TESOL session report
Session Report:
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.
This appears on my weblog which is specifically about the topic; unfortunately, this weblog was not advertised in my handout. The handout will appear on Google docs soon, but I'm reorganizing my google docs, and I'm not sure how soon.
Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
concordance experiment
My writing class is high-level graduate students who really want to know how to polish their writing well and quickly. They don't have patience for things that don't work, or things that give you the runaround on their road to where they are going. We study social psychology, because it gives us something to study about that everyone's interested in, that we can do an actual survey on, and get real data - one result of this is that I, as a teacher, become a little impatient with vague pronouncements about our culture, since I am usually in the active process of studying it systematically if not scientifically. For example, one can say that Texas is full of Republicans, and anti-gay marriage, and all of this might be true in a general kind of way, but our studies have shown statistically what our student body is like, and this helps me talk about it more accurately and have some facts to back me up.
Now on this road I've also become attracted to the concordance, and specifically to Brigham Young's
concordance, because as far as I can figure, it's the best one around. The concordance delivers to you the facts about the words. So, for example, I tell my students that
so that is different from
so (and generally they believe me) - but, with the concordance I can draw up thirty, forty sentences using
so that and show them how people are using it. It draws from a large corpus (and one can mess with how large, or what kind), and simply pulls the facts about any given word. My favorite example is
interested in...why is it that it's not
interested with or
interested by?
So I gave them all an assignment...I told them you have grammatical issues. I want you to look at this concordance, and tell me what you find about those issues. Report to me about how it works in learning more about grammar and how it works.
But alas, at the language lab, BYU got onto us, and told us that with a group, many people making searches from a single location, there was a limit, and we were beyond it already. You have to log on, and you have to have an account, and if you are merely a student, you have quite limited access.
I understand their financial bind, and know why they might feel they need to raise money to keep the thing going. And, it seems to me, a place like our university ought to fork a little money over in order to grease the wheels, and keep the good facts coming, and provide a service much like the databases provide articles for us. I, however, have not written a proposal, or identified that need, or suggested that our department make that service available for our graduate students. Our students are still on their own: you log in once, on your own e-mail; you go as long as they let you; and, you see if you can use the facts to make yourself a better writer.
I stand by my assignment (this problem is not resolved yet) - it may be that asking them to try this tool is simply not realistic, because we
don't have a site license yet. But to me, there is something quite liberating about the facts. It's more than a teacher telling them, you need to connect two sentences with
whereas. It's twenty or thirty sentences that give the student a picture, a snapshot, of how
whereas is used in modern academic English. For them, they
have to read it twenty or thirty times to get a sense of how it's used effectively. This concordance, the provision of twenty or thirty sentences using the word, gives them the missing step. It will be a shame if they can't, as a group, just use what's out there effectively.
Labels: concordance, grammar, ttu, writing
My classes try the concordance
I had a graduate assistant this semester who was inspired by the concordance. I opened it up and showed her how it could be a tool for high-level, international writers who I was teaching, and I showed her how. I had to play with it a while because I personally am not all that good with it; for example, I have trouble finding that fine column of sentences that use any given structure - how do you
find that? Eventually we found it. Off she went; she was fascinated.
The one we liked best was the BYU concordance, and we showed it to both classes. She had better luck showing it to the class she taught in, while I showed it to the other class alone, though later I brought her in as a guest speaker, and she showed it to that class too. She did her best to show them how useful it could be in the process of writing. I'm not sure to what degree they bought it, or tried it. We kept pressing them all semester.
It's my belief, and I told my classes repeatedly, that as a tool, nothing could be more useful than a machine that delivers the facts about what people do in academic English. You have your dictionary and your thesaurus, I said...you have these online, right? (it's my guess that not all had heard of, or actively used, the thesaurus - but these are graduate students - most had)....it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk about what they actually
did when they wrote.
And that's my focus; it continues to be my focus today. My working philosophy comes down to the following:
-Everything that is written is a product of what a student can create, and what technology does to it; it includes the ways the student negotiates with the technology to find compromise forms and structures that
appear to be ok.
-Students are reluctant to talk about the technology they use, since they are conditioned to be afraid of their copying
anything from online sources; in general, they expect their teacher to have a negative view of online "help"
-Students are protective of the system that they use at home; they will occasionally beg to be allowed to write something at home (as opposed to an on-campus site, with a different computer/different tech) for reasons related to technical support, but they will rarely even admit this;
-This system we refer to (depending on Word grammar-check, spell-check, or whatever paid or free grammar programs they use; or, in some cases, dependence on wife, friend, neighbor) is well-established, a habit. Asking them to change it is really asking them to
experiment with changing it and
adapt what works well. It will be a slow and painful process to even get to the first part. It may have to wait until break.
We asked them, when it was all over, to write about their systems, and to write about learning. What follows (soon) will be a general analysis of what they said.
Labels: grammar, internet, plagiarism, ttu, writing
Leverett, T. (2015). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL Convention, Toronto, Canada, March.
Here is the
Session Report.
I have to admit that the actual material for this presentation is now pretty much spread out. A lot of the new things I've written have been on the
For Better or Worse weblog. I have been unable to change the
original presentation page, which now holds FBOW 2013 and earlier, because servers now require encryption for any new pages or any uploading.
