"Perspectives on the Language Centers in Taiwan's Universities" Symposium

I know I'm supposed to be finishing up that third post on A Pail of Oysters, but I wanted to mention a couple of other things in the mean time. One is the symposium that Tunghai's FLLD held this past Saturday (May 6). Our department hosted nine invited speakers who run language centers at different universities around Taiwan. The directors were asked to address the following questions about their programs:

1. What is the mission of your language center?
2. What is the history/development/reasons for creation?
3. Introduce your language center (staff, faculty, students, structure within the universities, etc.).
4. What are the facilities (space, allotment/office space)?
5. What is the number of faculty and staff?
6. What is the status of teachers/kind of contracts?
7. What are the requirements in terms of teaching load and responsibilities for teachers?
8. What programs/classes do you offer?
9. What are some of the pros and cons of having a language center?
10. How are teachers in the language center evaluated?

The basic motivation behind this workshop was that Tunghai is in the process of developing its own language center and wanted to learn about the pros and cons of having one. I am not on any of the committees that are in the process of developing this center, but from what I understand as of the last time the school's president came to the FLLD to talk with us, the language center would be primarily a teaching unit, separate from the FLLD. It would be under the College of Arts, if I remember correctly. It would have its own director, who would be of the same rank as a department chair. So the purpose of the symposium was to find out what other universities' language centers have dealt with in their development, so we can learn from both their successes and their difficulties.

I'm not going to summarize each person's presentation, but I want to mention a few of the major themes that came out of the presentations. In no particular order, here they are:

• There's an increasing attempt to reach out to honors or otherwise advanced students through special semester-long or short-term courses. The program at one school (and possibly more) is also feeling pressure from the rest of the school to offer courses and other kinds of help to graduate students and faculty who now are feeling more pressure to publish in English-language international academic journals.
  
  
• Most of the language centers would probably be better labelled "language programs" because they are responsible for the required first-year English courses and elective language courses. There was one (if I remember correctly) language center that did not have the responsibility for the FY-English program. It operates more as a center that offers short-term courses, lectures, study groups, and other activities for extracurricular English learning. (And the staff there consists of one director, 2 staff members, and no faculty.)
  
  
• There are more and more attempts to make use of computer-aided self-study systems so that students can learn on their own. Some programs require the computer-aided learning to be graded as part of required courses; some just provide the learning stations and hope that students will come. (One director mentioned that they had increased the number of computers in one lab from 7 to 41, but only the same 7 students were showing up...)
  
  
• Most of the directors complained of being understaffed, particularly in terms of full-time faculty. As one director put it, the problem is not a sense that part-time teachers are not as hard-working; the problem is that because it is difficult to give part-time teachers the same level of pay and facilities as full-timers (office space, etc.), part-timers usually have to teach at more than one school and therefore cannot be around for program activities, office hours, or important program meetings. This makes it harder both for students to have more interaction with their teachers outside of the classroom and for programs to be as unified as directors would like. [This is my recollection of what was said--if it doesn't quite accurate to others who were there, please let me know!]
  
  
• I felt a sense that teachers and administrators in the language center are not as highly respected as teachers or administrators in regular departments. The term "second-class citizens" was used more than once in characterizing the language centers' status.
  
  
• Related to this, I noticed a concern that language center faculty will end up being evaluated in the same way as faculty in other departments (in other words, a heavy emphasis on research), despite the heavier teaching responsibilities that come with teaching English to the entire freshman class, teaching English electives to upperclass students, and running various programs to encourage students to use English outside of class and to ensure that the English proficiency of the students meets some sort of externally defined standard (the GEPT or TOEFL, for example).

Part of the problem, from my perspective, seems to be that the schools are stuck in a situation where the MOE's requirements put them at cross-purposes vis-a-vis the language centers. On the one hand they want the language centers to ensure that everybody's English meets a certain vaguely defined standard (and I do mean "everybody's"--not just undergrads, but graduate students and faculty and staff make use of the language centers in at least some schools). On the other hand, it sounded like several program directors felt hamstrung in terms of hiring because of the emphasis on hiring assistant professors and people who are going to publish. National universities don't allow the hiring of full-time lecturers, and there is quite a bit of pressure on private universities to follow suit. (I have more to say about this, but I'm going to hold off on that for a while. In the mean time, see this post on Michael Turton's blog that raises the question, how are all the universities in Taiwan going to hire PhDs to teach in their English departments/language centers?) At this point, I'm not sure to what extent language centers will be able to offer their faculty alternatives to the research/teaching/service (where "research" means publications in big-name journals) promotion/"tenure" model. This is going to become a much more pressing issue, too, as the MOE gives private universities more pressure to require lecturers to apply for promotion (more on that later, too!).

Again, this summary of the symposium is based on my impressions/memories of the meeting. I'd appreciate the corrections of anyone else who was there. (Like Kris Vicca, who in a careless moment admitted that he's read this blog before!) I have thought about whether or not I should mention who said what, but have opted not to at this point, though if the directors want their names attached to particular comments or opinions, I'll be happy to comply with their requests. And the paragraph above is based almost entirely on my own slightly muddled view of things. I'll try to develop these ideas in more depth at some point in the future.

[academia] [ELT] [language centers] [Taiwan]

Two brief comments on Silent Hill, which we just got back from seeing

1. I pretty much agree with Roger Ebert's review of it. 'Specially the part where he says that "everybody wanders through the town for two hours while the art direction looks great." That's basically the whole story.


2. There's a scene where the main character's husband (who's looking for her and their child) breaks into a small-town archives, finds the burnt boxes of the Silent Hill police records in plain sight, and discovers in seconds exactly the record that he seems to be looking for. (I say "seems" because I'm not even sure why he wanted to check out the police records in the first place.) As someone who has done research in several archives, I just have 5 words in response to the situation I've just described: Not. In. A. Million. Years.

A Pail of Oysters II

[Note: I took this down for a while, but have re-posted it. Some of what is below is developed in more detail in my 2007 article, "Empathy and its Others: The Voice of Asia, A Pail of Oysters, and the Empathetic Writing of Formosa" (Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 33(2), 35 - 60).]

In my earlier post I mentioned what little criticism or analysis I could find about A Pail of Oysters. Here I'm not going to summarize the entire novel, but I want to point out a few things that were interesting to me about the book.

There are four main characters in A Pail of Oysters:

• Li Liu, a part-Hakka, part-Pepohuan (Plains Aborigine--or literally, "plains savage") who has been sent by his ailing father to bring back their god (a framed picture, possibly like this, which was stolen by some KMT soldiers);
• Precious Jade, a young prostitute who escapes the House of the Laughing Gods;
• her younger brother, a middle school graduate who is about Li Liu's age; and
• Ralph Barton, an American reporter who is being dragged around Taiwan by KMT people so that he can write glowing accounts of how the Nationalists are running Taiwan.

After escaping the House of the Laughing Gods, Precious Jade finds her brother in the house of their adoptive father (the same man who sold her to the house of prostitution) and they both escape. In the process, Precious Jade's brother puts the identity cards of some of the other prostitutes in a place where they can find them and then escape. This, of course, makes his rich adoptive father very angry at the both of them, since the prostitutes are one of his main sources of income. He's also upset that Precious Jade's brother has escaped, since he had invested a lot of money in the boy in hopes that in the future he would have a son to honor him after his death.

The two run into Li Liu, who has accidentally ended up in Taipei after he hitched a ride on the jeep carrying Ralph Barton. Precious Jade's brother buys some food for Li Liu and invites Li to live with Precious Jade and him, despite Precious Jade's objections.

I want to dwell, at this point, on an interesting part in the story where Precious Jade's brother and Li Liu are talking and Li Liu asks the brother what to call him:

"...I was thinking. You call me by my name. You call me Li Liu, and I do not know what to call you."

"I see."

