Invisibly Epistemological Colonization in Early China’s English Language Teaching: Grammar Practice as an Abyssal Thinking

• In Event: Unsettling the Coloniality of Knowledge: Curricula as Inscriptions of Westernized Order

Abstract

Objectives:
This study problematizes English education as a purely linguistic and cross-cultural communication event and its critique goes beyond the proposition of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992; Lecercle, 2006) which regards English as a global hegemonic entity in retaining its sovereign power. The paper investigates the early English grammar book Yingwen Juyu used in the Tongwen Guan to investigate how the English language teaching seemingly appeared to adopt a “China origin” method by drawing on Confucian content that aimed to preserve Chinese ethnocentrism to facilitate students’ language mastering but triggered epistemological colonization through its discursive repatterning.

Theoretical framework:
Santos (2007) argues that Modern western thinking is “abyssal thinking” that serves as the judgment of truth to bring about colonization of other knowledge and epistemology. Building on Santos' theory of epistemological colonialism (Santos, 2016), the discussion investigates the discursive patterning of English grammar practice in Yingwen Juyu, which incorporates Confucian notions but reflects western-centric knowledge and epistemology. It is observed that translingual practice functions as “textual-political-epistemological” event (Zhao, 2021) that implicates unequal power negotiation and expresses epistemological reasoning in the invisible configuration (Zhao & Zheng, 2022). This unrecognized style of “reasoning” (Popkewitz, 1997, p.132) in the discursive patterning that gives attentiveness to certain objects, categories and formation of concerns as the judgment of knowledge and truth.

Methods:
The discussion re-examines the discursive patterning in the use of Confucianism notions qi (lit. breath, vapor, air, 氣), yin-yang (lit. positive-negative, 陰陽), dong-jing (lit. motion-stillness, 動靜) in the grammar book as mechanism of the constructions of neologism for introducing English grammar, for example, the parts of speech and punctuation marks.

Materials:
The paper examines Yingwen Juyu, a very early grammar book in 1879 used by Tongwen Guan (1862-1902) during the Late Qing Dynasty. It was translated and compiled from an English grammar book A Common-School Grammar of the English Language authored by Simon Kerl. The paper specifically focuses on the sections of parts of speech (particularly the nomenclature of inventions of neologisms as explanations of English grammar concepts) and punctuation marks, which are the majority of the book.

Results:
The paper argues that the reinventions of the parts of speech in classical Chinese notions in English grammatical practices educated the perception to fossilize and materialize things based on a categorical approach to perceiving matters embedded in Cartesian logic and binary thinking. And the teaching of punctuation marks, rather than allowing for stops and pauses to enhance clarity and precision in expression, aimed to grant forms of intelligibility in discourses and bestow a particular aesthetic of the deferrals and dispersion of space based on western psychological imaginings. The English grammar practices demonstrated in Yingwen Juyu, far from being solely language teaching techniques but underlying Western epistemology as coloniality of knowledge to form thoughts and actions.

Scholarly significance:
The paper contributes to linguistic studies, curriculum theory, and English education research as it provides an alternative lens for reexamining how epistemological coloniality of knowledge was embedded in English grammar practice in early China.

Authors

• Chushan Wu, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Xiaocui Hong, Zhejiang University