In February 2011, my husband and I moved from Taiwan to Sydney to pursue our PhD studies. Excited about coming to Australia for the first time, we were keen to try out our English and immerse ourselves in the English language community, even speaking with an Australian accent. However, after a few weeks in Sydney I began to wonder where I could immerse myself in English, let alone English with an Australian accent. For one thing, most of the new people I met seemed to be from mainland China. Once they knew I was from Taiwan, they tended to speak to me in Mandarin. Due to the popularity of Taiwanese TV variety shows in China, some were keen to talk to me about the shows that they had watched, and having these fun conversations in English seemed an unlikely proposition. For another thing, when I walked from my unit to the campus, which took about 30 minutes, along the way I frequently overheard Mandarin, while seeing many Mandarin advertisements for renting and trading goods posted on the electric poles. The Mandarin language was used much more widely in Sydney than I had ever expected.

My husband was in the same situation. He was located in a research office, sharing with three other Chinese PhD students in the department. Instead of speaking English, he was speaking Mandarin most of the time. The only chance for him to speak English was with his supervisor during their one-hour weekly meeting. Another student from Taiwan also told me she was concerned about the slow improvement in her English. She had expected to acquire English quickly and easily, but she had not done so. “I don’t feel like my English is any better than it was before I came,” she confided. “There are no local students in my accounting classes. My classmates are all international students, and about 90 percent are from China.” Similar to us, she came all the way to Australia and to her surprise found herself in classes where most of her peers were Mandarin speakers so that she spoke Chinese every day. Furthermore, she found it hard to make local Australian friends at university, despite the fact that she has a very lively and easy-going personality. Interestingly, she was not the first person I met here who told me that they wished they had local Australian friends and could experience more of Australian culture.

And it is this experience that shaped my PhD research!

This qualitative study explores the contemporary linguistic environment in Australian higher education, which has evolved as a result of globalization to accommodate a large number of incoming international students who are using English as a second language. Among them Chinese international students stand out as the largest group, which, for instance, made up 39.9 percent of all higher education enrolments in 2014. This study explores the new phenomenon of the Mandarin language predominating among languages other than English in Australian higher education. The study shows how the changing linguistic environment shapes Taiwanese international students’ experiences in Australia, as a group who happen to share a common language with Chinese students but do not belong to the same cohort.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning three years, this study follows the trajectories of thirty-five Taiwanese higher education students from ten universities in four different states in Australia. The study investigates in-depth how language learning intersects with their motivation to invest in overseas study, their participation in educational settings as well as in local communities, their sense of identity and belonging, and their overall study experience.

Data include one-on-one interviews, personal communications, field notes, and participants’ academic writing assignments and the feedback they received.

Employing content analysis, the study finds that these Taiwanese international students chose to invest in studying in Australia in order to attain English language proficiency, internationalization, and self-fulfilment. However, when they sojourned in Australia, there was a clash between a monolingual language ideology, where English was the target language, and multilingual language realities, where Mandarin was widely used. The unexpected linguistic environment mediated their use of English despite their strong motivation to enter English-speaking networks. In addition, the Master’s participants often found themselves participating peripherally in classroom and group work. For PhD participants, their candidature was often a lonely experience with little institutional or community support. As regards participants’ experiences with academic writing, the study identifies gaps in institutional language support services. Furthermore, the feedback given to the research participants on their academic writing was oftentimes ineffective and did not facilitate their learning.

Besides university study, the study also presents participants’ language use and settlement experiences outside university, a previously underexplored area. Domains, including church, accommodation, and romance, are examined and successful cases are presented of participants who were lucky to find a bridge to extend their social network as well as improve their language skills.

Overall, the study argues that language is a manifestation of participation, which is a dynamic and constantly changing process. The findings have implications for education providers regarding the (language) learning support required by international students.

Losing your voice or learning academic writing? (Source: business2community.com)

“A latent function of the educational system is to instil linguistic insecurity, to discriminate linguistically, to channel children in ways that have an integral linguistic component, while appearing open and fair to all.” (Hymes, 1996, p. 84)

Academic literacy as a way to demonstrate one’s knowledge and cultivation in tertiary education takes a huge amount of time and effort to develop. For some students, this learning process can be consistent and accumulative all along the way of education; however, for some, the process can be disrupted by a change in the medium of instruction. I’m thinking particularly of overseas students from non-English backgrounds studying in Australian higher education. In this context, it is a common-sense truth that formal academic English has to be embraced as the natural and neutral vehicle to pursue the truth of the universe. In this context, it is also a common-sense truth that English is equally transparent to everyone, regardless of their linguistic or cultural background.

