I love the craft of writing and I love teaching the craft of writing. But for the past few years, my love has grown more complicated. I’m a professor at Wuhan University in China and my students are “non-native” speakers of English. When I first arrived in 2018, I had to rethink how I taught students to write. And then I had to re-rethink how I taught students to write. In fact, I’m constantly rethinking and reflecting on this pedagogical problem.
See, the core of the problem is that I need to help my students improve their abilities to write in English while still empowering them to take ownership of the language they use. At first, I felt pretty confident about this. I had read my fair share of writing guides (Williams’s Style is still my favorite). I had developed what I considered to be a decent set of writing skills and habits. And I had previous experience at the University of Notre Dame teaching students how to write. But what I failed to realize was that my students at Wuhan University come to me with a very different set of needs, expectations, and vulnerabilities. If I were to help them without hurting them, I had to rethink my approach.
Within the academic literature on English Language Teaching (ELT), there’s this concept of native-speakerism. The basic idea is that the labels “native speaker” and “non-native speaker” are used to legitimize a host of unquestioned assumptions about the ways that the “native speaker” is superior to the “non-native speaker,” especially when it comes to teaching the use of their native language. I see native-speakerism everywhere in China: an American citizen fresh out of college will be hired to do the job of a Chinese teacher with years of experience and will be given 3x their salary simply because the American is a “native speaker” and the Chinese teacher is not. Maybe that difference would be justified if the American was better at teaching English. But the empirical evidence is pretty clear: while native speakers have their place in ELT, in many contexts they are the inferior choice.
Philosophy is not immune to native-speakerism. Several times now, I have read over a paper written by one of my Chinese colleagues because the journal they submitted to requested that the paper be checked by a “native speaker.” Sometimes, there’s a lot of work to be done. Usually, though, most of the “errors” are things like using the “wrong” preposition or “misusing” a popular idiom. Meanwhile, I regularly encounter papers written by native speakers that are rife with straightforwardly ungrammatical sentences and tortured metaphors.
To be clear, I’m not opposed to standards. I like standards! I am just wary of the way those standards get determined. Many non-native speakers of English have been publishing philosophy for longer than I’ve been alive. It strikes me as absurd that they are asked to defer to me and it strikes me as unjust that they be excluded from the norm-setting community of the language that they have used professionally for decades.
So how do I help my students become better writers without perpetuating this cycle? Here are three things I’ve started doing.
First, I tell them what I just told you. Most students find my little speech confusing the first time they hear it. But it helps when I connect it to the course material. For instance, in my Philosophy of Language course we cover Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”, and that leads naturally to a discussion about code-switching and all of the ways that a language is adapted to fit different registers and styles. Eventually, they come to see that English is just another tool and I am teaching them how that tool can be used for the specific purposes of philosophy. But the English of philosophy doesn’t “belong” to me, their native-speaking professor, any more than does a philosophical idea or a style of arguing.
Second, I carefully label all of my feedback. When I send students comments on their written work, each comment is labeled as either “Philosophy,” “Writing,” or “English.” The “Philosophy” comments are about the philosophical substance behind what is said—stuff like “I think you mischaracterized the causal theory of reference” or “This premise is implausible.” The “Writing” comments are about the composition of the paper, which can include global issues about style and organization as well as local issues about sentence structure and word choices (this is where Williams’s Style is a big help). Finally, the “English” comments are intended to be about more basic English-language issues, including those “misuses” of English that may be marked as non-native. I make it very clear to my students that the “English” comments almost never impact my ability to understand what was said and they are free to disregard such comments or respond to them however they see fit.
Third, I try to find ways for my students to settle how we should use English and I try to follow their lead. For instance, in my Philosophy of Language course we cover Frankfurt’s On Bullshit. The mass noun/count noun distinction in Chinese behaves differently than it does in English, and as a result my students instinctively add an ‘s’ to pluralize the noun. I used to correct them on this point and demonstrate how “native speakers” talk. I’ve since given that up. My students don’t need to talk the same way I talk. In fact, there are decent reasons to think that I should imitate them; it’s easier to compare acts of dishonesty (like lies) when the grammar used to talk about them is similar.
