often than not, she and the baby boy she cared for were out front, with no adult supervision. She was very friendly, greeting us foreigners unselfconsciously as we came and went on our way to class, but I started to wonder why she wasn’t going to school. Her clothing was tattered and dirty and her face chapped from the cold. Eventually I asked her (in Chinese) who she was and why she wasn’t going to school. She spoke Hunan dialect and it wasn’t at all easy for me to understand her. For example, the answer “yes” in that dialect is Ne! (instead of Shi de! Or Dui!) And “I” is no (instead of wo), much like Cantonese ngo. I started to spend more time trying to communicate with her and then began to record our conversations (which she agreed to) so I could later listen to them or ask one of my students what she was trying to say. Words I learned included ma (scold), pa (afraid), da (beat), and ku le (cried). I became increasingly worried about her well-being with each new verb and adjective. I eventually pieced together her sad story and realized that she was being seriously mistreated and denied an

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education. She had not yet learned to read (much) either. With a friend, I set out to buy clothing and age-appropriate books for her and, during the long lunch and naptime break for faculty, students, and workers on campus, I (of all people) started “coaching” her to read Chinese using children’s books that also had a phonetic script next to the characters so I could read along with her. She was one of my best sources of genuine communication in Chinese, despite dialectal challenges, and our mutual language/literacy socialization was truly bidirectional. Fortunately, following some advocacy over a number of months, she was removed from the abusive situation she was in and was able to go back to school in her hometown.

Critiquing and creating Chinese language materials With an American colleague in Shanghai, a proficient Chinese speaker with several years’ work experience in China, I bemoaned the poor quality of Chinese language learning materials. We decided to produce our own textbook based on communicative teaching principles (especially functional ones) and found a publisher at one of the most prestigious publishing houses in Changsha. We produced ten lessons/chapters and some of my graduate students volunteered to work on the materials too. Unfortunately, they were never published, because after leaving China I became too busy with my doctoral studies in the U.S. to follow up and my co-author had also left China. Furthermore, within two years the Tiananmen Square debacle occurred, constraining communication with China. It was a worthwhile project though and a constructive way of dealing with the problematic existing Chinese texts about foreigners visiting comrades in agricultural communes and factories. If I had been more connected with the applied linguistic community at that time, I would also have published a review of all the Chinese teaching materials available, which I had collected and analyzed. I am still concerned about the quality and content of instructional materials for Chinese because of this formative experience.

(Other) Social issues in Chinese language learning Being female hasn’t, as far as I can tell, been an impediment to my learning Chinese either to the extent that it narrowed my possibilities in Japanese because of the social norms for women vs. men there or in the way it seemed to affect Roma’s and Ella’s more recent experiences. With China’s current affluence, however, Chinese culture and society are changing and seem to be approximating some of the phenomena I observed in Japan in the mid-80s: ubiquitous

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karaoke bars and hostesses, disposable wealth, and work-related drinking, smoking, cavorting, and socializing by businessmen and leaders in particular, which might preclude expat women’s inclusion or comfort taking part in such social events. For example, associating with Chinese men in China usually means being exposed to copious amounts of second-hand smoke during meals or other interactions. That reality, combined with the widespread pollution in cities, has caused me considerable respiratory distress as an asthmatic. Being a “foreign” (White, Canadian) professor has naturally provided me access, opportunity, and status that I otherwise would not have had in China or elsewhere in Asia. Although often referred to as waiguoren (foreigner) the year I was in China and more recently as laowai, I haven’t felt alienated by virtue of my race or ethnicity so much as by differences in interests, lifestyle, personality, and work and social cultures – and also by my lack of proficiency in Chinese. I am frankly not much of a group person, though I often take part in large-group activities in Canada and abroad and have deep commitments to group membership and activities at the level of family, department program, and professional associations. In my spare time, however, I prefer to interact with a small number of people at a deeper level than with larger numbers noisily and superficially at big banquets, for example. But my limited Chinese also restricts my interactions to precisely those sorts of interactions where I can function reasonably well. The group activities typical in China (and Japan and Korea), with class or workplace groups traveling or socializing together evenings and during vacations, and the big banquet culture (in China, not Japan) therefore don’t really appeal to me very much. Thus, a more communal lifestyle and the values underlying it – emphasizing mutual assistance, accountability, and social obligation to the larger unit and others connected to that network – has required patience, accommodation, maturation, and sometimes letting go on my part. Having said that, I certainly see its value and functionality and have been its beneficiary too, especially in my research and professional networking in China.

Leaving China but not Chinese Following the year in China, I moved to the United States to do my Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles. I had considered staying an additional year in China, in which case I would have become the graduate program coordinator in Shanghai. That move would have facilitated my learning and use of Chinese and my professional standing but would have presented me with another dialect (Shanghainese) and delayed my doctoral education.

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In California, my exposure to Chinese came mainly from auditing two sections of a second-year Mandarin course. However, the paucity of spoken Mandarin in the course was disappointing, which inspired a friend and me to conduct a research project on that very issue: How much English (vs. the target language) was being used by teachers across a range of foreign language courses (Duff and Polio 1990; Polio and Duff 1994)? We were both quite comfortable with oral Mandarin after each having spent a year in China and had fully expected to be able to hear more of it in class. The only other graduate student in the language course, a political science major, became our ally and we three teamed up for (obligatory) Chinese skits, including one for the program’s Chinese New Year show. Having all spent time in China, each of us planned to do research involving Chinese for our dissertations. Apart from that, and friendships with other Chinese students, I had relatively little time to focus on Chinese language and culture while in the U.S. Plus, in the end, rather than study Chinese-English bidirectional transfer as I had originally intended, I embarked on an ethnographic study of dual-language education in Hungary for my dissertation, which took me even further from China and Chinese and immersed me in Hungarian instead. It truly made no sense on one level for me to shift directions, but post-socialist Eastern Europe represented a completely new and distinct linguistic, cultural, and geographical region for me, and one undergoing sweeping sociopolitical and educational changes. It also offered me exciting new academic opportunities. I nevertheless continued to have a strong affiliation with (if not proficiency in) Asian languages and cultures, perhaps more so than European ones. My next exposure to Chinese came from taking noncredit Chinese language courses in Vancouver and from regular trips to China for conferences and other travel from the mid-1990s. And much to my surprise, after a few trips to Beijing I noticed that my Mandarin pronunciation had gradually shifted from a southern accent to more northern one. My “-an” endings became “-ar,” as in yidiar for yidian ‘a little,’ for example, or wanr instead of wan ‘play,’ and then other consonants shifted as well: s ! sh, ts (pinyin c) ! ch, etc. After moving to Vancouver in the early 1990s, my interest in French, Spanish, and even Hungarian was also rekindled and I took several noncredit courses in each. Doing research on English learners of Mandarin (one on aspect marking and another on factors affecting instruction in Mandarin courses) gave me further exposure to Chinese but didn’t seem to have much effect on my own proficiency. While on sabbatical in the U.S., however, a Mandarin course I audited for research purposes proved very helpful. Important grammatical structures I learned included modifier or complement structures, especially those with de that I’d never learned before: e.g., xihuan he jiu de ren (person who likes drink-

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ing alcohol) or ta zuo fan zuo de feichang hao (he cooks really well: lit. he cooks rice cooks very well); zhao de dao (found); shui de hao (slept well). Since the early 2000s, I have had more opportunities to use Chinese, especially after my closest Chinese friend moved to Vancouver and I can practice Mandarin more freely and listen to conversations in Mandarin or Changsha dialect even when I am not a primary participant. With subsequent changes in my living situation, I have sometimes had more, and sometimes less, opportunity to use Chinese in my daily life. As my friend observed (generously) when asked for her impressions of my Chinese in 2010 for this project, she emailed: Well, her tones have never been exactly the same as native speakers’ but her pronunciation is very good. People in China just admire her speaking a lot. She may not be the best in long narratives when the context is less relevant and more complicated vocabulary and structures are needed. But in real life interactions, she is very good in talking with people on various rudimentary topics. After my parents stayed in Vancouver for a couple of months, Patsy not only learned how to play Majiang but also learned our Changsha dialect. . .

Chinese – still a long and arduous march. . . or a leisurely stroll? My research on both English education and Chinese education has taken me to China frequently in recent years, enabling me to practice Chinese even more. Every time I return from China, I feel re-energized about learning Chinese, and this CRCLLE project has also fueled that desire. At present, I am back to using familiar joking formulas (pragmatic routines) and other high-frequency expressions related to daily activities. However, I now have little free time to watch Chinese movies and, although I audited an advanced (3rd year) Chinese course in Fall 2010, the vocabulary and literacy burden was so great that it proved futile. I simply could not discuss or easily understand or retain language from texts about politics and social issues in the textbooks, even after I had the texts converted to pinyin. I wondered if the Internet might provide more suitable and flexible forms of exposure, support, and scaffolding for my Chinese and subscribed to a widely used online program called “ChinesePod” in 2009 for a year to explore just that possibility. I downloaded hundreds of dialogs and the literacy resources were very helpful, especially when using the interactive digital tools. The lower-level podcasts were irritating, however, with lots of banal banter and phrase-byphrase translation in English provided by the expat commentators. The apparent condescension on the part of one Anglo male interlocutor toward his female Chinese interlocutors was also off-putting. The intermediate and higher level

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materials were somewhat better though mostly aimed at learners residing in China. Overall, the dialogs and texts are not very long or particularly engaging, unfortunately, but at least they are current and provide access to different orthographies, dictionaries, and other resources. Being able to download such texts, both oral and written, and other online resources onto a handheld MP3 player is also a wonderful convenience. However, there is no question that using it to advantage requires dedication, discipline, and time. Sadly, I remain essentially character-illiterate in Mandarin – but not completely hopeless. I’ve found that free Chinese word-processing software allows me to input pinyin (without tone marks) and choose characters in that way, although this project has been the only time I have needed or wanted to produce Chinese characters (see Chapter 3). Perhaps with such tools, I will gain more access to Chinese literacy, even though I’m much more interested in developing higher level oral skills for the kinds of interactions I typically need to engage in with Chinese-speaking colleagues, friends, or acquaintances. Yet even my Chinese name, in characters, has eluded me. The original version was crafted in 1986 by a Cantonese-speaking Chinese-Canadian, a calligrapher in Calgary who used Traditional characters: 杜柏絲 = Du Bai Si = Duff Pat-sy (/du/, no meaning but a very common surname + pine + silk). However, the pronunciation of my name reflects the Cantonese of my christener-calligrapher, whom I never actually met (possibly dou + bak + si in that dialect). The elegant, brush-written name and my address in China were photocopied so people at home could just paste the label onto envelopes to help ensure their delivery (if only it had been that simple). . . Yet despite having written my name out many times during my year in China, I do it so seldom I constantly forget it, even though in Simplified orthography the final character changes, with far fewer strokes at the bottom: 杜柏丝. Furthermore, the meaning of the name, all important in Chinese, seems somewhat incongruous – pine (trees) and silk – but apparently an appropriate yin-yang pair at least to its creator and initially to me as well, not knowing otherwise. Yet, inexplicably, people in China then and now do not seem the least bit impressed by it (apart from the fact that I have a Chinese name) as it evidently does not convey the optimal aesthetics of nomenclature there. That being the case, I may still become “someone else” in Chinese by changing my name in the near future (as Chinese learners often do). Thus continues my socialization into Chinese language, literacy, and even naming practices and into the wider values, worldviews, knowledge, and aesthetics that come bundled with Chinese. Needless to say, even if I were more proficient in the language, I would certainly not adopt all the values and ideologies that I have been exposed to or might have been expected to emulate, although I have surely internalized many of them. I might “play the game”

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more deftly though. After all, each language learner must rely upon her own discretion, agency, gut instincts, inclinations, priorities, and skills to manage the “give and take of everyday life” (Schieffelin, 1990) when negotiating multiple languages, cultures, identities, and positionings as today’s global citizens, cosmopolitans, and applied linguists.

Roma’s Narrative (N3) Like a plum blossom: Cultivating a Chinese identity against a background of white This narrative is the story of a struggle, and flattening a struggle onto a page is painful. Every time I manage to press one piece into place, it forces another to bulge out from the opposite corner. Just as a map is a flat representation of a contoured world, this written narrative is a smoothed-over account of my various journeys. And just like a map, I look to this written account for direction. My narrative continues to unfold even as I write it; I am now only mid-story, maybe closer to the end than the beginning, maybe decades away from any climax, or denouement, or resolution. My story of learning Chinese is not about an acquisition of grammar, syntax, and lexicon. My story is about an acquisition of self, a translation of myself into another way of being, and my struggle – which is the struggle of every translation – to maintain the integrity of the original text.

