Critical Language Awareness Project

Critical Language Awareness Project Contextual Settings This class is located in an English Language Program at a four-year American University. There are twenty students in this class, who are 18-20 years old from various language backgrounds. These students have been in the U.S for less than a month. They have been formed as a class based on the placement test that has been conducted before the beginning of the class. Their English proficiency is considered high-intermediate to advanced according to the results of the placement test. This is a six-week summer intensive English language program, and students have six hours of language classes every week Monday through Friday. The purpose of this English language program is to better prepare students for their future study in America. This course is called “Introduction to Cross-cultural Differences” for two 50-minute ESL periods twice a week. All the students in this class have a primary language other than English. About 40% of the student population is from East Asia, and other students are from different areas of the world. Students consider themselves as non-native English speakers or ESL learners. This is the first time they live and study in an English-speaking environment. Coming from various linguistic backgrounds, most of the time students use English to interact and communicate with their classmates. But sometimes they use their primary languages when they talk with students who share the same linguistic background with them, especially to discuss teachers’ instructions and assignment requirements.

Although they have just been in America for less than a month, they have experienced some kinds of culture shock, among which not all is pleasant. While some indicate that they feel reluctant to go to restaurants or café for fear of being embarrassed about not knowing the names of foods and drinks, others express stronger sentiments about their personal experiences. For example, a student felt extremely uncomfortable when a local American told her she should change her Chinese name to an American one because the Chinese name was difficult to pronounce. In addition to language teaching, this “Introduction to Cross-cultural Differences” class aims to provide students’ knowledge and information about cultural conflicts and differences that they will experience in the future, as well as try to guide students reflect on and value their international, multicultural and multilingual identities. Specifically, the purpose of the course is three-fold: Firstly, as they have just arrived in the country, the students are exposed to the local American culture different from the culture of their home countries. They are most likely to experience culture shock due to the cultural differences. Moreover, in the ESL program as well as in their future university life, they are in contact with people of multiple ethnicities, and have to deal with issues of cultural differences in their study and life. It is hoped that the course can provide the students with basic knowledge about diverse cultures and the strategies of exploring cultural differences. In addition, it is believed that culture is inseparable from language, and every language use is embedded in power relations (Christensen, 2000). The students cannot foster appropriate attitudes towards cultural differences without analyzing and

challenging social assumptions and ideologies embedded in cultural texts, oral or written. Therefore, the course is conducted with a critical orientation, in which students have ample opportunities to critically examine the social inequality inherent in cultural texts, and raise their awareness about how language use reinforces or challenges social realities. Thirdly, since they are constructing new identities in America, it is essential that the students should be empowered to experiment with their multicultural and multilingual resources. According to Cummin’s Academic Expertise Framework, “the more students’ cultural, linguistic and personal identities are valued in their learning, that is, maximized ‘identity investment,’ the more they will be engaged cognitively” (as cited in Lau, 2013, p. 4). Therefore, the course also provides spaces in which students invest their diverse cultures, experiences, languages and other semiotic resources in their class activities. And the inclusion of their diverse “ways of words” (Heath, 1983, cited in Lau, 2013, p. 5) will help them reflect on how different choices affect the representation of voices and identities, thus promoting their awareness of their own language use.

Activity One This activity, which mainly adopts the approaches of Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Literacy, is based on a story that a student (hereinafter referred to as Zicong, a pseudonym) told in the class about her own experience. Since the issue in this story is easily encountered by international students and most students in the class expressed

that they had resonance with Zicong’s experience when she told this story, we decided to conduct this activity to help the students have a deeper discussion on this issue.

An incident leading to the activity One day in the class when we encouraged the students to share some incidents in which they experienced culture or language shock recently, Zicong told the class an unpleasant experience of her own: when she introduced herself to an American student, the American student mispronounced her name. When she corrected him, the American student complained that it was impossible to pronounce her name so she should change it to an American name. Zicong said she was quite angry at that time but she did not know how to express her feelings and whether she should do so. Therefore she said nothing back then. After she told this story many other students said they themselves or their friends had encountered similar situations, which made them uncomfortable. However they did not know how to respond in such embarrassing situations. Some students said that although they did not want to change their names, they were worried about being regarded as weird by American students because of their names. Considering the fact that such a scenario might easily happen to international students whose names are difficult to pronounce for indigenous American people, we decided to have an activity to help students have a better understanding of this issue: why or why not change to an American name, what it means to keep one’s original name or

use an American name and what are some possible ways to respond in such a situation. Since we think that compared with other out-of-class resources on this topic, using Zicong’s story, which was closely related to the life of the students, could engage the students’ emotions more efficiently, we decided to adapt her story as our teaching material. We planned to write out the dialogue in Zicong’s story based on her description and use this dialogue as the springboard for this class.