"You said you thought your name was Yamamuro at one time, and more recently Wang, but that you did not want these names any more. Truly, though, you must have a first name by which I can address you."

"The one who was supposed to be my real father used to call me Modiharu," the youth said slowly. "And the one who bought me named me Ching-Meng." He considered. "But I don't want those names either."

"Then what am I to call you?"

"I do not know. Would you want to call me nameless one?"

Li Liu shook his head. "No."

"I see." (120-1)

Eventually, they agree that Li Liu should call him "Didi" (younger brother), just as Precious Jade does. Later on, Precious Jade's brother gets a job at the Friends of China Club and meets Barton. The two of them get to talk a lot (Precious Jade's brother is trying to improve his English), and Barton gives the boy the English name Billy.

I don't know if Sneider intended it, but Didi's (or "Billy's") issues with his name and parentage (distinguishing clearly between "the one who was supposed to be my real father" and "the one who bought me") sound like a metaphor for Taiwan's situation at the time. The boy's confusion about his name involves the same confusion over national identity that people in Taiwan might have been experiencing at the time. The use of Japanese and Chinese names mirrors the problems of identification for the Taiwanese. Each "father" gives a different name that requires the child to reject the previous identity.

In the end, Precious Jade's brother rejects both his Japanese names and his Chinese names, settling first for the label "Didi", then also for an English name that is given to him by an American. Did Sneider mean this to be symbolic of the ideal American relationship with Taiwan--one in which the Americans would help the Taiwanese people establish an identity for themselves that would not only reject the oppressive identities forced upon them by the Chinese but also be friendly to the American people?

Another narrative thread in the book suggests that this conclusion might not be too far off. Barton also becomes involved with a Mr. Chou, the head of an architectural firm who arranges secret meetings with the American to tell him about the plans some Formosans have to try to reform the Nationalist government by getting rid of the "Communistic-technique" faction of the KMT. (Here Sneider alludes to Chiang Ching-kuo, not by name, but as a member of the "Communistic-technique" faction who "has lived almost half his life" in Russia [177]). Chou wants Barton to write articles about Formosa in order to let Americans know about the problems there so that the "Democratic-technique" faction can overcome the Communistic-technique faction. He also describes the Formosans' plans to build Formosa's democracy through economic development, specifically via "free enterprise," and their hopes that the Americans will help with this. Chou assures Barton that their plan to "build Formosa" will also "be helping to build all of Asia" (180). He argues that building a strong capitalist economy on Taiwan that breaks up government monopolies and allows for the participation of Formosans will help build a better society and more appealing alternative than that of Red China. Chou implies, then, that a democratic and capitalistic Taiwan would help further the U.S.'s fight against Communism in Asia.

Chou (or Sneider?) is at pains to emphasize that the opponents of the government are not Communists, even labelling CCK's faction of the KMT as the "Communistic-technique" faction. (I'm not going to argue with that characterization, though.) The future of Asia, it is implied, lies in developing a strong free-market economy in Taiwan, which will lead to a more democratic Taiwan that would be more friendly to U.S. interests.

This is, by the way, in sharp contrast to the impressions James Michener gives of the situation in The Voice of Asia, which was published only 2 years prior to Sneider's book. After interviewing a few Mainlanders on Taiwan (see my list of his interviewees here), Michener gives the following answer to the question, "Is the present Formosa Government responsible?"

It is probably the most efficient government in Asia today, not even excepting Japan's. It has solved the food problem. It has rationed goods so that everyone gets a fair break. It polices the island so that even white men can move about at night without risk of murder. It has launched an education program, prints liberal newspapers and insures just trials. Furthermore, in order to erase evil memories of initial Chinese occupation, the Government has specifically worked to protect the indigenous Taiwanese population. (106)

Michener's "Observations" section consists almost entirely of issues related to how and when the Mainland should be retaken militarily. He doesn't suggest any changes are needed on Formosa, and in the above paragraph gives unstinting praise to the KMT regime for reforms that the characters in Sneider's novel would say hadn't even happened. To Michener, the KMT government is taking care of the Taiwanese people and Americans don't need to worry about it. Sneider's book argues that American ignorance of the real conditions on Taiwan--ignorance exacerbated by reportage like Michener's--would be disasterous for Asia.

Toward the end of the novel, Barton finds out that Billy and Precious Jade have been caught by the "Peace Preservation Corps" and taken to a racetrack in Tamshui and shot. (Their adoptive "father" found out where they were and turned them in, accusing them of being Communists.) At first Barton is sick of Taiwan and wants to leave. Then, after he runs into Li Liu, he "borrows" a jeep and helps him escape back to the South before Li Liu can be arrested. As Barton drives, the car, he changes his mind about staying in Taiwan:

No, he told himself, he wasn't finished with this part of the world. His glance slid to the boy who held his god. He would stay here. He would learn all that he could. And then he would reveal--in articles and fiction--in any way he could, the utter stupidity, the ignorance of a small group who not only enslaved eight million people, but who endangered all of Asia. (304)

This is the last we see of him. And perhaps the alleged fate of A Pail of Oysters--pulled out of libraries then and virtually ignored now--might tell us what the fate of Barton's words would have been.

More here... [Not yet...]

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Vern Sneider] [Taiwan] [白色恐怖] [White Terror]

A Pail of Oysters I

I finished reading A Pail of Oysters the day after the book arrived. I should mention that the copy I finally bought is a little water-stained and lacks a jacket, but it didn't cost me nearly as much as a lot of the copies that I've seen for sale (a quick check of one on-line book dealer shows copies selling from US$45 to US$290). One of the reasons for this is probably the relative scarcity of the book. As I mentioned previously, the story is that the KMT had some student spies steal copies of the book from libraries in the U.S. (I'm curious if anyone has any hard evidence for this story, though. I'm not doubting that this kind of thing happened; I'm just wondering if anyone has heard of any evidence that people from the KMT identified this particular book as one to systematically steal from U.S. libraries.)

Before I make my own comments about A Pail of Oysters in another post, I'll quote a few sources that summarize it or comment on it. I checked around the web and in some academic databases and didn't find much about this book. It doesn't get mentioned in any Asian Studies journals or Asia-related magazines that I have access to, and the only comments I could find in English-studies journals were two brief mentions in 1950s issues of the English Journal (one was an article about using literature to teach American schoolchildren about other cultures, and the other was a one-paragraph review of the book).

Gale's Contemporary Authors Online has some contemporary reviews of the book that praised it:

In A Pail of Oysters Sneider again drew upon his first-hand experience in the Far East to write a novel about the political problems of that area. A more serious book than Teahouse, A Pail of Oysters was described by Margaret Parton in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review as "a serious and sometimes tragic story of a sad and troubled country." Set on the island of Formosa, where the defeated Nationalist Chinese government fled after the takeover of mainland China by the communists, the novel examines the corruption and injustices of the Nationalist government. "For anyone who has served as a correspondent with the Nationalists," wrote Gordon Walker in the Christian Science Monitor, "it sounds realistic and generally accurate." Pat Frank in Saturday Review thought the novel "combines beauty of expression, originality of thought, and contemporary historical importance; it is a bright light thrust into the infected peritonium of Formosa, into a region murky with propaganda."

I should note that Christina Klein described Saturday Review as a more left-leaning publication for middlebrow Americans, as compared with a magazine like Reader's Digest. My guess is that if Reader's Digest had a review of the book (did they do book reviews?), it wouldn't have been as complimentary.

On the web, the speech by Keelung Hong that I mentioned in a previous post has this short summary of the book, including some background on its writing:

It describes not just the foibles of confused Americans out of their depths across the Pacific, but accounts of KMT terror, including the shooting of the character based on the interpreter Ed Paine recommended to Vern Sneider. The book opens with a KMT patrol seizing oysters gathered by Taiwanese coast dwellers. Sneider makes very vivid the terror in which Taiwanese lived in the late 1940s, the oppression of KMT bandit-troops, the massacre of 2-28, and also makes clear the common Taiwanese views that what land reform was really about was breaking up any Taiwanese power bases.

