Functional Grammar Three

Again, a nicely practical unit so not too much to say. However, the claim that we can identify sets of items by ‘focusing on the similarities they share and ignoring the differences,’ seems to warrant a little discussion. The question is which differences, between which items?

Adverbs, for example, seem to be largely defined by what they are not (the ‘rag bag category’, and from what I can remember from the more psychologically orientated literature (cf. Lexis) and semiotics seems to suggest that we organize categories entirely in reference to other categories. Groups are not defined so much by internal similarities, but by their differences to externalities: by what they are not, in other words. Vive la diffarance!

Functional Grammar Two

16MB of RAM!

Functional Grammar One

This is either going to be utterly fascinating or massively grating, nothing in between.

I should probably say a little more than that, so let’s try this – is it just me, or does the tripartite conception of Experiential, Interpersonal, and Textual meanings not seem pretty similar to Peirce’s three elements of the sign (Object, Interpretant, and Representamen respectively)?

Efficiency and Redundancy in the L2 Classroom, Part II

Teacher Training Considerations

1.   Theory to Practice

It’s all very well for me to flippantly sign off with a line like ‘that requires thought,’ but what kind of thought, exactly? I’ve previously tried to express these ideas more colloquially on my other blog and that post got picked up by a JET messageboard, which was very gratifying. However, most commenters seemed to interpret what I was saying primarily as a call to speak more slowly, and that isn’t the main thrust at all. How, then, do we frame this in a way that inexperienced teachers can understand and apply? And, more to the point, why would we want to?

Efficiency and Redundancy in the L2 Classroom

1. Information Theory

This is the Shannon-Weaver Model of Communication –

Source: Shannon and Weaver 1998, p34

It was originally developed (and is still incredibly influential) for mechanical and electronic communication: telegraphy, telephony, the internet and the like. We need to be very careful about taking it too completely as a metaphor for spoken communication. That said, it can still be a useful model. We can re-label it for L2 or lingua franca exchanges like this –

Spoken Discourse Eight

Gah. This has been such a frustrating module. It’s not just that I find the descriptive aspects tedious (though there is that). It’s that my gut tells me that this is, or at least should be, very significant, useful, and important for my work in the EFL classroom, and yet that significance has only threatened to emerge in brief spurts. I don’t mind grinding out the data analysis if it leads to something more tangible than just another description. More consistent examples of applicability is what I’m after, and it’s just very frustrating that it’s taken until the last unit to get there.

But get there we have, finally, and it’s reassuring to see a bit of research to back up my general approach to the classroom. Now to track down the references and work up from there. This is stuff I can use. Maybe.

Spoken Discourse Seven

I must confess that in direct opposition to the last unit, I found this one tedious as fuck. There is of course a difference between ‘interesting’ and ‘important’ or ‘useful’, so the boredom threshold is no excuse for not taking it seriously, but it does make it harder to pay attention. Some observations though, however disjointed –

Spoken Discourse Six

This is more like it. I can use this. Questions and observations to follow –

1.

I thought Communicative Competence was a Chomsky thing?

2.

The ‘need’ to divide books into chapters – this is a very chicken and egg type thing. Just off the top of my head, Pratchett doesn’t bother with chapters. Maybe not so much chicken and egg as cart and horse (r.e. the precedence of): surely the chapters of a book exist in order to facilitate presentation of the contents, rather than the content being dictated by the need for chapters? And then we get into all that jazz with regard to form and content…

  

Spoken Discourse Five

So this is what’s been bugging me about performatives: they’re not really, are they? They don’t, in and of themselves, change anything at all.

I know that they’re meant to be the conditions for the performatives to function as such, but surely it’s those themselves that ‘change the world’ and not the words themselves? A ship doesn’t get a name until it’s written on the side, a couple isn’t married until they’ve signed the register, and a student doesn’t get house points until they’ve been written down in the record book. It's not all magic, y’know?

Spoken Discourse Four

Ah, OK then. Lectures. Nice to see that I wasn’t completely off track last time.

Mainly practical, this one, again. Which is nice but doesn’t give me all that much to get my teeth into here. One thing I would ask is why “staying very close to the classroom analysis” is necessarily an “advantage”. I can see why it’d be pleasingly symmetrical to produce a unified theory, but square pegs, round holes and all that.

Written Discourse Ten

Right, this is pretty much what I’m doing my essay on: trying to work my way down to some practical applications of CDA. I’ll keep it on ice for the time being, but if any of the few of you reading this (“Bueller? Beuller?”) want to get into it in any further I’d be more than happy.

