Researching Chinese English: the State of the Art

282 Pages·2017·2.992 MB·English

by  Zhichang Xu, Deyuan He, David Deterding

Multilingual Education
Zhichang Xu
Deyuan He
David Deterding E ditors
Researching
Chinese
English: the
State of the Art
Multilingual Education
Volume 22
Series Editors
Andy Kirkpatrick
Department of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Griffith University,
Brisbane, Australia
Bob Adamson
Chair Professor of Curriculum Reform, Department of International Education &
Lifelong Learning, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong
SAR
Editorial Board
Jan Blommaert, University of Tilburg, Tilburg, The Netherlands
Kingsley Bolton, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Feng Anwei, The University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Ofelia Garcia, The Graduate Centre, City University of New York, USA
Saran Kaur Gill, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia
Mingyue (Michelle) Gu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, 
Hong Kong SAR
Gu Yueguo, The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Hartmut Haberland, Roskilde University, Denmark
David C. S. Li, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, 
Hong Kong SAR
Li Wei, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
Low Ee-Ling, National Institute of Education, Singapore
Tony Liddicoat, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
Ricardo Nolasco, University of the Philippines at Diliman, Manila, 
The Philippines
Merrill Swain, Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto, 
Canada
Virginia Yip Choy Yin, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, 
Hong Kong SAR
The book series Multilingual Education publishes top quality monographs and
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Zhichang Xu • Deyuan He • David Deterding
Editors
Researching Chinese
English: the State of the Art
Editors
Zhichang Xu Deyuan He
School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
and Linguistics Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Monash University Gadong, Brunei
Clayton, VIC, Australia
David Deterding
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Universiti Brunei Darussalam
Gadong, Brunei
ISSN 2213-3208 ISSN 2213-3216 (electronic)
Multilingual Education
ISBN 978-3-319-53108-3 ISBN 978-3-319-53110-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53110-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937651
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Preface
English in China and the Continuing Story of Chinese
Englishes
Arguably the most important issue in relation to the story of English in contempo-
rary China is that of the remarkable statistics associated with the spread of English
in China, in particular the frequent reports of the many millions of people avidly
learning the language. Despite this, the reality is that the statistics we actually have
about the numbers of ‘English-knowing’ people in China are guesstimates at best,
although some guesstimates have been informed by hard information. For instance,
the benchmark national language survey of 1999–2000 reported on by Wei and Su
(2012) indicated that by the late 1990s around 400 million people had studied
English up to junior high school level. Such information is now 16 years out of date,
and today one can only speculate about how many more millions of learners of
English there have been since then, and how many people in China now ‘know’
English, to some extent at least. As far as the contemporary sociolinguistics of
China are concerned, it is also relevant and important to recognise that the past few
decades have not only seen the spread of English-language learning on an unprec-
edented scale but also the simultaneous promotion of Putonghua (Mandarin)
throughout the whole of China, where the major objective has been the ‘complete
nationwide popularization for Putonghua’ and ‘removal of dialect barriers’ through-
out the whole of the country (Wang and Yuan 2013: 27).
As far as English is concerned, however, the essential conundrum is not how
many folk are studying or have studied the language but rather how many people in
China actually use the language in their everyday lives. The domain of education is
obviously of key importance in this context, as English is not only taught as a sub-
ject in all schools and universities but also has gained an established presence
through English-language textbooks and even English-medium courses taught at
many universities and some high schools. For many students, gaining a command of
the language has also been of vital importance in order to study overseas, and in
2014, it was estimated that there were some 460,000 Chinese students studying
v
vi Preface
overseas, of whom many had opted for English-speaking institutions in the USA,
the UK, and Australia (Bolton 2013; Bolton and Graddol 2012; Institute of
International Education 2015).
In addition to the domain of education, English also has evident currency within
the business community in China, in particular with those Chinese companies
involved in international trade and finance, although until now very little empirical
research on the use of English in this domain appears to have been done. Another
domain where English has had a wide currency is that of tourism, and the numbers
of international tourists have been increased substantially through such milestone
events as the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai
and the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou. Again, however, little research has been
carried out on the role of English in this domain, with the exception of a number of
studies that focused on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (Gao 2010). Finally, there
is the domain of media, where, perhaps surprisingly, the use of English has grown
remarkably, with a 24-hour English-language news channel, China Central
