A national speech about Linguistics Society Operation

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This term I have set up a linguistics club with Yibo Zhao. He is the president and is responsible for the production of posters and the preparation of linguistics presentations. I am the vice president and am also the national campus ambassador for linguistics, responsible for leading the club menbers to practice for the International Olympics Linguistic and writing summaries and reports on our activities to be submitted to the committee of IOLC (International Olympics Linguistic China). Our club has been well received by the students since its inception and we have held many successful events, which has helped us to maintain our first place in the national ranking of clubs. At the end of November, the IOLC committee invited me to give an online talk to linguistics club leaders across the country about my experience and that of our club. I then completed a speech draft below, which includes my thoughts on running a society, some of the activities I have organised with Yibo, and some event references for other club presidents.

(p.s. I have posted the link of my sharing speech and the video of our club activity and the end of this article. My powerpoint slide has also been appended.)

Hello everyone, I am Fang Ziyan, the vice president of the Linguistics Society of Nanjing Foreign Language School. Its my pleasure to make this speech here. Our club has just been established this year, so as a founder of a new club, I am willing to share with you about some of the experiences I have gained during my exploration.
There will be a number of specific activity design references in my sharing, but before that, I would like to say something about the underlying logic of club operations.

(A) The Underlying Logic of Society Operation

I often reflect on a question. Why do we always write flowery hanrangue to present our establishment purpose when applying for the club, but often feel that these sonorous and powerful words look kind of hollow and unrealistic? Why do we always initially plan the school year club activities with fully enthusiasm, but eventually have to face the frustration that the gap between our imagination and the reality is too large?
I think that many society operators will encounter such confusion. So today, I want to start from the underlying logic of society operation and discuss what a truly “excellent” student society should be like.

First, let us return to the definition of a society. What we call a club, or a society, is actually an organization formed by people who have certain common characteristics and hobbies. Here, there are two key words, the first is “common characteristics” and the second is “people”. When we design activities, our ideas often start from this “common characteristics”, thinking about which linguistic-related activities can be organized, including field research, lecture, project study, etc. However, we often find these ideas unrealistic for senior high students to carry out. Hence now, let us change our ways of thinking, from the aspect of “people”—— those who are interested in our society, and the schoolmates around us. What kind of needs do they have? What kind of knowledge and experience are they yearn for through linguistic club activities?

Take our school for example. We faced an important question when we planned to established the society: Who is this society for? There are roughly three types of students in our school: students going abroad for college study, students who will be recommended by school to language majors in top universities in China, and students preparing for the college entrance examination. Our current president Zhao is students applying for language majors, and I am a student preparing to go abroad. Zhao said, our school’s recommended students will learn English, German, French, Japanese or other minor languages in college, however many of them are unfamiliar with their future majors because they often dedicate a lot to mathematics, physics or chemistry competitions in order to get the qualification to be recommended by our school. Hence Zhao suggested that we can popularize some knowledge that these students have better to master or are about to learn in the university for them through this society. On the other hand, as a student who have participated in the International Olympics Linguistic, I deeply understand the difficulty of preparing the competition alone, not to mention the fact that Nanjing Foreign Language School has loads of IOL contestants but no communication platform is there for them. Hence, I hope to provide some sharing to the students preparing for IOL. After discussion, Zhao and I decide that instead of working separately, it is better to collaborate and to establish a comprehensive club. “Provide services for more students”, this is also the concept we emphasized when propagating. Look at our posters here. I think this is also the reason why we have won the favor of many students just at our beginning of establishment.

