Literacy shmiteracy

[flonnebonne]

"Fanfic in Chinese is better! All the English ones are so bad! And you know, there's so much...18+ stuff!"
--something a Gr. 8 student said to me the other day

Getting students to read fanfic to help them improve their language abilities sounds good in theory, but all the badfic and porn out there gets in the way. The last thing you want is parents complaining that you told their kids to read porn. I think anime fandoms are especially porny, for whatever reason. Too bad, since that's what the Gr. 8 student likes.

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On another note....when I read in Japanese (which isn't that much), I tend to read crap. I read celebrity news--about Westerners, so I can't even make the excuse that I'm gaining cultural knowledge. I read manga and rarely books. I read freaking MSN ads. I rarely ever read anything difficult or substantive. And because I don't read difficult stuff in Japanese, I don't have the language to even think about difficult stuff in Japanese. I am barred from higher thought.

It really hit home the fact for me that access to high levels of literacy = access to thinking = access to power.

(This is my way of saying, "Ugh, I should have read more essays to prepare for the stupid JLPT.")

Comments

[darklight90.livejournal.com]

Getting students to read fanfic to help them improve their language abilities sounds good in theory, but all the badfic and porn out there gets in the way.

True that. I tried that with my brother and only succeeded in frying his brain from all the slash pairings we encountered.

[flonnebonne]

Yep. And even if it isn't slash, it's probably got too much romance in there for most young boys to be comfortable with it.

[ontogenesis.livejournal.com]

Hahah, slash trap...

Yeah, for the JLPT high levels, you have to do more serious reading. I think manga is good for conversational stuff, or specialty vocabulary, but not generally science (unless you're reading that one about the kid who can see bacteria and stuff.... name slips my mind).

[flonnebonne]

Ha, is "slash trap" an actual term? If not it should be.

With the new JLPT you need some casual language too for the listening section (although you could definitely pass with just serious language). You don't need *rude* language though, which is what manga is good for learning.

Is the bacteria one Moyashimon or something? I've heard of it but never read it. Science makes me run away!

[harumi.livejournal.com]

Yup. There's the separation between language fluency as well. BICS (basic interpersonal communication skills) can form within a year, and make people seem fluent or even native-like. CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency) however, will take as much as 10 or more years to form. So academic language takes time, yo. Which is why education is so important. Because if you can't develop CALP, or aren't given enough time to develop it *cough* NCLB *cough* you're cutting people off from a lot of things.

[flonnebonne]

The sad thing is I have neither good BICS nor CALP at this point (but if I live in Japan for a month my BICS will come back).

I heard CALP usually takes 5-7 years? For students in the school system, anyway. Ten is such a depressing number.

Man, everything I hear about NCLB makes me want to not teach in the US, even if there are no jobs here. Didn't Obama say he wanted to axe NCLB, though? What happened to that?

[harumi.livejournal.com]

It depends on the year. The later you learn English, the longer it takes, which makes sense. A 6 year old's CALP will mostly form alongside her peers, but a 15 year old will be essentially 11 years behind. I think 10+ is the upper limit, assuming there is a limit. Some never develop CALP after all. And recent research has shown that overall comprehension can only happen if a reader understands 95% of the words, which is pretty scary also.

Aw man, NCLB sucks, like really. You know how much time they give teachers and students in ESL programs out of those programs and onto the native speaker track? 3 years. At most. a;sdkjfa;slkdjfads arrrrrrrrrgh. And then they wonder why immigrants and their children are doing so poorly in schools.

Let's not even talk about what Obama is going to do, because I have no idea. Like many, I've been pretty disappointed, but the Republican candidates are even worse. Ugh, America, why you keep failing?!

[flonnebonne]

Ah, that makes sense. The kids who immigrate over here in the higher grades have heartbreakingly high dropout rates. I saw it on my practicum in a public school.

I've heard the 95% thing too and totally believe it. Vocab vocab vocab. It just takes ridiculous amounts of time to learn, especially if your L1 isn't similar to the target language.

Three years??? That's just...pedagogically unsound. Is that for students of any age? Makes no sense.

The one thing I've heard about the US that sounds awesome to me is bilingual education. We're starting to copy it here in my province in a few places (it's all Mandarin-English classes). Have you got a lot of that going on in your state? Ever observed a class? It sounds super interesting but I bet they need ridiculously well-trained teachers to pull it off.

[harumi.livejournal.com]

It is. When we got into talks about it our professors went into a hissing/spitting fit of RAEG. The NCLB is incredibly unsound, pedagogically, theoretically, practically, you name it, it's got problems. I don't know what they were thinking.

There are a few Spanish-English and French-English bilingual programs, but while they work well in theory, the program has to be designed very well, and the teachers well trained to pull it off. Unfortunately politics again gets in the way. Michigan's bilingual education is in danger of being closed down after affirmative action was voted away (ugh, the ignorance of the population just frustrates me. It's not about quotas people!). Pennsylvania has not, and the programs seem to be thriving. A few of my professors have kids in those programs, and according to them, they're bilingual, so that's something.

I'm hoping to do an internship at one of those places this summer. Wish me luck.

[flonnebonne]

NCLB (and your school system in general) is kind of a boogeyman up here. Our province's union just has to mention NCLB and all the teachers get scared. "Don't let standardized testing ruin our schools!" My cousin (who's a vice-principal) trained his nine-year-old kid to be able to give a very cogent argument against standardized testing.

Ha ha I'm such a hypocrite though. I'm working part-time at an SAT prep centre. It's uber reductionist education.

OOOH, if you do do an internship at one of those places I would love to hear about it, even briefly. Do they generally stick to one language at a time, or do they mix it up? I'm guessing in the lower levels they'd have to mix it up.

