NOBUYUKI HONNA
The English language situation in East Asia is being vitalized with a remarkable increase in the number of students learning the language in the whole region. While China witnesses an estimated 350 million people studying and using English (25% of the population; Bolton 2008: 6), Japan emphasizes English competence in its officially initiated globally minded Japanese development project. Korea and Taiwan are constantly committed to strengthening their primary‐school English language teaching (ELT) programs. In other parts of Asia where English serves as a language of intranational communication and where ELT spreads and succeeds, national varieties have invariably emerged. Although English is designated as an international (not intranational) language in East Asia, indications are that what amounts to a national variety is developing in each country in this region, too. One cause of this phenomenon can be attributed to the communicative approaches adopted in ELT programs regionwide. Those approaches are meant to put more value on mutual understanding than on simple mimicry and rigid pattern practice. Increased exposure to English‐using environments is also expected to make learners aware of varieties, thereby helping them to recognize that they can use English effectively without speaking like a native speaker. This chapter presents a brief description of the current English language situation and ELT innovations while referring to some structural and pragmatic features often noticed in English in East Asia.
The first contact between English speakers and Chinese on the Chinese mainland occurred in 1637, when four British ships arrived in Macau and Canton on an expeditionary mission. A century later, “Chinese Pidgin English” (which was then called broken English, jargon, mixed dialect, or Canton English) developed as a lingua franca between natives and foreigners on the coast of South China (Bolton 2002a: 184–185; see also Bolton 2002b).
The growth and diffusion of Chinese Pidgin English was enhanced by its extensive usability, which was taken advantage of by Chinese merchants and foreign traders bilaterally. The ban proclaimed by the Chinese government on the communication between foreigners and Chinese inhabitants made it extremely difficult for both parties to learn the other’s language formally. Those natives who dared to teach the “language of the central flowery nation” to outside “barbarians” were denounced as traitors (Bolton 2002a: 185). After the first Anglo‐Chinese War of 1839–42, Chinese Pidgin English spread to other open port cities including Shanghai, making it an indispensable lingua franca between natives and foreigners and even among Chinese themselves (e.g. compradors) when they spoke different provincial dialects.
After 225 years of international contact, the Treaty of Tientsin (Tianjin) of 1862 opened many other places (including inland enclaves) to western interests of various sorts. Throughout the country, missionaries from the West established schools, where either English was formally taught as an important subject or was adopted as a medium of instruction. By the early twentieth century, there actually developed a social stratification of Chinese English in the continuum of educated and pidgin varieties. The writings of Lin Yutang (1895–1976) and John Wu (1899–1986) represented prominent examples of educated English in China. The missionary influence continued to the Republican era, subsequent to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911.
The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 brought forth a chain of drastic changes in many domains of life. English disappeared from the school curriculum and Russian became the main foreign language, since the new government turned to the USSR for help in its nation‐building project (Hu 2001). After the collapse of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), English recovered its importance and popularity as the country shifted to modernization and economic development.
Contemporary China recognizes English as a global language and uses it as an important means of the state’s international communication strategy. In 2000, the government‐owned China Central Television (CCTV) instituted a new channel to broadcast a wide range of English‐language programs 24 hours a day for domestic and international audiences. The station statement declared: “CCTV International is China’s answer to introducing greater diversity and more perspective into the global information flow.”1
Using the metaphor of language as a weapon, Xinhua News (1 July 2010) reported on the setting up of another English station called CNC News, saying: “China arms its top media with a new English‐speaking global television and wishes more voices to be heard by the rest of the world.”2
At the same time, China introduced English as an obligatory subject in the third grade of the primary school in 2001. At present, English is taught from the first grade onward. With these initiatives, the national syllabus was established, integrating primary, secondary, and tertiary ELT. The national College English Test (CET) promotes English language learning at the university level. The certificate of CET Band 4/6 has attained such a high social value that a majority of universities have adopted the policy of “no CET 4/6 certificate, no graduation diploma,” with the result that 10 million students take the tests annually. Inaugurated in 1999, the China Public English Test System (PETS) also attracts a huge number of learners as more and more business and other organizations use its certificate as an official measure of English language proficiency (Pang, Zhou, & Fu 2002: 202–203).
