China Five - Text
Age: 18
Date of birth: 27/02/1990
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Chinese
Occupation: Student
Educational level: University, 1st year
I was born and raised in Nanjing, China, the city where I had been living for 16 years. I came to Australia when I was 17, then stayed and studied here up to the present day. As an ESL speaker I started my English course since grade one in primary school, which was quiet different from the other schools because they usually start teaching English from grade three or plus. My secondary study went for almost six years in Nanjing Foreign Language School, in which we were majored in different foreign languages as the name of the school says. We had foreign teachers from generally everywhere in the world so by the time I graduated I still did not have a defined accent. And I always thought my English was barely passable compared to my mates for strictly speaking I was not a good language student at school at all.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I was born in Nanjing, the um used to be capital in China. I just turned 18 a couple of month ago. So I’m currently studying as an oversea student at the University of Queensland, um situated in the city of Brisbane, which is a very peaceful place. And Um I am majoring in civil engineering, first year. So yeah actually this is my second year here in Australia, and before that I was doing a university preparation course held in a small, A-shaped office building in town called the um IES, which is short for International Education Services I guess. I could still remember the time when I was there, you know, life was just so bleak. At first I thought ‘okay so now I’m in Australia and so at least there will be some Aussies out there?’ but I was totally wrong by saying that. Um I mean, apart from the extremely lousy design of the building-which looks barely like a school-it looks like a typical Asian college. I just felt so desperate about that, you know. Um one of my early dreams had always been just to come here and to learn the authentic English, not like the kind of English, or chinglish you may call it, which is taught in China. When I finally made it through to Uni I just felt more than happy for myself. Now everything is going great and I have a bunch of friends who I am used to hang out with. It’s always a good, it’s always a glad thing when you finally come to a point that you feel good about yourself and start looking back at what you have achieved.