Description of activity At the beginning of this class, the following dialogue, which is adapted from Zicong’s experience, will be shown to the students (A=Zicong, B= the American student): B: Hello! I’m Michael. What’s your name? A: Hi! My name is Zicong. B: Hi Zikong. A: I’m sorry. It’s Zicong. B: What was that? A: My name is Zicong, not Zikong. B: That’s crazy. (laughing) Why don’t you have an American name? You should get one. It is impossible to pronounce your name!

A: Um... Then, we will lead the students to use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze the power relationship reflected in this dialogue by looking through the grammatical structures in the dialogue. The discussion questions will be: Do the two speakers (Zicong and the American student) have equal positions in this conversation? Which words or phrases gave you clues? We expect the students could find that the two interlocutors in this dialogue are not equal in terms of power. For the second question, some possible answers include: although the American student pronounced Sicong’s name wrong, he did not apologize; moreover he laughed, though it was not supposed to be a funny incident; he used ‘why don’t you’ and ‘you should’ to suggest Zicong change her name as if he was giving an order; apparently Zicong did not feel happy about his words at all, however she only said ‘um...’ instead of expressing her true feelings. If the students have difficulty in answering this question, we will give some hints (e.g. move the cursor around the sentence ‘That’s crazy. (laughing) Why don’t you have an American name? You should get one. Your name is impossible to pronounce!’) or directly provide an example to them. After analyzing this dialogue, the students will discuss their similar experiences and their feelings in such a situation. The discussion questions will be: 1) Have you or your friends ever experienced a similar situation? How did you/they feel at that time?

2) Would you feel happy about being asked to change your name? What would make you refuse to change your name? The students will first discuss in pairs and then share their answers with the whole class. When the students share their reasons for being unwilling to change their names, the teacher will write them on the board. After this discussion, the students will work in pairs again. Each pair will be asked to choose one scenario from this kind of situations that they encountered, witnessed or heard of and brainstorm alternate responses to express their feelings in that scenario. When they brainstorm, they can use the reasons listed on the board as a reference. Next, the students will act their scenarios out. If there is enough time they will take turns to perform in class. If the time is not enough, they will just perform in pairs simultaneously, while the teacher will walk around, noticing their actions. After their performances, on the computer screen the teacher will record some English phrases or sentences that the students have come up with as their responses in such situations. The teacher might also add some phrases to this list. Then students can practice using them in appropriate tones together. Some possible responses include: “That’s offensive.” “That’s not cool.” “Please respect me! My name represents myself.” “Hey, my name was given to me by my parents and I want to show my respect to them!” At last, we decided to end this class with a final discussion. This time the students will discuss whether they want to keep their original names or change to American names as well as some possible pros and cons along with each decision. Some students might

insist on keeping their original names as their unique identities and thus show the difference between them and American people. While some students, on the contrary, might feel this difference terrifying and thus want to eliminate it by changing their names to American style. When this discussion finishes, the teacher will conclude that neither of these two decisions is wrong and even if they refuse to use American names and thus encounter an embarrassing situation in which their names are mispronounced, it is not their fault. Thus there is no need for them to feel sorry or guilty in such a situation.

Connection to course readings This activity was inspired by our own experiences. When talking to our friends and classmates, many of them expressed their similar experiences and feelings. Since Lau (2013) also mentioned that they led their students to discuss the issue of changing one’s name to American style, we believe that this is an issue that is often encountered by international students. Therefore, we imagined a situation in which a student tells her story first to the class and then we make use of her story to conduct a class on this issue. Even though there is no student sharing this kind of story, we plan to have such a class. The imagination of Zicong’s story just helps this class happen more naturally. Moreover, if there is a student telling such a story in class, we will have this class in the next meeting, no matter when this class should take place according to the original program plan. This idea is inspired by the notion of

