Rashid al-Din Monument in Soltaniyeh, Iran (Source: Wikipedia)

Recently, I signed a contract for a revised second edition of my 2011 book Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction to be published in 2017. One way in which I am planning to extend the book is to have a greater focus on cultural mediators. What are the stories, experiences and practices of people who act as brokers between languages and cultures?

In some cases, people are pushed into the role of cultural mediators out of necessity, as is the case with child cultural and linguistic mediators. Others take on the roles of cultural brokers as an act of public service. In an age when most of our own political leaders seem to be more inclined towards erecting new borders, strengthening old ones and tearing down bridges, it is instructive to consider the case of two 13^th century statesmen whose friendship helped to connect east and west Asia: the Mongol Bolad and the Persian Rashid al-Din.

Rashid al-Din

Of the two, Rashid al-Din is today the better-known; as the author of the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh (“Universal History”) he is credited with having been “the first world historian” (Boyle 1971).

Rashid al-Din was born around 1250 CE into a Jewish family in Hamadān in north-west Iran. At the age of twenty-one or thirty (different accounts exist in different sources; see Kamola 2012), he converted to Islam and around the same time he entered the service of the then-ruler of Iran, the Il-Khan Abaqa (1265-81) as court physician. Under Abaqa’s grandson Il-Khan Ghazan (1295-1304) Rashid al-Din became vizier, one of the most influential roles in the state. Rashid al-Din also served Ghazan’s son and successor Öljeitü (1304-16). After Öljeitü’s death he became the victim of a court intrigue and was put to death in 1317, when he was around seventy years old.

During his long career he served his kings in many capacities: as physician, head of the royal household, military and general adviser, the mastermind of far-reaching fiscal and agricultural reforms, and, through his writing, as chief ideologue and propagandist of the Il-Khanids. In short, Rashid al-Din was a powerbroker, who did very well for himself and the realm he served:

He had become the owner of vast estates in every corner of the Il-Khan’s realm: orchards and vineyards in Azerbaijan, date-palm plantations in Southern Iraq, arable land in Western Anatolia. The administration of the state was almost a private monopoly of his family: of his fourteen sons eight were governors of provinces, including the whole of Western Iran, Georgia, Iraq and the greater part of what is now Turkey. Immense sums were at his disposal for expenditure on public and private enterprises. (Boyle 1971, p. 20)

Portrait of Kublai Khan (Source: Wikipedia)

Bolad

Thousands of miles to the east, Bolad’s career was very similar to that of Rashid al-Din: Bolad was about ten years older than Rashid al-Din and born around 1240 somewhere in Mongolia. His father was a man named Jürki, a member of the Dörben, a Mongolian tribe, who had submitted to Genghis Khan in 1204. Jürki quickly rose through the ranks of the imperial guard. In addition to his military distinction as a “Commander of a Hundred in the Personal Thousand” of Genghis Khan, he also became a ba’ruchi (“cook”) in the imperial household. While “cook” may not sound like much of a rank, in the Mongolian system this household position carried great prestige and showed close personal ties with the ruler (Allsen 1996, p. 8).

As a result of his father’s position, little Bolad was assigned to the service of Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan at age eight or nine. His education included the military arts and Chinese language and civilization. Bolad, too, forged a distinguished administrative career at the Yuan court. As he grew older, his duties and assignments included formulating court ceremonies, educating young Mongolians who entered the imperial service, and organizing the “Censorate,” the investigative arm of government. He became Head of the Bureau of Agriculture, which he helped establish; took on the role of Vice-Commissioner of Military Affairs; and headed a major anti-corruption investigation. His diverse appointments close to the centre of power at Kublai Khan’s court earned him the Chinese title chengxiang, “chancellor.”

In the spring of 1283, Bolad was appointed Kublai Khan’s ambassador to the Il-Khanids. The journey from Kublai Khan’s capital Khanbaliq (Dadu; modern Beijing) to the Il-Khan’s court in Tabriz took more than one year and Bolad and his embassy arrived in late 1284. He was supposed to return to China in 1285 but hostile forces made it impossible for a man of his rank to travel. He therefore stayed in Iran for the final twenty-eight years of his life. In addition to the role of ambassador, Bolad there assumed the role of chief advisor to the Il-Khan. During Öljeitü’s reign he became third minister and was in charge of logistics during a number of military campaigns. Active until well into his seventies, Bolad died in 1313 while he was in command of the northern garrisons.

Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad was a power broker. He distinguished himself not only at one but at two courts. Like Rashid al-Din, Bolad and his family, too, acquired significant wealth in their service to the Mongolian empire.

The context: the Yuan and Il-Khanid courts

Expansion of the Mongolian Empire, 1206-1294 (Source: Wikipedia)

Rashid al-Din and Bolad obviously met and became friends at the Il-Khanid court. But what was the broader context of their encounter?

After the death of Möngke Khan, a brother of Kublai Khan’s, in 1259, the unity of the Mongolian empire Genghis Khan had forged was permanently broken and the descendants of Genghis Khan fell into various succession wars. Kublai Khan held strong in Yuan China. The Il-Khanid line in Iran, founded by his brother Hülegü, formally acknowledged Kublai Khan’s sovereignty. Between these two allies, the Genghizid lines in Central Asia and Russia established various autonomous regional khanates, including the famous Golden Horde. These were at various times allied in various ways, at war with each other in various ways, and, particularly relevant here, often at war with China and Iran.

As nomadic aristocracy ruling two realms with a settled agrarian population and ancient civilizations, the Yuan in China and the Il-Khanids in Iran faced similar sets of issues: how would nomadic warriors be able to rule these complex agrarian societies?

Kublai Khan understood early that he would need Chinese support. His own Chinese language skills were not strong and he relied on interpreters in interactions with Chinese advisors (Fuchs 1946). However, he did seek out Chinese advisors and, more importantly, initiated the bilingual and bicultural education of young Mongolian courtiers such as Bolad. Bolad developed an intercultural disposition and “his frequent and active support for the recommendations of the emperor’s Han advisers indicates that he found much to admire in Chinese civilization” (Allsen 1996, p. 9).

Map of the Il-Khanate, 1256-1353 (Source: Wikipedia)

It is unclear when and how Bolad learned Persian but on his long trip to Iran and for the first few years there, he was accompanied by an interpreter, a Syriac Christian in the employ of the Mongols, who is known in Chinese sources as Aixue (愛薛) and in Persian sources as Isa kelemchi (“Jesus the interpreter”) (Takahashi 2014, p. 43).

The actual linguistic repertoire of Aixue/Isa kelemchi is uncertain; and that is an indicator of the linguistic situation in the Il-Khanate, which was even more complex than that at the Yuan court.

The preferred languages of Il-Khan Ghazan, for instance, were Mongolian and Turkish. Additionally, he happily spoke Persian and Arabic with his courtiers. Furthermore, he reportedly understood Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Khitai, Frankish “and other languages” (Amitai-Preiss 1996, p. 27).

Rashid Al-Din wrote in Persian, Arabic and Hebrew; from his style, it can be assumed that he also had some knowledge of at least Mongolian, Turkish and Chinese (Findley 2004, p. 92).

In sum, the nomadic Mongolian conquerors, whose strengths was military, needed to integrate their culture with that of the ancient settled civilizations of China and Iran in order to maintain the empires they had gained. They did so by fostering a new class of cultural brokers. These could either be drawn from the Mongolian population and raised bilingually and biculturally, as in Bolad’s case; or recruited from the local population, as in Rashid al-Din’s case. The latter must have been far more numerous because the nomads obviously did not end up imposing their language and culture on China nor Iran.

Fusion of East and West

The World History of Rashid al-Din, Exhibition of the Edinburgh manuscript

Bolad and Rashid al-Din ended up not “only” mediating between the nomad conquerors and the settled societies they came to rule, but their friendship is an example of the deep connections between east and west Asia that were forged during that time:

Their friendship was, without question, a crucial link in the overall exchange process, for Rashid al-Din, a man of varied intellectual interests and tremendous energy, was one of the very few individuals among the Mongols’ sedentary subjects who fully appreciated and systematically exploited the cultural possibilities created by the empire. (Allsen, 1996, p. 12)

The Jāme’ al-Tawārikh presents the culmination of their interactions. These chronicles were the first-ever attempt to write a world history and include information about the Muslim dynasties, the Indians, Jews, Franks, Chinese, Turks, and Mongols. Much of what is today known about the history of Central Asia up to the 13^th century comes from the Jāme’ al-Tawārikh. This could not have been achieved without extensive collaboration, and Rashid al-Din says about Bolad that he had no rival “in knowledge of the genealogies of the Turkish tribes and the events of their history, especially that of the Mongols” (quoted from Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Inter alia, Bolad translated information from a now-lost Mongolian source, the Altan Debter (“Golden Book”). Access to the Altan Debter was forbidden to non-Mongols, and Rashid al-Din even describes how their collaboration proceeded in this case: Bolad, who, as a high-ranking Mongol, had access to the Altan Debter, would extract the desired information and then, “in the morning before taking up administrative chores,” dictate the Persian translation of the desired passages to Rashid al-Din (Allsen 1996, p. 13).