And a summary of the book that I found on a booklist at Forumosa has this to say:

This is a fictional story, but the tale might as well be real to a Taiwanese. The story starts in near Lukang when KMT soldiers steal the god from a family and he is sent to bring it back. Much of the story focuses around an American newsman stationed in Taipei and how he learns Nationalist Taiwan is not what it seems. The true story behind the fiction is that Sneider met Ed Paine, an eye witness to the 228 massacre and Paine hooked Sneider up with his interpreter. The history is fuzzy, the places are not where they should be, but the story is more an allegory of 50's Taipei with the dreaded race track and deaths. This book is now considered rare following years of KMT student spies stealing it from libraries.

I don't know enough about 1950s Taipei to judge the accuracy of book's descriptions, but it does give a good feeling of what the city might have been like back then, with its descriptions of both main roads like South Chungking Road, where you would find places like "Cave's Book Store and the Bank of Formosa", and some of the small alleyways and fetid apartments where many poorer people lived. It's possible, though, that Sneider spent more time in Taipei and thus his descriptions of the countryside are a bit more sketchy and superficial.

I have more to say about the book in another post.

[Update, 3/2/2007: According to the March 11, 1954 issue (pdf) of The Grosse Pointe News of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, A Pail of Oysters was selected by the Notable Books Committee of the American Library Association as one of the 50 books "of the previous year which it considers meritorious in terms of literary excellence, factual correctness and sincerity and honesty of presentation" (10). Interesting...]

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Vern Sneider] [Taiwan] [白色恐怖] [White Terror]

More new books in the former native speaker's library

...in increasing order of how excited I am to have gotten them:

• Communication and Global Society, ed. Guo-Ming Chen and William J. Starosta (NY: Peter Lang, 2000)
  Several chapters in this collection look interesting, including Hui-Ching Chang's "Reconfiguring the Global Society: 'Greater China' as Emerging Community" and Starosta and Chen's "Listening Across Diversity in Global Society".
  


• The Voice of Asia, by James A. Michener (NY: Random House, 1951)
  As I mentioned earlier, this book was discussed in Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism. I don't think she mentioned, though, that Michener has a section on Formosa that includes five short chapters: "Indian Summer in Formosa" (a chat with Y.P. Tom, a Chinese C-47 pilot), "The Governor's Mansion" (a chat with Edith Wu, the wife of K. C. Wu, Governor of Formosa), "The Hard Way" (a chat with Liu Ping, a political science student at Taiwan University), "The Tank Commanders" (a chat with "four young fellows, tough, straight and aching for a fight"), and a chapter called "Observations". I'll talk more about this later, but right now I'll just make the observation that Michener's interviewees were all Mainlanders with a burning desire to reconquer the mainland. He evidently didn't talk with any Taiwanese or anyone who had a doubt that the KMT could reconquer the mainland (with the help of the U.S., that is). (A note of thanks, by the way, to my brother and sister-in-law, who sent the book to me, and to Ainsworth Books, who did a great job of packing the book when they sent it to my brother and s-i-l!)
  
  [Update: The K. C. Wu mentioned above also figured in Fires of the Dragon. Henry Liu interviewed Wu as part of his biography of Chiang Ching-kuo (CCK). Kaplan describes him as someone who "attempted to nurture a genuine democracy on the island" and notes that, "after watching CCK's agents spread a reign of terror across the island, [Wu] finally broke with the Chiang regime and fled to America" in 1954 (192). Ironically, Michener's chapter about Edith Wu ends with her apologizing for some unfinished work on the governor's house. She says, "'We've omitted some of the little finishings. After all, we do not think of this as our permanent home'" (97). But if she expected they would be moving to Savannah, Georgia Evanston, Illinois within four years, she didn't let Michener know.]
  


• A Pail of Oysters, by Vern Sneider (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1953)
  Sneider is more well-known for his book Teahouse of the August Moon, which was made into a movie starring Marlon Brando (as an Okinawan!). As Keelung Hong commented at a talk at Berkeley in 2003,

  Hollywood did not evidence the same interest in A Pail of Oysters as in his other books. Although well-reviewed, it was not a popular success. Even more than Formosa Betrayed, copies of A Pail of Oysters have disappeared from most libraries, probably on instructions issued to the student spies paid by the KMT to monitor Taiwanese on US college campuses.

  (Note: Hong's speech is worth reading in its entirety.) I noticed (without surprise) that the libraries in Taiwan don't have any copies of the English original, only of the Chinese translation that was published in 2003. This book was mentioned by a couple of people I interviewed; they said they had read it before they came to Taiwan. (A website related to Taipei American School's 50th anniversary recalls the book being "passed around the foreign community in a Catcher in the Rye book jacket".) I'm really eager to start reading this one.
  

[A Pail of Oysters] [books] [Communication and Global Society] [Taiwan] [The Voice of Asia]

Looking for a book...

I'm looking for a copy of Robert B. Kaplan's The Anatomy of Rhetoric: Prolegomena to a Functional Theory of Rhetoric. Language and the Teacher: A Series in Applied Linguistics 8. (Philadelphia: Center for Curriculum Development, 1972).

According to NBI (Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information database), there are no copies of this book in any library on the island. I've also checked several online bookstores and have come up with nothing. Anyone have a spare copy lying around?

[Anatomy of Rhetoric] [books] [contrastive rhetoric] [Robert B. Kaplan]

Scott will probably enjoy this one...

OBTAIN A PROSPEROUS FUTURE, MONEY-EARNING POWER, AND THE PRESTIGE THAT COMES WITH HAVING THE CAREER POSITION YOU'VE ALWAYS DREAMED OF. DIPLOMA FROM PRESTIGIOUS NON-ACCREDITED UNVERSITIES BASED ON YOUR PRESENT KNOWLEDGE AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE.
/*If you qualify, no required tests, classes, books or examinations.*/ *
*
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*
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24 hours a day, 7 days a week including Sundays and Holidays

Not just prestigious, these universities are also non-accredited! What more could you ask for?

(via a colleague)

Bold Plum: with the Guerillas in China's War against Japan

I was looking up the name of Michael Lindsay after finishing Philip West's Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916-1952 this morning. West mentions Lindsay, who taught at Yenching, and Lindsay's sympathy for the Communists. The reason I was interested in Linsday was that he was mentioned by name when R.O.C. (Taiwan) Minister of Education Cheng Tianfang (程天放) expressed to the founders of Tunghai his concern that they make sure they didn't hire any Communists or "fellow travelers" as faculty.

Anyway, I came across this website advertising a new book by Hsiao Li Lindsay, Michael Linsday's widow. The website has a 2006 copyright and says the book is coming soon. I checked Amazon, but the book isn't listed yet. Looks interesting, though!

[books] [Bold Plum] [Hsiao Li Lindsay] [Michael Lindsay] [Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations]

Violation from other parties, official notification from -----!

Dear ----- Member,

This email is to inform you, that we are upgrading our ways of security and your account may have been compromised by other parties.

Our terms and conditions you agreed to state that your account must always be under your control or those you designate at all times. We have noticed some
unusual activity in our research due upgrading related that your account indicates that other parties may have access and or control of your details in your account.

These parties have been involved with money laundering, illegal drugs, terrorism and various Federal Title 18 violations.

Your will need to re-enter some imformations about your account for advanced verification and to let us know that your are aware of this violation and due this way we can stop the outside parties.

We won't require your ATM PIN number for this operation!

Please follow this link to complete your security verification and protect your account :

Update your account now.

Please be aware, if you don't upgrade your account this will lead to money loss and we will have no other liability for your account or any transactions that may have occurred lately.