At the turn of the 21st century, structural and functional studies of Chinese patterns of English blossomed. In those studies (such as Bolton 2002b, 2003; Pan 2005; Xu 2010), extensive attempts were made to explore Chinese characteristics of English in the domains of phonology, lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and communication styles. The discoveries in these endeavors seem to suggest that Chinese varieties of English are developing. Because of limited space, only a few topics are discussed below.
Particularly important is the domain of lexicon. Besides an increasing flood of Chinese words into English in China (such as guanxi ‘relationship, connection’), many English phrases have been coined to refer to Chinese ways and experiences of life. Traditional ones include Four Books, Five Classics, barefoot doctor, people’s commune, Great Leap Forward, paper tiger, ideological remodeling, reeducation, reform through physical labor, red guard, red rice, and capitalist roader. More recent types are one country, two systems, harmonious society, the higher authorities have policies and the localities have their countermeasures, planned commodity economy, enterprise contracted production system, vegetable basket project, three represents, outstanding deeds and advanced persons, iron rice bowl, iron wage, iron armchair, breaking the three irons, four modernizations, one‐family‐one‐child policy, and spiritual pollution. China Daily, Shanghai Daily, and the Beijing Today Weekly are full of these expressions.
Since a person’s face is an enormously important concept related to his/her honor, respect, pride, integrity, and identity in China (and most of East Asia), “face” collocations abound in addition to the ubiquitous saving/losing face. Jia (2005) discusses aspects of Chinese practice of face and face negotiation, employing such Chinese‐English specific phraseologies as maintain (strive for) some amount of face, hold up the Chinese face to the world, she hasn't showed us the least amount of face, you shouldn't have given her so much face, you are simply losing my face, a Chinese way of giving face to somebody, have no face (left), love (desire) for face, give (grant) me some face, reject (refuse) face, rather die to save face, take my face into consideration, there is no faceless communication, hierarchical face, group face, care for the other’s face, etc. Actually, a Japanese business person can say to his Chinese counterpart: “I know your face is bigger (more important) than mine. But please take my face into consideration. Give me some face, will you? If I go home without your signature in this contract paper, I will become faceless in my company. I can’t go home faceless” (Honna 2013: 26).
In this connection, calques can be a rewarding study area of Chinese wisdom expressed in English. Pan (2005: 160–166) discusses some interesting facets of English transcreations of Chinese idioms and old sayings, claiming that “Chinese language and culture should enrich English language and culture” (161). Consider the sentence “Her beauty was such as to overthrow cities and ruin states.” Although this sounds like a direct translation from the Chinese, it has actually undergone an adaptation process. The English loan translation comes from the Chinese Qingguo qingcheng (‘Overthrowing states and overthrowing cities’). Thus, the English rendering restores the originally obliterated subject (reference to a woman’s beauty), avoids repetition of the verb, and changes the order of nouns from states‐cities to cities‐states. All these linguistic adjustments are made in an effort to create Chinese English expressions that are as structurally English and culturally Chinese as possible. These loan translations, mostly direct renderings, are popular among students, for example, ‘People mountain, people sea’, ‘Good good study, day day up’, and ‘I give face, you don’t want face’.
Syntactic features are discussed by Xu (2010). It remains to be seen, however, whether these are specific to Chinese English or whether they are general characteristics of English speakers of certain types of source languages. Here are some examples (Xu 2010: 224–228):
These rule‐governed sentence patterns are often seen in Chinese English. Thus, for example, sentence (2) illustrates omission of understood subjects and objects. Topic‐comment order makes it possible to interpret ‘this society’ in (4) as ‘when it comes to this society’.
Chinese English accommodates Chinese‐based pragmatics. Thus, “I’m not that good. You’ve overpraised me” is the response to a compliment heard more frequently than “Thank you”. Adopting American/British address forms is not a simple matter. “Having been exposed to both Chinese and Western norms,” Hong Kong linguist David Li explains, “I often have to undergo a mental struggle in the intercultural workplace before settling on a particular choice…. I constantly feel that following one set of norms entails violating another” (Li 2002: 581).