Il-Khan Hülegü and his queen, Doquz Khatun, a Syriac Christian, as depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

Given the wide-ranging interests and experiences of the two men, it is not surprising that their collaboration was not restricted to history but took in many other fields, too. Principal among these is agriculture. Rashid al-Din also produced an agricultural text (Āthār va ahyā’; “Monuments and animals”), which shows considerable Chinese influence (see Allsen 1996, pp. 14ff. for details). During this time an agricultural model farm was also established in Tabriz and, on Ghazan’s orders, new strains of seeds were solicited from China and India. While the details of these cross-fertilizations have been lost in the shifting sands of time, it “can be asserted with confidence that a considerable body of information on Chinese agriculture was transmitted to Iran and that Bolad was the principal conduit” (Allsen 1996, p. 15).

The two men also collaborated in the introduction of paper money to Iran (which would have necessitated knowledge of block-printing, only available in China at the time); the translation of medicinal treatises and the implementation of aspects of Chinese medicine in the Tabriz hospital Rashid al-Din had founded; and, of course, food. Rashid al-Din, in fact, developed such a taste for the delights of Chinese cuisine that he had a Chinese chef recruited for his household.

The mountains between India and China, depicted in a Jami’ al-Tawarikh manuscript (Source: Wikipedia)

The intense friendship of Bolad and Rashid al-Din is the story of a meeting of like-minded individuals who came together across what might seem a vast chasm of cultural difference. Their wide-ranging interests and intercultural dispositions allowed them to contribute extensively – and deeply – to the fusion of Asian cultures. The results were new heights of achievement in various spheres of life, as Basil Gray, the keeper of Oriental antiquities at the British Museum between 1946 and 1969, has argued with reference to painting:

The paradox which results from a survey of the history of painting in Persia before the Mongol invasions, is that it had not yet achieved the expressive and imaginative force which was to give it its special and unique quality only after it had come in contact with Chinese drawing. This is the agent which seems to have freed the Persian genius from its subordination to the other arts of the book by a mysterious catalysis. […] The “house style” of Rashidiya [the scriptorium in Tabriz founded by Rashid al-Din] is the most thoroughgoing example of Chinese artistic penetration into Iran. In it there is not simply a question of Chinese motifs, but radical adoption of the Chinese vision. [quoted from Robinson 1980, p. 212]

That the East-West fusion enabled by the Mongolian empire was not a one-way street is best exemplified by Bolad’s name: born into a high-ranking Mongolian family, the child was given a Persian name. “Bolad” is the Mongolian version of Persian pulād (“steel”).

References

Allsen, T. T. (1996). Biography of a Cultural Broker, Bolad Ch’eng-Hsiang in China and Iran. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 7-22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Amitai-Preiss, R. (1996). New Material from the Mamluk Sources for the Biography of Rashid Al-Din. In J. Raby & T. Fitzherbert (Eds.), The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290-1340 (pp. 23-37). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boyle, J. (1971). Rashīd al-Dīn: The First World Historian Iran, 9, 19-26 DOI: 10.2307/4300435

Findley, C. V. (2004). The Turks in World History. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, W. (1946). Analecta: Zur mongolischen Uebersetzungsliteratur der Yuan-Zeit. Monumenta Serica, 11, 33-64.

Kamola, S. (2012). The Mongol Īlkhāns and Their Vizier Rashīd Al-Dīn. Iranian Studies, 45(5), 717-721. doi: 10.1080/00210862.2012.702557

Robinson, B. W. (1980). Rashid Al-Din’s World History: The Significance of the Miniatures. The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 112(2), 212-222.

Takahashi, H. (2014). Syriac as a Vehicle for Transmission of Knowledge across Borders of Empires Horizons, 5(1), 29-52.

Australia-China Youth Dialogue 2014

I recently returned from the Australia China Youth Dialogue in Beijing, my head buzzing with new ideas. The Dialogue promotes “more sophisticated cross-cultural understanding among Australian and Chinese youth…[and] seeks to enhance Sino-Australian relations by bringing together key people from both sides to forge deeper connections for the future.” Now in its 5^th year, it responds to an absence of – and a need for – more institutionalised dialogue between Australia and China, highlighted by the first Australian ambassador to the PRC in 2009.

While the Dialogue is not a conference specifically about languages, linguistics or just for academics, there were discussions at the ACYD about bilingualism, cross-cultural understanding and the role of universities in Australia-China relations, starting from the opening address by BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at PKU, the historian Professor David Walker. He put current Australia-China relations in a long-view context and explained the breadth of Australian studies in China today: there are now a whopping 42 Australian studies centres and programs across China. Later that day, the current Australian ambassador to the PRC, H.E. Ms Frances Adamson, gave an impassioned speech about the role of the ACYD itself, and the broader context of Australia-China relations. She had great anecdotes to share, having just experienced a career highlight accompanying China’s leader Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan on a state visit to Australia, after the G20 summit in Brisbane.

From the opening speeches’ wide-angle look at Australia-China relations, the Dialogue then moved into three intensive days of seminars, Q&As and interactive scenarios looking in more depth at Australia-China relations, on topics from artistic exchange to climate change to entrepreneurship, business development, biosecurity and military relations (a subject on which I wrote a follow up article, wearing another hat!)

Both Professor Walker and the Ambassador drew attention to the Australian government’s New Colombo Plan, a higher education initiative under which about 60 young Australians per year will study or complete internships in the Asia-Pacific region, from 2015. (The ‘old’ Colombo Plan was a Commonwealth human resource exchange and development program in South and Southeast Asia which grew over time from the 1950s to eventually involve 27 countries.)

When launching the New Colombo Plan earlier in 2014, Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said “Our country will benefit enormously from having young ambassadors from Australia who have an understanding of and an insight into the region that only comes from living and studying and working there.” She’s right, and the calibre of the Australian delegates at the ACYD reflected how important and life changing living and working in China can be, for young Australians across so many sectors. Of course, of the 60 or so New Colombo scholars, only 10 are going to China in 2015, and this number needs to grow, as Professor Walker argued convincingly. He noted that Australia’s goal with New Colombo is so “unambitious” that we risk looking stingy in the Asian region. For my own part, when I first went to China to live and work it was through the Australian Youth Ambassadors for Development program (scrapped in 2012), which allowed for more hands-on work in China for upwards of 30 young Australians per year.

This year’s Dialogue also involved a cohort of outstanding and diverse young Chinese people who are living and working, or have lived and worked, in Australia. Their insights, and their utility as ambassadors for both Australia and China, are as invaluable as the experiences of Australians going to China.

As Professor Walker reminded us at the start of the Dialogue, having “fly in fly out” Australians in China does not really work to build an engagement between the two counties. Relying only on Australians who grew up as Mandarin-English bilinguals is also insufficient. There is an additional value in having people learn Mandarin formally and in having Australians who are not from Chinese backgrounds understanding Chinese culture(s), history and language. As the University of Canberra’s Yuko Kinoshita has said,

Be it economics, business, politics, or defence, the basis of any relationship is the people behind it, who are driven by values and beliefs. Individual beliefs about cultural differences have a fundamental impact on our position in the region. Australia needs people who can face unfamiliar values and practices with a healthy respect and tolerance, not arrogance and fear.

For more significant engagement, and to create ‘Ausinophiles’, the Australian education system plays a crucial role. However, education has become demand-driven as well as being an instrument to serve the needs of the nation. Demand for high school subjects that increase Asia-literacy skills (including language classes) is low these days. One (of many) reasons I encounter in discussions with language teachers is that students are wary of taking language subjects for university entrance exams for fear their marks will scale badly. Matriculation from primary school to high school to university can also pose challenges for language students, as the streams do not run consistently throughout. (Australia is not alone in this regard; Livia Gerber recently wrote on this site about barriers to bilingualism for students in Switzerland).

Allowing high school demand to set the course is not good enough, from a macro perspective. As Professor Walker argued, we need to think about the national interest in changing to a more balanced and longer-term education system that will meet the demands not just of individual high school students choosing their subjects, but the demand for a labour force with strong ‘Asia-literacy’. And that requires incentivising Asia-literacy and having long term education investments in both teachers and students.

Elsewhere, Professor Walker has noted that “the first systematic case for the teaching of Asian languages in Australian universities dates from 1908.” Around this time, there was also a small push to reframe the discourse about the “East” to be about the “North”, given the actual geographic relationship between China and Australia (it’s not East-West!). This aimed to break away from looking at China through British eyes and from the perspective of the British Isles, given that Australia is much closer to Asia than Europe and (was at the time predicted) likely to increasingly integrate into Asia (a prediction borne out).