Thank you for your time and consideration in this matter .

Sincerely,
© 2006 -----

Bank name deleted. The original link (which I've also deleted) leads, of course, up a phishing line. I don't usually post the spam I get, but this time I couldn't resist...

CFP: Rhetorics of Social Formation

Received this through the CFP mailing list.

Rhetorics of Social Formation

University of Redlands, Redlands, CA
19 - 20 January 2007

The Centre for Rhetorics & Hermeneutics and the New Testament Rhetoric Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity is pleased to announce Rhetorics of Social Formation, the sixth in a series of highly successful international conferences exploring rhetorical theory in the context of pressing public issues.

This conference will examine the role of rhetoric in creating, elaborating, and sustaining social formation and small group communication - how is group identity formed? How must it change in order to meet new and unforeseen contexts? How does it social formation break down? How are new group identities formed from out of old? How are conflicting identities of members of multiple, if casual, group identities negotiated? What can we learn from groups whose success is seen by their growth and longetivity?

The organizers start with the premise that much of group identity and the devices that support that identity, including belief systems and ideologies, are derived from rhetorical constructs and represent the convergence of arguments meant to describe and explain realities as experienced by the group.

We invite papers that either illustrate or challenge that premise, using theoretical models and/or analytical methods, etc., from the disciplinary perspective of the presenter. All disciplines are welcome, including biblical studies, anthropology, ethnology, rhetoric, culture criticism, public sphere, and other social sciences and the humanities. We have traditionally provided a unique space for dialogue and cross-, inter- and transdisciplinary exchange.

We welcome papers examining the phenomenon of group and social formation from any area and any part of the world. Additionally, we welcome papers that deal with the formation of the gospel tradition and the emergence of diverse early Jesus and Christian communities. Proposals should be no more than 500 words long, and must include identification of institutional affiliation of the applicant, or, in the case of independent scholars, a brief resume.

In the past we have had presenters from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Columbia, France, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the USA. As in the past, we strongly encourage foreign scholars to continue to submit proposals.

Each presenter must submit their paper several weeks in advance. The programmatic assumption of our dialogues is that every participant has read the submitted works prior to arriving on site. Each presenter is given 10 minutes to offer a summary of your paper, and we then dedicate 45-50 minutes of unmoderated, roundtable discussion regarding the implications and contributions of your work. In this way, we are unique in both the care with which we approach your work and the ways in which your work is brought into conversation with others.

Proposals are due to the organizers by 1 May 2006 (though the date is not firm). For more information, please go to www.ars-rhetorica.net.

Sounds interesting--and they're looking for scholars from outside the U.S....

Nice site on semiotics

Just came across a great website called "Semiotics for Beginners" by Daniel Chandler. It's been up for over 10 years, but I only came across it today. The web is a big place!

Just to let you know I don't just buy books...

I finished reading Cold War Orientalism this morning. I found the book to be both interesting on its own terms and helpful to my thinking about my dissertation project. It introduced me to what Klein argues were some of the dominant Cold War era discourses in the U.S. regarding U.S.-Asian relations, both in terms of external relations and in terms of the assimilation of Asians within the U.S. The latter Klein sees as a way for the U.S. to demonstrate to Asia its good intentions during the Cold War era competition for the 'heart' of Asia. (I'm not sure how much Klein sees this as a primary motive for the middlebrow intellectuals' treatment of Asian Americans in their work.)

As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea that middlebrow intellectuals--and the government--in the U.S. encouraged Americans to develop a sense of empathy for the people of Asia provides a useful connection (or counterpoint) to the kind of empathy that development scholars like Daniel Lerner argued was necessary for people in Third World countries. Lerner argued that empathy was necessary for people in undeveloped countries so that they could learn to imagine ways of living that were different from their own. This would provide motivation for the integration of the various groups (tribes, clans) into the "imagined community" (not Lerner's term, of course!) of the nation and for the integration of the new nations into the global community (a community that excluded Communist countries, of course). The kind of empathy that Americans needed to develop, according to Klein, was something that would enable Americans to avoid the accusations of imperialism that were made against other Western powers.

Klein's chapter "How to Be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism" gives a good example of the discourse of empathy that she describes. She argues that Michener positions himself as "a 'listening man'" who does not privilege his own voice in the book but rather privileges the voices of the people he interviews. "Michener presents himself and his interviewees as leaping governments and engaging in direct communication with each other," she writes (132). Michener's portrayal of himself as a listener is an embodiment of the "curious and open-minded American presence in Asia" (133) that was part of the ideal of an empathetic America.

I also like the fact that although Klein does critique what she analyzes (pointing out, for instance, how Michener's work feeds into "the liberal critique of racism as individual prejudice [that] proliferated in the late 1940s and 1950s" [134]), she also tries to read these texts sympathetically, as well. She argues, for instance, that "it would be a mistake to dismiss Michener's liberalism as only a mystification of neocolonial expansion" (135). She prefers to see the texts and the discourses in which they participated as more complicated than that--as having more than one kind of effect on or relationship to the U.S.'s role in Asia.

[Update: I should also mention that I finished Fires of the Dragon early last week. It was quite an enlightening read. It was a fast read, too--I guess because of its narrative style.]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [empathy] [James Michener] [The Voice of Asia]

Adventures in Mandarin pronunciation

The former native Chinese speaker has complained recently that my mispronunciation of several tones in Mandarin is beginning to affect her pronunciation. Most egregious of my mistakes is my frequent reference to the "kitchen waste container" (廚餘桶 chu2 yu2 tong3) as the chu3 yu2 tong3 (楚瑜桶, perhaps named in honor of James Soong?).

Two recent opinion pieces on culture and democracy

Two interesting articles with somewhat different perspectives on the relationship of culture to democracy:

• "Democratization: One View from Kuwait" by Dr. Samar Rashdan Al-Roomi, Kuwait Arab Times (via Intermittent Clarity)
  
• "Democracy Isn't 'Western': Cultural determinists should look beyond Ancient Greece" by Dr. Amartya Sen, Opinion Journal (from the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page) (via The Blogora)

[culture] [democracy]

CFP: Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Received this through the CFP mailing list. It looks like an interesting project and would, I think, benefit from an international perspective.

Knowledge Economy: The Commodification of Knowledge and Information in the Academic System

Tomas R. Giberson, Ph.D. Oakland University, Michigan
Gregory A. Giberson, Ph.D. Salisbury University, Maryland

We are seeking proposals for papers to be included in an edited collection investigating the various ways the academic economy drives the purposes, processes, and outcomes valued from Academics, individually and collectively. We suggest that our behavior as academics is governed not only by our dedication to our individual disciplines and our specific specialties but also is influenced and often determined by varying professional, intellectual, social, and political factors. These factors differ by the size, prominence, and mission of our individual institutions, our tenure status, as well as the expectations of our colleagues, students, administrators, and local communities. The competing and often contradictory demands placed upon us are often at odds with the traditional notions of liberal education that persist as traditional performative façade, an idealization of the academy existing primarily in the lore, rituals, and mission statements of most colleges and universities but not always in the products faculty are expected to produce. As Jean François Lyotard observed in The Postmodern Condition, "The question (overt or implied) now asked by the professionalist student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer 'Is it true?' but 'What use is it?" (51) Indeed, the "value" of higher education has taken on new meaning, which often contradicts its traditional goals: critical and intellectual development, and civic engagement.

Members of all disciplines are invited to share thoughts, observations, and experiences in each of the three traditional areas of academic work: teaching, scholarship, and service. We also encourage submissions that address the implications of the meta economy-the interaction of these three areas on individual and systemic behavior. Historically, these three areas of the academic "job" are thought of as responsibilities defined in job descriptions and position postings. However, teaching, scholarship, and service have become commodities-outcomes that enable academics to advance their careers and achieve prominence among peers and administrators, who bestow the ultimate commodity for individual faculty members, tenure and promotion. As commodities, these become not the production of individual scholars and teachers, but units of value to be held, traded, and bargained with by universities, corporations, publishers, and degree holders to promote, trade, and sell.

