Week 4

Reading about possible language transfers (positive and negative) that can come up when working with Chinese students, I was reminded of a really cool thing one of my Chinese students taught me during our first week of class. My first week of teaching, as a get-to-know-each-other activity, I had my students go around and tell me about their random obsessions, useless skills, surprising things they happen to know a lot about. One student, who is Chinese, lit up when she said her "useless skill" was deciphering the nuances between similar Chinese characters by noticing how their differences in appearance mirrors the differences in their meaning. I asked if she could give an example, and she gave a really awesome demonstration of some characters that denoted different quantities/arrangements of trees. The class was super into it, and it was a great way to illustrate how the act of close reading/interpretation/analysis can take many forms.

I realize the way I framed the initial question to the class might have been responsible for this, but I felt badly that the student had described her skill as "useless." It's not useless, it's awesome! But, tying it into transfer-based issues, it made me think about the language we use to describe these transfers, as either "negative" (when it results in an error/clarity issue), "positive" (no error, and enhanced, unique, or poetic expression), or "neutral." I realize this is just the jargon of the field, but it feels a little funny to me that the words we use to describe these transfers can also be interpreted as ascribing value judgments to certain transfer issues, especially since in "neutral" cases that aren't clear, that judgment can be pretty arbitrary. I loved thinking about how meaning can be enhanced through positive/neutral transfers, and I found myself hungry for more discussion of how to handle them.