Language Log

The PRC uses hànyǔ pīnyīn 汉语拼音 ("Sinitic spelling") for phonetic annotation, Taiwan uses zhùyīn fúhào 注音符號 ("phonetic symbols") for the same purpose.  Since we are well acquainted with pīnyīn, but not very familiar with zhùyīn fúhào, I will focus on the latter in this post:

Mark Swofford, "If you ever find yourself stuck on how to pronounce English", Pinyin News (5/7/23):

Here are some lyrics from a popular song, “Count on Me,” by Bruno Mars, with a Mandarin translation. The interesting part is that a Taiwanese third-grader has penciled in some phonetic guides for him or herself, using a combination of zhuyin fuhao (aka bopo mofo) (sometimes with tone marks!), English (as a gloss for English! and English pronunciation of some letters and numbers), and Chinese characters (albeit not always correctly written Chinese characters — not that I could do any better myself). Again, this is a Taiwanese third-grader and so is someone unlikely to know Hanyu Pinyin.

Helen Lewis, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America's reading crisis", The Atlantic 11/13/2024:

Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name?

Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”

But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)

Whenever I drive through the near northwest suburbs of Philadelphia, the names of the towns and streets there make me feel as though I've been transported to Wales:  Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Uwchlan, Llanalew Road, Llewelyn Road, Cymry Drive, Llanelly Lane, Derwydd Lane….  By chance, through some sort of elective affinity, today I happened upon the following article about that very subject:

"Welcome to Wrexham, Philadelphia and the Welsh language", Chris Wood, BBC (11/12/23)

Upon first hearing, the very idea sounded preposterous, but when I searched the internet, I found it all over the place as "nonword reading / repetition", "nonsense words", "non word phonics / fluency", "non-word decoding", "pseudowords", etc.  In other words (!), it's a real thing, and lots of people take the concept seriously as a supposedly useful device in reading theory and practice, justifying it thus:

"as a tool to assess phonetic decoding ability" (here)

"contribute to children's ability to learn new words"  (here)

"a true indicator of the alphabetic principle and basic phonics" (here)

etc., etc., etc.

I would not have taken the topic of nonwords seriously and posted on it, had not AntC pointed out that it is actually being applied in the classroom in New Zealand.

[Prefatory note:  The Chinese author of this guest post, TCI (encrypted acronym to protect her identity) holds a humanities M.A. from a top tier American research university which she attended from 2016 to 2018.  She has been employed for several years as an adviser to  students in China who desire to study abroad (especially the USA) in high school, college, or university.  Her statement will be followed by the remarks of a long experienced, well established practitioner of that profession (application counselor) in China who explains its aims and modus operandi.

The author (TCI) emphasizes what she considers to be a lack of logic in Chinese thought.  It is ironic that her focus is very much on the gender of personal pronouns at a time when many people in America are trying to do away with or downplay that aspect of personal pronouns.  Before dismissing what she says out of hand, bear in mind that for TCI it is a cri de coeur.  She grew up in China learning one system of thought, came to America and struggled to learn another, and now she has gone back to China and is trying to teach the next generation of students who want to come to America and think like Americans how to be less fraught in learning this new way of thinking.

In addition to a proto-regular-expression for English monosyllables, Benjamin Lee Whorf's 12/1940 Technology Review article has a weird diagram showing how a linguist (?) would organize French language instruction along the lines of mid-20th-century factory work:

Karin Fisher, "It’s a Bleak Climate for Foreign Languages as Enrollments Tumble", Chronicle of Higher Education 11/15/2023"

Enrollments in foreign-language courses tumbled nearly 17 percent between the fall of 2016 and the fall of 2021, the largest decline in the six decades the Modern Language Association has been conducting its census of American colleges. […]

Since peaking in 2009, foreign-language enrollments have deteriorated by almost 30 percent, the MLA found. This is a stunning reversal: Over the previous 30 years, the number of students studying languages had been on a steady upward trajectory.

Ryan Quinn, "Foreign Language Enrollment Sees Steepest Decline on Record", Inside Higher Ed 11/16/2023:

While the COVID-19 crisis lowered enrollments generally, the new report notes that the overall number of students in U.S. colleges and universities only fell 8 percent between 2016 and 2021. While those aren’t directly comparable figures, the drop in enrollment in non-English-language classes was over twice as much — and the 2021 decline in language-taking continues a pre-pandemic trend.