However, these common-sense truths fracture when it comes to the actual experience of overseas students’ academic literacy learning as I am discovering in my ethnographic research of the language learning experiences of Taiwanese students in Australia. Specifically, I have discovered that academic literacy serves just as much to instil linguistic insecurity and deny the voices of overseas students.

Let me illustrate my point with two vignettes. Both vignettes occurred during a five-week academic writing class particularly designed for Ph.D. students. When the class was advertised, it came as a timely rain to Ph.D. students in this cohort irrespective of language background or visa status. They had all been in need of writing assistance because each of them feels daunted by the challenge of having to produce a 70-100,000-word thesis.

In the academic writing class, students were given intensive tasks each week to practice their writing. The idea was to progress from a summary to a critique and then to a paper by the end of the course. The instructor, a native speaker of English and an academic literacy professional, gave them instruction and feedback on the tasks and assisted them to spot problems and overcome them.

 Vignette one: Nonsense language

In week 3, one of the participants, let’s call him Owen, received the following comment on a short summary he had written about an aspect of education policy in Taiwan:

Owen, please watch your “Chinese expression” directly translated into English. They do not read well and either need extra explanation or need to be written in an expression that makes sense in English.

Owen was puzzled. He could not recall where in the text he had used a Chinese expression and the instructor’s line and circle back to the original problem did not identify a Chinese expression. Indeed, the offending expression were not even his original writing but appeared in a quote from a senior researcher in the field. They were “Mandarin-only” and “Mandarin-plus.” It had been the point of the summary to describe changes in Taiwanese education from the use of only one language to a greater variety.

Owen was no longer puzzled but felt angry: the instructor had arbitrarily judged the terms as “Chinese expressions” upon seeing the word “Mandarin.” Apparently, she had not been able to make sense of them in the context of the summary.

Vignette two: Useless language

The event described in the second vignette took place a week after the one described above. Owen shared with me this excerpt from his diary:

Before the course commenced, the instructor wanted to see how we really write and asked us to send her something we were working on. I was excited about this tailored approach, which I desperately need but couldn’t have obtained from any other sources within the university except my academic supervisor. I quickly sent my draft chapter to her and asked for her advice since some contents covered in class did not apply to my case. The instructor replied, saying she would like to discuss my work after next class. I was very much looking forward to the meeting; however, the discussion turned out to be rather disappointing.

To begin with, the instructor told me she was using her own time to do this and it was too costly. So, she had not been able to read my 20+ pages as it would be unfair to other students. Plus, she had to leave in ten minutes for another appointment. She then started to comment on trivial things such as page numbers, table numbers, and how the boxes of interview excerpts would turn off readers. While I was getting the message of how little I could benefit from this conversation, her final comment really offended me. The instructor commented on an interview excerpt. My original interviews were in Mandarin and so the transcripts are in Mandarin and I present excerpts in blocks in Mandarin followed by the English translation.  “Why do you put Mandarin there?” she asked. “Uhm… that is the language the research participants speak and it is what they used in the interviews, so these are the original data and I have to present those.” The instructor ignored my response and went on to ask: “Who is going to read it anyway?” I was really irritated inside by this ignorant question! There are 1.2 billion speakers of Mandarin in the world! But, I couldn’t express my anger. “Uhm… I think there might be an examiner of my thesis who speaks Mandarin.” was the lame excuse I mumbled politely.  Within a few seconds, she rushed out of the door for her next thing and left me behind.  The experience made me feel like I was a beggar, for English and for academic writing.

These two vignettes reflect an English-only ideology that denies students’ voices in at least two ways: they have to use only English and they have to target only English readers. First of all, English is the default. Everything has to be translated into something which makes sense only in an imagined homogeneous English-only world. If no equivalent term exists in the material, scientific, spiritual, cultural, emotional or political world of the writer, they have to provide an extended explanation or risks being “nonsensical” with their own non-English expressions.

Put another way, English-only hegemony is disguised in academic literacy by making other languages invisible, by rejecting the legitimacy of writers from other linguistic and cultural backgrounds and by suppressing the richness of meaning human beings can express in languages other than English.