While momentum on this front waxes and wanes in Australia, the Dialogue at least is a dynamic and growing institution. It was and remains a non-government, youth-led initiative and was just named as a finalist in the inaugural Australia-China Achievement Awards. The Dialogue’s Executive Director, Fiona Lawrie, herself a Dialogue delegate from 2012, was included, along with government ministers, in this month’s inaugural High Level Dialogue between Australia and China.

The Dialogue was a great forum for Asia- and Australia-literate, mainly bilingual, young academics and professionals who excel in diverse fields and who have lived in both countries to share ideas and talk about the future of Australia-China engagement. Most delegates had used formal foreign language learning (Mandarin or English) and/or higher education opportunities in the two countries, to then launch into self-styled programs of further study, greater cultural immersion and dual-country careers. The Dialogue was, in fact, a great example of more ambitious engagement between the two nations, and continued to build upon the much longer history of Asia-literacy and Australia-China relations that Professor Walker reminded us we have.

PASCH Schools: Partners for the future

Last week I was privileged to attend the 3^rd Conference of School Principals of PASCH Schools in Southeast Asia. A ‘PASCH school’ is a regular secondary school with a particular emphasis on the learning and teaching of German as an additional language. PASCH schools constitute a global network of more than 1,700 schools. ‘PASCH’ stands for ‘Schools – Partners of the Future.’ Funded by the German government, the PASCH network was initiated in 2008 in order to offer opportunities to youths from around the globe to learn German and to develop a positive relationship with modern Germany. PASCH supports professional development training for teachers, provides language learning resources for schools, offers scholarships for students to study in Germany, and numerous other virtual and non-virtual exchange and collaboration opportunities, including global student newspapers.

Attended by representatives of various national ministries of education, school principals, German language teachers, industry representatives and former students from across Southeast Asia and Australasia, the conference provided an excellent opportunity to gain an understanding of the state of the art of language education in the region.

Most language teaching efforts across the region are, unsurprisingly, devoted to English. However, there is a clear sense that English is no longer enough. To begin with, the countries of the region are characterized by enormous linguistic diversity and mother tongue education in addition to instruction in the national language is increasingly incorporated into curricula.

Second, with the greater regional integration that the introduction of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 promises neighbouring languages are gaining in importance. While as yet weakly integrated in most curricula, their role is set to expand.

Finally, there are other international languages such as Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese or Spanish. Offering the latter in the curriculum is often a niche effort of schools who are trying to differentiate themselves from other schools and who are attempting to provide their students with an additional edge. That teaching international languages other than English is intended to create a small elite group of cultural mediators is best illustrated with the example of Singapore. There, the opportunity to study a third foreign language is offered to students who achieve in the top ten percent in the primary school leaving certificate. Only these top academic achievers are able to pursue a third language in high school by attending a Ministry of Education Language Centre (MOELC) in addition to their regular studies. The languages on offer include Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, French, German, Japanese, Malay and Spanish.

While German may seem like a relatively irrelevant language to pursue in Southeast Asia, this is in fact not true for students at PASCH schools. These highly motivated students do so with two main goals in mind: to pursue tertiary education at a university in Germany and/or to pursue employment with a German company. Speakers at the conference included a number of students who had achieved their goal and who spoke about their experiences of learning German in school, participating in exchange programs, studying at a German university and working in a role where their German skills are advantageous.

In addition to achieving personal aims, fostering German skills among a small group of cultural mediators also benefits the wider society, as speakers from various national ministries of education stressed. These benefits are related particularly to knowledge transfer. Interesting examples include partnerships with German companies to deliver an innovative automotive engineering program in a Malaysian college or partnerships between Singaporean polytechnics and German small-to-medium enterprises to deliver a dual vocational training program. In fact, attending industry representatives stressed the importance of combining language skills with strong academic and vocational skills for success in the global workplace.

Finally, a number of school representatives argued that a focus on German had improved overall language education in their school. A teacher from an Australian high school, for instance, mentioned that – in the context of Australia’s notorious ‘monolingual mindset’ – his school’s focus on German has had positive effects on language learning more generally. As students in the German immersion program have discovered the value of learning German, their desire to learn another language has also increased and the school has unexpectedly seen enrolments in its Japanese language program rise, too.

In Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, the positive side-effects of a school’s focus on German are different and relate to improved teacher quality. Speakers from these countries explained that teacher quality – both in terms of proficiency and pedagogy – was a concern. This affects predominantly English language teachers, as English is the most widely taught language. Participating in the professional development opportunities offered by the PASCH school program has helped to disseminate pedagogy training across languages and thus has resulted in improving the professionalism of English language teachers, too.

Despite their diverse backgrounds all speakers stressed that the problems facing humanity today are global problems and that the world needs to move beyond competition to become an international learning community. Linguistic diversity will inevitably mediate the success of our partnerships for the future.

Burmese newspaper in a Bangkok restaurant

They say, ‘Aaaah, Pamma (Thai word for ‘Burmese’)…. You don’t look Myanmar!’ Obviously, they think all Burmese are poor migrants. I stopped telling them I’m from Burma. They react nicely if I say I’m from Singapore.

Thiri’s experience is part of the narrative of the intensifying internationalisation of higher education in Thailand. Since the 1990s, Thailand has been driven to internationalise its higher education as part of its economic expansion effort in order to generate income (Lavankura, 2013). As a result, the number of international programs offered by Thai universities steadily increased from 14 programs in 1984, to 520 in 2003, and to 981 in 2010.

English as the medium of instruction is the key characteristic of these international programs (see Piller and Cho, 2013). Pad Lavankura (2013, p. 670) from Ramkhamhaeng University explains that “the extra demand for international programs is based on a growing need for graduates competent in the English language, in addition to being competent in their own discipline”. Similar to other Southeast and East Asian countries, Thailand enthusiastically embraces the discourse of English as capital to elevate its standing in the global economic and academic system. Against the background of Thailand’s poor record in English language proficiency (ranked 53 out of 54 countries; English First, 2012), and in thrall to the glamorous global status of the language, English MoI international programs have become an attractive option among middle- and upper-class Thais desiring to improve their social status and access to better employment.

While the majority of students enrolled in the international programs are Thai nationals, the number of international students has seen a steady increase. Lavankura (2013, p. 666) observes that ‘the ambition to “catch up with the West” continues, but the idea has been expanded to include other geographical parts of the world, especially the ASEAN countries”. According to the Office of the Higher Education Commission (2013), the total of international students enrolled in higher education in 2010-2011 was 20,309, and the highest number of international students came from China (8,444), followed by Myanmar (1,481), Laos (1, 344) and Vietnam (1,290).

Foreign Students in Thai Higher Education Institutions 2011

Indeed, many of my students are international students, mainly from other parts of Asia such as China, Myanmar, South Korea and Taiwan. Many of them opted out of going to an expensive English-speaking country and chose Thailand instead as a study overseas destination for affordable tuition fees, geographical proximity to their home country, friendliness of Thai people and wonderful local food.

Two students in my course told me eagerly that they have much more opportunity to use English here than they had in their home countries of China and South Korea. As a result, their confidence in their English has increased since they arrived in Bangkok. Few of them have learnt much Thai, but that has not caused much discomfort or inconvenience, and in fact, they say they are often admired by local Thais for their fluency in English, and their national identity as Chinese and South Korean has a strong currency in Thailand.

This positive reception by locals and their instant admiration for English-speaking Asians is rare in the narratives of the Burmese international students I’ve met to date. In fact, the opposite is true as demonstrated by Thiri’s experience. Another story comes from Tom, a young Burmese MBA student. Tom and his Thai-speaking Burmese friend were shopping in a watch shop one day. Tom asked several questions in English to a smiling Thai shopkeeper, who eventually asked him where he was from:

I said I was from Myanmar, and he said ‘Oh… Pamma…’ and quickly turned to other shopkeepers and start talking amongst themselves. My friend can understand Thai and said, ‘they are saying you won’t be buying anything because you are poor. They are surprised that a man from a poor country can speak English.’ I was so sad.

It is not only the public space where the stigmatisation of Burma impacts their everyday lives as international students. Speaking to several Burmese students enrolled in international programs at universities across Bangkok, I have learned that they have experiences of being excluded from classroom activities, of being called names, and of being ridiculed for their perceived naivety and accent in English on campus. As a result, there is a tendency to study and socialise among themselves. This obviously reduces access to interactional opportunities in English as a lingua franca, and they are well aware that such socialisation is counterproductive. Commonly, however, many of them have been able to form close friendship with their fellow international students, who share their goals of gaining more proficiency in English and more international experience.

