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I.

Introduction

UC Davis, famous for its diversified ethnicity composition, has a

significant number of Chinese-speaking students, including Mandarin

speakers and Cantonese speakers. As the number of Chinese international

students increases year by year, the total number of Chinese speakers on

UC Davis also rises drastically. However, as for what I observed over three

years, rarely there are Chinese-speakers choosing to major/minor in

Chinese, mostly resulted from the limited opportunity to find a Chinese

related job. Hence, I conducted a small research to closely examine the

discourse community formed by Chinese major/minor students on UC

Davis, especially on the common goal of the discourse community and the

composition of expert members of the community. According to John

Swales, a professor of linguistics and codirector of the Michigan Academic

Spoken English at the University pf Michigan, discourse community is a

group of communicating individuals with a widely agreed set of common

goals, a mechanism of providing information and feedback, at least one of

specific genres to realize the common goal, a special range of lexis, and a

threshold number of expert members. (Swales, 2011, p. 471-473). The

community formed by Chinese major/minor students on UC Davis uses

Canvas and other online platforms for providing information and

feedback. There is also a monthly gather held by Chinese department for

students to communicate and practice their Chinese skills. Both classical

Chinese genres such as classical poems and vernacular novels and


modern Chinese genres like prose-poems and post-modern poems are

taught in classes provided by the major. Its also clear that this

community possesses a specific range of lexis in order to translate

between Chinese and English, which belong to two distinct linguistic

groups. To be able to confidently classify the community mentioned

above as a discourse community, I conducted surveys and in person

interviews to find whether there is a set of common goals that most

Chinese major/minor students want to achieve, and if there is a balanced

number of members with higher degree of expertise. Also, I noticed that

students might enter Chinese major with different levels of Chinese

background knowledge, and the difference might also lead to distinct

goals and different confidence levels. Hence, I further refining the

targeted community into three groups based on their background

knowledge level: Asian Internationals who were born and raised in

Chinese or Chinese related cultures, Asian-Americans who were influenced

by Asian cultures from their parents, and Non-Asian students who usually

had less personal connection to Chinese cultures before they entered

Chinese major/minor. Both general view on Chinese major/minor as a

community and detailed analysis into the three groups within the

community are included in this research.

II. Methods
1. Survey

Printed surveys are distributed in three Chinese classes: Chinese 1,

Chinese 107 and Chinese 112, which are representatives of introductory


level classes, English-based Chinese classes, and Chinese-based Chinese

classes, respectively. The survey is conducted on anonymity base. Below

are the questions listed in the survey:

1. Please select the group you belong to. (Asian International students,

Asian Americans, Non-Asians)


2. Is there a goal that you want to achieve with majoring/minoring in

Chinese? If yes, please describe it.


3. Describe your confidence level in Chinese writing, including typing and

handwriting.
4. Describe your confidence level in Chinese reading.
5. Describe your confidence level in Chinese speaking.

Questions 3 to 5 are provided with 5 choices of confidence levels, ranging

from 1 to 5, representing not confident at all, most of the time not

confident, neutral, most of the time confident, and very confident,

respectively.

A total number of 46 effective responses are collected and analyzed.

2. Interview

To get more information about the common goal, and to analyze the effect

of difference in background knowledge levels on both goals and academic

standing (level of expertise), three interviews with one student from each

group defined in question 1 above are done in person.

Result

Survey results are summarized into graphs for better illustration.

1. Number of participants in each group


Number of Students
25 23
20 17
15
10 6
5
0

Number of Students

2. Summary of common goals of Chinese major/minor students


Common Goals of Chinese Major/Minor Students in UC Davis

11

21

14

Learn About Chinese Culture Find A Job With Chinese Degree


Other

3. Common goals of Asian American students

Common Goals of Asian American Students

5
8

10

Learn More About Chinese Culture Get A Job Related To Chinese


Other

4. Common goals of Asian International students


Common Goals of Asian International Students

4 10

Learning More About Chinese Culture Get A Job Related to Chinese


Other
5. Common goals of Non-Asian Students

Common Goals Of Non-Asian Students

Learn More About Chinese Culture Get A Job Related to Chinese


6. Average confidence levels in three dimensions of Chinese language

learning

4.5 4.3 4.4


4.1 4.1
4 3.7 3.8 3.7
3.5 3.2
3
3
2.4 2.5 2.5
2.5

1.5

0.5

0
Chinese Reading Chinese Writing Chinese Speaking

All Participants Asian International Students


Asian-American Students Non Asian Students

III. Analysis

Common Goal
Due to the time limit in survey (10 minutes roughly), answers regarding