[harumi.livejournal.com]

Depends on the program. From what I've heard, it's half and half. So sometimes every other week, other times every other day, or half day. Bilingual programs are ideally supposed to have half-English/half-other speaking students, so that both can exchange. Since America is such an English dominated country though, it mostly doesn't work that way, so more emphasis on the other language portion is given to give it a little balance in the beginning. Toward the end though, students should be fluent in all four skills for both languages, ideally.

[flonnebonne]

Cool. I'll have to look into it more on my own. Wish I could have been in a program like that! (Though as a kid I probably would have rebelled.)

[cryforthedream.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the hell that student is talking about. I think they're different animals. And none is better than the other at the higher levels.

I can't speak for Japanese literature/fanfic, but for everything I've read in Chinese (I'm a chink) they elicit different feelings than something in English. What is something I always found interesting, and I think Japanese in somewhat similar, is that the use of kanji can have multiple subtle meanings so there's a lot more interpretation by the reader that may not even be what the author intends. The language itself has its own ambiguities, in that regard. In contrast, I've always found the sort of things you can do with the English language to be super fun and interesting, but it's like having a whole stockroom of weapons and you have to be a lot more careful with what you use to elicit a reaction from the reader. The way you can play with the order of words, the way you squeezethingstogetherifyouwant, the freaking AWESOME variety of metaphors and adjectives you can utilize, all these things. There's less subtlety on average (and I always found Asian literature to be very subtle, which some people confuse for being bland), but you get a better, more individual feel for how an author wants to put things together. For me, a great majority of Asian literature reads kind of the same in terms of style-- it could be cultural, but I think in part it has to do with just the way the language is built.

Let's take an example from one of your fics:

"Miyagi checks the ball with Rukawa and as soon as it's in his hands again he's a blur racing down the court faster than anyone I've ever seen and he's going in for the lay-up but Rukawa and Sakuragi - no slouches in the speed department either - are already there to block him but one no-look pass later and the ball is in Mitsui's hands and then it's not, it's sailing in a perfect parabola through the air and through the net with barely a whisper of sound to acknowledge that it's good, not just good but great holy shit."

You could never emulate the "feel" of that sentence into Chinese. And no one could write something that great except for you. That's how I feel. I can try my ass off to write as well as you (and lord knows I've tried. The entire Hiroshi backstory chapter I slaved over trying to not just hit Inoue's voice, but also trying to get even an iota of your "awareness" of how the language transverses to the reader) but I never can. However, I can write my own way: and that hot steaming mess that comes out the other side is something that I believe, even tinged by the voices of so many other great authors I've read and tried to emulate, is still distinctly me. At the same time, I can write something in Chinese or Japanese, but I think I lose a bit more of my "voice" at the cost of having something that's just overall more poetic.

tl;dr: Slap that kid and make the student read your shit. That'll convert 'em.

[flonnebonne]

Thank you for your long comment--this gave me a lot of food for thought! Both for me-as-teacher and me-as-language-student.

My Japanese reading is still at a very literal level, and I can't read Chinese at all, but I do get the impression that you can do all sorts of things with Chinese characters that aren't really possible in English. In the manga XXXholic, for instance, the authors keep using the kanji 遭 for "to meet" instead of the more usual 会, which sounds more...I don't know, fateful or something. Most of this stuff flies over my head. You can also be all vague in Japanese about who did what (because you don't need to have a grammatical subject in every sentence in Japanese), which gives me a big headache sometimes.

I like the idea of every language having a different stockroom of linguistic weapons. (Ha ha, nice metaphor. Metaphors are great weapons.) I can see what you mean about English as being more weapon-like and Japanese & Chinese being more subtle-like. I was really surprised, though, that you felt the difference was that great. I just assumed that the amount of obvious, individual style that you can pour into English can be done in Chinese too (if not in the same way). But I guess all the things that are ANNOYING about English for language learners--the lack of correlation between spelling and pronunciation, the irregularity of its rules, the relative rigidity of its word order, the capitalization, the tons of punctuation, the plurals and articles and cases and on and on--are actually really useful tools in the hands of experienced writers. Hence the obvious, individual style you can pull off in English.

You are too hard on your writing. Two things you can do very well that I can't do at all are creating characters and plotting. Both of those are very rare in fanficland. There are a lot of really good wordsmiths out there, people with an amazing awareness of language and character relationships, but there are few people who can make OCs that don't suck and write something long and full of plot. And there are fewer still who can FINISH something long and full of plot. But you're doing it. Being able to sustain interest in your fic for a long time--and really caring about it, working hard to improve it--is a skill too, IMO.

Your style is actually very refreshing to read for me, since a lot of fanfic writers dwell on pretty little details and you don't. Sometimes I just want some basketball, man. Just write from the heart and don't kill yourself over the little things!

As for my student...there is no way I'll ever show a student my fanfics, ha ha. I keep my online life a zillion miles away from my teaching life. i don't write porn, but I occasionally have a bit of sex in my fics, and there are always parents who'll disapprove of very innocent things, so I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure the student doesn't have enough experience with English to have a good feel for the aesthetics of the language right now. She's still reading in English at a pretty literal level. She's only grade 8, so she's probably just starting to get to the point where she can appreciate aesthetics in her first language, never mind English. I'm pretty confident she'll come around eventually, since she has to read a lot in school and she's already an avid reader in Chinese. It's the kids who don't read in ANY language who are more worrisome. Anyway, I'm not sure I'll be teaching her next term, so I might not be able to see her again, but if I do I'll bug her about reading more in English.

Phew. Now I'm the long-winded one!