Translation and Transcription Notes
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P14-C1
2025-09-22
248
Translation and Transcription Notes
In this exchange, and the other exchanges, each Cantonese speaker's original Cantonese utterances have been translated into English and appear in italics. Any additional information needed to make the meaning of the speaker's words clear to the readers appears in brackets within or right after the translated or English utterance. Nonverbal communication such as laughter is indicated in parentheses. Words that appear in boldface are words that were originally spoken in English. In the exchange that follows, the only English words uttered by the Cantonese-speaking students were words associated with the math problems the students were talking about and words associated with the English names of the math teachers teaching summer school.
Lawrence: I really don't understand it. I only have two parts wrong. How could someone take away three marks ? I didn't think too lowly of her [And I thought so highly of her].
Eddy: She thinks lowly of you.
Lawrence: I don't know.
Cindy: How come you have half a mark for your bonus question?
Lawrence: Yeah, that's what I don't understand. It's not that I don't know [the right way to do the problem]. Where did I lose nine marks? There are only two parts here, that is the A and B relationship one. A and B are wrong, but C is correct.
Cindy: (Looking at Eddy's answer that was also evaluated as being partly incorrect) Heh, heh, heh. Your last question should be right.
Eddy: Me? [Mine?]
Cindy: You. [Yours.]
Eddy: I told her. She said she's not going to talk it over with me. I don't how to do it. [how to explain why my answer is partly right and why she should change the way she marked the answer]. Forget it.
Lawrence: Never mind. (Laughs).
Eddy: Yesterday, I asked the afternoon finite [math] teacher. He said I should have some marks, that I shouldn’t have a lost a mark.
Lawrence: Did you find it? [Did you find a way to explain why your answer is partly right?] Even you can't find it? [Even you can't find a way to explain why your answer is partly right?]. I really don't know what to do.
[Translated Exchange, July 20, 1994]
Negotiating a mark in a second language was not always easy for Cantonese-speaking students. As English was the legitimate language at Northside, those students who wanted Mrs. Lo to consider changing a mark she had given them on a test or assignment had to submit a written statement in English as to why they should receive more marks. This meant that students needed to be able to articulate exactly why their answers were (partly) right and why they should receive more marks. Talking with friends about your case (in Cantonese) sometimes helped make the task of negotiating a mark easier.
The third way that having friends was important to succeeding academically had to do with the way friends advocated for each other in the classroom. Students helped each other access the teacher's attention during "classroom practice" activities so that their classmates could ask Mrs. Lo to re-explain a math concept, find out why an answer to a math problem was incorrect, or contest a mark she had given them.
In interviews with research assistant, Veronica Hsueh and me, students also told us that finding friends who were intimate companions as well as classmates was important for reasons that were not linked to academic success. Intimate friends helped students with "problems," for example, family problems, problems with their friends, and academic problems they couldn't tell their families about.
Initiating friendship (whether it was a collegial or intimate friendship) and developing or nurturing a friendship was related to the way people spoke to each other in the classroom. Once a friendship was established, the students were then able to ask each other for help and assistance. Talk that was associated with making friends in the math classroom took place in different languages that varied according to who was involved in the interaction. Such conversations between students who used Cantonese as their primary language were undertaken in Cantonese.
The use of Cantonese to seek and maintain friendships within the Cantonese-speaking community at Northside can be understood as a survival or coping strategy. Following Monica Heller, who talked about Franco-Ontarian resistance to English as having to do with "creating a francophone space from which to more easily enter the anglophone world." I understand the use of Cantonese as a way for students to create a Cantonese space from which they could move more easily into the anglophone world in their school.1 This understanding mirrors Angel Lin's argument that bilingual Cantonese-English teaching practices in Hong Kong were a coping response to students' struggle to acquire English linguistic capital. The Cantonese-speaking students at Northside were using a coping strategy they had used in Hong Kong.
1 See Heller (2001).
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