第一章42 The Beginning: 我, 你, 他 and 们43 When I was ten years old, my father received a transfer from Calgary, Canada, to Singapore. This was nothing unusual in the world of oil and gas, but for my tiny ten-year-old soul it was earth-shattering. Growing up in comfortable, middleclass, corporate, and white Calgary, my worldview was narrow. In the 1990s, there were only a handful of non-white kids in my elementary school, and I distinctly remember the day we welcomed a Korean ESL student into our midst. 42 dìyī zhāng, Chapter 1 43 wŏ, nĭ, tā, men, I, you, he/she/it [general 3rd person pronoun, gender not distinguished in speech, distinct characters for ‘male,’ ‘female,’ ‘neuter’ only adopted in the modern period on the model of European languages], plural marker

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The day before, our teacher had coached us on how we were to behave towards him, how to treat him nicely and help him learn English. My job was to teach him the word “car,” and I was dismayed at his blank-faced response to my enthusiastic explanation. I felt sorry for him, but maybe I should have felt sorry for myself instead. He greeted his new world with blank-faced confusion, while I went about my familiar world with blank-souled understanding of what the world held. My experience of poverty was an unevaluated mix of images from downtown Calgary and National Geographic special reports. The furthest I had ever travelled was Florida. I thought there could be nothing worse than being uprooted from familiarity. To my delight, Singapore was tame and quiet and beautiful and smelled green and lovely. We wore uniforms to school and belonged to the American Club, an exclusive resort-like venue with swimming pools, a bowling alley, fancy restaurants and tennis courts. I learned the word “expatriate,” and felt very satisfied that I was part of this greater world. Although we went to a Canadian school, we learned Mandarin as part of the curriculum. I loved being a language learner, and not just a learner of French, the other “official” language of my country, or of Ukrainian, my “heritage” language, but of Chinese – a foreign, strange, difficult, exotic and impenetrable language. No one back home would ever even dream of studying Chinese, and that made me a hero. I used to fall asleep dreaming of the day I would be fluent in Mandarin, dropping jaws around the world. I was only ten years old when I fell in love with Chinese, and developed a deep desire to unlock the magic of characters. I was only ten years old when I learned to translate myself into something I wanted to be. I was now 我, the other was 你, and the Other was 他. I remember the excitement of learning the magic of 们, which allowed me to pluralize my new world with something so much more thrilling than a simple ‘s’. I did well in Chinese class, but my progress was limited by the shifting nature of the school; students were constantly coming and going, and every semester when a new group of students arrived, we would begin again from the first lesson. In my second year at the school I was invited to participate in an extra class for students who excelled academically, and was pulled out of one Mandarin class every week to attend special lessons. After this, my language learning stalled completely, and I remember my Mandarin teacher lamenting the decision to pull me out of her class. Despite my lack of progress, I never lost my desire to learn Mandarin. I remember telling my mother that learning a new language was like walking through complete darkness, and that acquiring new words was like running into objects in that darkness, feeling them, and learning to identify them. At

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ten years old, I believed that I would someday be able to identify every single object in that darkness and that when that time came, the darkness would be illuminated and I would walk through it without a single faltering step. I was only ten years old when I realized that being white and speaking Chinese was a way to be ultra-special. From the very beginning, I equated proficiency in Chinese with success. And, I was only ten years old when I started resenting other foreign people who could speak Chinese.

回国44 I was thirteen when we returned to Canada, and there was very little opportunity for me to continue studying Chinese, although I wanted to. I registered for a Friday-night class at the Chinese cultural centre, but it was cancelled due to lack of interest. My choice of high school was partially motivated by the fact that it had a Chinese program. To my dismay however, the program was disorganized and, more importantly, undervalued. There was no set curriculum, no textbooks, and no real mode of assessment, aside from the Mandarin IB test we took in grade 12. The few of us who stuck with the program made regular complaints that were greeted with no action on the part of the school’s administration. This was my first encounter with the institutional apathy towards language education that seems to permeate our educational system. Language classes are seen as a waste of time compared to science or math, a view that is clearly absurd to anyone who has even the most rudimentary understanding of the relationship between language and power. In any case, my language learning stagnated in high school, and I picked up only a few words and characters.

University: 殷若梅45 When I began university, I decided to do a minor in Chinese along with my major in English literature. I took Mandarin classes in every semester of my undergraduate studies, save the first and last. I loved it. Mandarin homework was what I rewarded myself with when my other homework was done. I excelled in my courses and was consistently near the top of my class. We studied from the Practical Chinese Reader, a traditional grammar-based textbook following 44 huíguó, to return to (one’s own) country 45 Yīn Ruòméi, my Chinese name

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two western characters on their innocently hopeful language learning experience. Through their painfully contrived cross-cultural interactions, we learned a good deal of useful grammar, as well as less useful expressions such as, “I am returning to China to help build Socialism.” I loved the Chinese program at my university. I participated in Chinese speaking contests and did very well. I developed close relationships with my professors and had the opportunity to be a research assistant as well as to help with a textbook they were writing. I felt that Mandarin was my calling, and was encouraged by my professors to continue learning. However disrupted my early learning of Mandarin was, I am sure it provided me with an advantage when I began studying at university. Some things such as stroke order and basic grammar felt fully natural to me, as though they had embedded themselves in my life. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for tones, which I still feel are impossible for me to master. My perception of myself as a tone-deaf Chinese speaker was solidified the day one of my professors said to me, “Roma, you’d be our best student if only you could get your tones right.” This comment closely followed a particularly painful class in which she had me repeat the word 回46 until I managed to endow it with its proper second tone. From then on, my strategy concerning tones was simply to ignore them. *** In first year Chinese, everyone in the program receives a Chinese name from their teacher. These names are particularly special because they are not just transliterations of our English names. On the contrary, the teacher spends some time developing a name for each student, making a connection to their English name, but also ensuring that it is a meaningful title. The name given to me was 殷若梅. 殷47 is a phonetic representation of (the first syllable of) my last name, while 若梅48 is an (approximate) phonetic representation of my given name and means “like a plum blossom.” Plum blossoms hold great significance in Chinese culture because they bloom in the wintertime, pink against white. They symbolize the ability to overcome difficulty. During my later travels in China, I was often complimented on my Chinese name and many people expressed surprise at how “real” it was.

46 huí, to return 47 yīn 48 ruòméi

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第二章49 At the end of my first year of university, I spent six weeks on a spring abroad program through my Chinese department. Every morning we attended class for four hours, while the afternoons and weekend were free. I absolutely loved the experience, and for the remaining three years of my undergraduate studies I nourished the dream of returning to China. Upon graduating, I received a full scholarship from the Chinese government to study Mandarin for a year in China, and I felt that my dream was close to fruition. A large part of that dream was a grandiose image of myself as part of an elite group of foreigners who had conquered the complexities of Chinese. I truly believed that after a year I would emerge from China as a beautiful Mandarin-speaking butterfly, flying towards my destiny on multilingual wings. While I had hoped to study at a one of the prestigious Beijing universities, I was instead sent to study in Hefei. Hefei is not Shanghai or Beijing or Hong Kong, or any other Chinese gem that glistens with the sweat of tourists. It is the capital of Anhui, a poor agricultural province with a conservative mindset, a lot of poverty, and a general sense of shabbiness. It is, they say, a “real” Chinese city, and I still wonder how drastically different my experience would have been had I been sent to a different place.

公费还是自费?50 The first label I ever received in Hefei was 公费,51 paid for at the government’s expense. I was not 自费,52 paid for out of my own pocket. It was not only a matter of my tuition or lodging being 公费; I, my whole being, was government funded. There were different rules for 公费. We got locked up at night, the front door of our building chained shut. We were also held more accountable for attendance, participation, and grades. We were continuously reminded that we were not self-funded, not self-dependant, and not permitted to regulate ourselves. There were over a hundred 公费 students at Anhui University, most from African and Southeast Asian countries. Unlike me, these students had received

49 dìèr zhāng, Chapter 2 50 gōngfèi háishi zìfèi?, government- or self-sponsored? 51 gōngfèi, government-sponsored 52 zìfèi, self-sponsored

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funding for an entire undergraduate or graduate degree, preceded by a year of language study. These students were my first glimpse into the global spread of Chinese, into China’s strategy of recruiting human resources from lesserdeveloped economies. Sharing a dormitory building with these students was also my first experience of intercultural living, of using a language other than English as a lingua franca, and of negotiating a myriad of cultural norms.

上课53 Weekday mornings were spent in class: 中级汉语,54 报刊阅读,55 听说,56 写作,57 中国概况,58 and HSK 辅导,59 while the rest of our time was free. I received little enjoyment from lessons. They were boring, dry, and dogmatic. For the most part, the hours I spent in class are blurred in my memory into one continuous stretch of boredom and frustration. I worked enough to achieve acceptable grades, but by the second semester I barely cared to do even that, and put in very little effort. The lack of explicit encouragement and positive reinforcement from my teachers played a major part in my decreasing motivation. Once discouragement and frustration had nearly completely suffocated my own personal desire to learn Chinese, there was very little to keep me going. For our first semester 听说 (listening-speaking) midterm, we were asked to present an animal story to the class. My friends and I all spent several days preparing. I chose to talk about my favourite animal, camels (see Appendix 1). I wrote, stressed over, and practised my speech until I felt comfortable. I was proud of the job I had done, only to discover that aside from my friends, no one else in the class had even bothered to prepare anything. One student’s “speech” consisted of the sentence “I love scorpions because they taste good.” The class laughed, the teacher showed no disappointment, and from that day on I felt no need to expend any effort.

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

shàngkè, attend class zhōngjí hànyŭ, intermediate Mandarin bàokān yuèdú, newspaper reading tīngshuō, listening-speaking xiězuò, writing Zhōngguó gàikuàng, survey of China (something like a social studies class) HSK fǔdǎo, preparation (tutoring) for Chinese proficiency exam

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Excerpt from an email to my mother: September 2, 2007: In terms of language, I almost feel like the last four years were for nothing. I met this guy from Sierra Leone today who’s been here for a year. When he arrived, he spoke no Chinese, and now he’s better than I am. So on one hand it’s encouraging to think about how much I’ll improve in a year. But also I feel like I know nothing practical. Sure, I got great marks in class in Calgary, but that means absolutely nothing when someone is trying to tell you how to work your phone, or you’re trying to order food at a restaurant. Really, it means nothing because I feel as though they may as well be speaking to me in some entirely different language. I think I’ll write my master’s thesis on the pointlessness of language classes that are removed from any sort of authentic speaking environment. Seriously, I’m so frustrated. But, I do know that it will get better. I just have to hang in there!! At least people are very friendly for the most part.

颤抖 During my first months in Hefei, my discouragement with the language continuously manifested itself in a strange fixation on random and difficult words I did not know. Instead of focussing on learning new useful vocabulary, I criticized myself every time I encountered an unfamiliar word that I felt I should have known. The very first lesson of the Intermediate Chinese textbook taught me the word 颤抖,60 which means to tremble or to shake. The story was a heartwarming propaganda account of a man who sponsors a child from the impoverished countryside to go to school. The man receives a thank you letter from the boy, containing a gift of sunflower seeds. He is so overwhelmed with emotion as he reads the letter that his trembling hands cannot hold onto the envelope and the seeds spill across the floor. I felt that in four years of study I should have learned the word 颤抖, so I sat in my room writing it over and over again, convincing myself that someone proficient in Chinese would know this word. Later, I spoke to an Italian student who spoke gorgeous Chinese and was taking advanced language classes. She told me about how ridiculous she had felt earlier that day when she had been unable to ask for napkins at a restaurant. Coincidentally she said, “can you imagine that I know the word 颤抖 but I don’t know the word for napkin?” We speculated on what it might be: 餐厅纸 maybe? Restaurant paper? We settled on that. And still, even after a year of using that word to ask for napkins, I am not sure whether it is a genuine Chinese word or just a logical jumble created to make ourselves feel in control of our destinies. *** 60 chàndǒu, to shake; to tremble

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After my first week of class I was ready to party, and I gathered up a group of ten or so people to go to a club. At that point in time, we were just strangers. Later, some of these people would become the best friends I have ever known, but most remained China friends. “China friends” provide superficial comfort: they speak English, they love to party, and they understand what it is to simultaneously despise and adore China. When we arrived at the club, the manager fawned over us, leading us through the crowd of bodies and clearing a table for us. Like in many Chinese clubs there was no dance floor, only a dj and the space surrounding the tables. I started to feel uncomfortable when I realized that absolutely everyone in the club, men and women both, were watching us. I was feeling bored and awkward when suddenly a man appeared on the stage, dressed in a tuxedo and a mask. He danced outrageously before tearing off his suit to reveal a red plastic thong and knee-high boots underneath. He went up to a girl and forced her to dance with him. The crowd loved it, and we all laughed. Then, he headed for us. He picked me and slung me over his shoulder. I struggled, kicked, and screamed as he carried me to the stage. He pushed me against the wall. He touched me everywhere. He forced his groin against mine and pushed again and again, his red plastic thong rubbing my favourite pair of jeans. My shirt strap kept falling off my shoulder and I kept trying to push it back up. I looked into the crowd, seeing nothing but cell phone cameras against the backdrop of laughter and cheering. My China friends were uproariously excited. I fought to get away. He held me tighter, whispering in my ear. I berated myself for not understanding what he was saying. I don’t know how long he kept me there, but it was long enough to leave me shaking with anger, humiliation, and confusion. I returned to my friends and they slapped me on the back. I made an effort to continue having fun, not wanting anyone to see that I was shaken. Soon, I went back in a taxi with some of the others and halfway home I shattered, tears spilling out in front of the startled driver. Since that day I have learned how to translate countless emotions into Chinese: sadness, fear, loneliness, embarrassment, confusion, disappointment, happiness, excitement, anticipation, awkwardness, love. But I still have no words, even English ones, to describe how I felt that night. This incident was so small, so miniscule and tame, I know that it is not worthy of upset. But I still think about it sometimes, and when I do, much more than sunflower seeds scatter through from in between the 颤抖 of my fingers.