the goal of studying Chinese are very board and diverse. Hence, I

interview 3 students from Chinese 112, a Chinese based Chinese class, to

investigate the possible common goal. To further investigate if there is

any difference among different types of students (Asian internationals,

Asian-Americans and Non-Asians), interviewees described above are

selected from the three groups, and it appears that even though there is a

set of broad goal that most Chinese major/minor students want to

achieve, there are significant differences among goals of each groups I

defined. Synthesized from the survey result, most student agree that they

want to learn more about Chinese culture and to spread Chinese culture

through studying Chinese here, and career-wise, many students answer

that they want to find a job utilizing their Chinese skills, such as

professional interpreters and Chinese teachers. Hence, there is no doubt

that members in the community of Chinese major/minor have some

widely agreed goals to work towards through studying.

When I summarized the common goals from the survey responses, and

sorted the answers based on groups, I found that even though each group

has all the goals that I defined as a set of common goals for the discourse

community, the most popular goals within each group are different.

Overall, among Asian International students, the most popular goals are

to learn more about Chinese from a western viewpoint, and to spread the
influence of Chinese culture. The prevalent goal among Non-Asian

students is to learn Chinese language for future career. In Asian-American

students, both learning more about Chinese and language base for career

serve as main goals.

Yukimura Matsuda, a Japanese international student who currently major

in Chinese and Food Science, said that she wanted to major in Chinese for

the reason of enriching her knowledge of China from the perspective of

the English based Chinese education system distinct from the Chinese

based Chinese education system that she used to study in during her two

years of living and studying in Beijing, the capital city of China, and the

cultural center of China. To compare the English based teaching system

used by UC Davis Chinese classes to the Chinese based teaching system

used in China and Chinese speaking areas, she talked about the two years

she spent in Beijing with her father who worked in the Japanese Embassy.

I still remember my Chinese teacher in Beijing telling me that a solid

foundation of Chinese grammar and vocabulary is rudimental if I want to

study Chinese literature. She said during the interview, But when I study

Chinese here, I found everything was so different. Two of the upper

division Chinese classes I have taken were not even taught in Chinese,

and that was a new experience for me because I was told that you have to

be proficient in the language if you want to study its literature. She

recalled that at the beginning of the class about modern Chinese novels,
her professor claimed that language should not be the barrier of studying

literature, and students were encouraged to view the cultural aspects

displayed in literatures from the angle of outsiders so that they could

get a more general and objective overview of modern China. Yukimura

concluded that Chinese education in China is more focused on the study

of Chinese grammar and basic Chinese composition, and teachers in

China believe that the best way to study literature is to put yourself on

the position of the characters/figures in the work and write about your

thoughts, while in UC Davis, the general, objective studying of Chinese

literature genres is emphasized, and the orthography is valued over the

grammar to encourage more reading. Many Asian international students

studying Chinese here have experienced the difference between western

and Asian teaching system, Yukimura said, and different learning styles

could inspire you with different perspectives to look into Chinese culture.

Instead of improvement in language skills, I expect to get more

comprehensive views as outsiders on Chinese culture while studying

Chinese here. In other words, for students with solid base of Chinese

language, its the potential to re-examine the Chinese culture with

different emphasis that attracts them to Chinese major.

Indeed, most Asian international students in this major already have a

solid base of Chinese language skills. Therefore, language skills

reinforcement is less valued in Asian international students compared to


two other groups. As a Chinese international student who has taken two

Chinese classes in UC Davis myself, I attended the monthly gathering held

by Chinese department once last year. When we discussed the difficulties

we met in studying Chinese, many Chinese international students said

that at the beginning, it was hard for them to switch from the Chinese

based classes to the English based classes, especially when the class is

about traditional Chinese but its taught in English. They mentioned that

they struggled reading those traditional Chinese works translated into

English, because English writing style is so different from Chinese writing

norm, including grammar order, word choice and writing logics, and it

could be confusing for Chinese native speakers to read English-translated

Chinese literature. However, most of them did agree that studying

Chinese here has widened their angle of viewing Chinese, because

professors here constantly encourage them to jump out of the box, and

think of new answers other than the orthodox opinions they studied in

China. The responses I collected from the monthly gathering further

confirmed Yukimuras opinion on why Asian international students want to

study Chinese on UC Davis.