In addition, considering that apart from ordinary high schools like us, there are many representatives of international schools here listening to my speech, now I am going to introduce more detailly about how we can classify students going abroad and provide corresponding services. We know that most students who plan to go abroad are always certain about their application direction, i.e. what major they would like to apply for. Therefore, they will prepare for competitions and activities in a targeted manner during the first and second grades of high school. And from my perspective, the linguistics club can not only provide opportunities for students who want to learn linguistics, but can also be an excellent platform for conducting interdisciplinary research. For example, when we established the club, we planned to hold a field research during the winter vacation this year. There are currently two ideas for the content of the activity. One is to investigate the dialect changes of the residents of Mount Mei in Nanjing after they moved from Shanghai, and the other one is to investigate the relationship between adjectives describing the dishes on the restaurant menu and their prices. When considering the question of how to promote these reseach projects, I upheld the concept of “Provide services for more students” and designed a set of research propositions for students interested in different majors, for example:

  • Biology: the physiological differences of dialect, the physiological determinants of phonetic phenomena;
  • Computer and data statistics: how to obtain and analyze the corpus;
  • Geography: the geographical factor causing the phenomenon of regional phonetic differentiation;
  • Sociology, history: the evolution of dialects and the social problems it caused;
  • Economy: the relationship between adjectives and prices on the restaurant menu;
  • Politics, national customs, laws: how to formulate policies to protect dialects, etc.

I hope that by following this logic——proceeding from the actual needs of the students in your school——you will never be troubled by your unrealistic ideas any longer. And of course, if you don’t have such troubles currentely, I hope my sharing can help you broaden your ideas of society operation and gain more inspiration~

(B)Reference for the Design of Specific Activities

  1. Translation activities: As a linguistics society, there must be quite a few multilingualists here. Why not take advantage of this by inviting friends who are good at particular languages to undertake some worthwhile translation activities? For example, our society president Zhao has been in contact with Maggie O’Farrell, a famous British fiction writer, and has obtained non-commercial use translation rights for her 2020 fiction “Hamnet” in the name of expanding the horizons of Chinese rural children. However, you know that sometimes it might not be easy to get access the right of translation, so here I have some extra advice. You can download quality viedos from YouTube or Facebook, manually translate them and post them on domestic video channels, as intelligent translation subtitles are not yet widely available. Certainly, if you willing to set current smart translation technologies as your research direction, that would be another great idea. There are vlogers on bilibili and Zhihu sharing such technologies, you can compare them and choose the one you consider as the most suitable to use or promote~
  1. Field research: Linguistics is not only about learning languages, many social phenomena are also worth researching. The two fieldwork proposals I mentioned at the beginning mey serve as reference if you would like to organise relative activities. To introduce a little more details here, what we intend to do is to participate the fieldwork activity together, including interviewing, writing and distributing questionnaires, etc. Once we have collected the data and resources, we can choose different research topics as our interest, then integrate and analyse the resources and materials to complete our papers or reports. I believe that this experience will be very helpful in improving our academic skills, which is highly valued by the top schools all around the world, no matter what majors the paticipants are planning to take in their future studies.
  1. a guide material for beginners && a organised set of questions: Those of you who have participated in the competition will understand that exercising is a crucial part of the International Olympiad Linguistics. Though some of the past papers can be found on the internet, it is difficult to find (free) beginner’s guide material or exercise with organised topics. For students preparing individually, take me myseld for example, last year when there were no clubs or seniors at school to guide me, solving and figuring out the questions on my own was a quite difficult process, as it was sometimes impossible to gauge the difficulty of the questions as well as myy level of solving problems, and I didn’t even know what past questions are proper to choose to practice. I found that many of other IOLs had similar experiences, so I came with an idea that with our experience in the competition, we can set up a guide material for beginners and a organised set of questions for our members, so that their learning will be much easier and more enjoyable.
    In terms of the organization of the set of questions, my plan is as follows.
    ① In the first semester I will offer the club members an introductory training on the basic linguistics competition questions, with a frequency of one question a week.
    ② At the beginning of the second semester I will provide an integration of questions of various categories covering grammar, syntax, lexicography, phonetics, phonology, semantics, numerical questions, odd questions and teamwork questions, etc. The training will last for about a month or two, and may be accompanied by inviting previous contestants or linguistics-oriented undergraduates to deliver relative speeches or lectures on the topic.
    ③ I will organise a mock test and a team selection test for the competition prepation stage after March next year. All participants of IOLC from the whole school (not only limited to club members) can come and take part in the test, which can provide a reference for team formation and preparation.
  1. Academic material integration: I often envy some of the best long-established societies for their own unique academic material integration, which is the best treasure to pass on the next generations of members. The core club members update and enrich this integration with their knowledge, and then pass it on from one generation to the next, who can then pleasantly enjoy the wisdom of their predecessors. As a budding society leader, I cannot say for certain whether our academic pack will be in existence for a long time period in the future, but if you are willing to start this project as we do, I am very glad to share some basic ideas for you.