‘With the introduction of the “Global 30” Project, the best universities in Japan are now offering degree programs in English’

My observations in this post are based on anecdotes that I have been collecting informally since I arrived in Thailand in 2011. The problem I see is that their complex experience of study overseas in English as a lingua franca in a (so-called) non-English speaking Asian country remains largely invisible in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Intercultural Communication and related areas, as the research focus to date has been concentrated on fee-paying Asian students studying in English-speaking Western countries.

As demonstrated by Ingrid Piller and Jinhyun Cho (2013) in the case of internationalisation of higher education in South Korea, and as further exemplified by Japan’s ambition to internationalise its higher education and by Thailand’s declaration of their plan to become a regional education hub, universities in Asia are en route to attracting Asian international students to their English MoI international programs.

The commodification of internationalisation of higher education within English-crazy Asia is a relatively new ball game in the name of globalisation. How do we make sense of this and its impact? One possible way is to start documenting challenges and issues faced by this emerging student population, like those experienced by the Burmese students discussed in this post. Such research efforts must look closely into the historical tensions among nations and ethnic groups and their impact on everyday negotiations of identity, access to interactional opportunities and a sense of belonging on and off campus.

Piller, I. & J. Cho (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society , 42 (1), 23-44 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404512000887

Lavankura, P. (2013). Internationalizing Higher Education in Thailand: Government and University Responses. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17 (5), 663-676 DOI: 10.1177/1028315313478193

ライター:高橋君江(Kimie Takahashi) | 翻訳: 貝和慧美 (Emi Kaiwa)

バンコクの憂鬱

「タイ人から出身地を聞かれた時は、『フィリピン、それかシンガポールから来ました。』って答えるようにしてるんです。そうすると、嫌な顔されないですみますから！」最近出会った経営学を学ぶ若いミャンマー人女子留学生が、バンコクでの暮らしぶりを教えてくれた。タイ語があまり話せないティリさん（本掲載内、登場人物は全て匿名）は、バンコクでの生活は英語でこなしている。アジア人なのに流暢な英語を話すという事に驚かれ、売店のタイ人に出身地がどこなのか聞かれる事が多いという。「どこから来たの？」という質問には慣れたが、その答えに対してのタイ人の反応は未だに悩みの種だ。

「『あぁ、パーマ（タイ語でミャンマー人の意）．．．、ミャンマー人みたいに見えないね！』って言われるんです。明らかに、タイ人は、すべてのミャンマー人が貧しい移民民族だと考えているんです。だから、もうミャンマー出身だって言わないんです。シンガポールから来たと言うと、優しくしてもらえますから。」

ティリさんの経験の背景には、タイ王国（以下、タイ）で過熱する高等教育の国際化への取り組みがある。1990年代以降、タイは、収入を増やす為の景気拡大の一環として高等教育国際化を推進してきた（Lavankura, 2013）。その結果、タイの大学におけるインターナショナルプログラムは増加し、1984年には14だったプログラム数が、2003年に520へ、そして2010年には981にも上った。

これらのインターナショナルプログラムの重要な特徴は指導言語が英語であることだ。（Piller and Cho, 2013参照）。ラムカムヘン大学のパッド・ラバンクラ（Lavankura, 2013、p.670）は、「大学の卒業生に専門分野における能力だけでなく、高い英語力が求められている現状が、インターナショナルプログラムへの需要増加の根底にある。」と述べている。他のアジア諸国と同様に、タイは経済と学問をグローバルレベルに高めていくための資本として英語を取り入れている。英語能力が低いとされているタイ人（54か国中53位；English First, 2012）にとって、グローバルステイタスである英語が出来る事への憧れは強まる一方だ。よって、英語で学べるインターナショナルプログラムは、高い社会的地位やより良い仕事に就きたいと考えている中流、上流階級のタイ人の間で魅力的な選択肢として注目を集め始めている。

タイ王国の高等教育機関で学ぶ留学生2013年盤

インターナショナルプログラムに入学している生徒の大多数がタイ人である一方、留学生の数も増え続けている。ラムカムヘン大学のパッド・ラバンクラ (2013, p. 666) は、「『西洋に追いつけ』という強い風潮はこれからも続くが、この考え方は、他の地域、特にASEAN諸国へと拡大している」との見解を示している。高等教育事務局（2013）によると、2010年～2011年の間にタイの大学へ入学した留学生数の合計は20,309名で、留学者数の多い国は順に、中国（8,444名）、ミャンマー（1,481名）、ラオス（1,344名）、ベトナム（1,290名）となっている。

確かに、私の学生の多くは留学生で、主に中国、ミャンマー、韓国、そして台湾などの他のアジア地域から来ている。彼らの多くは、費用のかさむ英語圏の国には行かずに、学費を賄う事ができ、地理的にも母国と近く、友好的な国民性があり、且つ食事のおいしいタイを留学先として選ぶ。

私の授業を受けている中国人と韓国人の生徒は、タイにいる方が母国にいた時よりも英語に触れる機会がとても多いと言う。その結果、バンコクに着て以降、彼らの英語力に対する自信は高まっている。タイ語ができなくとも生活に不便を感じる事は少なく、実際には、英語を話す方がタイ人に賞賛されるという。そして、彼らの国籍はタイで強い価値をもつ中国と韓国だ。

このようにタイ人から好意的に歓迎されたり、英語を話すアジア人として瞬時に賞賛されることは、私が今まで出会ったミャンマー人留学生の体験の中ではほぼ皆無である。ティリさんの体験のように、逆のケースの方が多いのだ。ミャンマー人の若いＭＢＡ学生のトムさんがいい例である。ある日、トムさんとタイ語が話せるミャンマー人の友人で時計店で買い物をしていた時の出来事だった。トムさんは、タイ語があまり話せないので、英語でタイ人店員に質問していたところ、「どこから来たのですか？」と尋ねられた。

「ミャンマーから来たと答えました。そしたら店員が、『あ、パーマ』と言うと、すぐに他の店員の方を向き、自分たちだけで話し始めました。僕の友人はタイ語がわかるので、通訳してくれたのですが、『彼らは、君がミャンマー出身で貧しいから、何も買うはずがない、と言っている。貧しい国出身なのに君が英語を話せる事に驚いているよ。』と。とても悲しい想いをしました。」

ミャンマー人留学生として生活する上での問題は、公共の場所だけに限らない。バンコクにある数々の大学のインターナショナルプログラムに入学したミャンマー人留学生達と話す中で、キャンパス内でも、クラスの諸活動から仲間はずれにされたり、嫌な名前で呼ばれたり、ナイーブさや英語のアクセントなどを馬鹿にされるなどの経験があるという事がわかった。その為、ミャンマー人学生は固まって行動する傾向にある。その結果、インターナショナルプログラムで学ぶ学生間の共通語である英語を使う機会が減る事になってしまい、彼ら自身、この様なミャンマー人同士だけのコミュニティー形成は逆効果である事に気づいている。ただその一方で、他国からの留学生と友人関係を築いているミャンマー人学生も多く、英語力を高めたり、より国際的な経験を得ていることも事実だ。

グローバル30プロジェクトの始動に伴い、今、日本の一流大学が英語での学位取得プログラムを開始している。

この記事で述べた私の見解は、2011年の来タイ以降、非公式に収集してきた逸話に基づいている。課題と思われるのは、応用言語学や異文化コミュニケーションなどの分野では、研究対象が西洋の英語圏におけるアジア人自費留学生に集中しており、（俗にいう）アジアにおける非英語圏に留学して英語を共通語として学んでいる学生たちの複雑な経験があまり研究されていないことである。

アジアの大学は今、英語インターナショナルプログラムによるアジア人留学生獲得に本腰を入れつつある。イングリッド・ピラー及びジンヒュン・チョウ (2013)が検証した韓国における高等教育の国際化、日本の高等教育国際化への取り組み、さらにアジアの地域教育のハブ国を目指すタイの計画がその良い例である。

英語崇拝のアジア、この地域における高等教育の商品化は、グローバリゼーションという名の下に始まったばかりだ。今後、アジアにおける高等教育の国際化・商品化とその影響をどのように理解していけばよいのだろうか？一つの方法は、上述したミャンマー人学生の話のような、留学生が直面している問題等を調査していく事である。その様な研究は、国家間・民族間の歴史的な問題とそれらが学生たちの日常生活において、どのようにアイデンティティーの形成、人との係わり合いの機会、キャンパス内外での帰属意識に影響を与えているかなどに注目する必要があるだろう。

Piller, I. & J. Cho (2013). Neoliberalism as language policy. Language in Society , 42 (1), 23-44.
Lavankura, P. (2013). Internationalizing Higher Education in Thailand: Government and University Responses. Journal of Studies in International Education, 17 (5), 663-676.