In terms of Chinese discourse, a frame‐main order prevails. For example, in making a request, the reason for the request is stated before its content (Kirkpatrick & Xu 2002). A similar trend is observed by Jia and Cheng (2002), who characterize Chinese discourse organization as “indirect and inductive” in accordance with the traditional qi‐cheng‐zhuan‐he model of rhetorical structuring. For details and ramifications see also Scollon (1991), Scollon, Wong, and Kirkpatrick (2000), and Hu (1999).
These differences can occasionally cause a serious international and intercultural communication problem. Honna, Kirkpatrick, and Gilbert (2001: 16–17) cite a case that was observed in Hong Kong prior to its return to China.
Several years ago, when Hong Kong was still a colony of Britain, I (Kirkpatrick) was sitting in the office of a superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force. The superintendent was English. In those colonial days, almost all the police officers were expatriates and the sergeants and constables were all locals. I was there because I worked for a company who had been asked to explain the communication problems that were common in the police force at that time.
There was a quiet knock at the door and in came a young Chinese police constable.
“Yes?” enquired the superintendent.
“My mother is not very well, sir,” started the constable.
“Yes?” repeated the superintendent, a frown appearing on his brow.
“She has to go into hospital, sir,” continued the constable.
“So?”
“On Thursday, sir.”
The superintendent’s frown was replaced by a look of exasperation. “What is it that you want?” he asked sternly.
At this direct question, the constable's face fell and he simply mumbled, “Nothing, sir. It’s all right,” and turned and left the room.
As soon as the door had closed the superintendent turned to me and said:
“You see. A classic case. They can’t get to the point.”
“So, what would you want him to say?” I asked.
“Well, instead of beating around the bush, he should come straight to the point. He obviously wants some leave so he can look after his mother. He should ask for leave and not waste my time going on about his poor mother.”
“You want him to say something like, ‘Can I have some leave please, sir?’”
“Yes, exactly,” replied the superintendent.
Traditionally, Expanding Circle speakers were expected to conform to Inner Circle speakers’ norms of linguistic behavior because English was broadly considered an American or a British language. From the perspective of World Englishes, however, these assumptions are increasingly being questioned. If English is a multicultural language, it has to be used as such. Asian speakers of English would not have much difficulty handling a situation similar to the one illustrated above (Honna 2014: 214–218). The frame‐first flow is shared by many Asians as a fundamental principle in information sequencing. In a hypothetical Hong Kong branch of a Japanese company, an English‐language conversation between a Chinese staffer and a Japanese chief (kacho) would most likely run like this:
Japanese:
Chinese:
Japanese:
Chinese:
Japanese:
What is important in intercultural communication is one’s capability and willingness to understand what the other has to say, not the disposition to impose one’s values and norms upon the other. It is important that we should be educationally informed of the fact that there is always another way of doing and saying the same thing and we should be prepared to respect these differences. We have to be trained in ELT to be able to accommodate intervarietal and intercultural differences so that communication can be conducted in a productive and constructive way.
The English language was first introduced into Japan in March 1600, when William Adams, the English pilot of a Dutch ship, reached the western part of the Japanese archipelago after a shipwreck. Later renamed Miura Anjin in the Japanese fashion, he soon won Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu’s personal trust and worked as an intermediary between the Japanese ruler and Great Britain’s King James I, delivering translated messages back and forth across the seas (Sugimoto 1999).
However, English did not become a language to be learned by Japanese officials and intellectuals for a long time. Japan allowed foreign relations only with the Dutch as part of its national insulation policy proclaimed in 1635 and upheld until the collapse of the shogunate. In fact, when the shogunate awoke to the deterioration of Dutch influence in world affairs and understood the importance of English as a language for obtaining international information in the early nineteenth century, it was a Dutch trade officer named Jan Cock Bloomhoff (1779–1853) who first taught English to Japanese samurai and other intellectuals in charge of translation in 1809, using Dutch textbooks, and Dutch and Japanese as the languages of instruction (Mozumi 1989: 89–92).