One may want to argue that since English is extensively used in global academia it is reasonable to require researchers to write proper English which can survive the judgement of English speakers. However, as the second vignette shows, the imagined English-only reader is an imposition, too. English-language readers have never been homogeneous and today’s global academics are more likely to use English as a lingua franca than as a native language (Graddol, 2006). Many if not most academic readers are thus unlikely to be monolinguals.

Unfortunately, academic literacy instruction seems largely unperturbed by these facts. It seems that its purpose is not to help novice researchers find their own academic voice nor to allow them to speak to a global multilingual academic audience but to instil in them linguistic insecurity and delegitimize their voices, as Hymes observed in another educational context all those years ago.

References

Graddol, D. (2006). English Next. British Council.

Hymes, D. (1996). Report from an underdeveloped country: Toward Linguistic Competence in the United States. Ethnography, Linguistics, Narrative Inequality: Toward an understanding of voice (pp. 63-105). London: Taylor & Francis.

Asia’s Chronic English Disease

The promotion of English in Asia is a frequent topic here on Language on the Move. Striving for global competitiveness and internationalization, states across Asia strongly promote English. Additionally, on the personal level, English is supposed to broaden an individual’s perspective and to enable upward mobility. Across Asia, English has come to assume the mantle of magic!

The converse of all this hype is that lack of English has come to be equated with deficiency. So much so, that lack of English is now a chronic disease endemic in Taiwan, as I’ve recently discovered when watching this TV commercial for a private English language school. Here, English is presented as a disease that needs to be cured. The ad features a white male doctor with an Asian female patient. The white doctor, the only character in the ad to speak, delivers his lines in Taiwanese and says:

Tutor ABC cares about your chronic English illness. Chronic English illness causes you tears of sorrow when reading English, and canker sores, sore throat, and cold feet when speaking English. If you suffer from these symptoms, please call our toll-free number 0800-66-66-80, 0800-66-66-80 [my translation]

For Taiwanese, the ad is hilarious. Not because of the content of the language doctor’s message but because it imitates another famous Taiwanese commercial advertising for sciatica treatment, which started to run more than a decade ago. In that commercial, the main character, a doctor, seriously delivered a message about sciatica treatment. Unexpectedly, the commercial caused a sensation through its unintended comic effect arising from the amusing contrast between the serious message delivered by the doctor with his earnest facial expression and attitude, and the childish, catchy rhymes and rhythm, particularly in the case of the phone number with its repetition. Despite its status as a budget ad, the clinic became famous overnight and the commercial continues to run on Taiwanese TV, recently with the addition of another character, a foreign blond female model. The doctor’s message has remained unchanged in more than a decade:

Jian-sheng Chinese medicine clinic cares about your sciatica. Sciatica is a lumbar disc displacement or lumbar intervertebral disc disorder, resulting in low back pain or limb pain. If you suffer from these symptoms, please call our toll-free number 0800-092-000, 0800-092-000. [my translation]

The intertextuality between the two ads serves to reinforce the notion in the language ad that English is a disease: a disease in need of a doctor and a cure. In the process, the majority of Taiwanese who don’t use English comfortably are constructed as patients. The doctor they can turn to is, of course, white but, at the same time, an approachable speaker of Taiwanese.

Constructing lack of English as an illness and language learners as patients seems an extremely manipulative way of promoting English. Presenting English as a cure to all kinds of social and personal problems and lack of English as a disease suggests that English is inscribed in the body and ties in with language ideologies that make the acquisition of the right linguistic capital a personal responsibility.

There really is a chronic English disease raging in Asia but it’s not the lack of English that is the disease; it’s the ravages caused by the blind faith in the miracle powers of English.

Are you an overseas student from Taiwan?

If yes, you are invited to join a research project investigating the experiences of Taiwanese students studying in Australia. We are interested in hearing your stories of language learning and studying abroad.

What is involved?

If you agree to participate in this research, you will be asked to participate in an informal interview, which will last for about 30 minutes to one hour. If you agree, you may also continue to join the research by keeping in touch and keeping sharing your experiences.

How will my privacy be protected?

The research has been approved by Macquarie Human Ethics Committee and your privacy and anonymity will be protected at all times. You can also withdraw from the research at any point, even if you previously agreed to participate.

Where can I learn more and how can I participate?

If you are interested in participating or if you’d like to ask further questions, please contact the researcher Grace Chu-Lin Chang at chu-lin.chang@mq.edu.au.

Thank you for considering participating!

台灣動起來: 流動，語言，留學經驗的互動與交錯

你是從台灣到澳洲留學的學生嗎?