Should ‘helping with English’ be part of the brief of humanitarian aid workers? (Source: helpage.org)

Over a few years of involvement in the aid sector in Asia, I became aware that aid workers turn their noses up at ‘English work’. Managers for my Australian government volunteering program encouraged us not to be sucked in to being human dictionaries while on NGO postings. In China, where I was, there was a bristling critique because USA’s Peace Corps volunteers were “only” sent to teach English: ‘How linguistically imperialist!’, we thought.

However, our local colleagues at NGOs and so called ‘development-sector’ government agencies often made requests of us native English speakers: to talk English with them, proofread and draft reports, apply for grants, translate the organisation’s website, help with overseas university applications and tutor their friends’ children. This sparked complaints like ‘I feel like I’m here mostly to translate’ and ‘I’m doing proofreading and admin tasks which I don’t see as capacity building’.

It sure is frustrating to move overseas and find you are expected to provide little but ‘white face time’ in your job. But is English language aid underrated?

Discounting ‘English work’ doesn’t happen because aid workers are haughty. These people have professional training in fields like environmental science or public health and believe they were hired to contribute in those areas. Moreover, many native English speakers recognize that they have no professional language teaching experience. Most aid workers are conscientious global citizens, wary of being language imperialists. But these ‘good reasons’ are misconceived, I argue.

Wrong Skills

Without teacher training, you are a less-than-ideal candidate to teach, no question. But in the regions I’m talking about, learners seldom get to select from a smorgasbord of English-speaking trained teachers and native English-speaking non-teachers. Even the Peace Corps receive some teacher training and teach in impoverished areas where TESOL staff-members are otherwise in short supply. Moreover, when learning a new language, important learning is done beyond the classroom and after childhood: for instance, between aid workers and their adult colleagues. Psychologist Vygotsky showed peer group learning with ‘more knowledgeable others’ was a productive part of language acquisition, with no teacher needed. Modelling grammatical and pragmatically-appropriate language provides useful input for learners. In short, helping colleagues with their English tasks or even just conversing can be valuable for their language learning and is within any English speaker’s ability. 

Imperialism?

In many countries, people see access to a native English speaker as a boon. Why not give communities what they think would assist their upward mobility? The contribution to informal, out-of-classroom English learning these native speakers provide is something their colleagues and communities may find even more valuable than the specific aid project, especially as the expense, scarcity and systemic preference given to children’s classes make formal language learning inaccessible to many adolescents and adults who want it.

As Kamwangamalu (2013, p. 328) notes of Africa – and I’ve found this in China, too – ‘stakeholders reject their own indigenous languages […] because they consider them insignificant and of no practical value in the linguistic marketplace.’ In this, local stakeholders are not wrong; English is indisputably of greatest value in many markets. Many (including me) would say this is evidence of linguistic hegemony and non-native English speakers are complicit in their own linguistic domination by prioritising English, embracing the coloniser’s model of the world. Even so, is it an incoming English speaker’s place to decide to attack hegemony by refusing to help people proofread?

Often, English is the language of power and funding, particularly for international aid, and non-elites may well perceive English as a resource monopolized by elites to preserve their status. For instance, Ghanaians ‘expressed the view that using the vernacular as an instructional medium was a subtle strategy employed by the elite to perpetuate communities’ marginalization from mainstream society’ (Mfum-Mensah 2005, p. 80).

Whether or not we oppose English’s dominance ideologically, it is beneficial to proofread co-workers’ donor reports, make templates for the office and attend events to speak for the organisation or those it assists, in English. The more co-worker inclusion in these activities, the better. That oft-encountered request to help a friend-of-a-friend with a personal English task should likewise be accepted, because language competencies can function as collective resources. Indeed, many linguists now advocate studying ‘actual linguistic, communicative, semiotic resources’ rather than ‘languages’ (Blommaert, 2010, p. 102). English resources can benefit networks rather than merely individuals. In expanding the networks around English resources, inequality and elitism is reduced.   

Both national politics and international development are ‘Fields’ (Bourdieu 1991). English is both economically and symbolically valuable in these Fields. Native English speakers – especially professionals doing aid volunteering – have an ability to use professional-register English at less expense (a Bourdieuian ‘Habitus’).  So it’s efficient for them to do tasks requiring professional English. Importantly, this is not short term efficiency at the expense of long term efficiency; helping out with English tasks now doesn’t preclude co-workers’ language acquisition in the longer term. Rather, it can play a part in their improvement so the ‘cost’ of professional English for colleagues will decrease over time. English-speaking aid workers, in doing ‘English work’, can improve their hosts’ access to material support and their ability to be heard in international forums.

The benefit of mobility of individuals, of organisations and across community networks is hard to weigh against the detriment of linguistic imperialism, but this weighing up should not be shirked, and nor should the ‘English work’ involved.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, Polity.

Kamwangamalu, N. M. (2013). Effects of policy on English-medium instruction in Africa. World Englishes, 32 (3), 325-337 DOI: 10.1111/weng.12034

Mfum-Mensah, O. (2005). The impact of colonial and postcolonial Ghanian language policies on vernacular use in two northern Ghanaian communities. Comparative Education 41 (1), 71-85.

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

What does an urban middle-class male university graduate from Conakry, the capital of Guinea, have in common with a peasant woman with little education from a village in Sichuan? Well, both are caught up in the processes of globalization and find themselves as semi-legal migrants with limited resources in Guangzhou’s Africa Town. “Africa Town” is the name of two suburbs in Guangzhou where the largest community of Africans in Asia resides. According to this photo essay on ChinaSmack, there were around 20,000 Africans registered there in 2011. The number of Africans estimated to come there for short business visits and those without a legal status was assumed to be about ten times that number.

Africans come to Guangzhou to trade: at one end of the spectrum there is the so-called “luggage bag trade,” which involves an African community pooling their financial resources. A member of the group then travels to China and purchases as many goods as possible. These are then shipped back home and sold on for a profit. At the other end of the spectrum of African traders in Guangzhou are more established people who run their own shops, catering to bulk buyers, including the luggage bag traders.

The retailers of Africa Town do not only include Africans but also rural Chinese migrants whose status is as semi-legal as that of their African peers if they don’t have an urban hukou (residence permit) for Guangzhou.

It is in this “marginal space in a peripheral country” (Han 2013, p. 95), that Huamei Han, a sociolinguistic ethnographer, met Ibrahim, the university graduate from Conakry, and Laura, the villager from Sichuan, as part of her project to study multilingualism in this high-contact situation.

English, as the global language of business, plays an in important role in Africa Town. So does Mandarin as the national language. Additionally, Cantonese, the local language and a number of other Chinese vernaculars are widely used in Africa Town, as are a number of African languages, including colonial languages such as French. So, there are a lot of codes being used in Africa Town but the preeminent power codes are English and Mandarin.

However, access to formal instruction in these power codes is rare and African Towners have to find other ways to learn whatever they can of these languages. As a result a contact variety, which locals call “Chinglish,” has developed. According to Han (2013, p. 88) this kind of “Chinglish” (not to be confused with unidiomatic Chinese English signage Westerns like to make fun of) is characterized by simple English vocabulary and sentence structures, repetition of key words, the mixing of Mandarin expressions, and the influence of Chinese syntax.

Africa Town, Guangzhou (Source: ChinaSmack)

It is this variety that Ibrahim mostly used, in addition to French, Susu, Pular, Mandinka and Arabic. However, his impressive multilingual repertoire was of relatively limited value without access to Chinese, as he explained to the researcher:

“Some factory they speak no French, they speak no English. So no Chinese, no business!” (p. 90).

However, immediate financial pressures in conjunction with a restrictive visa regime meant that his dream to attend formal Chinese language classes was beyond his grasp.

Laura, by contrast, felt she needed English to extend her business opportunities. However, formal English language instruction was out of her reach, too. Instead, she mobilized personal relationships and networks to acquire English, including the pursuit of transnational romantic relationships.

As Han points out, globalization is often conceived as associated with “elite multilingualism” where “the global person” is supposed to be highly proficient in standard varieties of the languages involved. However, access to these power codes depends upon economic capital: in order to study a language formally, you need to have money, time and legal status.

The inhabitants of African Town who Han spoke to had none of these and their structural marginalization thus also resulted in their linguistic marginalization. Even so, their informal language learning – the grassroots multilingualism of the inhabitants of Africa Town – is locally meaningful and enables their livelihoods in this space characterized by “globalization from below.”

Han, Huamei (2013). Individual Grassroots Multilingualism in Africa Town in Guangzhou: The Role of States in Globalization International Multilingual Research Journal, 7, 83-97

Multilingual Hong Kong (Katherine Chen and Gray Carper, 2005-2007)

During our visit to Hong Kong, Kimie and I met Katherine Chen, who introduced us to a sociolinguistic film she has co-produced: Multilingual Hong Kong. The film provides fascinating insights into the linguistic landscape of Hong Kong, into Cantonese-English bilingualism and into bilingual language use more generally.