At the time of the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japan’s new enlightened leaders came to realize that English would be essential for the country’s modernization and development. The government soon established a national educational system in 1872 and introduced English language teaching in five‐year secondary schools, often even in six‐year primary schools, in major cities. At the initial stages, reprints of English textbooks brought from the United States and the United Kingdom were used in the teaching of mathematics, physics, chemistry, world geography, world history, or ethics in newly instituted secondary schools. In its dawning period, the Tokyo Imperial University had to employ foreign professors invited from America, Britain, Germany, or France, who offered their lectures in their languages. As well depicted in Tsubouchi Shoyo’s naturalistic and descriptive novel The Student Character of the Present Time (1885–1886), there even emerged indications of Japanese and English bilingualism among university students (Ono 2000). These trends soon subsided as Japanese professors replaced foreign counterparts, and English teaching gave way to grammar and translation methods before the close of the Meiji era (1912).
English language teaching was reinvigorated as peace was restored after the end of World War II in 1945. Two years later, the government set up six‐year primary school and three‐year junior high school education as compulsory, with English introduced nationally as a subject from the first year of the secondary curriculum, to continue into the three‐year senior high school and then to college. Although it was officially designated an elective course at that time, almost all schools offered English as a required subject, while emphasizing ELT as an indispensable key to the international community. This trend continued into the twenty‐first century, with some substantial changes.
Since Japan opened its door to foreign countries English has always been a very important social issue in Japan. Besides ELT improvements, three prominent issues now include a torrential influx of English words into Japanese, arguments for and against English as a second official language, and corporate responses to English as an international language.
Perhaps the most remarkable influence which the English language has exerted in Japan is its lexical influx into Japanese. Many Japanese consider English loan words in Japanese as one of the most important, serious, and grave problems confronting the Japanese language today. The reason is simply that people believe that the influx of a tremendous number of foreign (read “English”) words into Japanese is an intrusion and will eventually lead to the confusion, corruption, and decay of their national language.
Commentators normally blame those Japanese who resort to allegedly “inconsiderate” use of foreign words in situations where “beautiful, authentic” Japanese ones are available. Letters to the editor’s pages of major national newspapers are constantly filled with complaints from readers about “excessive use of undecipherable, unnecessary, undesirable, incorrect, and misleading words’”borrowed from English.
In 2003, the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics came up with Japanese substitutes for over a hundred English expressions used in Japanese contexts in an effort to decrease the “thoughtless” dependence on foreign words. The list includes “outsourcing,” “action program,” “access,” “agenda,” “assessment,” “analyst,” and “amenity,” just to mention some of the items selected for Japanese translation. Yet many of the proposed Japanese substitutes may not necessarily work.
There seem to be two major reasons for the difficulties. First, foreign words involve new concepts that are not easy to express in Japanese. Second, foreign words are very often used as euphemisms in Japan; their Japanese renditions would kill the intended effect and become useless. “Hello Work” (formerly called Public Employment Stabilization Office) and “green car” (Japan Railway's First Class passenger car) are cases in point.
These functional and expressive limits on translation indicate that Japanese people actually need such foreign words for the smooth working of their present‐day society. To make sense of the situation, Honna (2008: 92–120) attempts a systematic analysis of the issues involved in English in Japanese, looking at (a) the Japanization patterns, (b) the role that linguistic borrowing plays in modern Japanese society, and (c) the sociolinguistic forces that stimulate the influx of English into Japanese. Moody and Matsumoto (2003) analyze creative aspects in the use of English in Japanese in terms of “code ambiguation.” As languages come into contact, they mingle in many interesting ways. The notion of one language as an independent system is only an imaginary creation.
Another interesting development is the controversy over a proposal to make English an official second language (EOSL) in Japan, a topic that attracted wide public attention in January 2000. The proposal was included in “The Frontier Within: Individual Empowerment and Better Governance in the New Millennium,” a report published by an advisory panel to former Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi (Honna & Takeshita 2003).
The idea of a bilingual policy did not originate with the release of this report. Much earlier, Arinori Mori (1847–1889), a prominent statesman, diplomat, and proponent of Western thought and social practices, proposed the abandonment of the Japanese language for English. Yukichi Fukuzawa (1835–1901), an educator, writer, and propagator of Western knowledge, who founded Keio Gijuku (now Keio University), wanted English spread all over Japan. The debate about the use of English as an additional language, therefore, is not new.
The Obuchi proposal did not make any headway due to the fact that it was only flown as a trial balloon, and it did not show any concrete action programs. Looking back at the proposal now, we may wonder if it is really necessary to have a law that declares English a “second language in Japan” in Obuchi’s terms. Japanese people and organizations now are becoming more aware than before of the reality of the importance of English as a language of international information, communication, and cooperation.
