Can Chinese Students Master Academic Writing in English?
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My college roommate was studying Mandarin; I was studying French. While I was grappling with accents grave (è) and aigu (é), she was learning Chinese characters. Each word has its own unique character! She told me that even her native-born professor sometimes forgot a character and would just put a circle on the chalkboard.
Many of my students are Chinese. They are required to do a lot of writing in the doctoral program where I teach, which culminates with the dissertation. Whether it’s an essay, a report, or a CV, it cannot have grammatical errors. Just as it takes Westerners years to learn to write in Chinese, it takes Chinese students equal effort to master writing in English. But they do. I am always amazed by how much their English improves from the first year to the last.
Let’s first look at the unique challenges that Chinese students face in English writing:
As mentioned above, the structure of their language is dramatically different from English, but it’s more than just Chinese characters versus an alphabet.
The Chinese language has no plurals, so instead of “one thing” or “many things,” it’s “one thing” or “many thing.”
The Chinese language has no tenses, so instead of “go,” “went,” “will go,” it’s “I go,” I go yesterday,” “I go tomorrow.”
English, arguably, has more words than any other language---over 170,000 according to The Oxford English Dictionary.
English words are derived from many languages, both active and ancient, including Arabic, Bantu, Chinese, Czechoslovakian, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Zulu, to name a few.
English words go in and out of style, and their connotations change—even becoming the opposite of their original meaning, such as:
Bad—Bad now means better than good--such as “she is hella bad” (meaning sexy), “bad ass” (meaning really good at something).
Queer—Queer used to mean odd, unusual. Then, it became a derogatory term for homosexual. Then, the LGBTQ+ community adopted the word, so that now it has a positive connotation but has no relationship whatsoever to its meaning 50 years ago.
In academic writing, many words are not allowable because they are clichés (overused phrases) or too colloquial/informal, such as the words awesome, cool, fine, perfect, really, super, sensational, and common spoken phrases such as fit the bill, down to earth, crystal clear.
Correct use of prepositions must be memorized: at, among, amid, amidst, by, in, into, of, off, on, upon, with, within. Using the wrong preposition is a common error, even among native speakers.
Choosing the correct term when making comparisons is another common error for native and nonnative speakers alike: Is it fewer, less, a decrease in, or a smaller amount? Is it more, greater than, or an increase in?
Finally, the proper use of punctuation marks deserves a “shout out”: comma (,), period (.), semicolon (;), colon (:), dash (—), question mark (?), exclamation mark (!), parenthesis ( () ), slash (/) and ellipsis dots (…).
Next week, we will begin to look at strategies to overcome these challenges.