Written Discourse Nine

You know how I said that CDA felt very wooly? I take it back, I take it all back…

Written Discourse Eight

“They were also concerned with ‘scientificity’; in other words, a description meant ‘objective investigation’.

Also:

“observation done in a scientific manner has the status of value-free facts.”

Oh, be still my aching sides… 

  

Visual Grammar

Running at a bit of a lag between finishing the units and posting about them here. As difficult as it might be to believe I do try to put some thought into these things. However, to tide us over until I pull my finger out (and other ill-matched idioms) here, with particular regard to Kreuss and van Leeuwen's concepts of the demand and offer gazes, is the front cover of this year's first grade English Communication textbook -

Fill yer boots.

Spoken Discourse Three

A pleasingly practical unit, this one, so not much in the way of notes here, either. I would suggest, though, that the highest rank of discourse being the Lesson is arbitrary and artificial, and ignores concepts of curriculum planning and progression. The claim that it is possible to show ‘objectively’ where ‘one topic ends and another begins’ is also fairly brave.

Written Discourse Seven

When reading up about performatives, all I could think of was this –

Written Discourse Six

1. News as Narrative 

Finally, something with a bit of meat on it. And also a lovely excuse to share this with everyone again –

Written Discourse Five

I think, maybe, here we’re starting to get a bit closer to something resembling a point. An answer to that ‘Why?’ question I asked last time out. Nothing definitive, but it’s beginning to present a utility beyond the merely descriptive.

1. Some Sort of Sub-Heading

The note’s claim that ‘The Sydney School does not acknowledge any debt to Longacre’s work’ seem quite odd. Not because it’s wrong, I’m sure it’s entirely accurate, but because, once again, a lot of this seem to be hanging off the bones of classical rhetoric, which is a far, far older debt. The section covering definitions of genre (5.9) seems awfully similar to the standard modes of rhetoric. It’s not just me seeing this, is it?

Written Discourse Four

Ah, OK. So I wasn’t totally off with the jigsaw analogy last time. Now we get to look at the edges and see how they line up with each other.

I have to be brutally honest, I’m not entirely sure where this unit, or indeed this module, is going. It’s all very descriptive – which is fair enough and I’m definitely not going to get into the whole Descriptive vs Proscriptive argument here – but we do appear to be just listing features of ‘good’ writing.

You have to start somewhere I suppose, but for the first time I find there’s really nothing all that interesting in my notes. It’s all just highlights and asterisks. I’m not against breaking it down into manageable schemas, but I’d be lying if I said it was particularly interesting or attention grabbing.

Spoken Discourse Two

“[I]n the classroom teachers spend most of their time asking questions and evaluating pupil responses…”

I wish this were true. The following might be a bit disjointed and ranty, but hopefully will come together to make some sort of sense. Eventually. I highly recommend reading up on the CONDUIT metaphor I mentioned in WD2, it’ll help bring a lot of this into focus. Perhaps.

Written Discourse Three

1. Simple, Logical Steps

Again, we seem to come back to Grice’s Maxims regarding what is expected and what is ‘good’ writing. The continuing assumption is that ‘good’ writing is the desired outcome, and I’m still not sure that the case for that has been sufficiently argued. It goes back to the Gender unit in Sociolinguistcs and the ‘conversational shitwork’, which presupposes that your ‘typical’ male conversationalist actually wants the conversation to progress in the same manner as your ‘typical’ woman.

Spoken Discourse One

“…it remains true that many of the tools we have available – the course books and so on – are based upon grammatical and other descriptions that were devised by people whose primary interest was in the written language.”

Oh good lord yes. In all my years involved with ELT in Japan I have never seen a genuine Spoken English textbook. They’re always just been grammar textbooks with a bit of talking: Reading Out Loud textbooks, basically. Endless substitution drills that do little to improve students’ spoken language skills but just continue to promote the rigid slot-and-filler view of language inherent in the grammar translation method.

Written Discourse Two

I can’t quite believe I’m going to open this by linking to a TV Tropes page, but I can’t not. Here you go:

The Death of the Author

Also, the CONDUIT metaphor FTW!

The Idea of English in Japan

Ideology and the Evolution of a Global Language

Philip Seargent (2009). Multilingual Matters: Bristol

I ran across this at the end of my digging around for the sociolinguistics module. I didn’t have time to read it then, but it’s clearly relevant to my interests so I read it anyway when a window opened up. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s in large part an extended exercise in discourse analysis, so that ties in very nicely.