My goal is to compile information. I will update you here. I also want to put the presentation handout on Google docs and link to it here (this should happen soon), and expand what I've written a bit and do the same thing with it. Google docs will at least
hold it, and make it available.
Here is the Google docs link.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19p1eL1W0ZB8qEhJ9Jmv87bHtFLkHSLAinjcyxd5U9XE/edit?usp=sharing
Labels: grammar, internet, personal, tesol
TESOL presentation
I will be presenting at the TESOL International 2015 Electronic Village Classics in Toronto.
Presentation Title: For Better or Worse: Grammar technology and the language learner
Presentation
Description: This presentation shows the technology that students are
using to learn and write, so that practitioners can adjust accordingly
Day and Time: Friday, March 27 2:30-3:20 PM
Computer Station: MAC 4
All invited!
Labels: google translate, grammar, internet, language, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
GT app
So today in class we were talking about technological innovations in our field, and I happened to mention that in language learning, the big one was the new Google Translate app, which you could hold up to anyone who is speaking any language and it would translate it into any other language. Now by "any" I mean the top thirteen, and right away my colleague who was really interested in Mongolian was asking whether it had Mongolian, but of course the GT guys have barely started with Mongolian, let alone Kazakh, Hopi, Tongan, or Jamaican Creole.
After a few minutes a woman admitted that she had it, and she even showed her phone. Sure enough, there was an app on it and I spoke "Hello how are you" into it, and it translated it into Arabic. I took her word for it that it was reasonably good Arabic, not perfect, she said. By now students from the next class were entering and we were under pressure to leave; all this happened when class was essentially over. But when one student said, "of course it'll do 'How are you,' but what about anything else?"....so I tried "Open your book to page 143 and write ten sentences" in a kind of reflex ESL-teacher mode. She again translated it into Arabic. It worked, she said. Not perfect, but it worked. An Iranian student vowed that she would download it immediately and see how it worked for her.
I didn't catch the
name of the app. I also saw the list of available languages, which included Moldavian (???)...I have a fellow teacher from
Moldova who insisted that wasn't her...but I reserved judgment on that because I'm well aware there
could be a Moldavian and it
could be among the top thirteen. Some people are obviously left out; in my class, I have Sri Lankans, Bengalis, a Brazilian Portuguese speaker (who was gone)...a few more. More on this later. This is what I want to know.
1. Obviously it's ok if you hold the phone right up to someone's mouth and they speak loudly and clearly right into it. But at what point does this fall apart? The back of a small class where people are whispering? A crowded cafe? Where is it most useful and least useful?
2. Obviously the skill involved in using it is a kind of grammar de-scrambler...it's possible that the computer is quite effective at figuring out the
words it has just heard. Also it reportedly can figure out
which language it's listening to, though I saw her specify, Eng. to Arabic. So - can you set it on
figure out the language? Does it make mistakes with the words? If so which ones?
How much descrambling do you have to do?
3. How
fun is it to use? Do you enjoy it? Or do you have to hide it from the average teacher?
Labels: google translate, grammar, ttu
Google translate muscles into the personal conversation business
Luckerson, V. (2015, Jan. 14).
Hands-on: Google Translate Is Now a Way Better Travel Companion.
Time. Hands-on: Google Translate Is Now a Way Better Travel Companion.
Dougherty, C. (2015, Jan. 14).
Google Translate App gets an upgrade.
New York Times blog. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/14/google-translate-app-gets-an-upgrade/?_r=0.
May, P. (2015, Jan. 14).
Google's new Translate app shines in a crowded field.
San Jose Mercury News.
The new app makes a lot of promises. Life will be much easier, they say, for every schmuck like me who is about to sojourn into a place where the local language is different from mine. I'll simply point my phone at the "atenciao piranha" sign (see picture, third article) and I'll know that there are piranhas in the river.
The first things that are wrong with this picture are 1) I can't turn on my cell phone outside of the country, and 2) I can't seem to keep it charged. There's also the fact that 3) it's pretty obvious by the fish picture that the sign is about fish, and, 4) I wasn't about to go skinny-dipping in the Amazon anyway, but let's disregard those. Here are some more serious ones. 5) Translation programs can make things worse, 6) Not every language is as easy to translate as Portuguese, 7) Siri can add an unexpected dimension to a personal situation, 8) phones don't work as well after you smash them into the concrete barriers that hold up hotels.
Here are some interesting points brought up by the articles. First, the fact that Google has moved in on this business has increased the success of machine translation so that it is definitely on a track toward better in virtually every language. It promises 38 (out of what, several thousand?), ok, but it's improving on those 38, and it's got the money to hire people that are making those better. So we're living in a time when machine translation, instant, by phone, is in its infancy, but nevertheless, capable of overturning everything we know, if only because it can only get better. The last time I checked Google Translate, Spanish and French were already pretty good (the first article mentions this), a number of languages were miserable, but there was a wide variety and clearly an arc toward better in each one. If they are getting better, we are dealing with a dynamic system which as one article says "might put high school Spanish teachers out of business."
