What We Talk About When We Talk About Talk

I may have mentioned this before, but – I’m way out of my league, professionally. Last term I taught two three-hour (!!!) undergraduate conversation classes, plus two graduate courses: sociolinguistics, and second language research design. You can refer to the post called “Foreign Expert” for more details, but suffice it to say that the graduate courses were…challenging, primarily due to the fact that half my students had only the most rudimentary command of English. And by rudimentary, I mean that few would have been comfortable introducing themselves and their hobbies in a 25-second impromptu talk. Discussing “the failure of positivism to address the issues of subjective experience in pedagogical research” becomes surprisingly tricky under these circumstances. Nonetheless, my students worked hard, and I thought and thought and thought about what the concepts with which we were wrestling really entail, and boiled things down to examples and metaphors as best I could. All in all, I’m not convinced they emerged from the course with a graduate-level understanding of the material, but they seemed to love the process, if nothing else. I can be content with that.

This term is a different matter altogether. First off, I now have four undergraduate classes, instead of two. Last term I was given the cream of the crop, as it were – those students whose English test scores had landed off the charts, and who had also proven themselves to be motivated, obedient little nerds. I adored them, and they had a blast doing all the weird things I make students do: acting with strange objects (buckets, babydolls, pictures of dead fish, sticks, fans, Kleenex), runway fashion shows, creating TV ads for ridiculous products, drawing pictures of the junk in the bottom of their backpacks, writing poetry, curating art shows, and running madly through the halls, to name a few. They giggled and shrieked their way through the term, consistently blowing me away with their insane vocabularies (“intrepid,” “synergy,” “talismanic,”) and their participatory joy.

This term, I have the kids who couldn’t give a shit. To be fair, there are always two or three in a class who desperately want to learn, and who ask to talk about politics and philosophy and world events. That means, out of my four undergraduate classes, 140 students total, about 10 of them still like studying English. The rest are there because A) they thought it would be an easy major, or, more commonly, B) their parents made them. So, I have 130 students who are all fascinating individuals: potential budding chemists, anthropologists, wedding planners, CEOs, hairdressers and basketball stars; yet they are doomed to futures as English teachers, burned out before they finish college, and destined to plod reluctantly through unfit careers, spreading the boredom of poor language education to other unfortunate students enacting their filial piety in a contradictory setting of global capitalism and insular propaganda.

You should never teach what you do not love; students can tell the difference. Think of your favorite teachers in high school or college – they were vibrant, interested, enthusiastic. That kind of enthusiasm is infectious, and seeds inspiration in students. Boredom is just as contagious, and with deeper-reaching consequences. A great course may be later eclipsed by other interests, but a bad teacher can turn you off to a topic for life. I am hereby trying to save a few lost souls, encouraging them to use their language skills in other fields, and working to make their conversation classes unforgettable, or at the very least, amusing, even if they’re sick of English. So far so good – having them translate menus for imaginary foreigners, and teach each other how to use chopsticks while I wandered through the classroom pouring them tea seemed to be a big hit. So did the role-play where they had to act like one of their parents, while their partner pretended to be them. One of the scenarios for this particular activity involved confessions of pregnancy, which elicited genuinely shocked yowls from the class, followed by impassioned play-arguments complete with face-slapping and dragging by the hair “to the abortion clinic.” Graphic, totally. They loved it. We’re making friends…now if I could just remember all of their names.

The names, by the way, are an esoteric art form, as far as I can tell. Chinese naming practices are in many ways much richer than those in much of the West; they bring to mind Native American traditions from the Plains. The complexity of characters and double-triple-multiple meanings lend layers and sometimes magical depth. Some are superstitious: if a child is born at a time of year which an astrologer deems deficient in some aspect of the 5 elements (earth, metal, water, wood, fire), then it is not uncommon for parents to select a name that has a character containing the character for the weakened element, even if it is not expressed in the pronunciation of the syllable, in order to correct the imbalance. For example, if a child is lacking in the water element due to astrological patterns at the time of birth, then the parents may choose a name that has the character or radical for water imbedded in a syllable of the name. Other names are selected for their poetry: one student of mine is called Hongzhong (2nd tone, 1st tone), which literally means “Red China.” He was born during the Cultural Revolution, and his parents’ zeal is reflected in his name. Another student is called Hui, which literally means “can,” in the sense of can-do; she was born in a small mountain village, and her mother wanted her to have the strength to find a better life for herself, and so blessed her with a name that signaled her competence in any situation. What is most interesting about the names, I find, is the fact that foreign language students are in the habit of taking a name from the language they are studying to use in the classroom. Although cultural renaming is not a practice I generally condone, especially not in an ESL context, all of my undergraduate (and many of my graduate) students have “English” names. Some are taken directly from literature or movies: I have a lot of Emmas, Janes, Lindsays (think Lohan), and Andys (from Andy Lau). Others, though, are chosen for their phonetic similarity to their Chinese names: June sounds a lot like Jun, for example; and still others are picked for content. These are the most interesting: I have had a Pineapple, a Simple, a Shine, a Nemo, a Sea, a Freezing, a Fire, a Doo-doo (no kidding), a Nokia, and a Robotech. Comparing wild names is a common chat-topic between foreign teachers here; the creativity and absurdity of many never ceases to amaze me, but I relish the sincerity with which the students approach the idea of self-identity. I mean, why not Shine? I think it’s beautiful.