The Idea… holds as its core thesis that English in Japan is essentially a cultural commodity, and in this role as a commodity performs a completely different function to what may more usually be expected of it as, y’know, a real-world language. It’s more important for what it signifies than for what it does. I’m not sure you would find many native English speakers who’ve been in Japan for any length of time who’d disagree, but it’s always nice to see it backed up with a bit of research.

Written Discourse One

1. All Natural Ingredients
People do seem very keen on recipe books as a genre, don’t they?

As with most other introductory units, this one seems to be the standard statements of the obvious wrapped up with a new, but fairly slippery, terminology. ‘Infuriating’ is exactly right, but I am at least heartened by the promise that, “Discourse Analysis is… a tool that we can use to take social action.” Lots of linkages to be made here back to the Language and gender module from sociolinguistics.

I’m curious about Stubbs’ specification of naturally occurring connected speech or written discourse. The ‘naturally occurring’ part. As opposed to what, exactly? Are we heading off into Turing Test territory here (again)? Even the most contrived examples of language (as with the examples in the Bloor and Bloor reading) are ‘naturally occurring’ within the specific discourse, it just so happens that it’s a meta-discourse about the discourse of discourse with smaller bugs upon their backs to bite them. And now my head hurts.

Sociolinguistics Ten

Phillipson’s got a bee in his bonnet, hasn’t he? Can’t say I disagree. I read From the Ruins of Empire not so long ago, and it makes for an interesting companion piece here.

Despite it rather being a case of biting the hand that feeds me, I remain hugely skeptical of ‘The Native Premium.’ The analogy I like is that the best football players (Bobby Moore, Maradona) generally don’t make great coaches because the game has always come so naturally to them. They’ve never had to think about why it works or how to play it, so they have real difficulty in communicating that to lesser players. It’s a problem level lower down the scale, as this interview with Tony Adams demonstrates.

The same is true with language teachers. The best ones are probably going to be those who’ve been there and done that. They won’t be the best speakers, probably, but the will be the best at explaining it to others. Yet, fortunately for my wallet, ol’ blue eyes here can rock up and command a fat paycheck merely on the strength of his passport. I can completely understand people being pissed off about that.

Sociolinguistics Nine

“By looking at language policy from a historical-structural viewpoint we can see why teachers are placed in a situation where embarrassment occurs and why they have to resort to using hygiene resources.”

When I was seven, I think, Barry Connors pissed himself during assembly. Mrs Wright stopped talking about Jesus and we all had to go back to our classrooms. She would have been comforted, I feel, to have known about the historical-structural context for Baz’s incontinence.

Sociolinguistics Eight

“[T]eachers and students adopt their own overt policies for coming to terms with an official policy which is in fact impossible to implement as intended.”

Ho ho, yes.

Sociolinguistics Seven

My notes here, again, seem to mainly consist of the words “who?” and “whose?” over and over. We’re well into power politics here once more, and I’m surprised the Law of Unintended Consequences hasn’t had a bit more of a run out.

Also interesting to note that, pace the claim that, “if one group benefits from a particular language policy it is likely that another group will be disadvantaged,” LPP appears to be a zero-sum game. Or at least it is conceptualized as such, and so we’re back to power politics again. Particularly notable in the Gill reading which characterizes the bartering of Malayan citizenship for Chinese residents as a “language battle” (p247) when to all intents and purposes it appears to be nothing short of a massacre. 

Sociolingustics Six

This module had a fair amount of associated reading, which got interspersed with that for the essay (as did units 5 and 7). My notes are even more slipshod than normal then, so this’ll be short.

Basically this is about power politics and the projection of ‘soft power’ through linguistics, isn’t it?

My notes contain the word ‘prestige’ numerous times, and ‘WHO?’ quite a lot. Sometimes ‘WHOSE?’ as well, often quite close to ‘prestige’. Also power. So those are clearly the main themes. You didn’t want details, did you?

Sociolinguistics Five

Cross-Cultural Communication

After four years of marriage, I have still yet to find a mode of address for my (older) Japanese brother-in-law with which we’re both comfortable.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

The Geography of Thought

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've settled on an essay from the Lexis module and am focussing on that right now. Family holiday scheduled for the end of July and it's going to be fraught enough without having to proofread stuff right before we leave. I'm almost done with the actual Sociolingusitics units. They're utterly fascinating, so it's a bit of a shame that none of the assessment questions quite hold my interest in the same way. I'll definitely be posting about them soon enough though.