Examples of questions that may be addressed include, but are not limited to:

Scholarship

• How has the commodification of knowledge influenced the research you engage in and the scholarship you produce?
• How is your behavior as a scholar influenced by the "number" and/or "quality" of publications required for tenure?
• How is your scholarly production consumed by the university and other institutions and individuals and how does that influence you as a professional academic?
• How has the increasing pressure to secure external funding through grants and the like impacted what and how you conduct research and scholarly inquiry?
• How does the pressure of publication affect the pedagogy within graduate and undergraduate education?

Teaching

• How does/did your perception of the professional implications of student evaluations influence your teaching in pursuit of tenure?
• How has your teaching been affected by the expectations of students, peers, and administrators?
• How are your teaching strategies influenced by the number of classes/students you teach in a given semester?
• How is your pedagogy influenced by the mission of your institution?
• How has your teaching been influenced by other external factors, local or otherwise?

Service

• How do service requirements influence your work as a teacher and/or scholar?
• How are service requirements for faculty accounted for in terms of tenure and promotion by the institution?
• How do service requirements influence your behavior in productive and non-productive committees?
• How do service commitments on the part of untenured faculty affect their bid for tenure?

Other

• How are the actions of your institution influenced by national rankings in teaching and research?
• How do federal, state, institutional, and unit-level budgets affect your behavior as an academic?
• How has the academic economy forced you to compromise your personal and professional goals?
• How have increasing expectations for productivity and assessment across generations influenced your relationship with other faculty?

Given the sensitivity of the topics addressed, we will accept submissions from authors who prefer their work to be published anonymously, particularly for aubmissions from untenured faculty. However, your submission must include a brief description of your institution, department, and your placement within the tenure process, along with reasons why using your name with your submission would cause problems. We hope that tenured faculty will want their names attached to their submission.

We are seeking proposals of 500 words or less for chapters between 3,000 and 7,000 words. We welcome submissions from faculty, administrators and staff. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2006.

For questions or to submit a proposal: knowledge_economy@hotmail.com

***************************
Greg Giberson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Director of Freshman Composition
Director of the Eastern Shore Writing Project
Department of English
Salisbury University
410-677-5003
***************************

Two new books in the former native speaker's library

Even though I'm only halfway through Cold War Orientalism right now, the post office still operates (to the extent that it operates) and two more books have found their way from various places in the U.S. (via Alibris) to my mailbox.

• Fires of the Dragon: Politics, Murder, and the Kuomintang, by David E. Kaplan (NY: Atheneum, 1992)
  This book was, I believe, recommended or listed in a posting by Michael Turton a while back. I found an inexpensive copy and got it while I could (had an e-coupon, which helped). The interesting thing about the hardback copy that I've got is that it has an American flag sticker taped to the spine and another sticker on the first page with an American flag and the name "COLONEL ELMER C. MARTIN" written below. He might have been the Elmer C. Martin, Sr. who passed away in 2000. Colonel Martin took good care of this book--it's in perfect shape.
  
  
• Transforming Agriculture in Taiwan: The Experience of the Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction, by Joseph A. Yager (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988)
  This one looked interesting because it's based on unpublished archival documents and covers the entire period, 1948-1979, when this US-ROC joint development agency was in operation.

[books] [Taiwan]

They have contests about these kinds of things?!

From a Times of India report:

MANGALORE: The Marathon Lecturer stopped at 11.30 am on Sunday, clocking 98 hours and beating the earlier world record of 88 hours for non-stop teaching.

Towards the end, the strain on Annaiah Ramesh had begun to show, and he had to be stopped by his mother and the guide. Ramesh, lecturer from the department of applied botany, Mangalore University, was in the quest of Guinness Book of Records, and began his lecture on Wednesday morning.

He wanted to clock in 101 hours, but spotting his incoherent speech, his mother Kamalamma and guide Y Srinivasa Reddy from the department of sericulture, Mysore University, and others convinced him to stop as he had already gone past the record.

According to the article, "Ramesh is fine, but disoriented due to lack of sleep." But what about his students??

[via]

CFP: Book collection about second-language writing across contexts

Would be nice to have some submissions to this book from Taiwan...

Also of interest: a conference on second-language writing at Tamkang University

Call for Papers—Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts

We invite contributions for an edited collection, Building Bridges: Second Language Writing Across Contexts, which attempts to close existing gaps in international conversations among second language writing scholars in elementary and secondary schools, two-year colleges, post-secondary institutions, and community programs. Much current scholarship on second language writing comes out of post-secondary institutions in the United States. This volume attempts to build bridges between this context and other sites of second language writing research, theory, and pedagogy.

We anticipate contributions to five major sections:

• Exploring Boundaries: Disciplinary Realms for Second Language Writing
• Understanding Contexts: The Current Status of Second Language Writing
• Posing Questions: Sites of Inquiry in Second Language Writing
• Supporting Collaboration: Projects that Cross Contextual Boundaries
• Identifying Resources: Annotated Bibliographies on Second Language Writing in Context

Contributions might focus on, but are not limited to:

• The current status of second language writing pedagogies, research, or theories in a specific context
• Institutional locations of second language writing instruction and research in relation to disciplinary boundaries
• What second language writing scholars would like to learn from their colleagues working in other contexts
• Underrepresented sites of second language writing scholarship
• Questions developing out of teaching or researching second language writing in a specific context
• Reports of in-progress or completed research that crosses contextual boundaries for second language writing
• Reports of in-progress or completed projects that reflect collaborations among scholars working in different contexts
• Suggestions for initiating and supporting collaborations among scholars working in different contexts

All contributions should be accessible to readers who are new to the field of second language writing or who primarily work in a related field. Given the volume’s focus on contexts, authors also should include descriptions of their own institutional contexts.

We request that submissions not exceed 20 manuscript pages (including a list of references, tables and figures, and appendices). Please follow the manuscript preparation guidelines outlined in the 5th edition of the APA Manual. We plan to send each manuscript out for external review to help us assess its quality and to generate feedback for revision.

Please send submissions to Jessie Moore Kapper (jkapper@elon.edu)—as Microsoft Word (.doc) or rich text format (.rtf) files—by June 30, 2006. Any questions also should be directed to jkapper@elon.edu.

Co-Editors:
Jessie Moore Kapper, Elon University, and Elizabeth Patton, Purdue University

Another new book in the former native speaker's library

Just received my copy of Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 by Christina Klein. I got the hardback edition for US$9.95 through the University of California Press website's sale. (Other books should be coming soon.)