My two graduate courses this term are semantics and pragmatics. Don’t tell anyone, but I never actually took semantics in graduate school. I studied plenty of pragmatics, which deals with many of the same concepts, but turned my attention toward phonetics and phonology, and later psycholinguistics and cognitive science, coming at semantics from the direction of neurolinguistic processing and models of the way language is organized and apprehended within the physical and reflective brain. The notion of “concepts” has a different focus when discussed from the point of view of neural maps than it does when arguing for or against the representational theory of mind. Needless to say, teaching a graduate-level semantics course when you only have an MA yourself is something of a professional stretch, but I am loving the opportunity to lose myself again in the academic literature of my discipline; teaching ESL and developmental skills to teens as I was in Portland, it’s easy to fall away from the brainier aspects of language study. I now get to stretch muscles I thought had atrophied. I get to google other professors’ lecture notes online; I get to read and read and read and read and read. Every class is like a research project for me. I am in a constant state of homework.

Someone asked me what pragmatics has to do with linguistics. It is another example of a word having different applications in different communities, in this case linguistics versus philosophy (a question reserved for semantics); it has nothing to do with pragmatism in the “sensible” sense. It has more to do with the way language is used in context. The concept is much more clearly stated in Chinese. In Mandarin, “semantics” is “yuyixue,” literally “the study of language meaning.” Pragmatics is “yuyongxue,” or “the study of language use.” While these labels occur to me as somewhat oversimplified, they do call attention to what is probably the primary distinction between the two disciplines: semantics is concerned with the notion of meaning at the language level – it asks questions about sense and reference, about the relationships between senses (think antonymy, synonymy, metonymy, etc.), and about how meanings are defined, extended, modeled, retrieved, learned, and interconnected. Pragmatics, on the other hand, seeks to understand and explore the ways human language and situations interact, and asks questions about context, mutual belief, and the encoding of intention. The simplest example I can give is this:

Mary: Can I offer you a piece of pie?
Ellen: I’m on a diet.

A semantic analysis might focus on the truth conditions of the utterances, while a pragmatic analysis looks at the fact that Mary was not actually asking about her own abilities to procure pie for Ellen, despite the “literal” meanings of the words themselves, nor was Ellen offering a non sequiter as a response. The intentions encoded in the communicative exchange were actually something along the lines of, “I am your host; I want to be polite; I want to give you something to eat; I have pie; I will give you pie if you want pie,” followed by “I acknowledge your gesture; I do not want pie; I will insert mildly self-deprecating comment about my own physical stature to reflect my desire to remain in solidarity with you,” and so forth. Pragmatics starts from the assumption that there is no such thing as decontextualized language, and goes from there. It is even possible for a person to have a pragmatic disorder, as the child in this exchange who is unable to make the necessary connections from one utterance to the next in his therapist’s question:

Speech Therapist: “So, you like ice cream. What are your favorite flavors?”
Child: “Um, hamburgers, french fries, pickles, chips…”

In pragmatics, we talk about fun things like indexicals: who is “you” and when is “now” and what is “that”? In semantics, we’re currently struggling to understand the problem of infinite polysemy: just about any word can be used to mean just about anything. It’s tricky, all that.

So, a couple times a week, I get dressed up and stroll into a lecture hall (they had to give me a lecture hall because too many students are auditing my pragmatics course; I have 47 students – in a graduate seminar), and get covered with chalk while yelling about meaning and reference and context. My students are mostly silent, but they laugh at the right moments, so I think they get it, for the most part. I make them keep journals, and I read them every week and write back, like a long, drawn-out game of passing notes, only I get to use a red pen (considered lucky in China), and I have way more note-friends than I ever did in high school. My semantics class is similar – mostly the same students, with a few new ones thrown in for spice, with only 25 regulars, and a rotating cast of perhaps 10 auditors. You can never tell the auditors from the “watchers,” those sent by the Party to monitor your lectures for moral correctness. I play innocent whenever possible, and let them bring up the tough subjects. I know more Mao than they do; these are Confucians, this new, experimental crop of communo-capitalists.

On a final note, a word to the wise: studying pragmatics will make you crazy. In the same way that a desktop medical reference text can transform your mild headache into sure signs of jaundice, leukemia, brain cancer and encephalitis (or maybe my own paranoid hypochondria is showing), looking too deeply into the inner workings of how intentions are encoded can make even the simplest linguistic exchange seem like a near disaster:
“You look nice today.”
“What the hell is THAT supposed to mean, HUH?!”

On top of all of these investigations into meaning, I have started studying Chinese again with a tutor. I can politely offer several kinds of tea, describe the placement of furniture in my living room, and enumerate my hobbies (cooking, boxing, weightlifting, reading – she thinks I’m so weird). Someday I hope to actually be able to have a normal conversation, but then I realize that I can’t even do that in English anymore. Let’s chat here on the perimeter, somewhere – these are letters from the fringe. As the postcard on my refrigerator says, “You cannot find and touch horizon if you do not go far away.”

~ by knifemaker on March 17, 2008.