Job Discussion Forums

[ruggedtoast]

I work for a Grad Schooly here in London (My Asian TEFL days being over) and I get a lot of email enquiries from Chinese students, most of them go something like this:

" i wanna come to ur university because im gonna work in london after. I hope u r gonna give me an offer cos i wanna come and study Masters"

"Gonna" ?

"Wanna" ?

"u" ?

What are you guys teaching these people!?

[abusalam4]

I gonna tell you that I don`t wonna be sarcastic....

Well, I can see two possible reasons:
- In China, there are some backpacker type of people who may teach that sort of sub-standard English to their students ... High School graduates from the USA, for example, who seem to have a great impact on their students of similar age to make them imitate all that;
- on the other hand, it may be the Chinese students themselves who just imitate the manners of us Westerners without really knowing what they are doing - "ur!, etc, seems to be a mannerism developed in Internet chats or the like.

However, most of us, I would say, are well-educated enough not to teach this sort of thing.

If you receive such mails with sub-standard English, just tell the senders their "variant" of English is not acceptable and they should send their requests again. They cannot expect everybody to understand US-based street or whatever slang, especially when your are from the UK and would be more accustomed to.....QUEEN`S English...hahaha!

[georginachina]

Don't blame us!! Blame the TV shows that teach slang! I've even had to contradict Chinese English teachers that teach "sth" for something, and "smb" for somebody.

[tw]

Many pronunciation textbooks do actually teach "wanna" and "gonna". In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many middle school students have learned that as the way to say "going to" and "want to". After all, isn't that how many North Americans speak? How are students going to know what "wanna" and "gonna" mean if they are not taught what they mean? The problem is that they were not told never use "wanna" and "gonna" in writing, only when spoken.

[danielb]

Exactly.

[Burl Ives]

They teach it to themselves QQ-ing, Skype-ing, and Messenger-ing. SMS-ing too.

U, ur, 2, 4, sth, sb, thx, bb et al.

I asked a class one day. "Convenient," they said. "Efficient." In other words, without these things having been taught in school, they are all recognised and widespread. And for the users it appears not to be an issue that these usages are at best colloquial, at worst outright insults to their recipients.

It probably tells us that despite all the nice young people we know, there aren't all that many Chinese using English in anything like an exacting communicative environment. They look like idiots when they find themselves in such an environment, but they don't know that either. And I'm pretty sure they don't care.

Whatever kind of tool English is for our charges, it's showing symptoms of Chinese characteristics.

[Steppenwolf]

I don't think any of us can be blamed for our students picking this sort of "English" up. I note that it's very popular with Indians and they in turn will point out that this is the way English is used on the Internet...

I guess it's the Internet generation's rebellious anti-establishment mindset...

[ruggedtoast]

I guess so but its not going to help them at graduate level. Most of these guys have IELTS of at least 6.5 or TOEFL of 100 or so as well.

Personally I find it quite rude. If they cant be bothered to write me a proper email how are they going to get by studying. I was thinking about making some note on their file like 'written English poor' and making them all do IELTS again but maybe Im just feeling vindictive today.

[11:59]

This is an area I teach at university (my 'Asian TEFL days' being far from over), so perhaps I can help. That is, perhaps I can tell you exactly what I teach 'these people', as you so eloquently put it.

I think those contractions just appear odd in the written language. In normal run-of-the-mill spoken language (native speakers of any language tend to produce between 10 and 15 phonemes a second) naturally occurring phonology will produce such contractions whether you like it or not. (It is rather like speeding up a record. Of course the acoustic elements will change.) You also seem to forget that much of the contemporary language is itself a contraction of former separate items (wasn't 'tomorrow' originally 'to the morrow' or something of the sort?). In short you are being prescriptive and ignorant of language change, a normal yet poorly understood phenomenon. I think this is quite odd for a teacher at a 'graduate school'.

As it happens, though, the contractions you cite ('gonna', 'wanna') are highly rule based, and so do not in any way reflect 'sloppy' or 'lazy' speech. 'Going to' cannot always be contracted to 'gonna' and 'want to' cannot always become 'wanna', at least not according to native speakers. Native speakers are of course often totally clueless about this, at least consciously, which of course is interesting in and of itself. You have to tease this information (declarative knowledge, not procedural knowledge) out of them through grammaticality judgement tasks.

Contraction of 'want to' to 'wanna' seems to be prohibited where the words 'want' and 'to' are separated by a Wh-trace (let's symbolise it as t) that has been 'left behind' in the phrase marker grammar by the movement of an earlier constituent through the syntactic process of 'raising'. Not many teachers of English are trained in syntax (and especially not computational syntax) so let me explain. Please bear with me.

Before I do though, I have to briefly explain the (Chomskyan) notion of D- and S-structure, that is D(eep) and S(urface) structure respectively. Long ago it was proposed that the sentences that we speak, hear, read, and write are but surface structures, and that they are the result of transformations from deep structures of which we are never aware. Some sentences can have two S structures but one D structure (or phrase marker structure), or vice versa. For example, 'I saw the girl with the telescope' is ambiguous as it has two wholly separate D structures, which in S-structures would be expressed with something like 'I saw the girl who had a telescope' and 'I used a telescope to see the girl'. Another example would be 'Washing machines can be dangerous' (i.e., you can hurt yourself when washing machines (of any sort), or, the machines we call washing machines can be dangerous - they often explode).