Joe Marshall, "As AI cheating booms, so does the industry detecting it: ‘We couldn’t keep up with demand’", The Guardian 7/5/2023:

Since its release last November, ChatGPT has shaken the education world. The chatbot and other sophisticated AI tools are reportedly being used everywhere from college essays to high school art projects. A recent survey of 1,000 students at four-year universities by Intelligent.com found that 30% of college students have reported using ChatGPT on written assignments.

This is a problem for schools, educators and students – but a boon for a small but growing cohort of companies in the AI-detection business. Players like Winston AI, Content at Scale and Turnitin are billing for their ability to detect AI-involvement in student work, offering subscription services where teachers can run their students’ work through a web dashboard and receive a probability score that grades how “human” or “AI” the text is.

Three weekends ago, I delivered a keynote here:

New Directions in Chinese Language Education in the 21st Century

The Eighth International Conference on Teaching Chinese as a Second Language

Swarthmore College, June 9-10, 2023

———–

Abbreviations:

    AI — Artificial Intelligence

    DT — Digital Technology

    IT — Information Technology

    DH — Digital Humanities

    AGI — Artificial General Intelligence, where machines supposedly can accomplish any intellectual task that a human can (to me that's a pipe dream)

(given for present and future reference and use)

Title "Aspects of AI and digital technologies in Chinese language teaching"

Abstract

In recent decades, language processing hardware and software have progressed at an astonishing rate, one that is geometric rather than arithmetic.  The opportunities these advances offer and the challenges they pose require our thoughtful attention and careful response, lest the machines get out of control and affect our students in detrimental ways.  DeepL, ChatGPT, and other constantly evolving technologies possess enormous power to manipulate language, power that we can utilize for the enhancement of Chinese language pedagogy.  On the other hand, we must monitor and adapt this potential in such a manner that it fits our purposes and meets the needs of our students. 

I promised that I would tell the story of how five old, white men persuaded me to begin the study of Asian languages two years after I was out of college.  Here it is.

When I graduated from Dartmouth in 1965, I joined the Peace Corps for two years in Nepal.  Although I contracted fifteen diseases, some quite serious, lost fifty pounds, and had three nearly deadly trail accidents, the experience was transformative.

I was an English major in college and wrote an undergraduate thesis on Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde".  At the end of my Peace Corps service, I still wanted to study for a PhD on Chaucer.  So, among other applications to graduate school and for funding, I applied for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship.  In those days (1967), that was a very prestigious prize.

I've always pronounced it as rhyming with "thanks", but Wiktionary makes it sound more like "monks" in German, Dutch, and UK English.

"Manx" is the English exonym for the language whose endonym "is Gaelg/Gailck, which shares the same etymology as the word 'Gaelic', as do the endonyms of its sister languages Irish (Gaeilge; Gaoluinn, Gaedhlag and Gaeilic) and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig)." (source)

Manx (or Manx Gaelic) was declared extinct as a first language in 1974 with the death of Ned Maddrell, but then achieved the remarkable feat of revival.  Since the topic of language extinction / survival / revival came up recently (see "Selected readings" below), I was especially drawn to this newspaper report:

An Ancient Language, Once on the Brink, Is a British Isle’s Talk of the Town

After being nearly silenced, Manx is experiencing a revival on the Isle of Man, thanks in part to an elementary school and some impassioned parents.

By Megan Specia, NYT (Nov. 24, 2022)

I played college basketball for Dartmouth for four years.  That means I had ample opportunity to play in Penn's hallowed Palestra.  All of the Ivy League schools had unique, distinctive gymnasia, and they remain sharply etched in my mind.  But the Palestra was something else altogether, as though it belonged in a different league, a different world.  Entering the vaulted space was intimidating enough by itself, but the fact that the bleachers (in)famously came right down to the edge of the floor, with no separation of the fans from the game, made it all the more nerve-wracking to play there, not to mention that the Penn teams were always extremely well coached and fiercely determined.

Since I do not know of any other sports arena in America that is called by such a classical, Greek sounding name, nor of any other that has such a distinguished history, it would be worth our while to inquire how it became so.

I am making this post because I think it is something that we should be aware of and try to understand in terms of the motivations of the Chinese government in enacting and carrying out these policies.

"First-level discipline a new starting line of calligraphy", China Daily (9/28/22)