如果是，歡迎你參與台灣留學生在澳洲的研究，我們想要聽見台灣留學生的語言學習及留學經驗的生命故事。

如果你願意參與研究，我們會有一個輕鬆的訪談，訪談時間約為半小時到一小時，之後若你同意，你可以繼續參與研究，與研究者保持聯絡，繼續分享你的經驗。

關係你的隱私

本研究經Macquarie大學的人權倫理委員會核准，你的隱私及匿名會受到完整保護。你也能隨時停止參加研究，即便先前已經同意參與。

若你有興趣或有任何問題，請聯絡研究者:

PhD Candidate Grace Chu-Lin Chang; Email: chu-lin.chang@mq.edu.au

謝謝!

What is “Competent English”?

“PR” is probably one of the abbreviations I have heard most since coming to Australia. Despite the fact that PR – “permanent residence” for the non-initiated – is the much-coveted subject of many conversations, I found out that it is extremely difficult to obtain. Recently, I received an email invitation to a Permanent Residency Information Session for international students at my university. Out of curiosity, I decided to join. The speaker was a lawyer working primarily in Australian immigration and citizenship law. He opened his speech by seriously reminding us, all international students obviously, not to believe any prediction on which academic major would enhance our chances of success when applying for PR. The rules keep changing, as he went on to say, and a major change came into effect this month.

I am particularly intrigued by the fact that the required IETLS test scores have been raised. A band score 6 average, “Competent English,” earns a hopeful applicant 0 points towards PR; at band score 7, “Proficient English,” is worth 10 points, and band score 8, “Superior English,” is valued at 20 points. When the audience collectively gasped at these high scores, the lawyer blithely informed us that some Australians would not be able to obtain a band score 6.

Right now I am happy with my student visa but if I ever were to wish to stay in Australia after my studies, I would have to apply for a general skilled migration visa and take another IELTS test. However, what does doing well on IELTS actually say about my English competence? Coming from Taiwan, I’ve obviously passed the language requirement to study here and obtained an IELTS score of 7.5 prior to admission. Even so, I am finding it hard to claim that I have “competent” English, let alone “Superior English,” of which I’m officially only 0.5 IELTS points short.

Does my tested and certified English enable me to confidently deal with every aspect of daily life here in Sydney? No. For example, I have to endeavor to improve my academic English for my study by reading, conjecturing, memorizing, and practicing the formal academic English genre and fighting with numerous elusive vocabulary items along the way. In three years, I will be expected to produce a PhD thesis which reads as if it had been written by a native speaker of English.

In addition to higher degree research, I, as every other overseas student, need to deal with daily life involving interactions with many different people who speak with various accents and with different levels of proficiency. I regularly read rental ads with grammatical errors; I rented a room from an immigrant landlord who spoke hardly any English, and now I share a unit with other overseas students. I make phone calls to ask information about things like health insurance, medical treatment, or driver’s license and each time I have to deal with different operators who speak too fast with all kinds of different accents and sometimes mysterious ways of explaining things. I have also been trying hard to make local friends by learning some Australianisms (in Taiwan we are expected to learn American English) and by trying to figure out interesting topics for young people (from Cricket to MasterChef). Of course, I am trying to figure all this out without asking too many questions so as not to bore or scare away potential friends.

In sum, there seems a large gap between the English I learned from textbooks and teaching materials and which enabled me to score relatively highly on the IELTS tests, and the English I am encountering in real life in this multicultural and multilingual country, which is supposed to be English-speaking.

However, after having worked hard to study, to overcome everyday problems, and to learn a lot about Australian English as well as all kinds of other Englishes, overseas students who would like to stay in Australia after graduation are being sent back to Square One. To apply for PR they will once again face the official view of their language competence. Once again they will have to sit an IELTS test, a test that is very much about the so-called Standard English that is found in textbooks and teaching materials. From a language perspective, it’s hard not to wonder what the point of studying in Australia is then? What does this Australian experience bring us in terms of English competence if everything I am learning here is not valued should I ever want to settle in this country? Because I could just as easily learn what IS valued – standard English as expressed in an IELTS score – back home in Taiwan.

Behind a name

One’s name is one of the most salient features for one’s identity. Some parents suffer from extraordinary indecisiveness when giving their newborn a wonderfully auspicious and proper name, all with utmost good intentions and expectations. English language learners often have the same experience later in life: how did you get your English name, especially if your mother tongue is not an alphabetic language?