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I teach English: 精疲力竭 and 肉麻 Long before I left for China, back in high school even, I had vowed to never teach English. I felt that it was unfair for English to be rushing into every corner of the world, riding the coattails of capitalism and forcing people into its embrace. Nothing irked me more than people, upon hearing that I was going to China, asking if I was teaching. It seems much more unsettling to tell people that I was going to study, not to teach. I thought it was a reflection of the general Western public’s inability to imagine a white person travelling to Asia for any reason other than to spread the word of English. On my first day in Hefei, before I had even eaten breakfast, I was taken to the bank to open an account. I was soon approached by a man offering me an English teaching position. I turned him down. It happened two or three times that first week, and continued throughout the entire year. Never once was I asked to prove my qualifications; my skin was proof enough. At the first party I attended, I got into a conversation with a foreign man who asked me whether I was planning on teaching at all. I replied that no, I was philosophically opposed to teaching English. He asked me how long I was staying in China. When I said that I would be there for a year, he laughed and said “oh, you’ll definitely teach English. One way or another, you’ll teach English.” I refused to believe him, but I was wrong. Early in the year, we were introduced to a restaurant whose owners had two young sons. One of my friends decided she wanted to contribute to the community by helping the older boy with his English. Because she spoke no Chinese at that time, she asked me to accompany her for the initial sessions. I was reluctant to facilitate the teaching of English, but I secretly relished the role of translator. As it turns out, I loved interacting with this boy and his little brother. On Sunday mornings, we would spend an hour or so quizzing the boy on the English he had learned in school that week, as well as teaching him new words. He was smart, but not always excited to spend his only day off studying. It was during the winter of our time in Hefei, sitting in the freezing little concrete restaurant, that I received my first experience of teaching English. I learned so much about the difference between the two languages, and I saw how speaking Mandarin as a first language would uniquely impact the acquisition of English. I also gained insight into education attitudes in China. Further, my little friend would always try to teach us some new words as well. One time I told him that I was tired, 很累.61 He responded by teaching me 61 hěn lèi, tired

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a new way to describe how I felt: 精疲力竭,62 translating my one-dimensional feeling of tired into something much more alive, much more meaningful. He showed me his dictionaries, and described to me how he learned to write characters. One evening, when the restaurant was packed with the frenzy of dinnertime, I saw my little friend playing cards with some male international students. At one point, he grabbed the deck and yelled “my turn!” with near-perfect English pronunciation. What we had worked for months to extract came suddenly, spontaneously, during a friendly game of poker, with no textbook, no dictionary, and no expectations in sight. *** In my second semester, I decided to take a job tutoring a 15-year-old Korean girl twice a week, while a friend taught her younger sister. Although I was totally unprepared for the job, and felt nervous every time I went, it was a hugely rewarding experience. Not only was I getting paid a decent wage, but I was expected to stay for dinner after every lesson. After months of eating greasy Anhui food and cooking in my bathroom, a real home cooked meal was the greatest treat imaginable. Sitting at a dinner table with the mother, her two daughters, and the other tutors they employed, I felt like I was at home with a family. At one of those meals, the girls punned my name by asking, “这是肉吗??”63 I also became “肉麻,” 64 sickening. The conversations I had with my Korean mother, as well as all dinnertime conversation, were purely in Chinese, as it was the only common language. Her Chinese was good, and she was able to carry out her life as a homemaker with no trouble. Her children often mocked her though, picking on her pronunciation and grammar slipups. My student’s English was good enough to carry out simple conversations, and it was the medium of our lessons. But whenever there was a misunderstanding, we spoke Chinese. Being younger and having spent three years at a Chinese school, her language skills were obviously far superior to mine. But looking back, I’m both proud and astounded at how much English I was able to teach with my limited grasp of Chinese.

62 jīngpílìjié, exhausted; worn-out 63 zhè shì ròu ma?, is this meat? The joke here is that the last two words of the question sound like my English name, Roma 64 ròumá, sickening; lit. flesh-numbing; another pun that sounds exactly like my English name

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老外阿姨 While I had arrived in China hoping to become a stellar student or an intrepid adventure, no matter what I achieved I felt that I was always only a 老外.65 I wanted nothing more in China than to be normal, unobserved, and simply ordinary. I wanted to walk down the street and not be laughed at, pointed at, talked about, talked to. I wanted to scream at every person who took my picture without my permission. I wanted to walk into a store and be ignored. I have been told that 老外 is not a derogatory term, but I cannot accept that continuously drawing attention to a person’s outsider status is not offensive. Before I lived in Hefei I believed that if I became proficient in Chinese I would someday make China mine. But 老外 is a constant reminder that I will never be Chinese. I used to despise this word, mocking people when I heard them call me 老外. But one day as I was walking down the street I saw a little boy point at me and yell to his mother, “妈妈你看！那里有老外阿姨!”66 I’ve always wanted to be someone’s 阿姨,67 and ever since that day, I have tried to accept that perhaps there is a place for 老外 in my life, and a place for me in China. *** One day during class, one of the student liaisons came into our classroom to announce that there was a special activity the next day, and that four of us had been chosen to attend. She pointed at me, the two students from Russia, and one from Latvia, telling us that instead of going to class the next day we would be participating in a tree planting ceremony to mark Tree Day. Only foreign-looking foreigners were chosen to go. Asian foreigners stayed home. We travelled for half an hour through the rain to a park. We were given ponchos, gloves and shovels, and told to pose for the camera. We held our shovels, in the manner of planting a tree, but no real planting went on. After a few minutes, we went back on the bus and left. The event had been staged to unveil the new “Foreign Experts’ Friendship Wood.” That evening on my way to a friend’s house, I watched the news on the bus television. There was a story about the fifty foreigners who had planted trees that day to symbolize their friendship with China. I caught the briefest glimpse of half my face.

65 lǎowài, foreigner 66 Māma nĭkàn! Nàli yŏu lǎowài āyí!, Mom, look! There’s a foreign auntie! 67 Āyí, auntie

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Excerpt from email to my mother: September 23, 2007 I think the biggest difficulty here is the prospect that I will never have intimate friends here. No matter how nice people are, there is always this awful barrier between you because you look different and you get different treatment. [. . .] Then there are the conversations you have that are nothing more than a battle of wills. You speak in Chinese and the other person speaks in English and you have this stupid bilingual conversation where you’re pretending to be polite but really both of you are just waiting for the other person to break down and speak the language you’re speaking. It’s a war of attrition. At this point I almost always lose. . .

JL JL was a skinny malnourished-looking waiter at a bar frequented by foreigners. One night, he came over and sat at our table, chatting with me and a British friend of mine. Our friends left and we stayed, talking with JL until 3 in the morning. He spoke no English, but with our Chinese, some paper, and some actions, we managed to piece together a fantastic conversation about China, politics, our lives, and our dreams. It felt so good to talk to someone young and cool and not looking to use us for our English. When I mentioned this to him, he said that he wanted to learn English so that he could be our friend, but he didn’t want to be our friend just so he could learn English. I was carried away by the feeling of that night, drinking beer in an empty pub on a snowy night. We headed home, and I felt as though I had found my first true Chinese friend. From that night on, JL was text messaging me everyday, several times a day. I started getting nervous every time I got a message from him, because they were full of words about how much he missed me, what we would do next time we were together, how much he liked me. On Tree Day, he said he hoped to someday have the opportunity to plant a tree with me in China. Two days after we starting talking, I left on a month-long trip, so I was able to put off meeting with him in person. When I got back to Hefei, I was no longer able to avoid JL, so one Friday afternoon I headed out to meet him. We went to an amusement park and played bumper cars. He bought two stuffed animals from the movie 长江七号,68 and gave me one. I deliberately looked away to make sure I didn’t see how much he paid for them. He bought me 臭豆腐.69 We went to KFC for dinner, and he let me

68 chángjiǎng qíhào, a recent movie that was very popular in China 69 chòudòufu, “smelly tofu,” a Chinese delicacy

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pay, but only after he grilled me to determine whether I understood the true meaning of “我请客.” 70 We ate fried chicken and talked about our dreams. He agreed with me that my Chinese was not very good, the first and only Chinese person ever to do so. I appreciated his honesty, and his willingness to be my friend. But I never trusted him completely, not after we went back to the bar and his friends clapped when they saw us together, and certainly not after he got me a drink that he proudly stated had more than the usual amount of alcohol in it. Having anticipated an awkward end to the night, I had arranged for my friend to meet me at the bar. He came, and I fled with him. I don’t know who lost more face: JL, for coming with a girl who left with another man; or me, for coming with one man and leaving with another. *** I avoided JL for the rest of my time in China, only sometimes answering his text messages, but always learning from him. I have always enjoyed sending text messages, but doing so in Chinese characters was a whole new level of fun and freedom. The medium itself is unique because it does not require instant response. However, because of an unspoken understanding that everyone always carries their mobile phone on their person, a text message is the best way to ensure that your communication will be instantly received. Text messages are necessarily short, abbreviated, and seemingly free of grammatical rules. In China they are often the means of passing on popular jokes, stories, and festival greetings. They are cheap. They allow you to have conversations with people in other cities without interrupting what you’re doing. They are portable and discreet, allowing you to make lunch plans while in class. And for the language learner, unlike face-to-face communication they allow an extra bit of time to ensure that you express yourself properly, and also provide a moment to interpret received messages. I learned several words and expressions from JL’s messages, most notable “不巧” 71 (in response to yet another excuse I made to not see him) and “早知道” 72 (as in “早知道你还在合肥, 我会请你来酒吧 玩儿” 73 ). My communications with JL, and several other Chinese acquaintances, were facilitated almost entirely by text messages in characters. It was thrilling, and 70 wŏ qǐngkè, to treat someone to a meal. Here JL wanted to make sure I understood the difference between asking someone to dinner, and offering to pay for dinner. 71 bùqiǎo, unfortunately; lit. ‘not propitious’ i.e. not a good time for something 72 zǎozhīdào, had I known sooner 73 “Had I known sooner that you were still in Hefei, I would have invited you to come to the bar to hang out”

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was the only arena in which I felt fully like a legitimate speaker. JL once praised me for my text messaging skills, pointing out that another of his foreign friends could speak Chinese but couldn’t recognize characters and so would write texts in pīnyīn, making them very difficult to decipher. I saw the linguistic power that they provided for the student I tutored in English as well, when one day I received a text from her that said “Hey Roma, do you wanna hang out tomorrow?” “Wanna” and “hang out” were colloquialisms I had taught her the previous week. Texts also provided me with an initially confusing insight into Chinese culture, when on 春节74 I received dozens of messages from friends and acquaintances that I could barely decipher. I soon realized that they were poems, greetings for the New Year written in classical Chinese, brought up to date for a new high-speed, digital culture. *** I once wondered aloud whether I was being too harsh on JL, thinking that maybe he was acting in a way that was perfectly in accordance with his culture. Maybe, I thought, it was perfectly normal in China to send these types of messages, and to make middle-of-the-night phone calls to people you barely knew. Maybe I was being culturally insensitive; maybe my feelings were completely illegitimate. When I shared these worries with a German friend, she suggested that someone else’s cultural norms should never delegitimize my feelings; if something made me uncomfortable then it was bad, no matter how normal it was for someone else. I still feel lost in the question of how to accept another culture without betraying yourself; I am still entangled in all the personal, political, and social intricacies that make this question so difficult to answer, and yet also so enticing. Sometimes I regret giving up my friendship with JL. My Chinese would have improved so much if I had spent more time with him, and my circle of Chinese friends would have expanded. I feel guilty for questioning his motives. And then I feel a sense of self-betrayal to think that I would sacrifice my comfort and possibly my safety for the sake of having more opportunities to speak Mandarin. And then, I feel like a coward for not taking that risk. I saw JL one last time before I left China. He gave me a gift, and with tears in his eyes said “我会想念 你的.”75 Caught in the guilty relief of my lie, I said “我也是.” 76

74 Chūnjié, Spring Festival (“Chinese New Year”) 75 wŏ huì xiǎngniàn nǐde, I’ll miss you 76 wŏ yěshì, me too

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Love and my western oasis One night in December, I met an American man at a going away party for a mutual friend. We instantly became friends, and later became much, much closer. My time with him allowed for precious respite from the outside world. We spent whole weekends watching Western movies, speaking English, reading news sites, eating Oreo cookies and drinking Coke. His presence in my life made me happier in China, and more comfortable. His room was also a welcome escape from my shared bedroom, which was increasingly wearing on me. I felt that I could put up with more, now that I had a safe place to escape. Ironically, this place that made me happier in China also took me away from it; time spent with him was time away from a Mandarin-saturated environment, and no doubt contributed much to my stalled language learning. When I met him I was caught off guard by how wonderful it felt to have a male friend in China from a similar background to my own, something I hadn’t even realized I didn’t have. With him, I never needed to explain why I felt uncomfortable in certain situations; I never needed to justify myself. My male acquaintances in the dormitory were all from entirely different backgrounds, and I never felt fully comfortable with any of them. This discomfort stemmed from their behaviour in certain situations: telling us that we “should be flattered” at the over-enthusiastic and sometimes disturbing attention we received from Chinese men; refusing to help when a Chinese girlfriend of ours was grabbed by a half-naked student and dragged into his room; calling us in our rooms and making rude, suggestive comments. It took me just a couple of weeks of living among these men to distance myself from them.

Excerpt from an email to a friend: April 2, 2008: Frankly, I don’t like who I am in this country. I’m impatient, selfish, judgmental, bitter, and racist. Sometimes I find myself saying really awful things like “god I hate Chinese girls” and when I look at myself from outside I’m kind of disgusted. You can’t say things like that!! [. . .] Some of the other foreigners are way worse than me though, like they say things like “Chinese people are uncivilized” or even “Chinese people aren’t people” . . . the idea that studying abroad makes people more tolerant is a total fallacy when it comes to China, that’s for sure!