Interestingly, when I try to figure out the goal of Non-Asian students in

Chinese major, I got utterly different opinions on Chinese studying from

my interviewee. Stephanie Smith, a Caucasian student majoring in

Chinese and International Relationship, provided a clear career goal to


work in Chinese NGOs. When she was asked why she wanted to work in

China, she answered: China is a country of great potential, and its really

attractive for me to find out how a country with a very different regime

structure from western countries could achieve the same level of

economic development in such a short time, and working in NGO is a

good way to participate in social life in China. China, unlike most modern

democratic regimes, is ruled by only one political party, yet its not an

authoritarian state as many western politicians claimed because people

still have rights to vote and participate in making important political

decisions. However, overall, Chinese central government has great

authority on intervening the markets compared to governments of other

western countries. Stephanie told me that shes interested in studying the

role of Chinese central government in Chinese market and how Chinese

central government contributes to the relative stability of Chinese market.

Despite her enthusiasm in Chinese society and economy, she said that

she has only been to Hong Kong once, and like most of the Non-Asian

students in Chinese major, she only received one year of basic Chinese

training in her high school prior to studying Chinese in UC Davis. I could

only recognize about 200 Chinese characters before I studied here, but

now I could read some simple Chinese academic articles without referring

to a dictionary. said Stephanie. Her expectation from learning Chinese is

to build a language base for her career goal rather than putting emphasis

on Chinese culture. She explained that with the current knowledge she
learned in UC Davis, its hard for her to have a general, objective view of

China as a living country, because most of Chinese classes offered here

are about Chinese history or literature instead of sociology. For people

who havent experienced Chinese culture in person, I feel like its arbitrary

to have a judgement of China solely based on what we have read from

class and online. She added, Because for every society, there are

aspects that you could learn while you are actively participating in the

daily life.

Indeed, before I studied in UC Davis, the main source I learned about

American society is through TV shows, which are extremely dramatic,

exaggerated portraits of American lifestyles I experienced in the past 3

years. Similarly, its immature to jump into conclusion of how China is like

based on reading. To understand a society as a multidirectional complex,

one has to be there and participate. Hence, its reasonable that Non-Asian

students with relatively weaker base of Chinese valued the improvement

in language skills over the cultural aspect of Chinese classes.

What interests me the most is the goal and expectation of Asian-American

students. Recorded response show that both learning more about the

culture they inherited from their families and prospective jobs using

Chinese are popular goals among Asian-American students in this major.

However, many students included family influence while stating their


goals, which are different from the more cultural wise motivation of Asian

International students and the more personal interest wise initiatives of

Non-Asians. For example, one Asian-American student denoted that he

wanted to learn more about the culture his parents were raised in

because since he was young, his parents told him Chinese myths and read

him Chinese novels. One unique property of Asian-American students that

is brought to my attention is that many of them were raised to speak both

English and their heritage languages--languages that their parents speak,

and this property is reflected by the relatively high confidence level of

Chinese speaking skills to reading and writing. Also, a common

experience for Asian-American students, especially the second-generation

immigrants, is to be the language broker for their family. Language broker

is defined to be children of immigrants who do translation and who

interpret for other people between their heritage and the English

languages. (Wu et al, 2010) Nina Wu and Su Yeong claimed that the

experience of being language brokers could produce both positive and

negative effects on childrens view on their heritage languages, varied

due to personalities.

Jacqueline Wong, a Chinese-American student studying Chinese and

Psychology at UC Davis now, told me that she wants to be a psychiatric

oriented for Chinese immigrants who cant express themselves fluently in

English. My family lived near the China Town in San Francisco before I
transferred to high school in Cuppertino. Jacqueline recalled. My parents

and grandparents cant speak English at all, so they had to live around

China Town. Whenever we had to see our family physician, I had to be

there to translate for my family. The language barrier that first

generation immigrants were facing inspired her to study Chinese in UC

Davis, and to pursue a career providing service to Chinese immigrants.