In some Japanese companies, English is already used as a de facto in‐house language. In many others, English proficiency, often represented by TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) scores, is required as a condition for promotion. For a larger number of Japanese to acquire a working command of English for their own specific purposes, it seems to be much more productive to try to improve ELT programs from a long‐range point of view than to plan legal intervention in the use of English in Japanese society. Actually, the Obuchi proposal for EOSL stimulated the nation’s renewed efforts for ELT (see section 3.2). And, predictably, failure to realize these planned programs could invite another call for EOSL.
Japanese companies spend a huge amount of money on foreign language training programs for their employees. According to a firm specializing in corporate education, the demand for English was outstanding, followed by that for Chinese, Portuguese, Indonesian, Thai, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Hindi, and Russian in that order in 2013. In fact, some companies have adopted English as a working language. Yet, the concepts of English as an international language and world Englishes are not well understood among business people and seminar conductors. Thus, corporate ELT remains native oriented with an emphasis on English conversation (eikaiwa) and TOEIC exercises.
Simultaneously, interest in English as an international language (EIL) or world Englishes (WE) is increasing. A personnel department chief of a general trading company (sogo sosha) once said: “Japanese businesses gain a tremendous amount of profit in countries where English is not their native language. We need to understand those people in their varieties of English” (personal communication).
All these trends show what contradictory views Japanese people have of English. Although they say English is an international language, they seem to find it difficult to disentangle themselves from the mythology of English as a language that reflects native speakers’ cultures. Actually, a glimpse at how English is treated in Japan’s business community reveals these tendencies.
A serious case was found on a website page of a leading Japanese company. When its financial management scandal became public some years ago, the corporation came up with an announcement on the Internet in Japanese and English to explain its position on the discreditable behavior. But the two versions were quite different in terms of apology. The Japanese statement acknowledged the firm’s “deferred inclusion of losses in securities investments in our financial reports,” and apologized to their stakeholders for “inconveniences such as the consequent fall in the stock prices.” In contrast, its English version did not mention the fraudulent accounting practice; it simply presented a rather semantically empty apology for “all of the distress and trouble caused due to the recent series of media reports and fall in the stock prices triggered by our recent change in President.”
Then, where does the difference in these announcements come from? Apparently it comes from the perceived disparity of the concepts of crisis management styles between Japanese and English. In Japan, it is believed that self‐defense is more emphasized than apology in English, and the conventional wisdom dictates that using English is using it the way native speakers do. For common sense to prevail, however, Japanese companies should not let their principles and policies fluctuate depending on the language they choose for communication.
In view of the fact that this practice is sometimes seen in English in Japan, Japan’s ELT should play a role as a rectifier in this pragmatic field in both schools and companies. To facilitate kaizen, that is, continuous improvement, in this domain, Japanese need to be better informed about EIL and WE in ELT, trained to express their ideas and values, and understand why they do what they do as clearly as possible.
Although Japan’s “English conversation” education industry is said to be worth 2 trillion yen (more or less 20 billion US dollars), which is as strong as the country’s publication business, Japanese are notorious for their “national” failure to acquire a working command of English. However, in an attempt to meet the increasing trends of globalization and international interdependency in the global village, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) in 2003 made public an action plan to cultivate “The Japanese with English abilities.”
The plan called for the establishment, by the year 2008, of a system to carry out various programs to improve Japan's ELT. The ministry strongly appealed to the public, local governments, and business and industrial communities for all‐out support and cooperation in its concerted efforts for improved ELT. With some positive results achieved by the initiatives (2003–2008), the ministry came forward in 2010 with a new series of educational programs designed to develop “globally‐functional human resources,” where English competence is further emphasized. According to the latest MEXT data, 16 undergraduate and 90 graduate departments on Japan’s university campuses offer degree programs in English, while the government has mapped out a plan to create an educational environment to invite 300,000 students from abroad to study in Japan by 2020.