In the meantime I actually read that book I mentioned in my post on Lexis Two and, as predicted, loathed it. I was going to post about it at length here but it quickly became apparent that even by the low standards I've set for myself on this blog I wasn't going to be able to maintain even the slightest hint of authorial impartiality. So I've put it up over at my other blog. Here it is, in all its sweary glory -

The Geography of Thought

Sociolinguistics Four

Here we go, boys and girls: Language and Gender. This is the big one.

Lexis Eight

1.    Style

So it appears we come back to this again. ‘Style,’ which I can’t help but feel is very much like pornography – no-one can really define it, but we all know it when we see it.

“They are used for stylistic variation… [t]his can be problematic for learners, particularly where their first language does not use stylistic (elegant) variation to the same extent.”

Lexis Seven

1. He sleeps like a baby 

He wakes up screaming every three hours having pissed himself.

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week. Don’t forget to tip your waitress…

Sociolinguistics Three

1.    Cut to the chase

I’m going to skip over most of this, merely pausing to provide a link to the Wikipedia article on keigo, before getting into the real business of the final discussion task. I might also include a brief diversion here to note that I recognize the slight clash of mode and field I’ve got going on here, where I’m quite deliberately discussing academic matters in a style and medium more usually associated with more casual discourse. Whether you consider that to be successful or not is largely up to you.

Lexis Six

Right. This all strikes me as very important and useful. I have, however, yet to work out exactly how. Bear with me.

1.    On the Ground and In the Air

“…there is room for work here too on going beyond simply statistical accounts of collocation, and trying to explain why words co-occur.”

No shit. Not ‘room’ so much vast open prairies stretching to the horizon and beyond so your view of open space is only limited by the curvature of the earth, for work.

Lazy Re-run

Here are some thoughts on the philosophical differences between the physical and social sciences, because they may be of interest and they should at least help to clarify where I’m coming from.

I have a BSc in (Physical) Geography. It’s not exactly particle physics, but I spent my own fair share of time in the lab with the safety goggles on and it did give me a reasonable grounding in ‘the scientific method’. The essay below I submitted as part of my subsequent MA (in Environmental Politics, if you care), so there are probably a few copyright issues with pasting it up here. However, when I was digging it out I was slightly disappointed to find that it’s been almost a decade since I wrote it, so we should be fine. I’ve also long since lost the references file so anyone looking to rip if off for an essay mill will have to do at least some sort of work to get it up to standard. I also can’t remember the exact question it was meant to answer.

Anyway, here you go:

  

Evolution of a Language

I gave that academic a conceptual diagram. Academics love conceptual diagrams.

  

Clear as mud

  

‘Evolution’ is a tricky metaphor for language development. I’m still trying to work out if it’s suitable or not, though I suspect it’ll be superficially attractive but ultimately not really workable. Comparing methods of evolutionary speciation to language development might be pretty instructive, but one of the main underpinnings of biological taxonomy is that cross-breeding between species is impossible; that’s a pretty good description of what a species is. That obviously doesn’t hold true for languages (and it’s worth noting there are dissenting voices on the biological front as well).

Sociolinguistics Two

1. Redundancy

“… pidgin Englishes are characterised by a limited vocabulary and the elimination of many grammatical devices such as reduction of redundant features.”

(emphasis added)

Here we go. “Redundant features” eh? I’m finally getting round to properly reading up on Information Theory and it’s interesting the way Shannon distinguishes between signal and noise, or efficiency and redundancy, and carrying capacity..

Morse’s original code had a different sequence of dots and dashes relating not to letters but to words in a dictionary. This was obviously very efficient in terms of information transmission and carrying capacity, but not particularly flexible. There was also little redundancy, which increased the room for error. If you get the sequence I-A-M-H-A-P-P-D you can be fairly sure that the D is an error and should be Y. But if you get I-AM-SAD then there’s no way of even intuiting if SAD is an error or not. In Shannon’s conception the more predicable the next step in a sequence is the less information it is said to be conveying, so the D, if intentional, has more informational value than the Y. It’s the same principal as with dropping the vowels in tlgrms or txts.

You increase efficiency by decreasing redundancy, but nothing’s truly redundant. ‘Redundancies’ act as checks, decreasing the impact of inevitable errors in transmission, which would explain why they get reintroduced as pidgins develop into full-blown languages, even at the loss of efficiency.

Lexis Five

1.    I’mfinethankyouandyou?

Ah, here we go. Now we really get to the meat of it.