‘teachable moment’ in Lau (2013). Due to the time limitation of the class, rather than working on this issue right after the student tells the story, we will choose to use the next class to have a deeper discussion, which makes it not a real ‘teachable moment’. However, we will talk about this topic in the next class instead of going back to it after several classes and we will use the adaption of the student’s story as the springboard of this class, which is a design inspired by ‘teachable moment’, since according to Lau (2013), encouraging students to dig into their own stories could more effectively engage students in a deep and meaningful discussion. Secondly, we adopted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach when leading the students to analyze the dialogue between Zicong and the American student. According to the PPT in Session 9 of Sociolinguistics class, CDA focuses on studying the power relationship produced by the way of using grammatical structures. Thus, in this section, we designed the discussion questions to help the students to examine the grammatical structures in the dialogue and find out which structures make Zicong and the American student unequal. For example, we expect that students would realize through the use of ‘you should’, the American student positioned himself as an interlocutor who had stronger power while Zicong as the weaker one, since it seemed that he was commanding her. Thirdly, since CDA also cares about learning how to challenge inequality by using grammatical structure, we designed the performing task and the followup practice to achieve this goal: the students will firstly in pairs think about some possible responses they could use in the situation and act them out, then the teacher will record these

responses and add some useful phrases that the students did not think of. Finally all of the students will practice using the responses. We hope that through this practice, in the future if the students encounter such situations again, they could know how to challenge the unequal power relation by using those responses. The goal of working with students to deal with the inequality by using English phrases is also supported by the direction of access in Janks’ Synthesis Model of Critical Literacy (as cited in Lau, 2013), which emphasizes that the teacher should help students to get access to the dominant language. Finally, the whole class was designed to embrace the call for emotional engagement and self-reflexivity in Critical Literacy education (as cited in Lau, 2013). Emotional engagement requires educators to engage students’ emotional experiences with texts rather than a rational examination of issues. Thus, instead of examining the issue simply and objectively by using readings or other means, we chose to use a real story that happened in the students’ daily life and adapt it to a dialogue that they could imagine encountering by themselves. We hope this design could involve stronger emotional investment of the students and thus make the class content more attractive to them as well as make them feel this class more meaningful. On the other hand, self-reflexivity requires teachers to create an environment in which students are able to involve their own complicated emotion when responding to cultural texts. Therefore, when working with students to produce responses in the situation, we decided to encourage students to brainstorm their responses based on their own thoughts and emotions, instead of asking them to respond to this issue from a rational

perspective.

Activity Two This activity will raise the students’ language awareness by using the critical literacy approach. In class, the students will read an excerpt of Anzaldua’s (1987) article “How to tame a wild tongue”, the beginning part of the article to be exact (see in Appendix I). The excerpt presents three major events: how a doctor accused the author of keeping her tongue wild, how the author’s teacher forbade her to speak Spanish at school and commanded her to use only English, and how the author’s mother and her school asked her to “get rid of” Chicano accents. The main purpose of the activity is to ask the students to critically examine dominant social assumptions implicated in the excerpt, that is, the issues of accents and “standard languages vs. inferior languages”. The specific steps of the activity are as follows.

Description of the activity The first step of the activity is to provide supports for the students to comprehend the basic meanings of the excerpt, thus laying the foundation for the following critical reading. Firstly, the teacher will tell the students that they are going to read an excerpt of an article titled “How to tame a wild tongue”, and ask them to predict the content from the title. Then the students will read the excerpt and think about three questions: 1) What can you know about the author from the excerpt? 2) What events are

described? 3) What is the main message of the excerpt? When students have difficulty understanding words or concepts, they can use smartphone Apps, Google Translate and other Internet tools to help clarify the things they have not understood (Flores, 2013, p. 12). During the discussions, to stimulate students’ thinking, the teacher will introduce more background information. For example, the author is a well-known “academic, speaking and writing about feminist, lesbian, and Chicano issues and about autobiography” (Anzaldúa, 1987). Chicano English is a variety of American English used by Chicanos, mainly in south Texas. In the second step, the students will be given another series of questions to discuss: 1) Why did the author write this piece? 2) What social biases are implicated in the excerpt? 3) What are the author’s ideas about the biases? 4) What language in the text gives you clues about the social biases and the author’s voices? For questions 1, 2 and 3, students will reflect on the social biases implicated in the excerpt and the author’s voices as to the biases. Most likely, the students will talk about two dominant social assumptions in America: English is the only standard language, and any accent that is not standard should be “got rid of”. As for question 4, the students will explore the political dimension of language, that is, how the use of language implicates the social biases and how the author’s stylistic use of language like translanguaging challenges the biases. In the third step, a bookmarking technique (Lau, 2013) will be adopted whereby the students use three different symbols to indicate the parts of the excerpt 1) that they like; 2) that they dislike; 3) that they can personally connect with. With the first two