So what on Earth does the theoretical and highbrow notion of D- and S-structure have to do with 'wanna' and 'gonna'. Well, first, let's establish that these contractions are not always licensed by the grammar of English as (unconsciously) stored in your head. Take the following example:

1) Who do you want to kiss?
2) Who do you wanna kiss?

In this example there is no problem contracting 'want to' to 'wanna'. The same is true for the next example:

3) Who do you want to invite to the party?
4) Who do you wanna invite to the party?

So, again, no problem. But, now look at the following (an asterisk in linguistics means that when asked native speakers reject the sentence):

5) Who do you want to kiss you?
6)* Who do you wanna kiss you?

And:

7) Who do you want to invite Fred to the party?
8)* Who do you wanna invite Fred to the party?

Native speakers reject examples such as (6) and (8), though of course they won't be able to tell you why there are ungrammatical. Well linguists can, at least those trained in generative syntax.

The D-structure of (1), 'Who do you want to kiss', is said to be:

a) You want to kiss wh

Which becomes:

b) Who i you want to kiss t i

(i = index, i.e., wh is indexed to 'who', recall that t = trace)

The movement of the wh-marker leaves a trace (think of it like copy and paste). In other words, the wh-marker wh moves to the front and becomes (in this example) 'who' (but in other examples it could be 'what' or 'when' etc.), and after moving it leaves a trace of itself (t) behind.

We then insert the auxiliary 'do' for other reasons unrelated to this analysis:

c) Who i do you want to kiss t i

And then, in the written language, we add the question mark:

d) Who i do you want to kiss t i?

So in the above example 'Who do you want to kiss?' can become 'Who do you wanna kiss?'. But remember that 'Who do you want to kiss you?' does not seem to be able to be contracted to *'Who do you wanna kiss you?'. If we conduct the same analysis we soon see why. The D structure of 'Who do you want to kiss you?' would be:

e) You want wh to kiss you

So we 'front' the wh-marker to make:

f) Who i you want t i to kiss you

Again, we add the auxiliary 'do' to make:

g) Who i do you want t i to kiss you

And again we add the question mark in the written language:

h) Who do you want to kiss you?

But, now let's put the phrase structure markers back in:

i) Who i do you want t i to kiss you?

We immediately see why we can't say 'Who do you wanna kiss you?'. The trace (t) 'blocks' the contraction of 'want' and 'to'. We don't see or hear the trace marker but it is still there in the deep structure and even though we are using surface structures our brains are only using them to express deep structures and so *'Who do you wanna kiss you?' is not permitted. It's simply a rule of grammar and that's that. Don't make the mistake of thinking that all because you are unaware of such things that they can't possibly exist. First, there seems little other way of accounting for native speakers rejecting such examples despite never having heard them before, and, second, there are a million and one things your brain does on a daily basis that you are not aware of.

It might all seem rather strange but in computational linguistics and natural language generation (NLG) that is how we avoid machines generating sentences such as *'Who do you wanna kiss you?'

[Burl Ives]

So why do they use it in written English? Why do they opt for SMS-style corruptions? I insist it is a conscious choice, a growing and widespread communication form that they have chosen for themselves. They choose speed and base utility, observing as we should that they find no great utility in adequately readable text.

Inadequate education or half-assed culture?

[ruggedtoast]

Maybe they think its cool or something. Koreans are the same ime.

[Burl Ives]

Several people I knew as students now have been in employment long enough to get promotions, negotiate raises, change companies. They work in positions requiring daily English language use. Some are in foreign trade. Some are management support staff. Some are management. They all use this same "b/c ur my friend" email style.

I wonder if anyone pings them for it. One time ticked off I replied to a friend using similarly curtailed text. I was pretty sure she'd always had the benefit of people writing complete English to her, and I figured she'd see some of the discomfort it causes if she had it sent to her for once. She replied saying I must have been going online to chat a lot recently.

I think writing is a sophisticated form of communication. I think most Chinese dash off emails without over much reflection. I think for Chinese email is like a peddle thrown in a pond--you throw it and then get on with whatever real life you were working on by the side of the pond.

But that still doesn't explain why they like these word corruptions so much. Perhaps it's a simple as typing. A native speaker accustomed to spelling and paragraph-making from before they reach the keyboard learns to type whole words fast and accurately (more or less) already having that as a standard. But having a range of technical proficiencies that have passed you exams and landed you a job is different from wielding syntax with a view to generating as opposed to mimicking meaning. Perhaps we can say a Chinese speaker of English gets to the keyboard before they learn even to compose their own sentences.

[ruggedtoast]

I dont think theres anything wrong with writing like that if its informal, but ostensibly theyre writing formal communications that get printed off, attached to their file and go towards determining if theyre suitable students.

They dont seem to know the difference.

One of my friends taught in Korea and students used to turn in essays with gonna and wanna in them and when she corrected them they got very stuffy and said 'oh well you know I speak American English' and refused to stop using it in written language. They wouldnt believe her it wasnt a correct way to spell.

[bendan]

The funny thing is you'll accept them, and more importantly their cash, anyway. Then they'll teach others how to apply to foreign universities.

-

[ruggedtoast]

Im not sure about that. We have about 8 applications for every available place and we're already a bit oversubscribed by Chinese students, so actually it does matter, to them at any rate.