The premise is simple: Katherine is filmed asking Hong Kong pedestrians to translate a commonly code-mixed sentence – “Today I must present a project.” – into Cantonese only. Most of the teenagers and young adults she speaks to are scratching their heads because they can’t do it or break down giggling because the Cantonese equivalents they come up with are too formal, too far off the mark or simply sound funny to them.

All too soon it becomes clear to the viewer that the interviewees have a hard time using” pure” Cantonese, i.e. saying the sentence without resorting to English loanwords for “present” and, particularly, “project.”. However, when asked what they think of code-switching a fair number of them say that it’s bad, that it’s a sign of laziness, that it’s disgusting or that it’s a sign that a person cannot speak proper Cantonese nor proper English.

Other interviewees, however, celebrate their code-switching and code-mixing and say it’s an expression of their Hong Kong identity. One interviewee even says that mixing Cantonese and English increases her levels of happiness!

A counterpoint to these translation efforts and beliefs about code-mixing of ordinary Hong Kong pedestrians is provided in interviews with Hong Kong linguists. One of them is Agnes Lam and she sums up code-mixing with a beautiful metaphor: mixing Cantonese and English is like wearing jade jewellery with foreign clothes.

Multilingual Hong Kong constitutes fascinating viewing for anyone interested in language and culture and in beliefs about bilingualism and practices of bilingualism in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

I would also like to strongly recommend the film as an ideal teaching resource to anyone teaching in sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language and culture, World Englishes, Asian Studies and related areas.

Running time of Multilingual Hong Kong is 30 minutes. A 4-minute preview of the initial segment is available here. The whole film is available through Yuefilms or by contacting Katherine Chen.

Who of these two men do you expect to speak better English?*

I am very much looking forward to attending the International Conference on Research and Applications of Intercultural Communication in Wuhan next week. By way of preparation, I’ve googled the conference hotel on tripadvisor and was disappointed to discover that the English-language comments were quite negative. Going by the ratings alone, the Chinese-language comments seemed to be much more positive. So what is it that bothers English speakers about the hotel that the Chinese speakers don’t seem to mind? You guessed it, it’s English!

“Its main drawback for western people is the total lack of English information. There is the major signage with Englsih, but few staff have much communication in English.”

“Reception staff does not speak English.”

“The hotel looks nice and the rooms are ok, however the English spoken is barely average.”

“Few staff speak English at all, and none that I encountered spoke it well.”

Examples could go on and on and I ended up browsing a variety of hotels in China just for language-related comments. What I discovered was an endless litany of English-related complaints. My impression is (and there’s obviously a research project here) that Western travellers to China mostly care about the English proficiency of staff when they assess the quality of a hotel and they generally assess the English of hotel staff in highly negative terms.

I am not aware of any research into the actual English language proficiency levels of hotel staff in customer service roles in up-market international hotels in China but I’d be extremely surprised if the situation was really as dire as it is presented in comments such as those quoted here.

The situation reminds me of the language panic about Asian teaching assistants that gripped US universities in the 1980s and that inspired the by-now classic intercultural communication research of Rubin (1992) and Rubin and Smith (1990). At that time, there were widespread complaints that American students couldn’t understand Asian teaching assistants and so weren’t learning anything. The researchers wanted to test whether the problem might be due not only to Asian ways of speaking but also to American ways of hearing.

The researchers audio-recorded a science lecture aimed at undergraduate students. The speaker on the tape was a native speaker of American English speaking in a standard American-English accent. The lecture was then played to two different groups of undergraduate students. In one case, the lecture was accompanied by the picture of a Caucasian woman and in the other it was accompanied by the picture of an Asian woman. Thus, the impression was created that a Caucasian woman was speaking in one instance and an Asian woman in another. Both women were shown in the same pose and had been rated as similarly attractive. So, we have one audio-recorded lecture spoken in Standard American English and two different visual signals: a Caucasian lecturer versus an Asian lecturer.

Can you guess where this is headed? Right!

The students who saw the Asian lecturer heard a ‘foreign’, ‘non-native’ or ‘Asian’ accent although none was present in the auditory signal. What is more, the perceived accent of the perceived Asian lecturer led to reduced comprehension. The students rated the quality of the lecture and the quality of their learning experience much lower when they thought it was delivered by a speaker with a foreign accent.

Is the same going on with hospitality workers now? Western customers expecting they’ll have a hard time understanding Chinese hotel workers? And this expectation becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy? I’ll find out next week, I guess.

If you are interested in learning more about performance and perception in intercultural communication, you could read the chapter about “Intercultural Communication and Exclusion” in my book Intercultural Communication or you could attend the pre-conference workshop devoted to “Why westerners don’t understand the Chinese: Intercultural communication between performance and perception,” which I’ll conduct at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law on Thursday, November 15, or the repeat at the University of Hong Kong on Tuesday, November 20.

* Both men are German politicians and native speakers of German. Phillip Rösler (l.) is Vice-Chancellor of Germany and Guido Westerwelle (r.) is the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Rubin, D. (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants Research in Higher Education, 33 (4), 511-531 DOI: 10.1007/BF00973770
Rubin, D., & Smith, K. (1990). Effects of accent, ethnicity, and lecture topic on undergraduates’ perceptions of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 14 (3), 337-353 DOI: 10.1016/0147-1767(90)90019-S

Last weekend the Australian government released its white paper Australia in the Asian Century. One of its recommendations is that “All Australian students will have the opportunity, and be encouraged, to undertake a continuous course of study in an Asian language throughout their years of schooling.”

Meanwhile, the Australian public continues to be largely unconvinced that language learning for everyone is a good idea – many remain skeptical of the feasibility or even the desirability of universal language learning. Talk-back radio is one of the media were this skepticism finds a particularly strong voice. Sydney’s 2GB devoted much of Monday evening to questions of language learning: is it feasible for all Australian kids to learn a language other than English? If so, which language should it be? Is there any point in learning another language seeing that everyone else wants to learn English? Does foreign language learning detract from English language learning?

Ingrid Piller joined the debate on the Steve Price show and you can listen to her passionate argument for taking languages seriously by clicking on the ‘play’ button above: as the rest of the world is becoming bi- and multilingual, Australian kids are missing out until we get serious about improving language education in this country.

“Imported Teacher”, the British Council’s new campaign in Thailand

As a language educator in Thailand my in-box is always full of invitations to conferences devoted to ASEAN and English language teaching. At such conferences, keynote speakers from the UK or the US make similar, if not identical, arguments for the importance of English as a lingua franca in the linguistically diverse ASEAN region. Their trump card is normally the economic value of English.

For example, at a seminar I attended recently in Bangkok, an American TESOL celebrity told an audience of Thai English teachers that: “English-speakers earn THREE times more than non-English speakers” [capitalization original to her Powerpoint slide]. This was a fact, she assured us, by referring to a report about English in the Middle East and North Africa. Commissioned by the British Council, the report claims that English-speaking receptionists in a city such as Bagdad in Iraq can earn three times more than their non-English-speaking counterparts. It’s impossible to determine the sample size but the results are based on 50 job ads for all kinds of professions. Only receptionists have a three-fold earning differential. To generalize on the basis of a handful of job ads for receptionists in Baghdad to a global assertion is, well, problematic, to put it mildly …

Propaganda such as this result in a single-minded wave of English fever. Of course, this is not unique to Thailand – Japan, South Korea and many other Asian nations also have their hearts set firmly for English. But it is important to ask ourselves if such a narrowly focused belief in the power of English – based as it is on questionable data and assumptions – is a good thing for Thailand and for its ASEAN project. The reality of ASEAN nations today are the ever-increasing flows of people and businesses from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds; in such a fluid transnational space, chances are that languages other than English are more useful or more realistic choices.

Let me illustrate this point by an example of a major Japanese company in Thailand. This company is considering providing English lessons for their Thai drivers, whose job it is to drive expat Japanese employees and their families stationed in Bangkok. Most of these Thai drivers speak poor English. As many of the Japanese employees and their families themselves have limited English proficiency, communication between the two parties is rather constrained.

A Japanese expat wife, whose husband works for this company, told me that she was scared of asking the driver to drive her and her children to their school in the morning. Because they don’t have a language in common, a number of failed communications have led to mistrust between them. Funded by her husband’s company, she’s learning English at a school in Bangkok, but with only a one-hour lesson per week she’s making little progress. Frustrated, her family’s decision to solve this problem with the driver was rather unique – they moved next to their children’s school.