If you ask overseas students how they named themselves in English, you probably will get some surprising and amusing answers. For instance, a young man from Taiwan shared this experience with me: He was given a name by his English teacher when he was a kid. “You are George,” said the teacher to him with a book of names in her hand. After he went home and told his mother about it, he started to hate the name. It was because the way his mother, whose first language is Taiwanese and who doesn’t speak any English, pronounced the name. The way she pronounced “George” made it sound like the Taiwanese word for “toad”. This made him feel upset and humiliated. After a few years, he was given another English name by another teacher. This time, he was called Wilson. He liked it and has kept using it until now for two reasons. Firstly, it is not so common in English textbooks. Secondly, the 28th President of the United States was called Wilson, although that was a surname.

As for me, I decided to name myself in preparation for the educational setting just before I entered college. It was not an easy choice for me, because I didn’t feel any English name sounded like myself and could express my identity. Finally, I named myself Grace after the wife of the US president in the movie, Air Force One. It sounded very elegant to me and surely I could not go wrong with the name of a fictional US first lady. However, in the first semester of college, a teacher played some TV episodes to us in which an “old lady” who was always telling tales had the same name as mine! I felt very embarrassed sitting in class. However, somehow I have just kept on using it. In addition to the English name that I use for English speakers, I have my Chinese name transliterated into the Latin alphabet on my passport as the official name on my documents. Nevertheless, I always feel distant from it because the spelling, which merely presents the sounds, misses out all the great meanings my parents bestowed upon my birth name, which is unique and unlike any other. Never mind all that talk about the Chinese being collectivist, we are very individualistic when it comes to names!

In addition to the many stories you can hear about choosing an English name, I found something interesting in interactions among overseas students introducing themselves to others in Australia. When meeting with non-Mandarin Chinese speakers, some prefer using their English name to make it easier for the audience. Some prefer using the spelling or homonym of their Chinese name, so it feels more like themselves in a sense. There are also some, but very few, using more unusual names to impress people, trying to stand out in this individualist culture.

When we meet other people from Taiwan, things become even more interesting and sophisticated. While meeting for the first time, one may start with one’s English name since the setting is in Australia. However, once the interlocutors realize they come from the same country, become familiar with each other, and maybe begin to converse in Mandarin or Taiwanese, at some point they start to exchange their Chinese names. This action implies that “now I know you in person,” no matter which name they would prefer calling each other afterwards. Asking and giving our birth given names symbolises a further level of the personal relationship. It is as if one’s real identity has been revealed and is suggestive of the potential for longer and deeper relationships. On the other hand, if a person purposefully refuses to mention their birth given name, the subtle underlying implication is “I am not revealing myself to you” or “I do not want you to know me.” By implication, the English name becomes a mask behind which we can hide.

Have you changed your name in another language environment? I’d love to hear your story!

One of the main reasons why international students pursue higher education in an English-speaking country is to gain high levels of proficiency in English, but after a few weeks in Sydney I’m not so sure how it works. For one thing, most of the new people I meet seem to be from mainland China. Another student from Taiwan I met told me she is concerned about the slow improvement of her English. First and foremost, she had expected to acquire English quickly and easily, but she is not. “I don’t feel like my English is any better than it was before I came,” she confided. English in Taiwan is a foreign language and interactional opportunities can be fairly limited. However, she came all the way to Australia and surprisingly found herself being in classes where most of her peers are from Mainland China, and she speaks Chinese every day. Instead of English, she finds that she’s been learning various dialects of Chinese to build up friendships.

Furthermore, she finds it hard to make local Australian friends at school, despite the fact that she has a very lively, active, and easy-going personality. Interestingly, she is not the first person I’ve met here, telling me that they wish they had local Australian friends and could experience more of Australian culture. I found myself having the same wish.

Then she told me about another girl from Taiwan, who had been here for only 8 months and had already achieved the magical goal of sounding like a native! “How come?” I asked. The “miracle cure” turned out to be the fact that that girl had a native boyfriend. This anecdote inspired my interlocutor: it gave her romantic hope with the dual purpose of achieving English language proficiency and finding romance. I hope it works better for her than it did for the Japanese overseas students described in Ingrid’s and Kimie’s research here and here.

Travelling from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere and struggling with language constraints, I think the pursuit of language in a way reflects some basic needs of humans: being connected to people and place, and being recognized and supported holistically.

References