While my relationship with the American was valuable and precious to me, nothing could come close to the importance my other friends held for me. There were about nine of us, all female, who bonded, loved, supported, and comforted

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each other during our time in China. We were all from different countries but our respective cultural differences rarely got in the way of our friendship. I have often said that were it not for them I would have either returned home early, or simply died in China. I wish I could write a chapter about each of these women, because anything I write here will be nothing more than a flimsy portrayal of their strength. We cooked and ate together, lamenting weight gain and trying to fit into Chinese clothes. We shopped obsessively, triumphantly returning to the dormitory with news of a newly discovered store. For about a month we eschewed studying almost entirely, in favour of watching the entire Sex and the City series. We travelled together, getting lost in new cities and losing ourselves in ancient history. When China became simply too much, we drank and smoked and cried together. We studied together – sometimes. We proudly spoke in 老外话,77 mixing English and Chinese. We took care of each other, because we knew that no one else would. We had a string of inside jokes, competing to take pictures of 屁股 pants78 and cringing at the constant throat clearing surrounding us. We philosophised about men, both Chinese and western, trying to make sense of what masculinity and femininity meant in China. We watched old Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies. Sometimes we fought, but like sisters do, knowing that we shared an inexplicable and unbreakable bond.

服务员 One of the first words any beginner Chinese textbook introduces is “服务员,” 79 which literally translates as “service person,” and serves as a blanket term for people in service positions such as restaurant waiters. Learning the word, however, is much simpler than actually using it. We used to fight over who would have to call the fúwùyuán over, yelling the word out as loud as we could when we wanted more rice or were ready for the check. Although it was entirely acceptable and, in fact, expected, that customers yell for service, it felt so wrong to us that we would have physical reactions against doing it. We were also often told that we should stop saying “thank you” every time someone served us.

77 lǎowàihuà, literally “foreigner speech,” a term we made up to describe our version of Chinese 78 pìgu, butt (a reference to pants with a slit in the crotch that the majority of babies and toddlers in China wear; the term “pìgu pants” is not a true word, but rather one that we created as part of our in-group language) 79 fúwùyuán, service person, attendant

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There was a 24-hour restaurant at the Holiday Inn that my American friend and I would go to sometimes. One night around midnight we were finished eating and were waiting for the check. The restaurant was almost empty, with just one other Chinese couple sitting on the opposite side of the room. I was tired and impatient and there was no server in sight, so finally I yelled out “fúwùyuán” as loud as I could. A moment later a server came running out of the kitchen, heading straight for the table with the Chinese couple. They shook their heads and pointed at us. I was ecstatic, triumphant. I had, for one brief moment, a truly Chinese voice.

Excerpt from an email to a friend: January 10, 2008: I don’t know, I guess it comes down to the fact that I’m unexpectedly kind of bored. It’s just not that exciting anymore. I really thought that Chinese was something I could carry with me forever, but now I just don’t know. Maybe part of it is that the classes here are rather less than great, and I feel like I’m not progressing as quickly as I’d like. I understand a lot more now, and I know a lot more now, but when it comes to speaking I get kind of nervous, and then I can’t think, and sometimes I can’t even form the simplest sentence. It’s so frustrating! And I wonder what it’s all for? Half of China speaks English and the next generation is starting to learn English from the very moment of conception. It’s like the egg meets the sperm and says “Ni hao,” and the sperm says “Hello” and pulls out an electronic dictionary from its pocket. What am I doing here?? What?? Bumming off a government scholarship, sitting around watching Chinese TV, getting fat (I’ve gained SO much weight), eating dumplings and half-heartedly xie-ing hanzi80 in my spare time. The happy thing is that I still want to go to grad school and study this whole language politics business. My interest in sociolinguistics has really increased during my time here. So that’s good. I guess I can just keep Chinese as a useful life skill and go on to something else. . .

第三章81 Throughout my year in China I was tormented by a series of unanswerable questions. Why had I come to China? Why had I spent so much time studying Chinese? Why was I progressing so slowly? How was I going to face my professors back home, who had put so much faith in me? Should I keep attempting to learn Chinese? Where was I going with it? What role did it play in my life

80 “Writing characters” 81 Chapter 4

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now? How could I have failed so completely, when I believed myself so capable of success? I discarded the potential of these questions, gathering instead the pain, the trepidation, the frustration, and the sense of failure they engendered. The first few months after I returned to Canada, I ignored China completely. Now, as part of my graduate studies, I have the opportunity to re-examine my experiences. Through the lens of SLA theory, I am beginning to understand the absurd and unrealistic nature of my original goal of becoming a native speaker. By listening to the stories of other language learners, I see that my experience is not so abnormal, that I am not a failure. Slowly, I am allowing Chinese back into my life. I am part of Mandarin Circle, engaging in conversation and Chinese activities with other 老外 who are learning Mandarin. One of these friends, Ella, and I took a class together in the spring. In between writing notes about qualitative versus quantitative research methods, we scrawled conversations in Chinese. We would write as much as we could in characters, inserting pīnyīn or English whenever necessary. Often, we would fill in the gaps in each other’s knowledge. For example, I once wrote “很无 liao,”82 not knowing the character for the last part of the word. Ella wrote it out for me, and I spent the next few minutes practicing in over and over. The word got a lot of use in that class, and is now a happy member of my lexicon. Recently, I have also felt again the stirrings of wanderlust, and I feel that China beckons to me again. I plan to apply for more study scholarships once I complete my MA, or to find a job in China. Upon hearing this, my friends and family inevitably ask “are you sure?” as though to ensure I haven’t forgotten how difficult my year in China was. I have also pondered this, but feel that this time I am better prepared; I have no grand delusions. If for no other reason, I have to return to China to travel. There are so many places I still have to see, and I feel much more confident now of my ability to travel to more remote locations. I am still shy to speak Chinese with native speakers, although I have developed friendship with some wonderfully generous Chinese speakers who encourage me to speak with them. I have begun to read much more in Chinese, mostly mystery stories written for young adolescents. Recently I have begun to read the Lemony Snicket series of books translated into Chinese. I continue to watch Chinese-language movies and television series. I often watch Seinfeld on the Chinese site 优酷,83 and challenge myself to read the Chinese characters while I listen to the English banter. 82 hěn wúliáo, very boring 83 yōukù, a YouTube-like site

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When I read or listen in Chinese, I don’t often use a dictionary, despite the fact that I come across many unfamiliar words. I know that if I did I could expand my vocabulary tremendously; however the most important thing for me at this point is to feel as though I’m engaging in normal, pleasurable activity. Understanding the story in an adolescent book without stopping every few words to consult a dictionary is much more satisfying and worthwhile than challenging myself to read an advanced book with more complex language. I will leave newspapers and adult fiction for the future; right now I am a happy childlike reader.

回中国 A while back, near the beginning of my grad school experience, I was interviewed in Chinese at a department function. I told the reporter that “我想回 中国.”84 She immediately corrected me, saying that because I am not a Chinese person, I can never “return” to China. Instead, I must say that I want to “go to China again.” I was frustrated, not only because I felt that I had lost face through my mistake, but also because it seemed to highlight how Othered I was by my skin. Now, I accept that in Chinese I am compelled to say “我想再 去中国”85 but in English I keep on repeating, “I will return to China. I will return to China.” *** I have a well-used collection of funny and disgusting stories that I tell as part of my act as the Conquering Hero returning from The Orient. In those stories, sometimes China is gorgeous, mystical, quirky, liberating, endearing, seductive, huge. Other times China is pathetic, pitiful, confounding, choking, appalling, repulsive, trivial. I always tell the story of discarding my own stool sample into the overflowing garbage can of a Hefei hospital. I never talk about the times I cried, torn over how to respond to the difficulties I encountered. I often assure people that my Chinese language skills are limited. I rarely commend myself on any of my achievements. I am acutely aware that the preceding narrative is little more than a collection of miserable experiences. I haven’t yet found the ability to fully appreciate the other feelings I encountered in China: the grimy energy of the hard-seat train

84 wŏ xiǎng huí zhōngguó, “I want to go back to China” 85 wŏ xiǎng zài qù zhōngguó, “I want to go to China again”

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cars, the bizarre fluorescent ecstasy of night markets, the soothingly painful beauty of ragged mountains drenched in fog, the simple satisfaction of placing food in the mouth that ordered it. There are so many things that I love about China, that still slice through me with an unexpected pang when they surface in my mind. They comfort me with the certainty that I am not free of China, that I will be back, that I will forever be entangled in its paradoxes, its unknowabilities, and its tongue.

Appendix One: Script of my midterm presentation for speaking class

骆驼 我最喜欢的动物是骆驼。人人经常问我我为什么喜欢骆驼，因为他们的样子 不好看，而且他们的性情很急躁 (ji2zao4)。比如说：如果他们不高兴， 就吐。可是我觉得它们特别可爱。除了可爱，它们还有一些很有意思的特点。 有两种骆驼。一种有两个驼峰 (tuo2feng)。他们住在亚洲，特别多在盟国。 其他种有一个驼峰。他们住在非洲，中东，和澳大利亚。大家一定听说驼峰 里有水。其实，不是水，是肉肥。凭着这个肉肥，骆驼可以很长时间不喝水， 不吃食物。 骆驼的眼睛有很长的睫 (jie2) 还有两个眼睑。眼睫和眼睑一起保护骆驼 的眼睛。在沙漠经常有沙暴 (bao4)。刮大风时，骆驼把眼睛闭上，从而沙就 进不去。 骆驼的蹄 (ti2) 很大，像盘子一样。沙漠的面不平的，所以这种很大的蹄 让骆驼很容易地走路。他们用蹄这样走，回避跌 (die1) 到。 因为他们有这些特点，骆驼是对人最重要，最有用的动物之一。你每一 次听到一个人穿过沙漠，是凭着骆驼。如果没有骆驼，人就不能住在沙漠。 本来，澳大利亚没有骆驼。因为那儿的沙漠非常大，所以人把骆驼带来澳大 利亚，帮助他们通过沙漠。现在，澳大利亚是世界上唯一有野 (ye3) 骆驼的 地方。其他国家的骆驼都住在动物园或者农场。 我亲眼没看到骆驼，但是我觉得他们是很好的榜样。就是说，我不想当 骆驼，可是我想跟骆驼一样做事儿。人人都有独特的特点，可是经常不要用 他们。我们应该像骆驼一样，用我们的特点很努力地工作，和帮助别人。

Tim’s Narrative (N3) I knew very little about Chinese before I first moved to Taiwan in early 2000. I grew up in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada, and my experience with other cultures and languages was fairly limited during my childhood. Although I

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took two years of French in high school, when grade 11 rolled around it did so without me parsing sentences and conjugating verbs. In university during the mid-1990s I was introduced to the philosophies of 老字86 and 孔子87 and this started to pique my interest in China and its history. China was a whole different level of foreign for me at this time: it had an exoticism that I had never experienced before and I was instantly intrigued. Experiencing it through the eyes of the media and in textbooks it was often like a surreal movie plot: the glamour of contemporary Beijing and the sagacious philosophy of Laozi, as well as oppression and tyranny with protesters blocking tanks and Mao ubiquitously gazing down from paintings. I saw what would get ratings and it was enough to hook me. This earlier interest in Chinese culture and philosophy predated my eventual move to Taiwan and had a strong influence on my initial decision to go there. For my first undergraduate degree (a Bachelor’s degree in English) I minored in Religious Studies. This was partly because of my desire (at the time) to educate myself in Christian philosophy and history. I was a fierce atheist and wanted to give a credible voice to my dissension. I was also interested in a variety of other religions and this interest eventually led the way to Asia, and to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism where I eventually fell in love with the Tao Te Ching and read it multiple times over the next five years. For me, Taoism represented the anti-religion, and gave my confusion of all things mystical and otherworldly a voice. I was drawn to Taoism because I saw it less as a structured religion and more as a philosophy – less ritualized and institutional than my experience with Christianity. After later moving to Taiwan I learned that this earlier perception of Taoism (as a philosophy more than an institution) was not entirely accurate. I have since become less interested in pursuing a deep connection with Taoism but it was still an important force to drive my initial curiosity to Taiwan. At the end of 1999 when I was near completion of my first undergraduate degree, a friend who had recently gone to Taiwan to teach English asked if I wanted to come; there was an opening at the school he worked for and the job was mine if I wanted it. Prior to that I hadn’t seriously considered leaving Canada to teach English but I was immediately intrigued. I had always wanted to travel and I was still very drawn to Buddhism and Taoism and I wanted to experience more. I took a day to consider it, talked it over with my family, and decided to go. The school needed someone for early January 2000, so I had a few months to prepare for the move and get my life in order. I left Canada on January 6, 2000 and landed in a hot and smoggy Taiwan sleep-deprived and tremendously excited for what was to come. 86 Lăozĭ 87 Kŏngzĭ (Confucius)