The ideology of English as ‘useful’ is obviously implicit in the company’s consideration of providing English lessons for their drivers. It seems to keep the company from considering a more efficient option: teaching Japanese to the Thai drivers and Thai to the Japanese expats. In addition to such lessons where they can learn basics, both groups will get many daily practice opportunities with each other.

Increasing numbers of Japanese restaurants are opening in Bangkok

Despite last year’s flooding that affected over 450 Japanese companies in Thailand, more Japanese companies are planning to launch their business here. According to Teikoku Data Bank (2011), 3,133 Japanese companies are registered in Thailand, and approximately 37,000 expats (plus approx. 13,000 non-company worker Japanese) are sent from Japan to work in this country. According to some Japanese expats and business owners I’ve met, they need not English-speaking but Japanese-speaking Thais or Japanese-Thai translators. While they also pay lip-service to the importance of English and are often forced to use English, they would actually prefer to use Japanese in business negotiations and feel much more at ease in the presence of Japanese-speaking Thai interpreters. According to one consulting company, the demand for Thai-Japanese interpreters is on the rise. However, they are difficult to find. Actually, Japanese-Thai interpreters can easily earn much higher salaries than English-Thai interpreters!

For instance, a newly opened Japanese restaurant hired a Japanese-speaking Thai waiter and his starting salary is 40,000 baht – four times more than his non-Japanese speaking co-workers, twice as much as that of my English-speaking Thai friend working for an international education firm in Bangkok, and close to that of a foreign lecturer with a PhD at a reputable university in Bangkok.

Furthermore, one Japanese expat working for a major Japanese company told me that English is often not the preferred choice of language among their increasing number of Korean and Chinese clients operating in Thailand. For instance, a Japanese expat, Ken, whom I met recently, had a meeting with a Korean expat businessman in Bangkok. Ken began his meeting by greeting in Korean (Ken is Japan-born Korean with basic Korean proficiency) and mostly used Thai and sometimes English during the meeting as his Korean client speaks good Thai but cannot speak English. He had a Thai secretary who translated Ken’s ‘no-so-perfect Thai’ into ‘proper’ Thai to her Thai-speaking Korean boss.

For Thailand to be competitive in ASEAN and the global economy, English will continue to be of importance, of course. However, it seems short-sighted and dangerous to ignore other languages. As Thailand prepares for the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 and as it strives to attract foreign investments from ASEAN Plus Three nations Japan, China and South Korea, the importance of a workforce that speaks their languages is paramount.

The need for more diverse language education and its link to employment needs to be based on empirical research evidence of the emerging language needs of international employers actually operating in Thailand in order to achieve positive policy change. Currently, this evidence doesn’t exist – a blind spot created by the relentless propaganda for English.

Underneath the zipped Asian face a Western face emerges: an English school’s ad in Bangkok (unrelated to the school in the blog post). Photo by Olan Sawangnuwatkul

Thailand is seeing an unprecedented English language learning hype. This hype, of course, is nothing but a closely engineered social phenomenon. It’s been promoted by various organisations and companies which claim that for Thailand to become more competitive as the launch of the ASEAN Economic Community in 2015 approaches, Thais must learn English. That’s why learning English is a good investment for Thais, says Michel le Quellec, President of Wall Street English (Thailand), the local franchisee of the UK-based Wall Street Institute. He assures us of the benefits of learning English:

Investing in English proficiency has an attractive return and is affordable, as they can expect a 15-20 per cent salary hike after finishing our course, or an extra Bt1 million after six years.

While it’s hard to know where Quellec’s conviction comes from, everyone involved in the business of ELT seems to be on his side. They believe that English is inevitable for Thailand and it is a career booster for Thais, but everyone also seems to think that the Thais are excruciatingly bad at learning English. It is at this point where we arrive at the inevitable question – who is to blame?

At conferences, in corridors at universities and in cyberspace, all fingers seem firmly pointed at the teachers: both Thai and foreign. For many critics including Quellec, “[T]he problem for Thailand is that there aren’t enough qualified teachers, while most teaching methods here are inefficient…” The majority of Thai teachers teaching at public schools are reportedly either underqualified or inexperienced, while most foreign teachers hired in public and private schools are shunned as unqualified and uncommitted.

A string of plans to rectify this grim situation are well under way. The Ministry of Education kicked off this year by appointing former British prime minister Tony Blair as the model English teacher and ambassador of Thailand’s Year 2012 English Speaking Program. This was followed by the proposal of increased salary for new English teachers with a university degree, and the announcement of the 100 million-baht budget to send 1,100 Thai teachers to English speaking countries for a training program during the summer vacation. Last week the Thai government working with the British Council brought more than 100 volunteers from the UK to Thailand, who will be teaching English in some 100 schools for six weeks.

In light of this engineered ELL hype and the alleged shortage of qualified Thai and foreign teachers, my friend’s experience in job hunting in Bangkok makes an intriguing story.

Originally from mainland China, Emily (pseudonym) was enrolled in a TESOL masters’ program at a university in Bangkok. To improve her CV, she applied for an English teaching position at a large franchise language school near her university. After a short job interview, a Thai interviewer declared that Emily wasn’t good enough – racially, that was.

“We can’t offer you a job because you are not white.”

Emily was taken aback, but she patiently explained that no, she’s not white, but she has two years of English teaching experience in another province and was studying an MA TESOL. Her persistence paid off and Emily was led to the principal’s office for further interview.

Indeed the Thai principal was impressed with Emily’s English. But this didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t white.

“It’s a shame! Your English is great, but you are not from a Western background. You are not white, you see. Why don’t you teach Chinese at our school? You can start immediately.”

For Emily, the principal’s offer wasn’t a good deal. To begin with, she had no experience or interest in teaching Chinese. She had no official qualification, either. What’s more, the principal asked her to use English to teach Chinese – for the school, she was capable of teaching Chinese, its complex language system and associated culture in English, but she wasn’t good enough to teach English itself. Most unfair of all, she was to teach Chinese in English for one third of the salary that English teachers were paid at the school.

It is obvious that race (being white) or the country of origin (US, UK, Australia, i.e., ‘West’) is not a qualification. Yet, the two categories remain entrenched as the primary criteria for hiring an English language teachers, while actual qualifications or work experience are secondary, if not irrelevant in the current ELT job market in Thailand. The national projects as well as the local hiring practice here are part and parcel of the global TESOL industry which is undergirded by race. What’s the point of believing in English as a global language or ELT as a profession if their race automatically renders Asians as second best?

Eatery on Kat Hing St, Wuhan, site of Chi Li’s Life Show (Source: city.ifeng.com)

I am very much looking forward to attending the Intercultural Literacy, Communication, and Competence in the Context of Multiculturalism Conference at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan in November this year. I’ve never been to Wuhan before (nor anywhere else in China) and what I usually do before going anywhere is read. I’ve asked my students and colleagues from China for recommendations, and as soon as I mention Wuhan, they’ve all said: “Chi Li! You have to read Chi Li’s novel about a restaurant owner in Wuhan.”

I’d heard the advice a couple of times but googling “Chi Li” turned out to be easier said than done, particularly as I had a summary of the plot of her most famous novel but no title. I asked around some more among the Chinese I know, wondering whether there was a translation into English and the answer I received was “Of course! She’s very famous. Her work has been translated into many languages.”

So, I asked for “Chi Li” in Chinese characters and then googled “池莉” – restricted to English-language sites, of course, as I can’t read Chinese. This way I found the Wikipedia entry for Chi Li although it’s only a stub and disappointingly short. However, at least I found out the English title of the novel I was after this way: Life Show. The Wikipedia link from “Chi Li” to “Life Show” however did not bode well: “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name” it says.

No matter, I now had the author and the English title and so I should have found the book in a matter of a few clicks. It wasn’t to be. In a blog post on ilookchina I learnt why:

Although many of her novels have been translated into French, there are no English translations yet, which is a shame.

What?! A famous Chinese author not translated into English?!

Unfortunately, it’s true and I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. Global book translations look very much like a one-way street out of English. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum English is the original language of a cool 1,220,893 books translated into other languages. The runner-up, French, is the source language of less than 20% of that number with 215,216.

Chinese is in 16^th position – behind such relatively minor European languages as Swedish (7^th), Danish (9^th), Dutch (11^th), Czech (13^th), Polish (14^th) and Norwegian (15^th).

Table 1: Top 20 Source Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

By contrast, considering the target languages into which the world’s books are being translated, unbelievably English is nowhere near the top. As Table 2 shows, English is only in fourth place as the target language with less than half of the number of translations than the 1^st placed, German. If you think 4^th place is not bad, consider the number of English-language readers and the size of the English-language book market, and the position is obviously ridiculously low.

