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.