I don’t think Japanese (the language or people) is/are necessarily any more formal than English (the language or people). There does seem though to be a greater willingness to acknowledge and codify the formalities, and thus introduce more explicit ‘rules’ governing behaviour and communication that we might be expected to understand more implicitly in the UK. Maybe.

Lexis Four

A bit more hands on, this one. If a largely theoretical exercise can be ‘hands on’. You know what I mean.

Either way, it doesn’t exactly lend itself to slightly sarcastic extemporizing in the usual way, so this’ll be short. Just a couple of quick points.

Sociolinguistics One

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

An old saw, but a pleasingly robust one. The requirement for a navy, for example, helps explain why Switzerland has no single language of its own and has to make do with borrowings from more seafaring nations.

Lexis Three

1.    ¡Hasta el infinito, y más allá! 

In Japan the traffic lights are ‘blue’ despite there being a separate word for ‘green’, and the sun is red not yellow. It’s right there on the flag.

So those “perceivable differences.” The question is, ‘perceived by who(m)?’ I’m sure we’ve all had discussions of various levels of heatedness with friends, sales clerks, and shopping buddies over whether a particular item of clothing is black or just very very dark blue. How much are those perceptions cultural (the red sun in Japan), linguistic (yellow most everywhere else), or individual (Newton, of course, spoke of ‘white’ light)? How do they feed up and down? If a word holds a meaning simply because a critical mass of people thinks that it does, then whose ‘perception’ really matters?

Lexis Two

1.    Where Wings Take Dream

Have you read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat? I’ll dig it out and put some thoughts up soon.

* * * * *

              “Search your memory for a few such mistakes… How do you explain these occurrences?”

Alcohol.

Cross Post

Not cross though. Just disappointed. The only person you've let down is yourself.

A Leisurely Stroke

Linky Linky

"Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions."

Further commentary here.

Lexis One

1.    Mairzy Doats

There are essentially three alphabets in Japanese – except they’re not really alphabets, but anyway: hiragana, which is your basic phonic syllabary and of which there are about fifty; katakana, which is the same but used broadly as italics are used in English and of which there are also about fifty; and kanji, which are the famous ideograms (not really ideograms) people get tattooed on their shoulders in the mistaken belief that they say ‘brave warrior’ when they actually say ‘discombobulated chicken’. School students are expected to remember about 2000 ‘daily use kanji’ but estimates of their total number usually hover around 6000.

There are no word breaks in standard written Japanese. As someone whose ability with the language hovers between ‘functional’ and ‘conversational’ depending upon alcohol consumption, this can cause me problems. Although frankly everything about the language causes problems but that’s for another time, perhaps.

Doing Applied Linguistics

Groom, N and Littlemore, J (2011). Routledge: London

A.K.A. Sampling Bias A-Go-Go

Some of the most common advice on structuring a speech is as follows: tell them what you are going to say, then say it, then tell them what you said. The authors of this book have taken that advice very much to heart, so much so that I’m half tempted to use the Introduction and Conclusion sections of each chapter as a basic grammar exercise for some of my students, comparing the future and past tenses in English in otherwise unchanged passages.

It is an introductory text though, so there’s value in covering the basics thoroughly. The opening chapters (1-4), specifically addressing the field of Applied Linguistics – what it is and does – are something I think I’ll returning to repeatedly as I get up to speed with the terminology. I have a bit of prior experience with social science (and indeed physical science) research methodologies though, so the chapters addressing these were less personally helpful. Not aimed at the likes of me perhaps. Fair enough.

However, “[i]t is also an important part of the applied linguist’s remit to go about creating problems – or more precisely, to go about identifying problems which have hitherto gone unnoticed” (p12). So let’s take the authors at their word and pick some holes in this baby, shall we?

Hand biting to commence in 3, 2, 1…

  

Expectations

Look on these as a version of my lecture notes. I’ll probably drop in other bits and bobs about extra reading and the like as and when, but for the main part I’ll be aiming to put up thoughts on each unit and associated reading as I get round to them. I imagine those notes will tend towards the digressive and idiosyncratic. Please believe me when I say that they’ll be more organized on the screen than they were in my head. My general approach is to throw it all at a wall and see what sticks. It’s an approach that (usually) works well for me, but your mileage may vary.

I’m still waiting on a couple of textbooks, but I’m going to get cracking with what I’ve got and try to fill in the gaps later. Fortunately I read The Language Instinct a couple of years back, so hopefully that’ll account for a bit of the slack. We’ll see.

Suggestions for the blogroll, extra reading and viewing, or whatever all gratefully received.