Klein's book looks really interesting and useful to me. I'll probably post some goodies on my dissertation blog soon. [here] For now I want to quote something from the beginning of the book, where Klein is analyzing a scene from the play/movie The King and I. Klein argues that although the setting for the play is the late 19th century, it really spoke to American concerns with their relationship to Asia during the Cold War period. She argues that the sentimental relationship of Anna to the Siamese is "an idealized self-representation of the middlebrow artists and intellectuals" Klein discusses in her book. Klein illustrates this by analyzing two things going on in the scene that culminates in the "Getting to Know You" singalong:

At one level the scene produces a hierarchical relation between West and East: Anna is an adult who dispenses knowledge, and her students are ignorant children subordinate to her authority. When Anna replaces the old Siamese map with the new English one, she replaces the local and implicitly inferior knowledge of the Siamese with a metropolitan and implicitly superior knowledge derived from European models. In the best Orientalist fashion, she denies the Siamese the ability to represent themselves and insists that they can only know themselves through a Western and literally Eurocentric system of knowledge. But something else is going on here as well: Anna is more interested in forging connections between East and West than she is in demarcating racial and cultural differences. ... She presents a world in which East and West can be understood as related to one another outside the coercive ties of empire. A shared history of political independence, as well as small size, implicitly connects England and Siam. Anna animates this vision of interconnectedness by infusing it with emotion: as she sings "Getting to Know You," she translates the map's geography lesson into a playful song about the intimate bonds of friendship that can reach across national and cultural divides. More important, Anna opens up a way for the children to participate in the forging of these emotional--and international--ties when she invites them to sing along. ... By the end of the number the hierarchical differences that structured the scene at the outset ... are looser, although they do not disappear entirely. (11-12)

I must admit that when I have watched the movie The King and I in the past, I never looked at the "Getting to Know You" scene from this kind of perspective. But Klein's point about Anna's encouraging the students to sing along with her puts a new twist on the lyrics of the song. If we just think about Anna's point of view--when she's singing--lines like "Telling you my dreams, / Getting to feel that you're with me" sound as though her main concern is with having her students identify with her. But when the students sing, the point of view changes and now they're telling her their dreams. Thus there's at some level the expectation of an intercultural interchange going on here, despite the hierarchical relations between Anna and the Siamese children. I am struck by this because it complicates the notion of the cultural imperialism of Anna's actions.

Later in the book Klein engages in an in-depth analysis of the play and movie, concluding that

Anna's loving instruction establishes an exemplary hegemonic relationship: it achieves its goals through sentiment rather than through physical force and by inculcating a desire on the part of its objects to behave in a certain way. It suggests power exercised not through political or military control, but through relations of exchange and influence. Anna's influence, like American-guided modernization, results in local leaders governing themselves but always according to Anna's precepts. (215)

I should note that Klein stresses the "ideal" nature of the images of Anna and of the United States here. She isn't suggesting that this is what actually happened. (Certainly Taiwan's experience during the postwar years is enough to illustrate how tenuous the connection was between this image and the reality of U.S. influence in Asia.)

Anyway, I'm glad I found this book--and grateful to Rex at the Savage Minds blog who mentioned the U. of California Press book sale!

[I should add here--for people who are wondering why I'd go to the trouble of buying this book rather than getting it out of the library--according to Taiwan's National Bibliographic Information Network, no library in Taiwan owns this book... *sigh*]

[books] [Cold War Orientalism] [The King and I]

Homework and college students

This news is a little old, but a report in last Saturday's Taiwan News cites a study that found that "[m]ore than half of Taiwan's university freshmen spend less than one hour per day studying outside of the classroom" and "the situation is similar among college seniors".

The article also mentions that "more than 40 percent of seniors at state-run universities and colleges are working part-time, a much higher figure than their counterparts at private universities and colleges." This is interesting, continues the article, because it "contradicts a commonly held belief that students at private universities and colleges which charge a higher tuition are more likely to work on the side while pursuing their studies."

A China Times article that was reprinted on the National Science Council's website adds that the survey was done by over 40 educational researchers and was given to over 40,000 first-, second-, and third-year university students. The study was conducted by Peng Sunming (彭森明) as part of a larger study commissioned by the National Science Council.

[higher education] [National Science Council] [Taiwan]

International writing conference "pre-call"

Received this via H-Rhetor:

Save the Dates February 22, 23, &24, 2008

2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research Theme: Writing Research Across Borders

This is an exciting time where research on writing is having many births, rebirths, and growing spurts in many nations and with focus on many levels of schooling and development across the lifespan. At the 2008 Santa Barbara Conference on Writing Research we hope to foster dialogues across different writing research traditions, located in different national, disciplinary, and programmatic venues. We are currently making preliminary plans to hold the conference on Friday through Sunday February 22-24, 2008. We are in the process of inviting a premier panel of plenary and featured speakers to represent the diversity of writing research in the world and to symbolically invite further broad participation from researchers of all nations interested in all age levels, institutional settings, and disciplinary approaches.

This conference follows on the successes of the 2002 and 2005 Santa Barbara Conferences on Writing Research, with the themes of "Writing as A Human Activity" and "Writing Research in the Making." Further information about this current conference and the previous ones is available at

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf08/ [My note: this link doesn't work yet] [Now it does...]

http://education.ucsb.edu/netshare/wrconf05/

Later this spring watch for our full announcement and call for proposals. If you have any questions contact us at
writing@education.ucsb.edu

For the Organizing committee

Charles Bazerman
Sheridan Blau
Rober Krut
Susan McLeod
Paul Rogers
Amanda Stansell

I'm looking forward to hearing more about this, and will pass on what I hear. Would be nice to have some folks from Taiwan there!

Beautiful warm spring day...

In the span of less than two hours--between about 10:15 and 11:50--we saw three 2-car accidents and two 3-car accidents on Taichung Harbor Rd. Nothing serious enough to need an ambulance, but their cars are all going to need some body work. (If I were Michael Turton I'd probably have pictures of 'em, but unfortunately, you'll have to use your imagination.) Beautiful day. Drive carefully.

Hmmm....

Haven't felt one of those in a while... (Guess I'm not usually sitting in the office when they come.)

The View from Taiwan: Bias and the International Media

Michael Turton has a great rhetorical analysis/critique of a USA Today article about Taiwan/China/US relations, reflecting on the biased manner in which these relations are portrayed in the U.S. media.

I'm not sure that it's possible to write about Taiwan (or anything else, perhaps) without some sort of bias, but I agree with Michael that the international press tends not to write articles that are fair to Taiwan. And, of course, I feel strongly that being fair to Taiwan is pretty important. China, for some reason, gets cut a lot of slack in the press. As Michael demonstrates, articles often end up blaming the victim for the PRC's actions and statements. Guess they don't want to "hurt the feelings of the Chinese people"...

Marjorie Bly of Penghu

Earlier this evening I caught a story on the TV news about Pres. Chen's visit to Marjorie Bly, a retired American nurse who is in a Penghu hospital. The reason that I mention this is that I only first heard of her very recently when I was going through some archival documents for my disseration and she was mentioned in a letter from the late 1950s. It was quite an interesting coincidence.

Bly, whose Chinese name is 白寶珠 (Bai Baozhu, which means "White Precious Pearl"), has lived in Taiwan since 1952 (most of those years in Penghu), helping people with leprosy. She is 87 years old and is in failing health, and the president's visit was to express the country's appreciation for her love and care for people with leprosy. A Chinese-language story about Chen's visit to Bly is available here (thanks, Linda!). Another Chinese-language story that covers Bly's 50 years in Taiwan is here. There's an English-language story from 2002 that reports on a fund raised to help her in her retirement and to continue to help people with leprosy. And here is an English story on her receipt of permanent residency in honor of her work in Taiwan.

[Update, 3/11/06: David Bly has included and linked to more information on his blog, including a Taiwan News article that I hadn't noticed. (For some reason, the TN article--actually a Central News Agency release--gets Marjorie Bly's name mixed up, calling her "Bly Marjorie Ingeleiv"...)]

"這就是中國人所說的人情味..."

Last night we went to "Tea Work" on Wenxin Road for dinner. Walking into the restaurant, we spotted a cute little baby (maybe a year old) sitting in a high chair at a table across from the cashier. He was playing with his mother's wallet while she and a friend chatted. A few minutes later, as I took our order to the cashier, he held his mother's credit card out to me, as if to say, "沒關係,你拿去用!別客氣!"

我實在太感動了!年輕人,你好大方! (I didn't take his offer, of course...)

In news about Wikipedia...

From BBC News:

Online reference site Wikipedia blames US Congress staff for partisan changes to a number of political biographies.

Computers traced to Capitol Hill removed unpalatable facts from articles on senators, while other entries were "vandalised", the site said.

The article goes on to report that

Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it.

On the other hand, the article cites Wikipedia as saying that "its investigation showed the vast majority of edits from Senate IPs were 'beneficial and helpful'."