As a matter of fact, Japan’s ELT is officially considered as part of a larger endeavor of “international understanding education.” Theoretically, ELT for this goal is composed of three indispensable components: (a) teaching English as an international language, (b) explaining Japan’s culture, and (c) understanding other cultures. In implementing this framework in Japan’s ELT, three challenging issues are noticed: (a) how Japanese can understand and teach English, not as an American language or a British language, but as a multicultural language for international communication; (b) how they can train their students to be able to talk about their ideas, their communities, and their ways of life in English; and (c) how they can encourage their students to become interested in the cultures of speakers of different varieties of English around the world (Honna & Takeshita 2014). The success of Japan’s ELT depends on how much can be achieved in these essential fields. Obviously, these issues are not Japan specific, but the ones to be dealt with in the world’s ELT community.
If Japanese English is a set of patterns Japanese speakers of English tend to produce after years of classroom exercises (Honna 2008), it covers a wide range of proficiency levels and performance varieties. Since non‐native speakers commonly look for and settle upon patterns they find easy to handle both structurally and functionally, it will be interesting to identify them descriptively. Although much has been done in the field of phonetics (Takefuta 1982), little is known about syntactic and semantic inclinations. Actually, Japanese people use English in their own ways on many occasions (Stanlaw 2004). One domain is the use of English in Japanese‐language contexts; word play is often employed in this domain. For example, Japan’s ex‐prime minister’s name, Noda, is a homophone of “(Something) is No!” so people once said “Noda is No‐da” in opposition to his policy on nuclear power plants.
The word game is sometimes played by leading companies. Suica is the name of a prepaid electronic commuter train pass issued by Japan’s largest railway company. It officially stands for ‘Super Urban Intelligent Card’; but to the Japanese ear, it sounds like a ‘sui‐sui card’. Suisui is a Japanese sound symbolism of ‘fast, smooth going’. Likewise, Ecute is the name of a shopping facility created by the company the same in the compounds of some of its major railway stations. It is supposed to be an acronym of Eki (‘station’), Center, Universal, Together, and Enjoy, the five key words they came up with for the shopping facility. But to a Japanese speaker, it just sounds like ‘eki‐cute’, meaning that the shopping facility in the station is a cute, attractive one. People seem to enjoy the bilingual puns created in using English in Japanese‐language contexts.
Additionally, Japanese companies are apt to highlight their corporate identities, company mottoes, or business campaigns by employing English. Many of these phrases are created in accordance with traditional Japanese diction. Some emphasize Japanese national themes such as dream, future, and possibility as seen in Drive Your Dreams (Toyota), Shift the Future (Nissan), Make it possible with Canon, Inspire the Next (Hitachi), and Think GAIA for Life and the Earth (Sanyo).
Other uses of English may stress affective values such as Feel Your Future (Kyoto Sangyo University), Color Your Days (Tokyo Metro), and To Be Your Best (Keio Railways), Open Your Beauty (TBC), which is based on the metaphoric understanding that one’s beauty is often closed in a box, which is hidden deep in one’s subconscious. Have a Rice Day (Agriculture Ministry) shows that the original colloquial English idiom (‘…a nice day’) is widely known among ordinary Japanese.
Thus, Japanese people have a long history of using English in a variety of ways. The purposes of such English uses may be for intranational communication, rather than international communication. But their extensive experience of manipulating English will certainly influence the way Japanese use English as an international language, which they are beginning to do more expansively these days.
At the same time, a wider linguistic perspective is required to understand and explain the legitimacy of a certain type of Japanese English expression. A good example is This restaurant is delicious. Many Japanese teachers cite this sentence as a representative of Japanese English, which they generally characterize as full of errors and deviations. Echoing some native speakers’ reaction to this sentence, they say: “A restaurant is a building, and a building cannot be delicious. So this is illogical and incorrect!” However, if this is a questionable sentence, then so is “Helen is sharp.” Helen is a human being, not a cutting instrument, so she cannot be sharp. Actually, however, these two sentences enjoy equal correctness and legitimacy status, although the first one may sound strange to some speakers. The fact is that they share a common metaphoric/metonymic foundation, which is, simply put, that the whole is the part.
The bottom line is that the correctness of a sentence should not be judged on the basis of whether the native speaker approves of it or not. To make sure that this approach really works in the real world, people need to be trained in metaphoric awareness in ELT so that we can be sensitive to and tolerant of different and unfamiliar expressions originating from other cultures. This principle should be applied to nonnative speakers and native speakers alike if English is to be used as an international language across cultures.