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To Taiwan (and back again) My first few weeks in Taiwan were a blur. It was my first time overseas and I was happily overwhelmed by all of the new experiences. I tried to play it cool when I got there but inside I was a gawking, naïve tourist, and the palm trees and new language everywhere were both novel and fresh. Aside from starting a new job (which was eventually to become a new career), I began studying Chinese with a friend at a private language school that catered to a mostly adult population and taught a variety of languages. I was able to customize my schedule to work around my teaching duties and take either group or individual classes. This fit my needs well since I was working a lot, and eventually teaching both mornings and evenings at two different schools. The first three to four weeks of class were a little tedious and I remember feeling frustrated, embarrassed, and consistently humbled at trying to grasp the basics of the language. We worked primarily with pronunciation and accuracy of tones with little detail to “learning how to talk” during this time. In retrospect, I’m glad our teacher did this, although I sometimes wonder how much it helped since I still struggle with completely accurate pronunciation and remembering tones. The teachers at this school were mixed. A few were very structured and inflexible regarding the curriculum and I had trouble learning this way and often felt frustrated and bored. As my Chinese progressed, I increasingly wanted to set my own learning agendas and control what I was studying and at what pace. In the beginning I was largely at the mercy of the basic building blocks of Chinese: practicing pronunciation and the rote memorization of words and tones. The textbook we used (Practical Chinese) was a wonderful resource, and is still a book I use for reference today. After I could manage basic conversation, I started to control my destiny a little more, and was fortunate to meet a great teacher who allowed (and encouraged) me to interrupt our lessons with any sort of question I had and let our conversation take any path that naturally occurred. This more natural flow of communication better suited my learning style and helped me engage in more substantial and authentic ways than occurred in my other classroom settings. She would still help with my grammar and pronunciation, and I still focused on increasing my then limited vocabulary, but class was very unstructured and free flowing – like a long, scaffolded conversation with a good friend. I loved this approach and really feel like I benefited from it. I still received homework, and followed the textbook when I studied on my own, but we would rarely use the (somewhat contrived) dialogues and structure of the textbook during our scheduled class times. My other teachers were less willing to do this, and perhaps this was equally beneficial in the long run. Although I enjoyed it less, and often found it less useful (I just wanted to talk!),

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this did provide the yin to my unstructured yang; it forced me to concentrate on aspects of Chinese that I wasn’t necessarily drawn to. One possible drawback of the learning environment at this private school, however, was the lack of external consequences. Because it catered to a somewhat transient and less academically motivated population (mostly English-teaching expats), there were no tests, grades, or external pressure to improve or perform. Although I tried to push myself and maintain steady forward progression, I wonder how formal language assessment and tangible consequences would have impacted my learning at this time. I stayed at this school on and off for the next year until leaving Taiwan in 2001. By far the most substantial leap in my progression in Chinese occurred during the final months before returning to Canada. This was mostly due to a Taiwanese friend at the time who had limited command of English and was very supportive of my Chinese learning. For much of this three-month period I spoke Chinese at least a few hours a day in casual, social, and non-classroom settings. Combined with my usual independent study at home or in a coffee shop, this was a perfect situation for rapid language progression. I had the mornings to study new vocabulary and review grammar, and the evenings to practice what I learned – to really internalize what I had been studying with application into the “real world.” I look back on this time as pivotal in my learning and I feel that my Chinese reached new heights during this time. This is not to say that I was completely immersed in Chinese, because 70% of my day was still relegated to teaching and thinking in English, but most of my free time was spent in a Chinese world interacting almost entirely in Mandarin. This period of time has continued to inspire me because it shows that with the right kind of opportunity and real dedication I can quickly and effectively achieve new heights with respect to my Chinese learning. During my first year in Taiwan it was difficult finding people to practice Chinese with, especially at the beginning stages where even basic conversation was fragmented and strained. Most of my Chinese speaking-partners in Taiwan were either my teachers or, to a lesser extent, fellow Chinese classmates. At work we were discouraged from speaking Chinese with colleagues, parents, and especially our students because of the pressure to use English exclusively to maintain an English environment. Most of my friends were also English teachers, generally Canadians and Americans, and these social connections rarely provided opportunities to use and improve my Chinese. With the exception of one American friend who had very advanced Chinese, and another Canadian friend who began studying the same time I did, English was dominant in most of the social settings in my life. In particular during this time, I never developed any substantial relationships with Taiwanese men which might have provided some

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unique opportunities for not only friendships but also conversation partners and language resources. I had numerous casual acquaintances who were Taiwanese but most were met through my professional life (fellow colleagues from work who were mostly always female) and most of the time we spoke English. I can’t say that I tried or didn’t try to make Taiwanese male friends at this time, but that’s just the way it worked out. My social situations were largely embedded in the expat community or were superficial (parties or clubs). Neither lent themselves to making deep connections outside my group of mostly expat friends and probably contributed to the lack of genuine friendships and speaking opportunities that I had. There was a time when a friend’s partner (now his wife), who was studying Chinese linguistics at a local university, posted an advertisement on the school’s message board looking for a language exchange partner for me. All the respondents were women and none were men. This is perhaps based partly on the gendered nature of language study (which she was involved in), but can also show how there are many complex factors which contributed to how I found speaking partners and formed friendships with Chinese speaking women much more than men. My choice to leave Taiwan in 2001 was a combination of several factors. I had met enough expats by this time who became stuck in Taiwan floating from school to school without stability and forward progression. Although I had become quite connected with Taiwan as a country, was very happy teaching, and had a solid group of friends, I knew I needed to return to university someday and also wanted to pursue my dream of becoming a paid musician. Although the latter failed to come to fruition, the former proved to be a wise choice. Despite leaving I knew I would be back again at some point so I never regretted my decision (although I did miss Taiwan greatly during my long tenure away). After leaving Taiwan in May of 2001, I spent five weeks in Thailand and Cambodia before returning to Canada. I spent three weeks backpacking in Cambodia and was amazed at the remains of Angkor Wat and the gorgeous landscape of the country. I rode a boat down the Mekong River sipping cocktails on the roof, and eventually made my way to Sihanoukville, a beach town on the coast. I took another boat back to Thailand from Sihanoukville where we got stuck in a terrible storm far off the coast of Cambodia and amost drowned. Amidst the chaos of the other passengers (people crying and getting sick all around me) and the boat’s crew scrambling into life jackets, I tried to find peace and meditate. After two hours the seas calmed and we slowly limped back to land. This, I hope, was my last ever Cambodian boat ride! At the end of this trip I returned to Bangkok where I had three days until my flight left for Canada.

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Feeling a little homesick for my recently departed friends in Taiwan and missing my family and friends back in Canada, I found myself wandering around Bangkok’s meager Chinatown for hours at a time feeling nostalgic for what I had just left and contemplating my uncertain future back in Canada. Back then I was fearless about initiating conversation in Chinese, and once I discovered the shopkeepers and servers could speak Mandarin I spoke without hesitation. Strangely, I remember little reaction to this in Thailand – maybe because there are so many travelers that it was more common to hear foreigners speaking the language. After my brief stay in Cambodia and Thailand I returned to Canada to begin a program in International Studies. I was a little lost in terms of what I wanted to pursue academically and how this would translate to a career, but I knew I wanted to combine my interests in internationalism, economics, politics and, of course, Chinese. This program was perfect in this respect because of its interdisciplinary focus and the wide variety of interesting and diverse courses. There was a language requirement and I registered to take three credits of introductory Chinese. Chinese class in Canada turned out to be very uninspiring and disappointing. I was frustrated that I never fit in (with the disparity between my spoken and written abilities – being functionally conversational but basically illiterate) and it was difficult for me to maintain my engagement with the class and sustain any long-term investment with my learning. Coming fresh from Taiwan, I had been speaking a lot of Chinese and felt very comfortable with basic conversation, so on the first day of class I didn’t hesitate speaking Chinese with the professor. I explained my situation – that I had recently returned from Taiwan and was very enthusiastic about concentrating on reading and writing – and I hoped that we could use Chinese as the main medium of communication during classtime. Strangely, she seemed upset and told me to not speak Chinese like that during class because it might make the other students feel intimidated. While (now) I understand her logic a little better, at the time it was extremely discouraging and disappointing. As the semester progressed things improved somewhat, but I rarely spoke in class and coasted through without much engagement. The “highlight” of this period was being the Master of Ceremonies at our university’s Chinese New Year’s celebration. I was (I felt) the token white guy speaking a teacher-mediated script in front of 600 people to give my teacher face (while not being encouraged to do this in class). Regardless, I found other ways to practice my oral Chinese during this time period and was still quite engaged with my learning outside of class. Jun88 was a Chinese friend I met shortly after I returned to Canada in 2001. He was a fellow student I met after putting up signs across campus looking for 88 Name changed

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a Chinese/English language exchange partner. We spent many hours together every week just hanging out and talking and helping each other with various language issues. Although Jun returned to China shortly after we met, those four months were quite useful for the maintenance, and even improvement in certain areas, of my oral Chinese ability. It was one of those rare occasions when a language exchange worked (I’ve had many, with most being filled with strained conversation and feigned interest, ending soon after they begin). This period of time is important in the larger story of my Chinese learning because it marked the end of my formal and informal study for many years to come. After Chinese class ended and Jun left Canada, I lost motivation to actively continue studying. Other things were happening in my life, particularly being involved in a few active bands, combined with my continued studies at university and the demands of work. While Chinese was pushed way back in my life, it was still in my mind (and heart). It wasn’t the end of my journey, only hibernation. The next four years were spent playing music and working with a non-profit organization (and, of course, more university). I never finished my International Studies degree, opting instead to become a certified English and Social Studies teacher. Near the end of this bachelor’s degree in Education in 2006, the band I was in decided to call it quits. I was excited to be moving on and turned down a teaching offer in my hometown to get back to Taiwan as soon as I could. I had quite a few friends still living there, and others who had moved there since, so going back was an easy and comfortable transition. I was excited to reengage with Chinese but I was mainly focused on teaching and reconnecting with friends. This lack of a devoted plan to significantly improve my Chinese was to be telling in terms of what I eventually ended up accomplishing. This second time in Taiwan was much less productive in terms of language study than my first, but much more valuable in other areas. I went in the summer of 2006 and stayed for just over a year. The first month was quite encouraging since I moved in with my cousin and his Taiwanese partner. I ended up speaking a lot of Chinese with her and really felt like I had just picked up where I left off after leaving in 2001. During that month, we would all frequently go out together and it felt great to be speaking so much Chinese again in comfortable situations with relative ease. After so many years of not speaking any Chinese, I was surprised at how quickly it all came back. Words I thought long since forgotten would reappear spontaneously during conversation, much to my pleasant surprise. Others, that I once knew and used, would not. And despite starting well this first month, I never got focused to improve in any substantial way. Although I returned briefly to the private language school I studied at more intensively in 2000–2001, I never really felt like I had enough time (or motivation) to engage in my studies with dedication and rigour. Again, I was busy teaching

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English, this time at a “famous” high school in the daytime as well as a second job at a private school at night. As a result, I felt increased pressure to spend extra time preparing for teaching and all of the other bureaucracy and work that comes with this kind of position. For the first part of this year I tried to regain my old study habits. I would go to a coffee shop and study new vocabulary and review my old textbooks that I had brought with me from Canada. While in 2000–2001 I did this on a daily basis, during this second time in Taiwan it was relegated to a weekly (or even monthly) occurrence. Although my Chinese never progressed like I wished it had, I did gain some valuable EFL89 teaching experience as well as meeting my future wife who was also an English teacher at the highschool I worked at. It was also during this year that I applied for graduate school back in Canada and after getting accepted to the University of British Columbia (UBC), I moved back in the summer of 2007 to begin my MA in Modern Language Education. I came to UBC proud and a little intimidated. I began my MA with some vague ideas of how to incorporate my life interests into my academic pursuits. For the first year of my program my plan was to research the role of motivation in Chinese L2 learners at an elementary level Mandarin immersion program in Western Canada. I soon began to struggle with this topic (personally, not academically) and my decision to research this area was a constant source of unease and discomfort. Despite my interest in the area I felt like an imposter, not qualified to research something I myself had limited success at, particularly due to my limited proficiency with Chinese literacy. This discomfort combined with a nagging pragmatism regarding my future career (as an English teacher, in some capacity) was central in my decision to switch to another thesis topic based on my first language (English) and related to my teaching areas (ESL/ EFL). I wondered whether research on English L2 academic writing, which I eventually pursued, would better situate me competitively in obtaining a higher quality teaching position after I graduated. I know my fears were a little unfounded and perhaps exaggerated, but I still think, pragmatically, I made the wise choice, although I sometimes regret not pursuing my original goal. Also during this time at UBC, I became part of a research group of fellow Chinese learners. Over the course of several years we met often and began an investigation into the complex and complicated (and frustrating) processes that learning Mandarin entails and embarked on a rich journey of documenting and analyzing these experiences. This research group ended up being a highlight of my time at UBC and become a substantial source for my re-energized investment in Chinese, particularly as an academic pursuit. Around this time I also became involved in a group called Mandarin Circle which met on a more casual basis to 89 English as a Foreign Language

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speak in or about Chinese (or about Chinese in Chinese). Mandarin Circle was one of the rare times I had spoken Mandarin with other non-Chinese L1 speakers for a sustained period of time, and I remember feeling very hesitant, even awkward, about the possibility of joining. My apprehension turned out to be unfounded and this group became not only helpful to my language learning but also a source of encouragement and motivation. It also helped break the prejudice that I had against speaking Chinese with other L2 learners and it was beneficial to hear of others’ struggles and accomplishments with the language.