I suppose there's some degree of transparency to the Wikipedia's articles if you're willing to go to the trouble of figuring out who made particular changes, as the Wikipedia folks did here.

Journal of Public Deliberation

A few months ago I noted an article and an editorial in the Taiwan News regarding the possibilities for deliberative democracy in Taiwan. Tangentially related to that, today I came across the Journal of Public Deliberation. It doesn't have any articles about Taiwan (yet), but it looks interesting. And it's Open Access, through the Berkeley Electronic Press, which means your library doesn't have to pay companies like Elsevier tons of money to read it... (Wow! How many issues have I touched on in this short post?)

[Update, 2/10/05: Schenectady Synecdoche suggests asking the editors of JPD to set up an RSS feed. Sounds like a good idea! (I wanted to say this on SS's post, but her blog evidently doesn't like my comments: it tells me "Your comment was denied for questionable content." Hmmm... it's not like I cussed or anything...)]

[deliberative democracy] [Open Access journals] [public deliberation]

Puppy pics found over the holidays

When we were back home over the CNY holidays, I came across a few pics of Mei-mei from about 11 years ago. Thought I'd share a couple of 'em with y'all...

When I get time, I'll add a picture of her from her "awkward teenage years"...

A guest post from Mei-mei

New books in the former native speaker's library, CNY prep edition

The former native Chinese speaker and I went to Bookman Books (書林) downtown this afternoon so she could look for a book for her monsters. I managed to find some books that I can take with me to the in-laws' this weekend and read while they play majiang:

• The Hidden Dimension, by Edward T. Hall
• Beyond Culture, also by Edward T. Hall
• Communication Between Cultures, 5th ed., by Larry A. Samovar and Richard E. Porter

See a theme here? Yeah, I'm thinking about the ICC course I'll probably offer again next fall. The third book is a possible textbook for that course. I've been using a reading packet the last few times I've taught this course, but now I'm thinking a textbook might be a better way to go about it so students don't just get my idiosyncratic view of the field. (Instead, they'll get 2 other people's idiosynctratic view.) I've got some time to look it over and decide if I want to use it. Also ordered an inspection copy of Intercultural Communication: A Contextual Approach by James W. Neuliep. That one's a Sage book, though, and the problem with Sage books is that they're so doggone expensive. The quoted price for Neuliep's book is US$59.95--close to NT$2000. If I used that book, I would definitely not have any students. At least the Samovar and Porter book is only around NT$400 (with a discount), which students will still probably scream about since the course is only a semester long. (On the other hand, they usually pay NT$2000 or so for their Norton anthologies that they use for a year...)

The first two books are ones I should have read a long time ago, but didn't have time for until--well, actually, I still don't have time for them. But I'll make time to read them before next fall.

(This website has some information about proxemics, which is the theme of The Hidden Dimension.)

[Edward T. Hall] [intercultural communication]

Photo of the former native speaker at work...

Courtesy of the Simpsomaker--or is it the "Simpomaker"? (Note: I had to do a "PrtSc" to get a copy of the image--which is why the cursor is still showing...)

Seomtihng to sohw sutdnets nxet smeseter

Got this (forwarded) from ERG:

Cna yuo raed tihs? i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rsceearh at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs rpsoet it.

It doesn't always seem to follow the rule it mentions ("the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae"), and a missing apostrophe in a contraction makes one word hard to read, but still...

8 years ago today...

Back in 1997, I wrote about the first Chinese New Year that I spent with my then-future in-laws, but the only version left of that story is archived here...

In response to this:*

'Are you guilty?' said Winston.

'Of course I'm guilty!' cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. 'You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?' His frog-like face grew calmer, and even took on a slightly sanctimonious expression. 'Thoughtcrime is a dreadful thing, old man,' he said sententiously. 'It's insidious. It can get hold of you without your even knowing it. Do you know how it got hold of me? In my sleep! Yes, that's a fact. There I was, working away, trying to do my bit -- never knew I had any bad stuff in my mind at all. And then I started talking in my sleep. Do you know what they heard me saying?'

He sank his voice, like someone who is obliged for medical reasons to utter an obscenity.

"Down with Big Brother!" Yes, I said that! Said it over and over again, it seems. Between you and me, old man, I'm glad they got me before it went any further. Do you know what I'm going to say to them when I go up before the tribunal? "Thank you," I'm going to say, "thank you for saving me before it was too late."

--from 1984

[Update, 12/27/05: Well, now that (as everyone probably knows), the student in question has admitted to lying, I guess we should all let down our guards and realize that the wiretapping and other domestic spying activities the U.S. government is conducting couldn't possibly endanger the freedoms of patriotic Americans. After all, Colin Powell says it's OK...]

A must-read from the latest Written Communication

At the top of my list of articles to read:

Lillis, Theresa, and Mary Jane Curry. "Professional Academic Writing by Multilingual Scholars: Interactions With Literacy Brokers in the Production of English-Medium Texts." Written Communication 23.1 (2006): 3-35.

Authors' Abstract:

Scholars around the world are under increasing pressure to publish their research in the medium of English. However, little empirical research has explored how the global premium of English influences the academic text production of scholars working outside of English-speaking countries. This article draws on a longitudinal text-oriented ethnographic study of psychology scholars in Hungary, Slovakia, Spain, and Portugal to follow the trajectories of texts from local research and writing contexts to English-medium publications. Our findings indicate that a significant number of mediators, "literacy brokers," who are involved in the production of such texts, influence the texts in different and important ways. We illustrate in broad terms the nature and extent of literacy brokering in English-medium publications and characterize and exemplify brokers’ different orientations. We explore what kind of brokering is evident in the production of a specific group of English-medium publications—articles written and published in English-medium international journals—by focusing on three text histories. We conclude by discussing what a focus on brokering can tell us about practices surrounding academic knowledge production.

[academic publishing] [literary brokers] [multilingual scholars]

Update; upcoming vacation

A few items:

• The writing workshop with Charles Bazerman on Dec. 3 went really well. There were over 100 people attending. Dr. Bazerman's talks on the history of literacy and of social organization and on assessment were well-received, as were the panels on text-type in teaching and assessment. I hope that we'll be able to do something like this again in the future. (And as Dr. Bazerman himself said, we don't necessarily need to have a big scholar from the U.S. to come in order to have such a conference. Though it was nice to have him here!)
• Saturday the 10th I went to Tainan to give a talk to Dr. Clyde Warden's IMBA class on using secondary sources in research. The IMBA program at National Cheng Kung University has students from many countries (I met some from Taiwan, New Zealand, the U.S., and Cambodia) and conducts its classes in English. Some students seemed to have done quite a bit of research before and some hadn't, so I tried to aim my talk to those with less experience. I was happily surprised to see Robert, a former student from Tunghai who's now in the IMBA program. Quite a coincidence to run into him!
  
• Both Chuck and Clyde talked to me about my dissertation, encouraging me to "finish it!" So I'm going to try to work harder on it, cutting out some of the less necessary distractions in life. (Though there seem to be more and more necessary distractions...) One of the LNDs for me is blogging, so I'm going to be taking what I hope is an extended vacation from the blogging life (contingent upon my ability to control myself!). I hope to be back at some point in the next few months with some good news about my dissertation...
  

House of flying kitchen tiles, or The former native speaker's kitchen self-destructs! 2

In this episode of the continuing story of the slow demise of the former native speaker's kitchen, we see the former native Chinese speaker making lunch, oblivious to the kitchen's murderous intent...

Suddenly, she hears creaking sounds. Before she can do anything, pieces of tile fly toward her, pointing their sharp edges at her...

Fortunately, her slow-moving but loyal companion Bing Xiang (冰箱) blocks the ceramic shards of death, saving her life.