I know this third practice seems very minor. But I think it’s important for my student to experience what it’s like to take control of the use of the English language and “correct” someone else’s English, especially that of a native speaker. It’s also not as easy as it sounds. Consider the use of the word “gay.” In China, it’s normal to say “a gay” to refer to a gay person—in fact, gay people in China often use this as a term of self-identification. To my American ear, though, “a gay” sounds derogatory. If I am truly committed to relinquishing my undeserved authority over the English language, does that mean I have to get more comfortable with people using English in a way that I may find derogatory? I don’t have a good answer to this question.
Thus far, I’ve been reflecting on how I teach my Chinese students. But I think these reflections can be applied more generally.
First, “native-sounding English” is often conflated with “English that sounds like it was produced by college-educated white people.” Thus, I think students from other racial and socioeconomic backgrounds can also benefit from being empowered to take ownership of the English they use when writing their term papers (as well as the English they use outside of the classroom after they graduate). To be honest, I don’t have a lot of experience in this respect. But I imagine first-generation college students may have many of the same needs and vulnerabilities that my Chinese students have. Similarly, native-speakerism can intersect with racial prejudices in pernicious ways.
Second, I think it is important for everyone to be made aware of native-speakerism, even (or especially) native speakers. Standards in philosophical English, like all standards, are manifestations of power, privilege, and prestige. Again, I don’t mean to say that all standards are bad. But it is important that we, as teachers, be honest about the power of standards and help our students to wield that power more responsibly.
I’ll end by suggesting some practices you can adopt to help address these issues. While there are more radical options (such as entirely redesigning your reading list to include more non-native speakers of English), I want to focus on practices that you can more easily adopt now, even after the semester has started.
When you give writing assignments to your students, draw their attention to the different registers that they could write in and discuss the comparative advantages and disadvantages of writing in one register rather than another. When professors ask their students to write an essay, they often implicitly assume that their students will write in a fairly formal variety of English (admittedly, though, philosophical English does tend to be less formal than other varieties of academic English). Nevertheless, your students might not have an explicit understanding of the difference between formal English and informal English. Explain the difference to them. Use examples. You can also teach the difference through practice: ask your students to write a paragraph in formal English and then rewrite it in informal English; then have them discuss which paragraph is better suited for your assignment and why. By teaching your students about different varieties of English, you can help them understand the social aspects of linguistic standards and (hopefully) empower them to think about those standards more justly.
Finally, when you evaluate your students’ writing, model how you want them to evaluate writing in the future. Personally speaking, I don’t like when my students use culturally specific idioms because (i) they can impede comprehension, and (ii) philosophy tends to privilege the idioms that come from dominant cultures. Similarly, when I evaluate my students’ writing, I try to avoid rewarding prose for having “style” or “flair” and I try to avoid punishing prose for being “plain” or for having some grammatical “infelicities.” (Here, I am drawing on the first of the Barcelona Principles for a Globally Inclusive Philosophy.) I understand that not everyone will agree with me about how philosophical writing should be evaluated. But I still suggest you think carefully about what your evaluations might be implicitly teaching your students. In all likelihood, you are teaching your students much more than you realize.
The Professor Reflection Series of the APA Blog is designed to center attention on how professors engage in teaching and learning. Professors are asked to reflect on how to improve teaching and learning in higher education. We would love for you to be a part of this project. Please contact Series Editor, Dr. Samuel Taylor at staylor@tuskegee.edu.
Peter Finocchiaro
Peter Finocchiaro is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at Wuhan University. He is interested in testing how Western-developed pedagogy is best extended to a Chinese context. He is also interested in metaphysics and social philosophy and the places at which they intersect -- like, for instance, the metaphysics of sexual orientation.