Here's one thing that's scary. The geeks at Google are proud of themselves in that they made Google Translate better by turning Google's massive calculation apparatus on the languages themselves. May quotes Cattau as saying, "We base translation on machine learning, by looking at billions of Web pages that have been translated into other languages," says Cattiau. "We find 'dog' has been translated millions of times into 'chien,' for example, so the computer now knows the two mean the same thing." Ah, but the computer is doing exactly what people do, basing its experience entirely on learning and reality. Thus, we can trick the computer, or we can change the meaning of things simply by changing the way they appear. How is the computer supposed to know? It's pretty easy with a word like 'chien' which is pretty uncontroversially, universally recognized to be 'dog'. Their claim of course is that roping in thousands of translation statistics helps them strengthen their assertion that 'chien' actually means 'dog' which is not complicated, in this situation, by other factors. In the world of translation it's usually complicated by other factors. Translation is dogged by these problems, in fact.
More later. I'm going to see what my phone does with "y'all cain't".
Labels: grammar, tesol
War on Passive, bib.
Gopen, G. (2014, Winter). "Why the Passive Voice Should Be Used and Appreciated"
Litigation, (ABA Journal), Vol. 40 #2, pp.16-17.
Leverett, T. (2014, Oct.). Documenting the war on passives. thomas leverett weblog.
http://tomleveretts.blogspot.com/2014/10/documenting-war-on-passives.html.
Sheffield, N. (2011). Passive Voice in Scientific Writing. Duke Graduate School Scientific Writing Resource.
https://cgi.duke.edu/web/sciwriting/index.php?action=passive_voice. Accessed 1-15.
Pullum, G. K. (2014, Jan. 22). Fear and Loathing of the English Passive. Language and Communication.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf. Accessed 1-15.
Rhodes, S. (1997).
The active and passive are equally comprehensible in scientific writing. Doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Washington. https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/bitstream/handle/1773/9033/9819294.pdf?sequence=1. Accessed 1-15.
Neurobonkers. (2015). The Passive War: "The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger". The Big Think.
http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/the-passive-war-the-blind-warning-the-blind-about-a-nonexistent-danger. Accessed 1-15.
Labels: grammar
Watson, A. (2012, Feb. 20).
Navigating ‘the pit of doom’: Affective responses to teaching ‘grammar’.
English in Education. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1754-8845.2011.01113.x/. Accessed 1-15.
"...Interviews with 31 (secondary English) teachers reveal two discourses which frame the ways in which teachers express their feelings (about grammar teaching): a dominant discourse of grammar as threatening, reactionary and dull, and an oppositional discourse which positions grammar as inspiring, fascinating, and empowering." (from the abstract).
Jean, G. & Simard, D. (2011, Aug. 10).
Grammar Teaching and Learning in L2: Necessary, but Boring? Foreign Language Annals. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1944-9720.2011.01143.x/. Accessed 1-15.
"...Results showed only slight discrepancies between students’ and teachers’ beliefs and perceptions, and very few differences according to the target language and students’ gender or age. The main findings suggest that grammar instruction is perceived by both students and teachers as necessary and effective, but not as something they enjoy doing." (from the abstract)
Myhill, D., Jones, S., Watson, A. & Lines, H. (2012, Nov. 27).
Playful explicitness with grammar: a pedagogy for writing.
Literacy. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2012.00674.x/. Accessed 1-15.
Truscott, J. (2006, Oct. 27).
The Case Against Grammar Correction in L2 Writing Classes.
Language Learning 46(2), 327-369. June 1996.
Labels: grammar, learning theory
war on passives
The Passive War; "The blind warning the blind about a nonexistent danger" by "Neurobonkers"...nice handle, eh? Good comments.
Labels: grammar
grammar checkers
I'm going to start putting things here, instead of the previous site, which was http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com. The main site for this presentation is
here.
Wright, N. (2013, Dec.).
Does grammar checkers work? Style Writer.
Though this is a commercial site (pushing Style Writer itself), it's interesting because the author believes that just trying to "correct" grammar is not only futile but also is the wrong approach. He's very critical of not only Word but also the similar ones, because they have very little to make them better than Word. It's the wrong approach, he says.
Krishnamurthy, Sandeep.
A Demonstration of the Futility of Using Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar Check.
Good bibliography of 'scholarly work'. Actually there's a dearth of scholarly work; I'm still looking.
Labels: grammar, internet, writing
Toronto 2015
I've accepted an invitation to present an Electronic Village Classic at the TESOL 2015 Convention in Toronto, which brings up a number of other topics. The presentation is called
For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner and in brief it shows how technology changes the student's process of learning, as well as the process of writing, the final product, etc. I often show free grammar-check programs and show what they do to the writer. Ironically teachers often stop by hoping to just get computers to fix the problems; it's as if nobody really wanted to deal with grammar in the first place. The site for the presentation is
here though obviously it will need to be updated.
So here are a couple of other issues related to Toronto. First, are my good friends the Webheads going to be there? I hope so. Toronto is one of my favorite cities. The Webheads are my favorite people. This would be wonderful.
Second, do you need a passport to get into Canada nowadays?
Third, what about the SIUC reunion? I feel like I'm sitting on a lot of information, and I don't know what to do with it. Last year, I couldn't organize a reunion, because I didn't go to Portland; I'm not sure if they even had one. I have all these e-mail addresses in my inbox, and information from SIU alum...
I need to forward it to someone. Nobody was interested in keeping track of people when I took it over, but I said,
SIUC, your international alumni are your most valuable resource. Even now, what I have is a set of e-mail addresses bottled up in an e-mail box that has become impossible to maneuver, due to the fact that SIUC put it all on Outlook Express, and I can't seem to view the entire mailbox. There are hundreds in there, but they are deep on the inside, constantly covered up by more recent correspondence. Time to clean out the box, Tom!
