Ian Blog Post #3

I found the "Possible Transfer-Based Problems" handout to be a helpful crystallization of some of the patterns I've seen in the past few weeks, as I've begun working with a non-native speaker from China. The handout helped to localize and categorize some of the patterns of error I'd noticed in this student's early writing, most commonly in the grammatical transfers, including a difficulty with tenses, difficulties with modality, and a continual tendency to drop articles. Speaking to this student has further revealed a few issues with phonological transference, particularly in regards to parsing apart the vowel sounds I produce. What I most appreciated about this handout was that it gave, in a concise, efficient way, names to so many issues I previously could only feel my way through. (For instance: I have dealt often with students who have issues with modality, but did I ever call it by that name? No. In this case, classification feels very grounding and useful.)

One piece of information I learned from the handout that shocked me concerns the radically different syntactical structures of English and Chinese. Of course, I anticipated there might be considerable difference between the two languages, but as I have no experience speaking/reading/writing in Chinese myself, I was taken aback and humbled by just how big the syntactical difference is. As a writer in English, I value the prioritizing hand of subordination in my sentences (though interestingly, and at least from a creative writing standpoint, the subordinate sentence is decidedly out of favor to the additive one, which more closely resembles the loose connectives of Chinese syntax. Even then, however, the two feel radically different). If nothing else, this further increased my respect for those students who choose to take the leap and study in a language other than their native one.