Chinese in my life In 2006 I met my future wife in Taiwan and this has had a significant impact on the role of Chinese in my daily life and the continued access I have to the language. I am fortunate to have a partner who speaks Chinese and the benefits that this has on my language learning are substantial. I am never shy to speak with her and because she is also a language teaching professional (and a fellow PhD student in applied linguistics) she has the linguistic and cultural tools needed if I ask her for an explanation or want clarification on language issues. Having a Chinese-speaking partner while living in Taiwan, however, can also be a source of frustration when we are together in public. Despite my efforts to use Chinese as much as possible in public, when we are together it can be difficult because of people’s unwillingness to communicate with me (in Chinese), choosing instead to address my wife. Regardless of whether or not I begin a conversation, she will often be forced to finish it. We often laugh about this trend although my frustrations are quite genuine. When I detach from this scenario personally I realize that there are likely many causes for this to occur, namely a discomfort or inexperience speaking Chinese with someone who is not Taiwanese or other physical markers like my size or sex (or a variety of other reasons as well). However, because this happens so often when we are out together it does play a role in how often I get to use Chinese in public while with my wife in Taiwan. There are other potential challenges to having a Chinese-speaking partner as well. I fall into lazy patterns, not trying to figure out what is 100% correct because I know she can understand me. Because she can usually “get” my sometimes imperfect Chinese, it doesn’t force me to correct myself and find more accurate or complex ways to communicate. I tend to stick to patterns or vocabulary that I have already acquired instead of working on new ones. Also, when we are in a Chinese-speaking environment, I know that if there is something I can’t understand I can rely on her to translate. This is helpful in a practical sense but is also a detriment to my learning. This means I don’t concentrate

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as much as I should in linguistically complex situations and I don’t push myself into these difficult (linguistic) situations if they can be easily avoided. Also, there is little correction of language errors that occurs when we are talking unless one of us specifically requests it. There is nothing worse than having a conversation (or worse yet an argument!) and being corrected when you don’t want to be. While this unsaid ‘no correction’ policy is necessary to drive normal conversation and stay in a healthy relationship, it is not a perfect situation for improving language use. Despite these limitations, having a Chinese-speaking partner is a valuable resource, but not as flawless a scenario as others may think in terms of language learning.

My learning During my first stay in Taiwan in 2000–2001 I was highly engaged and motivated and I spent much of my free time studying. I still had an active English social life and taught English for much of the day, but Chinese dominated what was left. I loved sitting at a coffee shop, memorizing new words and having little conversations with myself to practice. I had a daily ritual for six months that I rarely broke: wake up, teach in the morning, go to Chinese class for two hours, study Chinese for a few hours, and teach from 4 : 00 to 9 : 00 pm. Weekend days were spent at the park or coffee shop studying and with friends. As someone who has learned Chinese in primarily informal contexts, I’ve developed various strategies to learn effectively. I use mnemonic devices to help memorize words and tones. For example, 畫90 (huà) is fourth tone, because my painting strokes go down (and hence the 4th descending tone to represent this “downness”). I codeswitch between English and Chinese (and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese) because it allows me to communicate with greater fluency – plus it can be fun to play creatively with a variety of languages. I try to use new words in context, and I ask questions when I don’t understand something. I have books full of notes and questions that I carry with me when I’m studying and engaged. In Taiwan, I try to go out of my way to speak Chinese as much as possible, and strike up conversation with anyone I can. However, any improvement with my Chinese has always been an arduous process and largely depends on how much time I have to sit in front of a book and memorize and find meaningful ways to practice. I feel like everything I’ve learned has been with a great amount of effort and endless repetition; nothing has ever come easy.

90 To paint/draw

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I never learned much about Chinese grammar when I first began studying. Any understanding of the language regarding syntax, morphology, phonology, etc. came much later. At the time of my initial burst into the Chinese world in 2000 my learning was more natural and less analytical and perhaps this is a contributing reason why I have not achieved an advanced level of fluency. Now I am much more interested in the constituent building blocks of language and understand more about Chinese in a linguistic sense based largely on my own teaching and education as an evolving applied linguist. During my first year in Taiwan I learned both bopomofo91 and pīnyīn, the phonemic orthographies used primarily in Taiwan and mainland China respectively. I initially learned bopomofo under pressure from my teachers because they felt pīnyīn would prejudice me to use English sounds over Chinese ones whereas bopomofo would help me associate these new sounds with a new orthography. I never firmly believed this and found the logic faulty. While I agree that it is indeed challenging to acquire new phonemes as an adult, I never felt that this was related to romanized pīnyīn and its similarity with the orthography of English. My decision to forgo bopomofo in favor of pīnyīn was in part because I liked it better and in part because of pīnyīn’s predominance in text resources (on a global level primarily, although pīnyīn is also very accessible and prevalent within Taiwan). In short, I don’t think it matters. If becoming proficient in Chinese pronunciation were as simple as the choice of a phonemic orthography, then there would be no problems with becoming a native sounding Chinese speaker. How some adult speakers become accurate speakers and others don’t is an enigma to me. As a teacher I have always thought that teaching pronunciation (especially to adults, and especially those who have problems) is a particularly difficult part of language instruction. For myself, I think my pronunciation is adequate and has likely reached its peak in terms of accuracy. I am slowly coming to terms with my inadequacies in Chinese and realize that I will always have non-L1 pronunciation no matter how hard I try. Just as I advocate as a teacher that difference in English should not only be accepted but valued, I have slowly come to accept this regarding my own language use in Chinese. I’ve always felt that my oral Chinese has been an odd mix of SouthernTaiwan pronunciation, the desire to sound “standard” (like the Chinese I hear on instructional recordings and Chinese news broadcasts), and various (generally negative) transfer issues from English. I know that I will never fit in to any sort of a native mould when it comes to pronunciation, but I’ve tried to do the best I could. After returning to Canada in 2001, and becoming friends with a man (Jun) from mainland China, I noticed my pronunciation and word choice changed 91 The colloquial term used for 注音符號 (zhùyīn fúhào)

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slightly in response to his. I began to strongly emphasize the initial retroflex sounds92 “zhi,” “chi” and “shi,” and found myself saying “nǎr”93 instead of “nǎlǐ,”94 “zhèr”95 instead of “zhèli,”96 and “lāji”97 instead of “lèsè.” 98 I was proud of my transition, and felt more authentically “Chinese.” After I returned to Taiwan in 2006, this pronunciation and choice of certain lexical items came with me. I remember one night in a pub shortly after I had arrived talking with a Taiwanese guy I had just met. I was feeling pretty good about my Chinese, having just returned and restarted speaking after a long break (almost four years) without any practice. After a while he told me it sounded like I had eggs in my mouth and that my pronunciation was strange. It wasn’t nice to hear, but it was not uncommon to get some very blunt comments like this, so I smiled politely and was happy he couldn’t read my mind (which was not so polite). I never thought about this much until I heard a Taiwanese friend say the same thing about people from Beijing, and then I began to wonder if this person’s egg comment had something to do with my attempt to emulate my Chinese friend’s pronunciation at the expense of sounding less Taiwanese. This incident made me realize that I will never sound “standard” and I will never sound “native-like.” However, it also made me realize that the perception of standard or accurate pronunciation is subjective and contextual. Now, I do not want to sound like any one from Beijing and far prefer trying to emulate Taiwanese 國語99 (guóyǔ), particularly that found in the south of Taiwan which is more heavily influenced by Hokkienese (Taiwanese) in various ways, most noticeably in terms of pronunciation, borrowed lexicon, and syntax. I now enjoy trying to sound very “local” and trying to emulate Taiwanese 國語 in subtle ways (like “softening up” the retroflexed zhi, chi, shi sounds to zi, ci, si or mixing Mandarin and Taiwanese together). During my early years of learning Chinese, literacy had an almost nonexistent part in the process. There have been spurts when I studied hard, particularly in 2001 after I first returned from Taiwan and studied Chinese formally at a Canadian university, and I could read and write about 700–800 characters. This was just before the “dead-period” of my Chinese learning (2002–2006) 92 In Taiwan these retroflexed initials tend to be less emphasized [i.e. are often subsituted by the non-standard equivalents z c s] than in standard mainland Mandarin or Putonghua 93 The common pronunciation of “where” (哪兒) in China [northern Mandarin] 94 The common pronunciation of “where” (哪裡) in Taiwan [southern Mandarin] 95 The common pronunciation of “here” (這兒) in China [northern Mandarin] 96 The common pronunciation of “here” (這裡) in Taiwan [southern Mandarin] 97 The common pronunciation of “garbage” (垃圾 ) in China [mainland Mandarin] 98 The common pronunciation of “garbage” (垃圾 ) in Taiwan [Taiwan Mandarin] 99 National Language (Mandarin)

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when I went years without speaking a single word of Chinese let alone studying characters or laboriously reading simple Chinese texts. I had no opportunity to, or rather I created no opportunity to, speak and study because of other priorities in my life and the difficulty in finding compatible language exchange partners. In 2001, after I returned to Canada from Taiwan and took the introductory Chinese class at my university, I had an opportunity to engage with Chinese characters and to have an external sense of pressure to work on my literacy skills. Since I was far ahead of my classmates in terms of speaking and listening, this allowed me the chance to concentrate on improving my (almost nonexistent) literacy base. I was quite diligent for the term, but after this class was finished there were no others to take. My university obviously had little demand from the students or resources for anything other than an introductory Chinese course. After I was done with this one term of Chinese, my limited literacy skills were the first thing to go. Generally, I did not feel upset with my illiteracy. I would obviously have been elated to be able to read and write proficiently, but I never felt at a major disadvantage not being able to function in a literate Chinese world. I never needed to be able to read and write in Chinese. In Taiwan, if I couldn’t understand something, I would just ask what it was (orally), or would just ignore it and move on. If I needed to read something (a bill in the mail, a menu, or some other document) I could always ask a friend to help. I don’t think literacy is unimportant, quite the opposite in fact, but I always put speaking and listening far ahead in terms of what I could dedicate time to, and what was more pressing for me to improve on. I didn’t need to read and write as much as I wanted to talk to people and manage my life in social settings. I felt that my daily activities that required me to speak were of more importance, and so speaking is what always took my focus, time, and dedication and was of most interest to me. It wasn’t until nearly a decade later when I returned to Taiwan in 2010 that I really began to embrace literacy acquisition and make significant gains in acquiring Chinese characters and learning how to read and write. Now, more than ever, I would like to maintain at least a base level of Chinese literacy. I still don’t feel like I need to be fully literate in Chinese, but I want to more than ever. I want to prove to myself that I can survive, independently, in a Chinese world if I have to. Not excel, but just survive. Improving my Chinese in a more holistic sense is also a practical choice in terms of fitting into Chinese language classes. With the difference in fluency between my speaking and listening and reading and writing I have always been placed in a beginner class to accommodate my lack of literacy skills. If I ever want to take more language courses, I need to maintain this gap in order to be placed accordingly and maintain my interest.

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As an adult learner, I have never blamed a teacher or a book or a way of teaching to be at fault for my limitations with Chinese. I place the entire experience within myself; any failure and success has been due to my own actions. As a teacher who has worked with many adults, I know that the ones who usually achieve greater success are those who put in a personal and focused commitment to learn the language. As a teacher, I think there are ways that I need to motivate and guide students to find the best ways to learn and to help them succeed. As a student, however, I don’t rely heavily on a teacher, nor do I think a teacher will be the primary indicator of what I can achieve – ultimately, this lies within. Perhaps this view may be in part related to my lack of formal classroom experience, or because I’ve never felt particularly inspired by the vast majority of the Chinese teachers I’ve had (with the exception of one). In fact, most of my memories of these teachers have not been particularly fond. Admittedly, my formal language education experiences have been quite limited, but what I’ve encountered has been very teacher-directed, antiquated, and generally dull and uninspiring. The field of Chinese as a second/foreign/additional language is still in its relative infancy, and I’m positive that future approaches to teaching and learning can evolve and progress in exciting ways. Generally, however, I have found that most of my teachers have not been prepared to answer the questions I ask (due, possibly, to their own limitations in English and my own in Chinese). While the use of a student’s first language in the classroom is not always possible, I think I would have benefited more if I had teachers who could answer specific and sometimes difficult Chinese questions and explain to me in my first language the similarities and differences between Chinese and English, particularly at the beginning and early intermediate stages of my learning. Fortunately, my wife can now provide many of these answers in a way that my past teachers never could. I don’t blame them, but it certainly would have helped. When people ask about my Chinese I say that it is far from perfect but that I can function in most situations to achieve my desired goals. Sometimes I can’t express exactly what I mean, but I can usually speak “around” things to get my meaning across, and this is greatly helped if my interlocutor is familiar with me or is used to hearing Chinese L2 speakers. Instead of saying, for example, “the picket fence,” I can say “that long brown wooden thing that is in front of the house.” I can do many things in limited ways, and others still not at all. I can talk with students and parents, understand simple Chinese pop songs, order food, function daily in normal situations, talk to my in-laws, and talk with my friends and my wife in relatively fast and fluent ways. Talking with my wife is a little like reading a good book. I know it’s not completely real, but it’s fun to lose myself and get caught up in the fantasy. I know that she usually under-

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stands my less-than-perfect grammar or odd lexical choice and can “get” what I mean when others might not be able to. I can also understand nearly all of what she says in Chinese due to her skillful modification of her own language choice to speak in ways that are understandable, yet not child-like or ungrammatical. There are also many things that I can’t do: I struggle when watching movies and certain TV shows. I have difficulty understanding pronunciation that is not Taiwanese-like, particularly heavily retroflexed varieties. I can’t understand conversation (or produce it) that is out of my comfort zone, particularly anything specialized or complex. I sometimes have trouble talking on the phone, and I still get upset when people misunderstand me.