But it's also time to dust off this presentation. I was pleased to be invited, pleased to accept; I hope it can happen. Oh Canada!
Labels: grammar, tesol, writing
documenting the war on passives
To make a long story short, I am teaching a class in dissertation writing for international students. They bring me projects representing years of work, and they need help with the language required by their disciplines to get a dissertation accepted and passed. Sometimes their advisor tells them, "Using words like
I, me, we, our, etc. is the mark of an inexperienced writer." One would think this is an injunction to use the passive, but there are actually several ways to deal with this command.
Other departments scorn the passive, or at least tolerate active constructions like
"I will show that..." or
"We found that..." In fact it could be said that there is a wide variety of dissertations being accepted at this university today, and essentially a wide variety of commands being given to internationals and others writing dissertations, so that you have to tease out of the dissertation writer what is expected, before you can reasonably assume that you are giving him/her good advice. As a dissertation proofreader I find myself knowing several grammatical ways of talking about what happened in a project, but not necessarily knowing which will fly within the department or, at a wider level, which will sound good in the field. The social sciences are the home of the war on passives, which basically overhauled the traditional paradigm and replaced what could be termed as expectation to use the passive with scorn for the passive; international students are in essence caught between. They don't know what Microsoft Word means when it encourages them to avoid passive in favor of active; they also don't know what an advisor means when he/she says to "never use
I"...
We asked our students to provide model dissertations, and then we read them carefully. Most were accepted by Texas Tech in the last ten years. Not all had perfect grammar; in fact, a wide variety of grammatical mistakes were tolerated and in some cases, it was clear that grammar wasn't important at all, in comparison to the ideas or the study itself. The dissertation, though, is important; it represents a scholar's arrival in the field, the cornerstone of his/her expertise, authority, and reputation in the field, and it lasts forever as an ongoing record of scholarship and work.
My wife is a full professor in sociology, and maintains that the war on passives dates back to the 90's and has its roots in feminist theory. How can you remove the agent or the one who saw or did the action, when that agent will so clearly color the results? To her it was incredible that a professor who called herself feminist could still tell students to remove
I from all writing, since it contradicted an ideology that insisted on taking responsibility and noticing the actor who found, collected, studied the data. Remember that it was tradition, the advice of the elders, to remove
I, we, etc., from this kind of writing. Throughout various departments, tradition was maintained even as the content of studies became rigorously more modern, up-to-date, and radical. The professor in question had simply passed on traditional academic advice to writers, not questioning whether this advice might also change along with the adoption of modern ideologies and their integration into academia.
One can avoid
I, we, our, my, etc. and still avoid the passive, which one's computer is now reminding us is archaic, undesirable. One does that by animating ideas, studies, and projects.
This research concludes...This study found...This data show...etc. It's hard to tell whether modern language has made this kind of construction necessary, right, or even more common. Does anyone else cringe when studies become able to do such things? This kind of construction results, often, when the writer has acquired both the distaste for the passive (encouraged by Word grammar-check)
and the traditional injunction against using the personal pronouns. Does this mean the
formal academic writing now requires a certain detachment from reality, in the sense that you have to let inanimate actors do the work that they shouldn't do, or take on life that they don't have? I intend to find out.
My wife says another thing, however, that I found interesting. She said, it's not the dissertations that matter, since virtually anything can be accepted by a committee, and much of it is not read very widely outside of that committee. It's the journals that matter, and what they require. It's the journals that you should read, because they are setting the standards, and defining academic language as it is. Training to be a PhD student is essentially training to write and express oneself in a discipline, and if this process is not up to a standard, the newly-minted Doctor, who goes off to be a professor somewhere, may never publish again. My internationals are protected from this sad fate, mainly by being so good in what they do that they get a lot of help in the other areas, until they truly understand how to publish and keep publishing. It's interesting, and it's what keeps diversity in our world.
Labels: grammar, ttu, writing
Cars have universals; languages have funny sounds
When I went to Korea, I was curious about why people walked to the left on sidewalks, in order to avoid bumping into each other. The question was, basically, whether it was possible for a whole culture to be what appeared to us to be "left-handed" - which, if you think about it, is just another way of saying that it's opposite of what one has come to expect. The language always had verbs last, and had post-positions instead of prepositions. So I began to wonder: Is it possible for people to just be oriented in another direction?
But alas, they drove on the right, like we do. So I said, why don't you drive on the left, like the Japanese? Is there a reason for these things? And someone said, well, that is the reason, if the Japanese drove on the left, we didn't want to be like the Japanese. At the time we got roads, we were more inclined to imitate the Americans.
I studied these phenomena for a while because of my general sense that language is kind of like random human cultural behavior, which as you can tell from the above anecdotes, is far from random, yet at the same time, does not seem to have a rational physical explanation. In the search for universals, you might do what the Chomskyists did, which is to say that every culture sticks to one side or the other, it's just that the culture determines which side. But I ran across the British, who, when walking on the street,
don't stick to either side. Apparently they use a different system to avoid bumping into each other. And keep in mind, virtually every other cultural tendency, starting with the language but including law, we seem to have either gotten from the British or adapted from the British. But my point is, if there are cultures in which people don't stick to either side when walking in the street, then there are really
no universals about walking in the street. You can't say that
if someone bumps you with their left elbow, they're more likely to bump you with their left foot is a universal.