Korea’s first English language school was established in 1883 during the Joseon Dynasty (1883–1920), to train interpreters (Park 2009). In Korea’s 130‐year history of English language teaching, the 1990s saw enormous changes in all aspects of its endeavor.
In 1997, English was formally introduced in primary schools (from third grade onward) as a regular and obligatory subject, thereby establishing seamless ELT programs through secondary to tertiary education, with a strong emphasis on communicative and practical proficiency.
Beginning in 2001, Teaching English in English (TEE) became a main stream in primary and secondary ELT. The purpose is to provide students with as much exposure as possible to the language they are learning. It is now being emphasized in inservice and teacher‐training programs around the country, and teachers are expected to develop the necessary English ability to practice this pedagogy. TEE can be a valuable means of ELT in countries where English is rarely used as a language of social communication. A similar approach is being considered in Japan.
At the same time, some improvements have been recorded in college‐level ELT, intended to produce college students who can communicate in English. One such innovation is observed in the English section of the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT), which all Korean high school graduates are required to take if they wish to go to universities. Although the similar test of English previously focused on phonological, lexical, and grammatical knowledge, the present examination (first administered in 1993) has the following characteristics: (a) emphasis on communicative competence, (b) introduction of a listening comprehension test, (c) fluency over accuracy, (d) emphasis on reading comprehension, and (e) no paper‐and‐pencil test on pronunciation or spelling (Kwon 2000: 67–68).
Furthermore, the Korean government spent millions of dollars to develop a National English Ability Test (NEAT) designed to assess the four skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, thereby encouraging well‐balanced ELT at all levels of education. This test was to replace the CSAT in 2015, but was virtually abandoned for financial reasons in 2014 (Park & Kim 2014: 52–53). In spite of occasional ups and downs, Korea’s ELT initiatives have definitely produced some educational results. For example, universities are now offering an increasing number of courses taught in English as a means of instruction (EMI). Park and Kim (2014: 48, n.1) list some major institutions of higher learning whose ratio of EMI courses is recorded, including the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (91%), Korea University (40%), and Yonsei University (28.5%).
Importantly, the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology (MEST) adopted the concept of EIL as its ELT goal, defining English as “the language of multicultural speakers,” not that of “native speakers” in its 2008 revised national curriculum. In fact, old habits die hard, and “native‐speakerism” still seems to remain as influential as before among students, teachers, and parents. Yet, some specialists predict that it is only a matter of time before EIL is accepted pedagogically and practically (Park & Kim 2014: 57). To make that happen, Koreans generally will need to know more about EIL and WE. If there is to be adaptation, there has to be enlightenment.
English became a topic of public debate in a larger sense in November 1999, when a Korean industrial association called on the government for the immediate designation of English as the nation's second “public” language. In a forum sponsored by the Korea Center for Free Enterprise, industrial, political, and intellectual leaders declared unanimously: “When Korean people master English, it will boost Korea’s national competitiveness greatly.” In explicit support for this drive, some companies were trying to establish English as “the language of all in‐house communications’”(Yoo 1999). Naturally, opposition has been expressed from the nation’s academic and cultural quarters. The great debate still continues without any proposal having successfully been implemented (Yoo 2005: 8; for English in Korea from an ideological point of view, see Park 2009). Actually, since the economic crisis of 1997 in Korea, public awareness of the importance of English has evidently been widened. As a result, young people, particularly those in business and other professional sections of the society, display stronger readiness than before to use (Korea) English whenever an opportunity arises.