kinds of bookmarks, the students will share their feelings about the excerpt, either with regards to the social biases or the author’s representation of voices. With the third kind of bookmarks, they will make personal connections. Some students may talk about their opinions about “English-only policy” in classrooms, while others may share their experiences about how they deal with their own and others’ accents. Through the discussions during the second and third steps, the students will have critically examined the dominant social assumptions about accents and “English as the only standard language”. Based on this, in the fourth step, the students will be asked to work in groups of 3 or 4, and produce a short piece of writing to present their stance about an issue that involves the social assumptions. Their writing only needs to contain 1-3 sentences. They can choose among diverse issues, like “English-only policy” in classrooms, the balanced use between students’ home languages and English in ESL, and teachers’ perceptions of students’ accents. Moreover, they are encouraged to use all kinds of semiotic resources including visuals, comics, and a blend of their home languages, English or even Spanish. The point is that the students will experiment with their communicative repertoires so as to provide a representation of their stances. Then, all the groups will present their pieces of writing in class, explaining their stances to the issues covered in their writing and their intentions of using certain semiotic resources. This step will provide opportunities for the students to exchange their critical ideas about certain issues and to reflect on their own semiotic choices.

Finally, the class will end with the teacher announcing that for homework, each student should think of an experience about culture shock, and that in the next class, they will use more semiotic resources to create a translingual autobiography.

Connections to course readings The major conceptual orientation of the activity is the critical literacy approach that seeks to promote students’ ability to examine the political dimensions of texts and empower them to challenge the social inequality embedded in cultural texts (Christensen, 2000). The excerpt of the article “How to tame a wild tongue” is chosen because not only does it demonstrate the social hierarchy that ranks English as standard and other languages as inferior, but serves as an example of how the author attempts to resist the social inequality. By reading the excerpt and examining the social biases and the author’s voices, the students will learn how to uncover the power relationships embedded in texts. By discussing which parts they like or dislike and making personal connections, the students “‘talk balk’” to the excerpt, and think if their own lives are in parallel with the struggles the author faces (Christensen, 2000, p. 109). Moreover, the step of creating a short piece of writing to claim their own stances “opens the possibility for students to act on their knowledge” (Christensen, 2000, p. 105). In the second step of the activity, the students are asked to examine the use of language in the excerpt from two aspects: 1) what language implicates the social

biases, and 2) how the author uses the language to envoice herself. This is in line with the aim of CL education proposed by Lau (2013, p. 2) – students should be equipped with “a language of critique”, to analyze dominant social assumptions generated in texts, and “a language of possibility”, to articulate one’s own voices and aspirations. To be specific, while the students are discussing the social biases and the related language clues, they will learn about “a language of critique”, to critically examine dominant social assumptions. On the other hand, while they are exploring how the author challenges the social assumptions through her use of language, the students will learn about “a language of possibility”, reflecting on some envoicing strategies such as translinguaging. As for the third step where the students weigh the text against their feelings and personal experiences, it is in accordance with the call for emotional engagement and self-reflexivity for critical literacy education (as cited in Lau, 2013). As suggested by Lau (p. 6), apart from a rational analysis of dominant social assumptions, students’ real and complex emotional responses should also be valued, because “people’s subscription to certain beliefs often involves strong emotional investment”. This is also the reason why the students are asked to express their likes and dislikes about different parts of the excerpt. Moreover, it should be noted that the teacher will reinforce the idea that any feeling and attitude is valid and that there is no “right” answer. To facilitate the students’ self-reflexivity, the teacher will also navigate the discussions in a way that will make the students turn inward and interrogate their own assumptions when they are feeling in certain ways. For example, if one student feels it

is OK for the author’s mother to command her to speak “proper” English, the teacher will guide him/ her to realize that he/ she might be endorsing the social assumption that English with accents is substandard. In addition, self-reflexivity is also conducted when the students relate what they read to their personal experiences. The students will share how they dealt with and felt bout similar encounters. They will also reflect on their own assumptions. The last step – creating a short multimodal or multilingual piece of writing to claim one’s stance about a related issue – is in line with the directions of diversity and design (Janks, 2000, 2001) for CL framework (as cited in Lau, 2013). According to Lau (2013), students should invest their diverse cultural and linguistic resources as well as other multimodal systems in their actual use of language. Therefore, in this step, the students are asked to experiment with their communicative repertoires including linguistic resources and other semiotic resources. Their experience on the use of diverse semiotic resources and the critical reflection afterwards will help them think about their own taken-for-granted ways of thinking and writing, and about how meanings might be missed and added when different semiotic resources are used.