So it is with language. Some universals, for example,
all languages have vowels and consonants, appear to apply to all languages, at least all the ones that are primarily oral, but even that opens up a can of worms. But the ones that deal with word order all assume that word-order restrictions are an inborn part of our language mechanism, and they're not. Plenty of languages have no word-order restrictions whatsoever. So what they refer to as "universals" sound more like physical movement regularities like the one with the left elbows. These are not universals. Some languages use order to express things. Some most definitely do not.
I was most provoked by the assertion that sticking to one side of the road, when driving, is a universal, while the culture itself determines which side. This assertion relies on the assumption that roads have room enough to actually have two sides, which in my experience, is a false assumption. But, allowing that the vast majority of one's roads have plenty of room, I still see no reason why a person born into a world with no cars, few cars, or random cars would necessarily feel compelled to stick to one side, except when encountering another car, or as a cultural habit developed upon encountering other cars regularly. In other words, there is no genetic imperative to stick to one side regularly. It is a cultural habit that people develop for their own convenience (and to save lives, generally) and they might choose either side depending on their whim or their political inclinations (people in the Falklands, for example, might prefer aligning with Britain to aligning with Argentina). People who regularly have entire roads to themselves have no special reason to stick to one side or the other at all, and generally don't. We are in the habit of taking our Western obsessions with word order, road alignment, etc. and imposing them on other cultures, as if, if you don't have this particular obsession, then what are you, radically chaotic? I think the example of British sidewalks, if true, though, reminds us that a culture can be quite rigid and regular about a number of things, and still have
no cultural agreement about which side of the sidewalk to walk on. Sometimes people don't agree. Sometimes they have other methods to avoid bumping into each other.
The story of the wave brings up an interesting point. In that story, people in stadiums (stadia?) around the world have taken to standing up, and by the movement of their bodies creating a wave that moves around the stadium, clockwise in the northern hemisphere and allegedly counter-clockwise, more often, in the southern hemisphere (as evidenced by the Olympics in Sydney). Now if it is true that the spontaneous movements of large groups of people can be influenced much in the same way water goes down the drain, then an argument can be made that
when there is movement, the movement can be influenced by certain external factors. I'm not sure I buy that argument, or that that argument could apply to language, where Japanese and Korean have post-positions, but English has prepositions. So we place certain things to the left or to the right. But this doesn't come from the movement of the earth, or from our relation to the magnetic pole, or from the fact that we are in the "west". It's simply a cultural agreement, and we could change it if we agreed to change it. That's actually kind of scary, but it's true.
Labels: chomsky, grammar, language, linguistics, self-organized systems
Cultural flexibility presentation
Leverett, T. (2014). Cultural flexibility as a characteristic of good language learners. Third Annual AL/SL Conference on Language Learning and Teaching, Texas Tech University, April.
Gave this presentation today, and got lots of input. The handout will follow, as will links to several things I've written about it. I'm a little slow in getting it all online, but will, all in good time.
The essence of it is, when you fill a classroom with well-motivated adults wanting to learn a second language, their own native culture will be an impediment to their learning, and will provide variation in learners. For example, those from languages without article systems will find our article system pointless and ridiculous, and will have trouble learning it, whereas those from Spanish or Portuguese backgrounds, for example, will have the mental framework and will have already accepted the principle of such a system. People spoke of things in language that were hard to swallow: An old Chinese man spoke of how he couldn't get over English's failure to distinguish
kinds of cousins (mother's side? father's side? male? female? older? younger? etc.). An American woman learning Arabic spoke of the way the language pulled you into the religion and she had trouble with that. One Chinese woman pointed out that she herself had reservations about acquiring such expressions as "bless you" which seem overtly Christian. The trouble we have in just adapting an entire system is often internal resistance to the culturally unpalatable demands of the new situation.
More on this later. It was to some degree unfinished business; I taught ESL for 28 years, and now am seeing the top end of it, people who are almost fluent. How can I look back at the whole process, and dispense wisdom from what I've seen? Basically, everyone was motivated, at least on the first day. Everyone had a memory and a working mental apparatus, with the slight exception of a few that were missing a switch here or there. So what remained, and why did people learn languages at different rates? This presentation attempts to get at the answer.
A good discussion occurred about the passive voice. A claim was made earlier in the day that active was more basic than passive, thus bound to be acquired earlier; that would be more natural, that would be as it was meant to be. There is a natural order to these structures, this speaker said, and we learn them in order.
Alas, but my presentation points out the ways we
don't learn them in order, or, we take that order in our own hands, and impose our own order on the system, and acquire any feature only when we're ready. Thus it would be possible for a person to acquire articles first, or last, depending on their inclination, but more important, with passives, it would be theoretically possible for a person to deliberately acquire passive and passive
only, since it is not
required to know active before one knows passive, or to "enter" the cognitive sphere through the active voice. Is it? That, I think, would be my more fundamental research question.
Labels: grammar, language, learning theory, personal, ttu
thee, thou, thy and thine
After I'd studied "y'all" for a while I turned my attention to thee, thou, thy and thine. Most people have at least a basic background on them. They used to be informal ways of addressing people, used for friends and equals, similar to German "du" and Spanish "tu". Then Quakers mucked everything up by calling everyone by thee, thou, etc. and refusing to grant preferred status to the higher-ups, like tax collectors and royalty. THEN to avoid sounding like Quakers, English speaking society decided to just call
everyone you etc., without regard to status. So what happened to thee, thou, thy and thine? Several things. First, they went out of common use; they were common in certain Quaker areas and Quaker communities for a while, and in some British dialects, such as Yorkshire and near Lancashire, but they have begun to fade, even there, recently.