This is the table of contents of the handbook edited by our President for the would-be language students. As you can see, it starts with a basic introduction to sub-disciplines of linguistics, including phonology, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, etc. As many of our students will become English major students, hence he then introduces some specific research to Chinese language and English language. If you are preparing for the Linguistics Olympiad, you can also modify this part to integrate some of the problem-breaking ideas of the competition questions, for example, when solving numerical questions you should pay attention to the binary, while when you are solving grammar questions you should start with a comparison of the same morphemes in the corpus, etc. Finally, you could add some interesting extra topics such as psychology and sociolinguistics, dialects, or even how to get a hign mark in language exams (e.g. TOEFL and IELTS).

(C) Academic Resources and Access

  • Past papers: itccc official wechat
  • Scientific articles and videos: bilibili zhihu
  • Other materials: Senior Group/Junior Group sample questions and handbook, Chen Run’s “Beginner’s Guide to Linguistics”, NPCSC Linguistics Club competition questions, North American and Russian past papers ……
  • The following is the book list that we have compiled in our handbook for would-be language students, in which there are textbooks from top schools in China and around the world, as well as the recommended ones.

So, in what way should we share academic materials or promote and hold events? Here I have provided some ideas for you. For example, we can advertise through the club QQ group, the school public website and by putting up posters around campus. Regarding the format of the event, we can design offline presentations as well as organise some online lectures, so that even if some students cannot participate in the activity because of other arrangements of their own, they can watch the playback again later on. Finally, the easiest way to share your club’s activities is to upload group files and group albums, or, if you have a club WeChat number, ask a dedicated student to run it. In addition, uploading to online platforms such as bilibili and Zhihu is also a great option. For example, I uploaded the video of our last event to bilibili, and here is a screenshot of one part of it. As you can see, the site has a ‘navigation’ feature, meaning that I can post videos with the start time of each section, so that interested students can watch them as they are needed, which is really convenient.

(D) What can you gain by running a society?

Finally, I would like to get back to the underlying logic of running a society and discuss what the time spent working for a club can bring to you.
I know that actually not all of you are enthusiastic about fulfilling the ‘purpose’ of your application and doing more for the linguistic society, or perhaps you even started out with the idea that starting a club would bring you glory and add colour to your personal statement. But I think you definitely understand that, a full and authentic club experience will be greatly beneficial to your further education and even your life.
As the teacher in charge of our school’s Union of Societies once said, running a society is like running a company. At the beginning you need to define your goals and plans, you need to submit ‘cumbersome’ documents; you need to spend a lot of effort on publicity, during which you may face the helplessness of not being able to recruit enough members; during the process of operation you may encounter differences on ideas with other core members, and only through discussion and concessions can you reach a consensus; you may find that your initial ideas are too idealistic, and the reality forces you to revise or even abandon them.
You may suffer from sacrificing a lot during these days, but I hope you could understand that what you will gain in the end will not only be proficiency in organisation, but also an experience of meeting constant frustration and the grind of reality.

I hope that today’s speech has provided you some useful tips and ideas on how to run your society. Finally, I would like to thank you all for your patience to listen my long speech, and I wish all of you can gain a lot during operating a linguistic society!

The link of video of the sharing speech is:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lNJkJ-EkKsrSCof8yHfFTg

The link of video of our last event:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1gF411a7Rh?share_source=copy_web

And here are my powerpoint slide: