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!