Television Channel 9 (or CCTV 9), as well as the English-language China Daily,
and a number of other English-language publications that are available on the
Internet, including Global Times, 21st Century Weekly and Beijing This Month,
among many others. Whatever the utility of such publications in providing news to
foreigners and tourists in China, these government-steered media also routinely pro-
mote official ideologies and policies to an international audience through English
(Alvaro 2015).
At the level of linguistic analysis, there has been much discussion since the 1990s
concerning the extent to which ‘China English’ or ‘Chinese English’ can be regarded
as a variety in similar fashion to such Outer Circle varieties as Indian English,
Malaysian English and Philippine English (Kirkpatrick and Xu 2002; Bolton 2003).
This debate continues to the present and to a large extent turns on the issue of
whether distinctive features at the levels of phonology (accent), lexis (vocabulary),
morphology and syntax (grammar) and discourse are sufficient (and sufficiently
regular or stable) to warrant the description of such forms of language in terms of a
‘variety’ (Xu 2010a, b). One essential problem is coming to grips with the indeter-
minacy of applying the notion of variety to what have traditionally been regarded as
clusters of features associated with the use of English in an Expanding Circle con-
text, that is, an EFL rather than ESL context. The question then raised here as in
similarly indeterminate settings is how to classify and analyse distinctive features of
linguistic use, as varietal features, or as instances of language learner varieties,
Chinese-English interlanguage, language learner approximative systems and so on.
These are all interesting questions, and issues deserving greater attention and
research, as evidenced by the interesting and illuminating contributions to the pres-
ent volume, which, as explained in the introduction, wishes to ‘unpack’ the notion
of ‘Chinese English’, and its relevance to the wider fields of Asian Englishes and
world Englishes. The volume comprises key sections on Chinese-English phonol-
ogy, vocabulary, grammar and discourse, cultural linguistics and research scholar-
ship on the topic of Chinese Englishes. Once again, many of the contributions
usefully and understandably focus on the use of English within various domains of
Preface vii
education, as it appears clear that it is here within the context of schools, colleges
and universities that ‘communities’ of users (if that term truly fits) may be most vis-
ibly found (Bolton and Botha 2015; Botha 2014).
This volume also achieves another important aim in expanding our thinking
about future areas of research in the study of English in China, including new areas
of analysis in phonology, morphosyntax, cultural linguistics, rhetoric, attitudes and
multilingual creativity. In addition, I would suggest there is also a real need for
much more research on the sociolinguistics of English in China from both a macro-
and micro-perspective. At the level of macro-description, we still lack detailed case
studies of English in the business sector, in relation to international trade and com-
merce and in relation to the tourist industry. At the micro-level, we also lack detailed
studies of the impact of English in the lives of the Chinese students who are now
learning English to what are by any description rather high levels of language pro-
ficiency. In addition, there are not many fine-grained descriptions of the role of
English in the language worlds of these young people (Bolton 2013), at a time when
the Chinese nation continues to experience rapid economic, social and linguistic
change. In this context, other new frontiers for research include the code-mixing
and ‘translanguaging’ habits of increasing numbers of young people in China
(Zhang 2012, 2015).
This is a fascinating and important area of study, and this volume provides new
perspectives and opens new possibilities for future research and scholarship with
particular reference to the role of English in China’s education system. The editors
are to be greatly commended for bringing together an important selection of inter-
esting articles into a volume that describes both the continuing story of the English
language in China, as well as providing a benchmark study that will serve as an
important point of reference for a number of years to come.
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Kingsley Bolton
References
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Contents
What We Know about Chinese English: Status, Issues and Trends ........... 1
Zhichang Xu, David Deterding, and Deyuan He
Part I Researching Chinese English Pronunciation
The Pronunciation of English in Guangxi: Which Features Cause
Misunderstandings? ........................................................................................ 17
David Deterding
The Hong Kong English Syllable Structure ................................................. 33
Lian-Hee WEE
Part II Researching Chinese English Lexis, Grammar
and Pragmatics
Lexis-Grammar Interface in Chinese English: A Corpus Study
of the Prototypical Ditransitive Verb GIVE ................................................. 49
Haiyang Ai and Xiaoye You
Researching Collocational Features: Towards China
English as a Distinctive New Variety ............................................................. 61
Jianli Liang and David C.S. Li
A Corpus-Based Study of Syntactic Patterns of Nominalizations
Across Chinese and British Media English .................................................. 77
Ying Liu, Alex Chengyu Fang, and Naixing Wei
A Study on Modified-Modifying Sequence in the Compositions
by Chinese Advanced Users of English ......................................................... 93
Wendong Jiang
Pragmatics in Chinese Graduate Students’ English
Gratitude Emails ............................................................................................. 109
Wei Ren
ix