Now this story gets interesting in several ways. First is, what little usage they have today, could basically be called "put-on religious" or "put-on Quaker." If you want to sound old, or hopelessly out of date, or rigid or moralistic in the sense that people see old Quakers, you might want to use them. People generally have lost track of the grammatical difference between "thee" and "thou" so they might use "thee" in subject position, or less frequently, "thou" in object position, incorrectly. They don't have a very clear sense of their grammatical sense, except possibly in the places where they were really used daily.
Then, I asked the Quakers what they thought of so-called "plain speaking"...how could it be that, if it's called plain speaking, it's really only used in a "put on" way? Quakers are by nature opposed to pretentiousness, thus they shun such things as creating an in-group, putting on airs of any kind, or trying to "sound" as if they were something they're not. So, are these words doomed? Yes, in the Quaker community anyway. If they sound put-on, Quakers aren't going to use them. Period.
Such it is that the opposite has evolved from what was, at one time, "plain speaking." If it is no longer plain, it is on its way out, and if any group
chooses to start using it on a day-to-day basis, to create an ingroup, religious or not, or for any other reason, I'd like to know. It's a system, and, without wanting exactly to go back to the days of King James, I really would like to know how it sounds in an everyday kind of way.
Labels: dialects, grammar, y'all
instant karma
When I was in graduate school, all teaching methods that involved instant feedback were out. If you were to jump on a student for pronouncing "three" as "tree," for example, he would stammer, make the correct "three" word again, lose his train of thought (not to mention his confidence), etc. Theory favored the affective side of it: let him speak as much as he is capable of speaking; let him string entire sentences together; correct him later, if at all, privately, and let him know that his pronunciation and/or grammar are impeding meaning, or should be worked on before the others. Naturally, those that impede meaning are more urgent than those that don't. Also, we are well aware that with much feedback in general, there is not a direct relationship between what you tell them to work on, and what actually gets improved on the following day. They like feedback, and appreciate it, and are especially grateful to know when it is responsible for their grade's being a little lower than they'd like, but, even when they apply themselves to changing their pronunciation or grammar, often they can't, at least not right away. Or, they will change it on a prepared speech, but immediately get thrown off when asked a question or expected to produce language spontaneously.
Now I am in a situation where I am teaching high-level learners; grammar and pronunciation are sometimes an issue, but usually not. The issue for them is often lack of tone, poor tone, long thought groups or poorly broken up thought groups, lack of prominence or no stress on important words. Tone, I think, is extremely important. They drift into a monotone, and people fall asleep, losing not only the information but also a sense of how important it is. Tone doesn't come naturally to speakers of other languages. They're head is full with creating sentences, recalling what they meant to say, making correct pronunciation (which, as I've said, is not bad at this level.
But a graduate student, A.H., has taken to giving them instant feedback on their DI (discourse intonation), mostly with their permission, and her partner, R.R., now jumps right in there beside her. They'll stop a student in the middle of the second sentence and say, "No tone!" or "Why are you using a rising tone? Are you unsure of yourself?" or perhaps, "Mind your prominence! Stress on the important words!"
Students, as I've said, liked this, and agreed to it willingly at first. They needed to know their faults and the sooner the better, they figured, even at the expense of obviously losing their train of thought, getting rattled in front of a crowd, etc. Generally they would be teaching in front of their peers. Generally their presentation was limited - maybe ten minutes at most. Generally they would stumble upon being corrected, but get back on their feet fairly quickly. Sometimes the fault that was pointed out would be corrected in what they produced after the feedback. In those cases, we could say it was a success. They were directed to mind an aspect of their DI (often one they weren't paying attention to); they would mind it; they would improve, and presumably they would learn the skill of considering DI simultaneously with the other things they were trying to juggle.
I stuck to my traditional method, which was to point out their weaknesses on a grading sheet, to be given them after (well after) their presentation, which often pointed out both DI weaknesses and traditional, pronunciation/grammar problems. My theory was that private, separated feedback could be handled more rationally later, could be separated from the plain view of peers, and allow their immediate observations more room to develop as they were speaking.
The instant feedback system had several negative consequences. One is interesting and worth noting. One poor girl, frustrated at being criticized for lack of tone, had adopted an uptalk kind of style. This actually is quite common. Students hear others doing it, and adopt it, and notice that they do better with uptalk than with nothing. I actually encourage it, although I know it's rather grating to the ears of a native speaker, it makes us say, "you're from the valley?" or "you're asking me?" or some such. But it
is a tone, developmental as it is, and it helps them begin to hear them, hear their consequences, etc. So A.H. jumps on her for her uptalk, and says, basically, "You're giving out your syllabus (true). You're telling them how you're going to grade them (also true)...and you make it a question? WHY are you using uptalk?" The poor girl, flustered, starts over again. She realizes the feedback is intended to help her, she's not overwhelmingly embarrassed. But she really doesn't
know how to vary her tones, or she would have done it. She is more embarrassed by not being able to make what she wants, than just being mistaken.