Table 2: Top 5 Target Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

1. German 290,828
2. French 237,890
3. Spanish 228,151
4. English 145,737
5. Japanese 130,610

The figures for source and target languages of books translated in the world are a good indicator of the inequality of cultural flows. The UNESCO figures make a mockery of the rhetoric of intercultural communication: it’s almost as if the whole world was listening to the communication emanating from a narcissist.

In Australia “becoming Asia-literate” is currently a very fashionable media topic. How that is supposed to happen without translations from Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Asia’s many other languages, I don’t know.

As far as my quest to read at least one novel by Chi Li before I visit Wuhan is concerned, I’ve now ordered Le Show de la vie and will be looking forward to brushing up my French while I learn about China!

Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok

I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, under the supervision of Kimie Takahashi. She has encouraged me to share my experience in developing this project here on Language on the Move. Funny enough, my research topic is often seen as ‘outside the box’ here, but it came quite naturally, so to speak, and here is why.

In 2010, I arrived in Bangkok as an international student from Taiwan, and since then I’ve been introduced to many fashionable gay hubs, such as the glamorous Telephone Bar or The Balcony on Silom Soi 4 or the always-packed DJ Station on Soi 2.  The city has always been well-known  internationally for its gay-friendliness and sexual diversity (Jackson, 2011), and indeed these places are packed with international couples, especially Asian and Western.

What struck me most about Bangkok’s international gay scene here is that these Asian gay men from non-English-speaking backgrounds, do not only speak good English but also seem very confident and skilful in socialising with Westerners: they so elegantly flirt, joke around and engage in intellectual conversations on the economy, education, globalisation and whatnot, all in English. They definitely don’t fit the image of Asians as deficient or shy speakers of English that is still paramount in the literature that I have been reading since I began my master’s degree in ELT. I’m pretty sure that they’d roll their eyes or be offended if I told them how Asians are talked about as such by researchers.

When I initially started developing an MA thesis project last year, I didn’t know that what I had observed in my daily life could be a research topic. Having read A Passion for English by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi (2006), I learned that research on the intersection of sexuality and desire in second language learning is actually cutting-edge I then decided to propose a project that would look into the language learning trajectory of gay Asian men in Bangkok, to explore if they were like the Japanese women in their study who developed akogare (desire) for the English language alongside their fantasy for Western masculinity.

Having decided to model my project on Ingrid’s and Kimie’s work, I looked for similar ELT studies with a focus on Asian gay men’s desire for English and the West. My pursuit was rather fruitless. Brian King (2008) explains that although the fields of ELT in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular have investigated learner motivation and learner identities since the 1980s, the literature has suffered from heteronormativity. Indeed, doing my literature review has made me wonder what kind of world previous research has been occupying for the last so many decades – certainly not the one occupied by millions of fellow gay and lesbian friends of mine living side by side with fellow heterosexual folks.

As such the fields of ELT and SLA have failed to address why gay learners aspire to learn English or how such aspirations manifest in their linguistic practices and learning or if being gay really matters at all. Similarly, the fields of Sexuality Studies or Sociology seem to have paid little attention to the language learning trajectories of gay Asian men who desire Western men. My study is thus designed t to fill this gap in the literature on Asian gay men’s desire for English and Western men, and how their desires may impact their opportunities to learn and use English in Bangkok.

As part of the requirements for my degree, I defended my proposal, a critical ethnography of Asian gay men’s desire and second language learning in Bangkok, to the proposal committee in April, 2012. One of the comments by an examiner was “This is an interesting project. It’s like thinking outside the box”. I was flattered, of course, as every new research has to be original and innovative. But, at the same time, the metaphor of the ‘box’ seems to index the very problem I’m going to challenge head-on, i.e., heteronormativity. For me, a gay man belonging to the thriving gay community in Bangkok and beyond, what I’m going to look into is pretty much inside the box.

References
Jackson, P. A. (2011). Queer Bangkok : Twenty-first-century markets, media, and rights. Aberdeen, Hong Kong; Chiang Mai, Thailand: Hong Kong Univ. Press; Silkworm Books.

King, B. (2008). “Being Gay Guy, That is the Advantage”: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (3-4), 230-252 DOI: 10.1080/15348450802237855

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59–83.

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.

Source: Kang 2009, p. 201

Every linguistics undergraduate student is by now familiar with the fact of linguistic imperialism in academic publishing where the pressure to publish in international journals translates into the pressure to publish in English, leaving researchers from non-English-speaking backgrounds at a competitive disadvantage. I have often joked in my introductory sociolinguistics lectures that discovering a cure for cancer and not being able to publish it in English would probably be little different from not discovering a cure for cancer at all. The academic pressure to publish in English is thus old news but I’d never before thought about the fact that there might be more to the story: does the dominance of US- and UK-based journals among the most highly-ranked journals not only constitute pressure to publish in English but also pressure to conduct particular types of research? I.e. is there not only a form effect but also a content effect?

Myungkoo Kang’s article about university reform in South Korea demonstrates exactly that. In the name of globalization and international competitiveness, South Korean academics, just as their colleagues elsewhere, are under pressure to publish in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals. In South Korean academia, publications in SCI- and SSCI-indexed journals bring financial rewards for faculty, have become indispensable for being awarded tenure and constitute a positive hiring consideration.

In 2007, for example, there were 1,865 journals indexed in the SSCI. 1,585 (79.62%) of these originated in the USA and UK (see table for details). SSCI-indexed “international” journals are thus clearly hugely skewed towards those originating in Anglophone “center” countries. Among Asian countries, 7 SSCI-indexed journals (0.38%) originate in Japan, 5 (0.27%) in China, 4 (0.21%) in India, 3 (0.16%) in South Korea, and one each (0.05%) in Singapore and Taiwan. Even those SSCI-indexed journals published outside the Anglophone “center” countries are overwhelmingly English-language publications. So, the fact that pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals translates into pressure to publish in English is obvious.

In order to find out whether it is not only the language of publication that changes with the pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals but also the actual research, Kang analyzed articles published by Asian scholars in the top SSCI-indexed journals in the area of Communication. He found that most such articles “framed local phenomena with American mainstream theories” or “appropriated mainstream theories by redefining mainstream theoretical concepts.” By contrast, only a very small number of these articles attempted to formulate research problems from the local context.

The author concludes that South Korea’s policy for improving research competitiveness (as expressed in pressure to publish in SSCI-indexed journals) actually jeopardizes local/national knowledge production and the formulation of local/national research agendas with relevance to the actual needs of local/national societies. The attempt to foster globally top-ranked social sciences researchers in South Korea constitutes simultaneous encouragement of social sciences researchers to neglect issues within their immediate social contexts.

Kang’s paper is part of a special issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies devoted to “Neo-liberal Conditions of Knowledge.” All the contributions in that volume demonstrate how academic “internationalization” in effect means the imposition of English-mediated centralized regimes of knowledge. It is not only local/national languages that are being pushed aside and undermined in the process but, more worryingly, locally informed, locally engaged, and critical forms of knowledge production and dissemination.

Kang, M. (2009). ‘State‐guided’ university reform and colonial conditions of knowledge production Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 10 (2), 191-205 DOI: 10.1080/14649370902823355

The method used by Babaii to make her point is ingenious: a discourse analysis of bio-blurbs published in a conference booklet. The conference was Asia TEFL 2006 and after discarding the bio-blurbs of keynote speakers and Western academics, she was left with a corpus of 512 bio-blurbs of academics from Arab countries, Iran, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, China and Japan. This corpus was analyzed for any evidence of “self-marginalization,” i.e. evidence that the authors down-played their local credentials and highlighted connections with the West, even if those were tenuous at best.

For instance, she found that academics with a PhD from a non-Western university rarely provided the institution where they had obtained their PhD in their bio-blurb – in contrast to presenters who had obtained their PhD from a Western institution. This also worked by association: if presenters were affiliated with or supervised by someone who had a PhD from a Western institution, that information was likely to be shared in the bio-blurb. Some of the bio-blurbs quoted in the paper mention connections to Western institutions so minor and seemingly irrelevant (e.g., having attended a conference in the USA; having attended a short-term study-tour) that they seem almost comical. If a local career of 20 years is mentioned in less detail than having “once” taught a course in the UK for a semester, as in one example, one cannot help but feel sorry for that academic.

Babaii concludes her study by comparing academics who exercise self-marginalization to strike-breakers:

Periphery academics who exercise self-marginalization, similar to strike-breakers, slow down, and sometimes, nullify the efforts on the part of those independent scholars who try to resist the ‘imposed identities’ […] in the world of professionalism dominated by Western ethos.

The paper is a call to take a long and hard look at the internationalization of higher education: is the global community of scholars and scientists just another colonial system that institutionalizes subjectivities of inferiority in its peripheries?

Reference

Esmat Babaii (2010). Opting Out or Playing the ‘Academic Game’? Professional Identity Construction by Off-Center Academics Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines, 4 (1), 93-105