For Jacqueline, the experience of being the language broker serves as a

sense of efficacy that encourages her to make more progress on her

heritage language. To provide possible reason for the positive effect of

being a language broker, Nina Wu and Su Yeong stated in their paper that

Evidence reveals that when Chinese American adolescents are more

Chinese oriented they ultimately feel a sense of efficacy as language

brokers for their mothers and fathers, and that these relations are

partially explained by the importance they place on familial obligation and

the perceptions that they mattered to their parents even when controlling

for prior levels of the exogenous and mediating variables. (Wu et al,

2010) For many Asian-American students like Jacqueline who were raised

by Chinese oriented families, familial obligation provided them with more

authority to their family roles, which could give them positive view on

Chinese language and culture, and inspire them to pursue a degree in

Chinese. This reflects the importance of family influence on peoples

career goal and study interests.


Overall, we could see that the level of background knowledge of Chinese

has a significant effect on peoples expectation of studying Chinese here.

The more background knowledge one has, the more possible that the

cultural aspects of Chinese studying matters the most. Through analyzing

the Asian-American group, we could also see that ones childhood

experience could affect his career goal. All the findings above show that

Chinese majors are also very diverse in terms of goals and motivations,

which is different from my pre-judgement that most students in this major

are just interested in Chinese culture but not for pursuing career or

research purposes.

Expert Members:

The primary standard for expert members in Chinese major/minor

discourse communities I used is based on the overall confidence level in

Chinese skills. Summarized from the data collected from survey, overall,

Non-Asian has the lowest average confidence level in all three dimensions

of Chinese languages. Asian-American students and Asian-International

students all show high confidence level in reading and speaking, while

Asian International students have significantly higher level of confidence

in writing level. This could be explained by the difference in background

education they received before entering UC Davis. Most Asian

International students have received Chinese education taught in Chinese


prior to studying in UC Davis, and have been familiarized with Chinese

writing, while Asian-American students who received systematic Chinese

education taught in English. To examine the importance of Chinese writing

in the studying Chinese language, I went searching in online database for

related secondary research. In the paper Writing quality predicts Chinese

learning, researchers trained 48 English-as-second-language speakers

with Chinese characters writing, and test one their general Chinese skills

before and after the training. Result shows that there is significant

improvement in average test scores after participants receive the training

and its concluded that handwriting quality improvements have important

role when we predict peoples reading gains assumed that background

knowledges are controlled. Researchers explained that writing is overall

important in language learning because The ability of the character form

to drive this character identification process depends on the quality of its

representation and its connections to meaning and phonology. Writing

may especially strengthen the link from orthography to meaning in word

learning. (Guan et al, 2015) That is to say, students will benefit from

improved Chinese writing skills because it could potentially speed up the

process of interpreting Chinese characters and linking the character to its

meaning while reading. Hence, we could say that when prior knowledges

in Chinese speaking and Chinese reading are roughly the same, the group

with higher level in Chinese writing will have higher overall level of

Chinese language skills. Hence, my conclusion is that more likely Asian


International students are members with higher level of expertise.

Considered that there are a lot of Asian International students currently

studying Chinese here, the Chinese major discourse community possesses

a stable number of expert members. However, as my personal

suggestion, it will be beneficial to the development of Chinese major in UC

Davis to recruit more members other than Asian international students

because they could potentially provide more new research directions

when they meet questions during their process of Chinese learning, and

its also an opportunity for Chinese department to improve their class

structure if they could have more local students in classes.

IV. Conclusion

After the survey and three interviews, I realize that Chinese major

students form a more diverse community than I expected. Students from

different cultural background and with different goals gathered in this

major, and work together to study one of the most ancient languages

classified by linguistics. However, as a Chinese student who wish to

propagandize my country and the charming culture, I will suggest that

this discourse community works on enriching its racial diversity. Offering

more classes in basic Chinese orthography might be one way to improve,

since most non-international students wish to develop their Chinese

language skills, and improving Chinese character writing are important in

Chinese studying. Also, it might help to have more group studying


opportunities so that students from different groups could find chances to

exchange their Chinese learning experiences and learn from each other.

V. Reference:

Swales, J. (2011). The Concept of Discourse Community. In Writing about Writing(pp. 471-473).
Boston, MA: Downs and Wardle.

Guan, C. Q., Perfetti, C. A., & Meng, W. (2015). Writing quality predicts Chinese learning.
Reading and Writing, 28(6), 763-795. doi:10.1007/s11145-015-9549-0

Wu, N. H., & Kim, S. Y. (2008). Chinese American Adolescents Perceptions of the
Language Brokering Experience as a Sense of Burden and Sense of Efficacy. Journal of
Youth and Adolescence,38(5), 703-718. doi:10.1007/s10964-008-9379-3

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