Always 阿兜仔100 When I first moved to the south of Taiwan in early 2000 there were not a lot of white foreigners living there, although this has changed considerably since. Not that Taiwan was uncharted territory for foreigners looking to travel, teach, or live there, but many days simply walking down the street would elicit pointing and staring because of my skin colour. I quickly learned the words 阿兜仔101 (“foreigner” in Taiwanese), 美國人102 (“American,” the default term for white people) and, of course, 外國人103 (“foreigner” in Mandarin). I never knew how to translate these words properly in terms of the deeper (racial or cultural) connotations that might be embedded within them. Having grown up in Canada, the notion of pointing at a person (particularly a visible minority) and calling them “foreigner” would be in poor taste at best, if not downright derogatory or racist. Even after all these years it still bothers me to be called “foreigner” by strangers who pass me on the street or yell from a car, although I recognize that this label carries different implications depending on the context, country, language, or even person who is speaking. Regardless of the apparent neutral connotation of “foreigner” in Mandarin or Taiwanese, I still feel uneasy when I’m pointed at and labeled as such, especially after having lived in Taiwan for many years. Because of this obvious physical marker (my Whiteness) I often felt completely exposed in Taiwan. I could never blend in to a crowd and I could never fit in. Sometimes I enjoyed this notoriety and other times I wanted to hide. 100 /a tɔk a/ – Represented formally in Taiwanese as 阿啄仔 (literaly meaning “sharp nose person”) and colloquially as 阿兜仔. Commonly translated as “[Caucasian] foreigner”. 101 a tok a 102 měiguó rén 103 wàiguó rén

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I know many of my foreigner friends often felt like they were a sideshow, and felt contempt about how they were singled out. At times I would see other foreigners get upset because they thought Taiwanese people were speaking negatively about them. As my proficiency in Chinese grew, I knew that this was rarely (if ever) the case. Because most of the foreign English teachers around me lacked even basic proficiency in Chinese, they couldn’t understand what was being said and inappropriately interpreted the attention to be negative, instead of general curiosity. I too felt this annoyance at times, much to my chagrin, although this faded as I became more fluent in the language. Regardless of this standing out, or perhaps because of it, I was awarded certain things that I may not have otherwise received because of my physical appearance. As a Caucasian English teacher living in Taiwan I undoubtedly had special privileges. I received a disproportionately high salary for teaching English, had smaller class sizes, and had better holidays compared to my Taiwanese counterparts who worked in the same schools and often, at the time, had more specialized education. When I spoke Chinese, even at the very beginning of my studies, I was applauded (figuratively) for my effort and progression. I received frequent compliments on my Chinese, even at the beginning of my studies and regardless of how accurate or fluent I was. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but the frequent reinforcement of being complimented and recognized as a legitimate Chinese speaker definitely helped sustain my motivation, especially during times when I felt stagnated and frustrated with my (lack of) progression. This attention, to both my Chinese speaking and foreignness, was nice at times and annoying and intrusive at others. I found (and still find) myself walking a tightrope between being nice, polite, and diplomatic or feeling upset when people explicitly label me a foreigner or compliment very basic (and even inaccurate) Chinese. These are the times when I do not want to be the tall white guy riding a small motorcycle getting pointed at. This sort of attention impacts how much I want to use my Chinese or even go out to crowded public places and try to engage in conversation. I should note, however, that being a white male who complains about the difficulty of “standing out” does not mean I fail to recognize my privileged status in various communities. I acknowledge the opportunities that such a position has afforded me in terms of progressing my career and the generally positive reinforcement I have received when using Chinese because of this “standing out.” There are other factors that have impacted the way I have come to view myself in a Chinese-speaking world. My first Taiwanese boss gave me my Chinese name 安亭牧.104 I have since come to learn that it’s very “unique” – a euphemism not lost on me. And yet, I don’t care if it’s a strange or uncommon name 104 An Ting-Mu

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and never have. My Chinese name is only a costume that I wear if I want to amuse people. No one takes it seriously, including myself. This feeling can be extended outwards to my perception of a Chinese-self and my connection with Chinese culture. In some ways I feel deeply connected to Taiwan and love many things about its languages, religions, social behaviours, etc., but I don’t feel particularly “Chinese” or “Taiwanese” nor do I desire to be. Despite living there off and on over the last decade, I am first and always a foreigner. This is reinforced by the immigration laws of Taiwan on an explicit, institutional level, and confirmed by perceptions, reactions, and opinions of foreigners by some Taiwanese people. Perhaps if my Mandarin were more proficient I would identify more with a Chinese or Taiwanese identity, but this disconnectedness has never bothered me. I have never strongly identified with my own cultural roots (possibly because of my own mixed ancestry), so this might have an impact on not caring about fitting into Taiwan culturally except in a very token way. This sense of disconnectedness has usually inspired me to study harder instead of making me feel rejected or like an outsider because I feel like I have more to prove. It has inspired me to force my way into a world where I will always be viewed as a visitor.

Final thoughts Some of the things that inspired me to pursue Chinese when I first began are precisely the things that dissuade me now. Having people hear me speak or see me studying Chinese used to make me feel important and special. Now I rarely want to speak Chinese in public (in Canada) because I don’t want to be heard or marked as trying to show off or stand out. If I speak to my wife outside the home in Chinese I’ll speak quietly or we’ll just use English. I never practice writing Chinese characters in coffee shops anymore because it might be seen as pretentious. I don’t feel this same hesitancy to use Chinese in public in Taiwan and in recent years I have started feeling less like a spectacle and more like a regular person when I interact in the community. I think one of the positive things about the growing number of Chinese speaking foreigners in Taiwan is that it has become much more common to see and hear Chinese L2 speakers both in the media and in daily life. This change might also have negative impacts as there are fewer opportunities for foreign Chinese L2 speakers to feel “unique” or “special” as more and more people of non-Chinese heritage are becoming Chinese speakers. I’m always thinking about when I can go back to Taiwan when I’m not there. Especially now, with a Taiwanese wife and (a half-Taiwanese) daughter,

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there is a stronger emotional and practical connection to return. My time in Taiwan has been a very formative experience in my life, personally, academically, intellectually, and emotionally. It was the first time I traveled internationally, the first time I lived outside of my home province, the time I discovered I wanted to be a teacher, the only period of my life when I seriously engaged in learning other languages, and the place where I met my wife. So in part my fondness of Taiwan is a culmination of all the past formative events, but it’s also about the future and my continued connection with Taiwan and Chinese. Chinese will continue to play a part in how I construct my identity and how I interact with the world. I am increasingly using Chinese in my daily life with my wife and our young daughter, who we are raising bilingually, as well as with other Chinese-speaking colleagues and friends through personal communications or social networking sites. I am currently a doctoral student who is involved with research in Chinese and I plan to continue this work into the future. As a teacher and student of language(s), I don’t see a time when Chinese will not be influential in my life. However, it is impossible to guess where I will ultimately end up and what level of Chinese I will eventually achieve. For now I am just trying to stay positive and optimistic. I’m not completely satisfied with how things have gone regarding my Chinese learning, but I also know that this isn’t the end of my story; there is much more to be written, and I’m excited about finding those words.

Appendix B: Sample Questions for Chinese Proficiency Interview (2009, 2010) Section 1: Greeting and chit-chat

Section 2: Questions and answers (e.g., for Ella) 请简单介绍一下你学习中文的经历。你为什么会对中文感兴趣? (Please describe briefly your Chinese learning experience. Why were you interested in Chinese in the first place?) 2. 你马上就要去台湾了，你为什么会选择去台湾？你希望在台湾学到或体 验到什么? (You are going to Taiwan soon. Why did you choose to go to Taiwan? What do you expect to learn or experience there?) 3. 你在昆明的经历和在上海的经历有什么不一样？如果你可以选择回去一 个地方, 你会去哪里? 为什么? (How was your experience in Kunming different from your experience in Shanghai? If you were to go back, which place you would choose? Why?) 4. 你的研究有没有改变你对自己中文学习经历的看法?为什么? (Did your research change your perception of your own experience of learning Chinese? Why?) 5. 一年来你的生活有什么变化? 发生了哪些重要的事情? (How has your life changed this past year? What important things happened during the year?) 6. 你觉得明年你的中文会不会有进步? 你将来想怎么样学习或者使用中文? 有没有新的学习目标? (Do you feel that your Chinese will improve in the next year? How do you want to study or use Chinese in the future? Do you have any new learning goals?) 1.

Section 3: Picture description 手机在亚洲国家特别流行。人们的生活社交已经离不开它。请你谈谈手机怎 样改变了人们的生活方式和社会, 它的好处及弊病（请举例说明） 。最后请你 说说手机在你的生活中的作用和重要性。你可不可以想象没有手机的生活?

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(Cellphones are particularly popular in Asian countries and are necessary for people’s social life. Please talk about how the cellphone has changed society and people’s way of living as well as its pros and cons (please give examples). In the end, please talk about how important the cellphone is to you and how it functions in your life. Can you imagine life without a cellphone?)

Section 4: Book/movie/TV show description 请介绍一下你最近看过的一本书。(Please describe a book you read recently.)

Section 5: Debrief

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Subject index accuracy see linguistic complexity, accuracy and fluency ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) see assessment – see also interviews acquisition see linguistic development affect or affective 13, 17, 20, 118, 142 agency 17, 22, 31, 103–105, 113–125, 139, 143, 157, 185–186, 246, 264 analysis 25–32, 49–52, 55–76, 113–114, 143–157 – emic vs. etic perspectives or analyses 24, 39–40, 108, 164, 190, 255 – qualitative linguistic analysis 69–75 – qualitative narrative analysis 150–154, 168–174 – quantitative linguistic analysis 55–69 – quantitative narrative analysis 158–168 – narrative see narrative – thematic analysis 31, 102, 113–140 aspect or aspectual – grammatical aspect 34–35, 46, 69, 72– 73, 104, 182, 192 assessment and tests – ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview 35, 40– 42, 75, 183 – Chinese proficiency test or testing 11, 35 – Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) and ‘can-do’ 27, 30, 40–45, 58, 64, 75, 85, 87, 102–183, 188, 194 – HSK 11, 40–42, 48, 75, 194, 215, 217, 219, 269 – TOP 12, 40–42, 194, 240 – TOCFL 12, 40–42, 75, 194 – self-assessment 27, 29–30, 40, 43–46, 49, 50, 55, 58, 62, 73–75, 102, 183 – standardized tests 30, 40–43, 50, 75, 182, 194 attitudes see ideologies attrition or language loss 11, 243, 275, 186, 234 autobiography see narrative auto-ethnography see narrative

Bethune 256 bilingual, bilingually, or bilingualism 2, 14, 17, 38, 76, 118, 131, 179, 220, 245, 275, 300 CAL see Chinese as additional language can-do see assessment (CEFR) Cantonese see Chinese case study 10, 13–20, 23 – and cross-case analysis 29, 143–144, 191 CCTV 9, 195, 257 Chairman Mao 250, 253 challenges of learning Chinese 14, 20, 29, 45–49, 87–88, 225, 227, 237, 245, 291 Changsha 47–48, 122, 169, 249–250 – Changsha dialect see Chinese China vii, 1–10, 14–19, 22, 24, 34, 36–40, 44–48, 78, 83, 84, 115, 118–122, 127– 139, 180, 187, 191, 194–196, 202–203, 205, 209, 211, 215–218, 223–234, 244, 247–251, 256, 259–260, 268–269, 274, 280, 282, 284 China rising 1–3 Chinese – as a foreign language 10, 12, 110 – as a heritage language (CHL) 4, 19–20, 109, 111, 118–120, 134, 182–183, 100, 109–110, 124, 135, 181, 184, 192–193, 243, 244 – as a lingua franca 4, 216 – as an additional language (CAL) v–vii – as an international language vii – Cantonese 3–7, 14–16, 20, 110, 213, 241, 263 – characters see orthography – classical Chinese 8, 10, 83, 233, 243, 253, 277 – culture see culture – dialects or varieties vii, 4–7, 10, 18, 31, 39, 45–49, 97, 110, 151, 225, 253 – diaspora (communities) vii, 4–5, 10–11, 18, 19, 78, 109–111, 194, 235 – Hokkien(ese) see Taiwanese – Hunanese or Hunan or Changsha dialect 47, 252–254, 258