The augmented use of English in Korea has exerted strong influence on Korean, as is well illustrated by Baik (1994), Lee (1989), and Shim (1994). It also gave rise to Konglish, a coinage that refers to patterns of English Korean students tend to employ. For example, a monthly textbook to go with Korea Education Broadcasting System (EBS)’s Morning Special radio program made for ELT carries a section called “MS Konglish Dictionary.” Although examples are treated as something to be corrected, they are not presented in a derogatory manner. They reflect how Korean users are struggling with English in their linguistic and cultural contexts. Among those on the list in the June 2000 issue of Morning Special (86–87) are the following:
While the employment of a sentence after a preposition in (16) can be regarded as a case of grammatical failure, “quarreling” denoting arguing in (13) may reflect Korean semantics. Similar patterns may constantly occur when people are encouraged to speak English. In fact, Kwon (2001) argues that Konglish or Koreanized English should not be stigmatized as bad language as long as it is understood by other English speakers (cited by Park & Kim 2014: 57). Most of the other phenomena may be noticed in mother‐tongue‐influenced basilectal and mesolectal varieties of other Outer and Expanding Circle countries. While they are the culminations of cross‐linguistic contact and accommodation, it is interesting that they characteristically do not cause communication problems.
Exploratory but nonetheless important work on Korean English is reported in Jung and Su (1999), where analyses are made of the usages of English modals and prepositions based on a corpus of sampled texts from The Korean Herald, the most widely read English‐language newspaper in Korea. One of Jung and Su’s prominent findings indicates that will and would are the most common modals in their data, whereas shall (meaning volition and prediction) and should (used as a first‐person variant of hypothetical epistemic would) are almost obsolescent in The Korean Herald. Another discovery is that since Korean does not have the distinction between at and in made in English in terms of dimension‐type, size, and semantic difference, the grammatical knowledge of Korean may have permeated the sentence found in the esteemed newspaper: “The writer is a visiting professor in (instead of at) Korea University” (Jung & Su 1999: 34–35). A larger‐scale corpus study will likely further reveal characteristics of how English is transplanted in Korean soil.
It is encouraging that Korean‐authored articles can be used as samples of Korean English in Korea. In Japanese English‐language journalism, articles written by Japanese are usually examined and finalized by copy editors for whom English is a native language. In the same vein, many academic journals prescribe that authors wishing to publish in English should have their articles checked and corrected by native speakers before submission, thus making explicit the presupposition that Japanese English is incorrect.
English has been a big issue in Taiwan since ex‐President Chen Shui‐bian expressed his interest in 2002 in making English the nation’s “quasi‐official” language, highlighting its importance in the light of globalization. In a well‐coordinated move, Premier Yu Shyi‐kun promised to realize the status of English as such over a period of six years (by 2008), while the Minister of Education Huang Jung‐tsuen declared he would chair a task force to map out strategic plans (Ko & Yeh 2002). But as of 2014, it still remained to be seen how far the official commitment will be carried out.
Maezawa, Honna, and Tan (1990) was a first introduction to English in Taiwan, which depicted its phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic features. Referring to Chinese linguistic codes, the authors attempted to explain where such patterns as the following come from: Please wait until I write this letter well (meaning “until I’ve written this letter”); Now is three o'clock; Though I got up early, [zero] was late for school; I met the professor [zero] wrote this book; Because he was busy, so he didn't come; Have you eaten yet? (as a greeting).
A more recent contribution, Chen (2003), explores a wider range of issues extensively. One of her research topics involves comparison of request forms between Taiwanese and American speakers of English. “Since most people in non‐native English speaking countries take English used by native speakers as their learning model and speaking an English close to theirs is regarded as ‘good’ or ‘standard’ English in those non‐native English‐speaking countries (e.g. in Singapore),” she concludes, “Taiwanese or any other English learners certainly can benefit greatly from gaining information on how to interpret and respond to native English speakers appropriately” (154).
At the same time, successive Taiwanese administrations have strongly supported ELT as a means of making the island country an Asia‐Pacific Regional Operation Center. The project has created a huge demand for English communicative competence among Taiwanese people. Foreign visitors notice the ease with which young people handle English in the office and on the street. Interestingly, Pan (2005: 161–162) observes that Qingcheng qingguo is more popular in Taiwan Chinese than Qingcheng qingguo used in Mainland Chinese and assumes that the new form has materialized as a result of English translation of the Chinese idiom (see section 2.2). The possibility is mentioned that a wider use of English in Taiwan may result in two varieties of Chinese which are different from each other in some domains.
As trade and cultural relations between and among the countries in the East Asian region grow, the reliance on English for multinational communication is likely to increase. Asian varieties of English are here to stay, and the claim that English Is an Asian Language (Bautista 1997) may someday apply to East Asia as it does to South and Southeast Asia now.