The gruesome aftermath (caution: not for those with weak stomachs!):






To view the first episode in this series, click here. Note that this sequel has come out less than a year after the first episode. Take that, Sam Raimi!

Actually, the real story is the FNCS heard the noises and quickly got the camera to take shots as the tiles flew off the wall. (Unfortunately, the battery was dead, so she had to wait until it recharged to take pics of the aftermath...) But why ruin a good story with the truth?

Plagiarism and the Chinese news media

ESWN has helpfully translated an article from MediaChina.net on the prevalence of plagiarism in news organizations in China.

Light-pole thievery in the ol' hometown

(Well, actually I grew up in Baltimore County. But it was close to the city! Anyway...) This article in the New York Times caught my attention: "Light Poles Are Vanishing, and Baltimore's Police Are Baffled":

Thieves are sawing down aluminum light poles. Some 130 have vanished from Baltimore's streets in the last several weeks, the authorities say, presumably sold for scrap metal. But so far the case of the pilfered poles has stumped the police, and left many local residents wondering just how someone manages to make off with what would seem to be a conspicuous street fixture.

The poles, which weigh about 250 pounds apiece, have been snatched during the day and in the middle of the night, from two-lane blacktop roads and from parkways with three lanes on either side of grass median strips, in poor areas and in some of the city's most affluent neighborhoods. Left behind are half-foot stubs of metal, with wires that carry 120 volts neatly tied and wrapped in black electric tape.

Things like this happen in Taiwan, also. Every time a typhoon is coming, someone discovers that some industrious thieves have stolen the steel water gates that are needed to help prevent flooding. But it's amazing to me the trouble the Baltimore thieves are going to to take these light poles. As the Times reports,

The culprits seem to have pole-snatching down to a model of precision and efficiency, city officials say. They appear to have gone so far as dressing up as utility crews, the police say, and placing orange traffic cones around the poles about to be felled, to avoid arousing suspicion among motorists.

(My question here is, if the police know that the thieves have done this, why haven't they caught anyone yet?)

(Thanks to MJ for the New York Times reference.)

Abstract for my part of Dec. 3's panel on writing instruction

Earlier I mentioned that my department is hosting a workshop on writing instruction on December 3. I'm on a panel about text-type in teaching and will talk about teaching students to use reference materials such as different kinds of subject dictionaries, subject encyclopedias, and handbooks when they're doing research. I want to post the abstract for my part of the panel and make a few comments about what I'll talk about. Here's the abstract:

Tunghai sophomore English majors are required to take an introductory course in research methods. Some of the more important ideas that I hope students in that course will think about concern how they understand themselves as users of (English-language) texts and how they understand how the texts they are using have been designed to function. I will use basic reference works such as dictionaries and encyclopedias to serve as an example to discuss orienting students to texts that are nominally of the same genre. In Research Methods, students look at how surface differences (such as textual conventions like the use of complete sentences vs. fragments, use of headings, bold typeface, and italics) among various reference materials can inform them of those materials' different purposes and audiences. I hope that this focus will help students become more conscious users of reference materials (in particular) and of texts (in general).

In my 10-minute talk, I want to take people through some of the experiences I had teaching the research methods course and coming to an awareness of what students needed in order to be able to use reference sources. I remember at first, years ago, when I gave students an exercise summarizing subject encyclopedia and subject dictionary articles related to their research topics, some of them would have a lot of trouble figuring out the main idea of the article. There turned out to be several reasons for this trouble, one of which was that the articles didn't always organize information in the same way. Articles in some reference works start out immediately with a brief explanation of exactly what the concept is. (Sometimes the brief explanation is all they have.) Others begin with a "funnel"-like introduction--moving from general to particular in ways similar to how students are often taught to write English essay introductions. (David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language is like this, for instance.) The variations in the organization of articles disrupted student expectations about how to identify the main idea(s). So part of what I found I needed to do was help students put aside those expectations.

Another related issue I will discuss concerns helping students see typographical conventions such as bolding, italicization, capitalization, and the use of different fonts as information rather than decoration. The idea that those surface features (what Paul Prior calls "typographical cuing systems") mean something was something I took for granted until I taught people and worked with people who didn't take it for granted. (This reminds me of Prior's story in Writing/Disciplinarity about an Indonesian undergraduate in one of his classes who had copied down a call number from the index but didn't know what to do with it. Prior's point is he considered libraries "transparent spaces" until then. What he considered "basic" knowledge was not so basic to the student who perhaps had never before used a library with an open-stacks system.) So one of the in-class activities I initiated involved looking closely at various dictionary entries on the same word, comparing and contrasting the information that different dictionaries presented about that word. (This exercise is similar to one that Roy Flannagan had us do in his graduate class in Milton back in the early 1990s, except, of course, we worked with different versions of a poem by Milton.) From there we could begin to discuss purposes and audiences for reference works and begin to see how compilers of those works find ways to condense different kinds of information in different ways for those audiences and purposes. Finally, we would look at the Oxford English Dictionary (which I think English majors should work with at least once before they graduate--if it's available, of course) in its physical and virtual forms. We worked on understanding the types and forms of information that the OED provides. The students' final assignment in this sequence was an exercise in "decompressing" the information in an OED entry and writing a brief "study" of a word based on that entry.

I hope that students were able to take out of these activities the idea that reading and using information in English requires attention to, and interpretation of the "typographical cuing systems" as well as the ability to read "through" the words to get at the meaning. I have some sense that many were able to do this. I think it also can help create an atmosphere in which learning how to use the MLA citation system is tied to communicative purposes rather than being merely an exercise in formalistic correctness.

Anyway, that's basically what I'm going to talk about on Dec. 3. If you're in the area, stop by! (Not just to hear me talk, though! More interesting people than I will be on hand!)

[EFL writing] [teaching research methods] [writing conference]

The celebrations continue...

The former native speaker just found out that his brother, a.k.a. "the former blogger" (heh... he's gonna kill me for that) won, along with a coworker, the Creativity and Innovation Award at his place of work. He works at Vanderbilt University's Peabody Library. Congratulations, Chris!

A weekend of celebrations

Friday was the former native Chinese speaker's birthday (she heard that Michael Turton's wife was born on Nov. 11 and just wanted to get in on a good thing, I guess). But she had to work on Friday night so we waited till Saturday to celebrate. I made reservations to go to a fancy shmansy hotel restaurant for a seafood dinner. She really wanted to have some Alaskan King Crab. When we got there, after braving Taichung's Saturday night traffic, we found out that what they had available was 'Alaskan King Crab Surprise'--the suprise being that we were supposed to have ordered 3 days in advance and that the AKC would have cost NT$9000... So I guess we were lucky not to have gotten the AKC. Anyway, we did have a decent meal of prawns and lobster, though if we had known... if their website had given any indication... *sigh*

And today (well, actually, Nov. 13) is my parents' 40th wedding anniversary! (How 'bout you, Michael? Anyone in your family having an anniversary today? heh heh...) My parents like to say they were married on Nov. 13; 13 months later my brother was born, and 13 months after that I was born. Good thing we're not superstitious...

Workshop on writing instruction in an EFL context

The Tunghai FLLD will be hosting a workshop entitled "Situating Writing Instruction in an EFL Context: A Conversation with Charles Bazerman" on December 3. Information about the workshop can be found here. Charles Bazerman (as the workshop's website says)

is an influential scholar in the field of Writing Across the Curriculum and has lectured in many countries about writing theory and practice.

He has authored and co-edited such books as Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of The Experimental Article in Science (1988), What Writing Does and How It Does It (with Paul Prior, 2004), and Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum (with Joseph Little, Lisa Bethel, Teri Chavkin, Danielle Fouquette, and Janet Garufis, 2005).

He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA).

Dr. Bazerman's website contains a bibliography of his works and online versions of many of his essays.

[Charles Bazerman] [EFL writing] [writing conference]