318

Subject index

– language education see language education – Mandarin dialects or varieties 5, 46–47, 55, 215, 253, 294 – morphemes see morphemes – names (for non-Chinese learners) 5, 19, 88, 152, 230, 263, 266–267, 298–299 – ownership of 9, 120, 195 – philosophy 202, 284 – Pŭtōnghuà 4, 11, 252–253, 258, 295 – as a second language see linguistic development – Standard Chinese or Standard Modern Chinese or Standard Mandarin 4, 47– 48, 95, 159, 195, 231, 233, 253, 258, 293–294 – tones see tones codeswitching 52, 54, 63, 65–66, 76, 153– 154, 220, 222, 239, 292 coding (data, or coded data) 9, 25, 103, 117, 158–159, 163, 166, 189 cognitive or cognitivist or psychological approaches (to SLA, Chinese) 12–13, 21, 30, 35, 79, 80, 84–85, 100, 103– 106, 150, 178, 191 collaborative research and writing 20, 22, 23, 32, 142–144, 166, 174, 187 collocations see lexis Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) see assessment and selfassessment complexity see linguistic complexity, accuracy and fluency complexity theory 13 community 11, 20, 25, 31, 102–140, 185, 189, 201, 204–205, 208, 218–219, 226, 235, 241, 257 – and identity see identity – community of practice (CoP) vi, 21, 32, 106, 111, 114, 145–147, 166, 258 – building 21, 166–168, 174, 177–178 – discourse community 146 – home community 110–139 – imagined community 114 – membership 187 – target-language community 111–140 complements 70–72, 182–183, 192, 261

complexity see linguistic compounds 6, 66, 70–72 Confucius Institutes and Classrooms 9, 11, 34, 195 correction (of errors, by self or others) 48, 52, 63, 82, 89, 93, 156, 159, 282, 292 cosmopolitan (language, person) 194, 195, 245, 264 corpus or corpora 27–28, 51, 55, 58–62, 76, 104, 179, 182–183, 241 – HSK word lists 62 – Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC) 58–62 critical appraisal 160–171 critical experiences or incidents 22, 111, 149–150, 185, 216 critical theory 104, 106 culture(s), Chinese and others 3, 8, 9, 10, 16–19, 34, 36, 85, 109, 112, 114, 119– 130, 147, 164, 167, 177, 184, 187, 193, 195, 209, 224, 230, 236–238, 240–246, 250, 255–256, 259–260, 264, 277, 283–284, 299 cultural politics 8, 9, 187 Cultural Revolution 247, 249, 251–256 curriculum (Chinese) 34, 87, 195, 266, 285 Dashan 9, 256 desire (to learn Chinese) 9, 17, 31, 99–100, 102, 107, 109–110, 114, 117–119, 121, 123, 125, 131, 135, 151, 186, 245, 265, 269 dialects see Chinese diaspora see Chinese difference see identity disfluency see fluency European languages 13, 34–35, 45, 85, 109, 182, 186 emic see analysis enculturation 112, 217 epistemology(ies) 21–23, 31, 103–104, 112, 143, 179, 188, 190, 217 etic see analysis ethnicity 19, 126, 131, 193, 260 exceptionalism 8, 184

Subject index

exoticism and Chinese 117, 119, 128, 184, 224, 234, 284 expatriate(s) and expat communities 16, 18, 114, 116, 121–123, 125, 128–129, 136, 176, 210–211, 221, 230–231, 249, 251, 260, 265, 287 emotion(s) 105, 150, 153, 210, 236, 243, 271, 300 English teaching and Chinese language learning 122–125, 131–132, 195, 203 fetishization (of characters) 8, 184–185 fluency 30, 33, 35, 49, 52–55, 62–69, 75– 76, 104, 182–183, 188, 190, 225, 232, 234–235, 242, 244, 292, 293, 295 – see also linguistic complexity, accuracy and fluency foreign language learner, foreignness, or foreigner (lǎowài ) 8–9, 16, 18, 49, 114, 120–140, 169, 203, 205, 207–209, 211, 220–222, 230–232, 236, 248, 260, 268, 274, 278, 297–299 – see also race formulaic speech or chunks or expressions 48, 61, 245, 253–255 fossilization or stabilization 225 frustration(s) in learning Chinese 14–15, 28, 47–48, 77, 80, 82–83, 116, 124, 131, 151, 160–161, 164, 169, 176–178, 193, 217, 219, 225, 229, 237, 245, 254, 257, 269, 270, 280–282, 285, 288, 291, 298 generalizability 103, 105, 191 gender and language learning 103, 113, 114, 116, 126, 133–140, 150, 171, 177, 185, 187, 256, 287 glossing see translation grammar and Chinese learning 12, 30, 33– 35, 47–49, 69–77, 152, 159, 161, 182– 183, 188, 192, 210, 214, 228, 236, 245, 252, 261, 267, 286, 293, 297 – see also linguistic Hanban v, 1, 11, 34, 40 Hefei 38, 40, 268 heritage language (learner) see Chinese as a heritage language

319

homonyms 7, 79, 90, 91, 95, 96 HSK see assessment hybrid(s) and hybridity 8, 9, 111, 131, 185 – see also identity humour and language play 3, 9, 124, 152, 161–162, 165, 167, 185, 190, 220, 236, 240, 258 Hunan 38, 47, 122, 249, 250 – see also Chinese language, Hunan dialect identity or identities 9, 13, 17–20, 25, 29– 34, 78, 81, 87–88, 100, 102–103, 105– 141, 145–146, 150, 156–157, 160, 171, 185–187, 189, 208, 231–232, 237, 241– 243, 245, 256, 264, 299–300 – Chinese or language identity 111, 185, 232, 237, 241–242, 264, 299 – difference 31, 114, 127, 130, 256 – gender see gender – hybrid 9, 111, 131 – multilingual 33 – sinophone 9, 19, 31, 188 – subjectivity 20, 21, 108 ideologies 5, 8, 17–18, 20, 83, 100, 133, 180, 184, 214, 225, 228, 233, 245, 263 idioms, or four-character idioms 7, 67, 82, 86–87, 182, 226, 236, 240 imperialism or hegemony 132, 195, 203, 243 implications for pedagogy, policy and research 191–194 interpretation, interpretive research 105– 106, 160–168, 174 intersubjectivity 24, 32, 90 interviews 25, 27–31, 49–77, 89–99, 188, 301–302 investment in language/literacy learning 78, 80–82, 100, 111, 114, 231, 234, 239, 288, 290 Japanese language/literacy learning or kanji 10, 14, 35, 38, 44, 53, 80, 82, 127, 134, 152–153, 159, 186, 225–226, 229– 230, 237–238, 242, 248, 249, 252–256 Korean language (learning) 10, 38, 44, 109, 225–226, 230, 241, 243, 245, 248, 254

320

Subject index

kung fu 77, 119, 200–207 Kunming 37, 215–217 language education – Chinese v, 1–2, 8–12, 33–34, 180, 191, 193, 196, 296 – Chinese teaching/learning materials and textbooks 10, 34, 84, 87–88, 192–193, 195, 259, 263, 184 language exchange 135, 137, 187, 219, 231– 232, 236–237, 241–242, 287, 289, 295 language loss see attrition language socialization 28, 32, 36, 80, 109, 111–112, 131, 156, 185–186, 244–245, 258–259, 263 lǎowài see race learning strategies 35, 150, 172 Lee Kuan Yew 18–20 lexis or lexicon or lexical items 33, 46–48, 52–77 – density 56–58, 75 – idioms see idioms – measures 57 – parsing or parsers see word parsing – sophistication and variety 55–64, 77 – unique (words) 75, 79, 183 – see also word lingua franca see Chinese linguistic – analysis 75–77 – complexity, accuracy, and fluency 62, 66, 69, 75–76 – development or developmental scales 34–35, 42, 181–182 – grammatical variety 69–75 – metalinguistic awareness 36, 108, 150, 252 – performance 50–51, 77 – profiles 37–39 listening (or auditory) 43–44, 53, 55, 216, 219, 225, 229, 253, 269, 295 literacy (Chinese) 4–6, 12–15, 18, 31, 39, 43–45, 78–101, 104–106, 122, 184– 185, 188–189, 191, 194, 243, 248, 258– 259, 262, 294–295 longitudinal development and research 13, 17, 188

loss – of language see attrition – of self 186 Mainland China see China Mandarin see Chinese media and Chinese 1–3 memorization, mnemonics 79, 84, 101, 152, 154, 221, 232, 235–236, 285, 292 metanarrative see narrative metaphor see narrative morphemes – aspectual 72–73 – compounds 6, 66, 70–72 – direction and motion 70–71 – grammatical 34, 73 motivation 3, 31, 80, 101–103, 109–113, 117, 121, 123–125, 128, 149–150, 269, 289, 291 multilingualism or multilingual subject 17, 32, 37, 39, 76, 85, 113, 245 names see Chinese narrative – annotation 32, 143, 154–173 – (auto)biography 14–19, 36–37, 141–144, 147, 150–151, 164, 178, 220, 224, 233 – auto-ethnography 143 – coding see coding – diary study 14, 23, 142 – genre 32, 79, 87, 89, 142, 150–152, 175 – inquiry 17, 23, 32, 141–168 – memoirs 14, 16, 23, 142 – metanarrative 28, 32, 141–174 – metaphor 3, 24, 81–82, 116, 119–121, 150, 153–155, 189 – research 23, 113, 141–179 – turn 106 – voice see voice n-gram see word; lexical item non-heritage learners 18, 100, 109–110, 181, 187, 213 OPI see proficiency Orientalism 8, 184

Subject index

orthography v–vii, 5, 14, 47, 56, 78–101, 153, 192, 199, 225, 228, 233, 235, 243, 263, 293 – bopomofo see zhùyīn fúhào below – Chinese characters 2, 5, 6, 12, 33, 36, 40– 41, 45, 78–101, 157, 184, 199 – Fántĭzì 3 – morphological awareness 36 – orthographical awareness 12, 33 – phonetic or phonemic script 4–5, 15, 39, 78, 81, 88, 93, 94, 96–97, 293 – pinyin vii, 4–6, 10, 39, 42–44, 47, 78–79, 81, 86, 88–89, 93–95, 97–98, 100, 184, 192 – radicals 12, 79, 84, 91, 96, 98, 192, 229 – romaji 248 – Simplified characters vii, 2–6, 10–11, 14, 47, 78, 80–88, 94–101, 152–153, 184, 189, 192, 199 – tones see tones – Traditional characters vii, 3, 6, 14, 78, 81– 93, 184, 189, 192, 213 – Wade-Giles 5, 233 – zhùyīn fúhào (bopomofo) 5–6, 10, 39, 78– 79, 81, 86, 88, 91, 92, 192, 228, 231, 293 ownership of Chinese see Chinese ownership parse see words participants in research 23, 37–39 participation in (learning) communities 112– 114, 147, 187 pedagogy see language education People’s Republic of China see China phenomenology 13, 36 phonetic script see orthography pīnyīn see orthography policy, (Chinese) language education 10, 180, 191, 292 positionality and positioning, subject position 18–20, 31, 103, 105, 108, 110, 113–114, 116, 118, 123, 125–140, 146, 185–187, 209, 234, 245, 256–257, 264 positivism 104–105 poststructuralism see sociocultural

321

power 1, 2, 105, 114, 116–117, 120–121, 131, 195, 200, 202, 223, 243, 266, 277 – see also soft power Practical Chinese Reader (textbook) 209, 234–235, 266 pragmatic(s) 35, 225, 236, 255, 262 privilege (White, racial) 120–133, 177, 185 procedures see research proficiency – interview see interview – language 39–77 – self-assessment see assessment Pŭtōnghuà see Chinese qualitative analysis see analysis quantitative analysis see analysis race 18, 126, 130–131, 150, 177, 260 – lǎowài 18, 114, 129–133, 169, 209, 260, 274 – Whiteness 113, 126–127, 157, 297 – see also privilege radicals see orthography reading see literacy reflections/reflexivity (on learning and research) 21–25, 142–179, 180–199 repetition 84, 221, 292 research – questions 22 – collaboration see collaborative – participants see participants – procedures and timeline 25–29 romanized script see orthography script see orthography second language acquisition (SLA) theory 13, 14, 17, 24, 104, 106, 117, 153, 167, 168, 281 – cognitivist see cognitive – sociocultural see sociocultural – see also linguistic development; sociocultural theory self see identity sexual harassment 114, 127, 135, 138 Shanghai 37, 203, 205, 212 Simplified characters see orthography

322

Subject index

Singapore 4–5, 18–19, 38, 44–45, 78, 118, 180, 248, 264–265 Sinology 8 sinophone(s) 8–9, 19, 31, 131, 188, 195–196 social see sociocultural social distance 125–127 socialization see language socialization sociocultural theory 17, 78, 104–113 – and poststructuralism 104, 107, 133, 245 social turn 104, 106, 133 sociolinguistic(s) 33, 35, 107, 111, 133, 186, 194, 210, 256 soft power 1, 3, 195–196, 203 spoken production 43–44 stance 105 – epistemic 23–25 study abroad and SLA 14, 35, 62, 65, 98, 127, 134–135, 150, 186 subjectivity see identity symbolic resources 133, 220, 223, 245 Taiwan 3–5, 22, 24, 34, 37–41, 44–45, 47, 49, 52, 78, 84, 87–88, 91, 115, 131, 182 Taiwanese – Mandarin 46–47, 52, 55, 97–98, 130, 230–233, 294 – language (Hokkien, Hokkienese) 39, 124 Taoism 119, 284 teaching see language education tests see assessment textbooks see language education theory building 144, 166–167, 190 third space 111, 246 TOCFL see assessment

token see word tones vii, 3, 5, 7–8, 33, 47–49, 52, 54–55, 63–64, 66, 77, 80, 89, 93, 95, 97, 100, 164, 192, 225–228, 253, 262, 267, 285, 292 TOP see assessment topics, topicalization, topic chains, topicprominent 34, 76, 238, 248, 252 Traditional characters see orthography trajectory(ies) 13, 19–20, 28, 30, 32, 49, 104, 106–107, 109–113, 133, 144, 176, 244 transcription 27–28, 31, 50, 51, 66, 84, 88– 99, 173, 248 translation vii, 73, 55, 66, 74, 86–88 – glossing vii – of self 116 triangulation 23–24, 33, 143, 187 vocabulary 30, 35–36, 45, 48, 52–46, 58, 61–62, 83, 152, 183, 192–194 – see also lexis; word lists voice 9, 25, 32, 120, 142, 150–153, 174, 190, 195 word – boundaries vii, 7, 75, 93 – lists 56, 58–62, 76, 104, 179 – parsing or parser 55–56, 61 – see also lexis, lexicon Whiteness see race writing see literacy writing system see orthography