Author, Author!

(Beware: vanity posting) Being vain, I did a search on my name in Google last week and found a new quarterly journal (June 2006) called "The Asian EFL Journal"-- which carries academic papers on the teaching of English and linguistic research (I guess “EFL” stands for English as Foreign Language)-- citing me. Curious, I downloaded the pdf document and read the paper by a Dr Derrick Nault, who teaches English at a university in Nishinomiya, Japan. The title of his paper is “Using World Literatures to Promote Intercultural Competence in Asian EFL Learners” and he used extracts of a play I wrote in 1990, and published by NUS in 1991. He wrote that he was using it to teach his Japanese students, arguing that English literature from cultures other than the “narrow” British and American cultures broadens the appeal of English. He had asked the students to guess what all the Singlish particles; “lah, what, aiyoh, ah, oi, choy, etc; meant to the characters speaking them. He also had them act out the dialogue and rewrite them in another way.

Of course mine was not the only text given in his paper to advance his thesis. He had actually gotten to know of it from another academic paper put out by 2 Australians, Anna Wierzbicka and Mary Besemeres, who had used my play, amongst others, to comment on “Singapore English: A Semantic and Cultural Perspective”, published in Multilingua in 2003. I’d read that a while back and saved a copy of it as well, but it’s kind of cool to see the play being used again now. Once something is referenced, it gets cross-referenced again. I’m tickled that somewhere in a classroom in Japan, they’re dissecting something I wrote 16 years ago. Dr Nault wrote in his conclusion that, “Interestingly, I have even had students express a desire to visit African and other Asian nations as a result of lessons based on world literatures.” I guess I can expect that from the passionate Japanese. I once read that some of the most devoted pilgrims to William Faulkner’s house in USA’s Deep South were the Japanese.

In both these research papers, I was introduced as “Singaporean author”. It’s a bit premature, I feel, since it’s based on only 2 published but obscure plays which were never performed, and for someone who has written nothing of worth since then. But it’s definitely one of those things I want to be and maybe I’ll live up to it one day?

Chup