And this, in general, is probably the biggest problem. Tone becomes fluent in developmental increments, which are now disrupted, and not allowed to be half-perfect. If she develops a fear of uptalk, or picks up the disparagement on the part of native speakers in the room, she goes back to monotone. The disruption of the process sets back the entire thing, and, as a result, she can't use varying tones at all until she is entirely ready to make them all right.
I have often pointed out this tendency in the development of grammatical structures, for example, present perfect continuous. A student, in trying to say "I have been going to the Rec Center" says instead "I have been go to the Rec Center," producing an intermediate, developmental form. The computer tells them that's bad, go back to square one, or, the student is corrected and set back by an aggressive grammar-cop type of ESL teacher, who jumps on him, marks him down, publicly shames him, or whatever. Bottom line: avoid that structure altogether. Avoid trying it, avoid developing it, avoid putting it out there. Correction can have an opposite effect of stifling ordinary natural developmental progress. And it certainly doesn't reward experimentation, the risk-taking required to master anything.
These may be the traditional arguments against
all feedback, and they remind me a bit of the writing "Error correction wars" in which some theorists argued strenuously against
all error correction, and even those who were in favor of it were reduced to saying how much and how strenuously they would couch it in positive terms, save it until the end, devalue it or absorb it into larger meaning-expression issues. That kind of feedback, in writing, was
out and was staying
out as far as I could tell, last I checked. Those who wanted to know
principal from
principle were left looking online for one of those online proofreaders.
I should mention, by the way, that A.H. and R.R. tried to set up a study; they asked students how they felt; they tried to determine whether this method worked, and how students actually felt about it. While getting accurate results on its efficacy may be extremely difficult, the controlled environment under which they asked students their true opinions might yield interesting results; I'll keep you posted.
Labels: grammar, ita's, learning theory, ttu, writing
keep calm y'all
I have a couple of grad. assistants working for me who teach often. Today I said to them, I have a bone to pick with y'all. As I watch you, I've noticed that you use "y'all" sometimes to address the class. But other times you use "you guys". And you NEVER use "you" to refer to the class. What's up with that?
They admitted, they were avoiding "you". You grow up in Texas schools, they said, if a teacher addresses the class as "y'all", everything's fine. If the principal addresses the class as "y'all", everything is fine. If anyone uses "you" everything is NOT FINE.
So they are avoiding it at all costs. It sounds rude, short, uncaring, harsh.
Now they are well aware of the problems of "y'all" sounding hick, sounding southern, being too informal, etc. They are also well aware of the problem I told them, that even we northerners were beginning to give up on "you guys" because it only referred to half the class at any given time, and the other half was bound to be offended.
But in the north, "you" as plural is not really marked one way or the other. It's not rude, it's not formal, it's not really a problem, using it with a class, using it with friends, using it with anyone. The only problem with it is that it isn't really
clear; it can refer to one person or many.
They have many ways to refer to one or many down here. "Y'all" can be used for one or many, but is used for one mostly when you don't know that one, or it is an older person, or you have to assume that the person has family or people around that you don't know about. Waitresses use "y'all" for singular; they're allowed. They have to be polite to everyone. They don't have time to sit and decide whether you are one or many. "Y'all" in that context generally refers to "you and yours" and is remarkably similar to some other languages that essentially use you-plural in polite situations. So in fact "y'all" can and does act as both singular and plural in all
kinds of situations, making it as ambiguous, in number (sometimes), as "you" is up north.
But one teacher pointed out something else. There is actually a "clipped y'all" which sounds more like "yaw" or "yuh". It's singular "y'all". Even though there is a
plural y'all, all-a-y'all, it's actually a quite complicated situation, and it has more to do with politeness, which always matters, than true number, which is a fluid concept (since not knowing whether someone has family, is the same as assuming that they do, and you just don't know it). We northerners shake our heads at the concept that "it's not about number."
About this "yaw" or "yuh" - I
have heard it. I'll keep my ears out for it again. There aren't so many people you can even
ask, as they aren't always all that aware of how they speak or why; they misreport, or give questionable data. Doesn't matter. If you live here a while, I figure, you get the hang of it. People are friendly. They like to talk.
So I told them, well, there's always "you folks" or "you lot" - I doubt they're going to go with the Pittsburgh "you'ns" or the bronx "youse" which I once, by the way, heard in Alton, IL. These are similarly marked. There's a whole lot of us who have trouble with all the options. Now that I'm Texan, I'll start having trouble with "you", because I'll begin to hear it the way they hear it - too formal, too rude. One doesn't want people thinking one doesn't care.
Labels: grammar, languages, ttu, y'all
Grammar technology: For better or worse 2013
Leverett, T. (2013, Mar.).
Grammar technology: For better or worse. Internet Fair Classics, invited presentation. TESOL Convention, Dallas, TX, USA.
This one was a little harder for me logistically, because I'd been in Illinois beforehand and had to come back to Texas in order to do it. Nearby my friend Vance was doing a webcast from that same Classics presentation. Dallas was a nice city; I enjoyed it, unexpectedly.
Reactions from teachers were interesting. One that stuck with me was a woman who wrote off use of grammar technology by students as plagiarism. I didn't want to dispute with her the subtle difference between simply copying someone else's paragraph and calling it yours, and taking some paragraph in native language, yours or someone else's, and crunching it through a machine. In this sense "plagiarism" is redefined as "getting one's English paragraph without actually constructing it in English," but it can be seen as a related form of laziness, unwillingness or inability to do the work.
