Cultural Beliefs

Culture can play a big role in writing. The way an individual writes often reflects his beliefs, and thus it is no surprise that problems can result for Chinese ESL students who are not used to American culture.

cul·ture shock: the feeling of disorientation experienced by someone who is suddenly subjected to an unfamiliar culture, way of life, or set of attitudes.

Chinese beliefs largely stem from Confucius, an extremely important person born in 551 BC. Chinese citizens modeled their behavior after him and his beliefs — he was considered a paragon for all Chinese to follow. His beliefs, chronicled in the Analects, have existed for over a millennium and almost indirectly serve as a religion for all Chinese to follow.

How does this make an impact on their writing? Because unlike American writing, which often strives to be direct and straight to the point, Chinese writing prefers to be loose and avoid taking certain stances. This becomes a big problem in the Test of English as Foreign Language (TOEFL), a mandatory test for Chinese students to enroll in colleges. It is essentially the Chinese ESL student version of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The idea for this essay is to come up with an argument arguing one side or the other, argue it all the way and back it up with examples, and then end with a firm conclusion summarizing what was covered. This ends up being a huge problem for Chinese ESL students, who may not be used to arguing for one side. Confucian ideals emphasize harmony – thus, it is common to see Chinese students supporting both sides of the argument.

The TOEFL iBT® test is given in English and administered via the Internet. There are four sections (listening, reading, speaking and writing) which take a total of about four and a half hours to complete.

The Chinese basic essay format is different as well, as explained by Chen.

Qi means the beginning of an essay, in which there is a topic partly related to the theme. The role of cheng is to follow the beginning paragraph and amplify it. In the third part, zhuan, the whole essay turns in another direction. That is, the topic introduced in the beginning and following paragraphs will be addressed from a different perspective, which aims at surprising the reader. The whole essay also reaches a climax at this point. The last paragraph, he, is to conclude the previous paragraph with a particular point which refers to the theme of the essay. A good ending paragraph is powerful and speedy, providing the reader with a great insight and also some space to ponder the theme. This basic structure has been used in Chinese poetry and prose for centuries. (2-3)

Read more at http://www.catesol.org/06Chen.pdf.

 

Sentence Structure Issues

The basic sentence structure of English

Chinese sentence structure differs markedly from English sentence structure.

1. The object can be placed in many places. It can be put before the verb, before the subject, or even wiped out entirely.
   1. Example of this can be shown in the following English sentence – “I like to read the newspaper on the train”. Correct sentence structure when using Chinese rules is instead: “I like on the train read the newspaper”.
   2. Notice that in this case, the object is placed before the verb, instead of after it.
2. Time is always placed before the sentence in Chinese, as opposed to the loose placement in English.
   1. In fact, this is the reason why strings of sentences written by Chinese foreign students will often all start with a dependent clause.
   2. It can lead to poor sentence variety in essays written by Chinese students.
   3. Chinese writers often preface the main topic of a sentence by first stating the purpose, location, reason, examples and conditions as introductory elements. However, this has the effect of demoting the importance of the main idea and making the reader think the author is indirect. Bring the main idea to the beginning of the sentence stating any locations, reasons, etc., afterwards.
3. Common articles are often omitted.
   1. Examples of these articles include “a”, “an”, and “the”.
   2. These are commonly omitted because there is no equivalent for these articles in Chinese.
4. Read more about common mistakes at: http://net.pku.edu.cn/~cuibin/resources/chinese-english-problem.pdf.

 

Different Text Structure

One of the issues that Chinese ESL students face is having to adapt to a completely different text structure.

• European foreign students typically have their romance language be of a Romanic or Germanic type, which is very similar to English (English being a West Germanic language).
  • Many words in English are taken from these languages:
    

    The word ballet comes from the French word “balle”, meaning bullet, or ball.

     

• However, for Chinese, the language is completely different.
  • It is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages.
  • The language is not alphabet based, instead being more about symbols.
  • Pieces of these symbols resemble ideas and objects, and when put together they form words.