Activity Three This activity follows activity two in which students read an excerpt of Anzaldua’s (1987) article “How to tame a wild tongue”. While they were analyzing how the author envoices herself, the students have learned a bit about the impact of

translanguaging on the representation of voices. They also have experimented how to use semiotic resources. Activity three applies translingual writing approach for students to produce a piece of writing exploring the theme of cultural differences that they have experienced in the new environment.

Description of activity At the beginning, the teacher will tell students that after reading “How to tame a wild tongue” which is translingual writing, this time students will create their own translingual writing about the cultural conflict they have experienced in America. There are a series of steps to help students complete the process. Firstly, in order to help them better understand translingual writing styles, a former student’s writing sample will be provided. The sample (see in Appendix II) was produced by a Chinese student who used translingual writing style to describe her experience of feeling awkward in expressing politeness in English. This provision of the sample aims to raise students’ awareness that translingual writing is not the privilege of experts, and they can envoice themselves through translingual writing just like the experts. After reading the writing sample, so as to help students understand the envoicing strategies of translingual writing, a graphic organizer (see in Appendix III) will be provided. Students will get in groups of three or four to complete the graphic organizer. By finding examples of different strategies listed on the graphic organizer

like “Other languages”, “Fonts” and “Visuals”, the students will be provided a better understanding of how the author applied these strategies in her writing. There is also a column of “Other Strategies”, through which students will brainstorm more possible strategies to express meanings. Some students might talk about using audios, while others might consider videos as an alternative. After the group discussion, the teacher will ask students to share with the whole class to ensure that students understand different strategies correctly. While sharing with the whole class, students will be also required to analyze the possible reasons why the author chose to use the particular language forms and semiotic resources, and what might have been missing without these forms. This analysis will help the students critically reflect on the impact of using the forms. At the end of the activity two, the teacher will ask the students to think about the cultural conflicts they experienced, which is the topic of their translingual writing. Working in pairs, students will share the experience they are going to write and brainstorm strategies of conveying their meanings. This discussion will further prepare students for their final autobiographical work. After the pair discussion, the teacher will give students some time to compose a translingual paragraph. The point of this translingual paragraph writing is to raise students’ awareness that although Standard Writing English (SWE) form is the pre-dominant writing choice in their future study, there are multiple ways to express their subjectivities. After students finish their translingual paragraphs, they will exchange them with their partners to give reflections on their partners’ writing. The interaction and discussion could

provide students with feedback on how effective their use of envoicing translingual strategies is. In the end, the teacher will ask students to make some revisions in their translingual writing according to their peers’ suggestions as their homework.

Connections to course readings The conceptual orientation of this activity is translingualism approach which critiques the monolingual ideology and raises students’ awareness towards their multicultural and multilingual identities (Canagarajah, 2013). Students’ own experiences of culture shock and cultural differences are the topic of their translingual autobiography. As the new arrivals in America, their language use and lives are related to the large society. Putting “students’ lives at the center” can provide various and authentic resources for the class, since their lives are “part of the text of the class” (Christensen, 2000, p.106). Also mentioned by Lau (2013), Cummins (2001) proposed “Academic Expertise Framework” which challenges the inequality in ESL classrooms (p. 3). The framework advocates the notion that ESL students should be valued and defined by their rich cultural and linguistic backgrounds and talents instead of insufficient English proficiency. Moreover, asking students to share their own stories is in alignment with the diversity direction which refers to the inclusion of students’ diverse cultures in Janks’ Model of Critical Literacy (as cited in Lau, 2013). As Janks mentioned, literacy is connected with