It is clear to me, though, that it's not always motivated by these things, which are so familiar to teachers especially in places where students don't
want to learn so much as to survive, pass or move on to a better place. I look at it more this way: The technology is there; it's free; why would you
not use it, or at least try it, until you were told loudly and clearly that it was prohibited?
My friend told the story of how students did in fact use both kinds (electronic dictionary, one word at a time, and Google Translate, one sentence at a time), and eventually settled on one-word-at-a-time systems because of their teacher's extreme reaction to GT's garbled variants. Teachers do in fact respond negatively to big vocabulary words that you couldn't possibly have known already, put into complex native-language grammatical patterns that are difficult to decode. If the students slog through and construct sentences in their own English, they'll have better luck with this kind of teacher, though. And this is what would happen, according to her.
I spent a long time talking to a guy who saw it somewhat like I did. You have to keep your eye on this software, and learn what is available to students. You have to know what they can do with it the minute you turn your back. You have to assume that they are going to use it at every possible chance
and that they are genuinely interested in learning the language. You might as well be honest with them about the fact that it's there, that they can use it, that it will affect what they write, and that it will affect their learning, and for example that it will cause their high vocabulary to belie their true ability, and rub some teachers the wrong way. Students, incredibly enough, come away from it all with a sense of what they still need to become fluent, and are even able to talk about this and pass it along to other students.
Labels: bib, grammar, personal, tesol
War on passives
This year for the first time I am teaching international students and American students simultaneously. One difference is that internationals generally know what the passive is. The passive is a way of saying something (like
I am involved in intramural sports or
I have been struck by the incongruity of this situation) where the verb has a
be in it more or less beside the past participle, and the victim of the action now lies in the subject position. It is very useful in sentences like
2000 were killed in an earthquake or
employees were informed of the layoffs when the bad guy is horrible or doesn't want overt recognition; one could argue that simply emphasizing the victim, by putting him/her/them in the subject position, one is not necessarily hiding the perpetrator so much as de-emphasizing, but, passive takes the rap for being used by those sneaky perps to cover up their actions.
The lamp is broken is one sentence I used to use in order to teach it; the child learns this as part of his/her increasing sophistication with the language, thus learning how not to admit to one's crimes.
So in the sixties, or thereabouts, social science writers in particular led the charge to iron out all
it was observed that... constructions, in science reports, and just own up to who did it, as in
we observed that.... Where this turned into a tidal wave of denigration of the passive, I'm not sure. Today in English classes throughout the land, graduate assistants are using "eliminate the passive" as code for "make your writing as powerful, assertive, and direct as possible." This is in general good advice. Saying "We observed..." is more assertive than saying "it was observed" and leaving it to the reader to figure out who did it. For writers to systematically weed out these constructions may be unrealistic though. One big problem is that by and large they don't know what they're doing.
I'll start with the internationals. The machines, namely grammar-check, have taken to telling them that it's wrong, and advising them to use active sentences. Thus we see a lot more "I involve in that." The more sophisticated machines can tell them that it's "Intramural sports involve me" but that also is awkward, and it removes the flow of an essay that focuses, for example, on what they have been doing this semester. There are many words, like
involve, that need passive in order to be used properly or smoothly. But internationals don't know this from the advice the computer gives them. In the last few years I began noticing, as I taught passive, a quizzical look on internationals' faces, as if to say, is this real? Can you do this? (if not, why does my computer keep saying you can't?)...Are you serious?
Internationals, at least, can see the reasoning, and the history, of the war. Steeped in grammar, they can see why you'd use it, why you'd reject it, why it might be necessary sometimes, and why the computer can't tell when it's necessary and when it's not. They get disgusted by the whole mess, but grammar is like that anyway, and they've been studying TOEFL, for example, weeding out exceptions and irregularities; they've become expert on these things, and have picked up some speed in building the background knowledge necessary to process it.
Americans are another story. The GA's in freshman English classes themselves don't always know the passive, and mark sentences like
This is appropriate and
That is exorbitant as passive, when they're not. The war on passives is extended to all
be verbs and comes to be somewhat like the war on terror: A huge outlay of time and effort for an unknown enemy. Freshmen writers are even more clueless; they often don't know when they've used it, what it looks like, how to make it active. Sometimes the teacher doesn't give them the guidance. Truly getting caught in a grammar dispute makes the grad assistants quite uncomfortable, so they tend to stick to higher ground, the content, or analysis of a work, and leave the grammar for the red pen to make a single mark on it, often indecipherable, or vaguely criticized.
Maybe the last thing I'd like to do, a dream I've had for some time, is to make a little book that explains this in simple words, and helps these poor students understand what the grad assistant is saying. You can't do much about grad assistants who abuse their power, or who don't know what they're talking about, or whatever; they could use a book like this too, of course. I could put lots of things in it, like why it's considered a dilemma when writers say, "The student brought their book;" it's surprising to me how many of them
don't even see the problem. It's one thing to make an informed choice, to go against the grain, or do what's easiest and take the rap. What amazes me is the perpetuation of cluelessness, as if mentioning that passives are not as direct or assertive as actives, will actually change people's language. Maybe it would, for the one or two percent of us, but, we weren't really the primary audience.
Labels: grammar, writing