“socially-situated identities”. The implementation of students’ diverse experiences can show various features in thinking, valuing and feeling which can help students reflect on their own diverse linguistic forms and cultural and linguistic background (Lau, 2013). Although students are familiar with the topic, they lack comprehensive understanding of translingual writing style. As demonstrated by Cumming (2001), encountering highly cognitive tasks, language teachers should provide not only adequate linguistic support, but also evoke students’ prior multicultural and multilingual background and knowledge (cited in Lau, 2013, p. 4). In light of that, there are a series of connected steps, such as providing a writing sample and group discussion, to scaffold students’ knowledge of translingual strategies for their own translingual autobiography. As one of the most important translingual strategies, envoicing sets the stage and foundation for negotiation (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 49). Ensuring students understand the envoicing strategy is the cornerstone of composing translingual writing. In the scaffolding process, we provide sample of this particular writing style and a graphic organizer to show students how other people use different linguistic and semiotic resources. The pair discussion provides students a chance to connect the envoicing strategies with their own writing. While they are brainstorming for and writing their translingual paragraphs, they will experiment with these strategies. Moreover, translingual writing which aims to express the author’s voices shifts literacy “from autonomous and situated to negotiated” (Canagarajah, 2013, p.40).

This ESL classroom is a global contact zone in which students are from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this dynamic contact zone, students as readers and writers might diverge as to the intended meanings and the uptake of these meanings, since they do not have shared language norms. How students co-construct meaning and how successful this process is are essential. This is the importance of interactional strategies (Canagarajah, 2013, p.56). The peer reviewing after students finish their writing provides an interactional opportunity to not only examine the success of envoicing, but also to co-construct meanings with the readers. Peers’ suggestions are part of the negotiated literacy. Students can make changes and revisions based on the suggestions, which makes the literacy from “autonomous and situated to negotiated” (Canagarajah, 2013, p.40).

Acknowledgment This project is for our Sociolinguistic class, which is instructed by Dr. Flores. Our utmost appreciation goes to him for his suggestions and PPT. We are also indebted to Dr. Flores for the inspiration of graphic organizer and tranlingual writing activity.

References Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Chapter 5. Borderlands, La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Ann Lute Books. Canagarajah, S. (2013). Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment. Research in the Teaching of English, 48, 40-67. Chritensen, L. (2000). Reading, writing, and righteous anger. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools Ltd. Flores, N. (2013). Undoing truth in language teaching: Toward a paradigm of linguistic aesthetics. Working Papers in Educational Linguistic, 28. Flores, N. (2014). Introduction to sociolinguistics in education: critical language awareness [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://penngse.instructure.com/courses/1222316. Lau, S. M. (2013). A study of critical literacy work with beginning english language learners: An integrated approach. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 10(1), 1-30.

Appendix I “How to tame a wild tongue” This excerpt is taken from Anzaldúa, G. (1987).

Appendix II A former student’s writing sample in Activity Three (This writing is adapted from Sicheng’s translanguaging writing piece from Sociolinguistic class)

I wish English have a YOU. In Chinese I use 你 when talking to friends but use 您 when talking to professors and other senior people. 心, heart, turns 你 into a respectful word. I will say 你怎么 想 to friends but say 您怎么想 to professors. It makes me feel safe because I’m being polite. However in English I can only say ‘What do you think’. How can I say 你怎么想 to professors? That’s terrible. You can’t imagine how uncomfortable I was when I first time sent this kind of message to a professor. I felt I was so impolite. The fact that there is only one you in English drives me crazy.

You may ask why don’t I think ‘you’ as 您. Yes if I can think in that way things will be easier. But 你 is much more commonly used so it absolutely can’t be omitted. So ‘you’ can only be equal to 你. Actually not all Chinese people will use 您. Some

don’t. But that’s my politeness strategy so I feel unsafe to lose it. I then started avoiding using ‘you’ to professors as much as possible. Avoiding using ‘you’ is a comfortable strategy for me. In Japanese ‘you’ is always avoided. たとえ ば, if I’m talking to Professor Smith I will say ‘Smith 先生はどう思いますか’ instead of ‘あなたはどう思いますか’. Sometimes it helps but it can’t work all the time. One time I was short of a little to just say ‘what does Professor Smith think’ when talking to Professor Smith. However I stopped myself I feel it sounds so stupid in English. I say to myself: just write a YOU in your heart and regard it as a different you. Then you’ll be fine.

Appendix III Graphic Organizer in Activity Three Envoicing Strategies in the writing sample:

Envoicing Strategies

Other Languages

Direct Translation

Examples

Fonts

Visuals

Other Envoicing Strategies you can think: