New Year's resolution
I have a lot going on in my life: I've started peddling my own books, and writing four or five of them a year; I am still tutoring for Texas Tech, although that has died down a little; I am raising three teenagers, having just sent another off to college at New Mexico State (requiring occasional drives across the White Sands and Tularosa Basin), and we're basically still trying to maintain a kind of rural outpost where my wife can ride horses and I can look several directions without seeing anyone or anything but pine trees and mountains.
But I still have my eye on linguistics, because I feel my purpose in life is not complete until I address one major question. the world of linguistics is still relying on Chomskian universals, even though nobody has come up with any, except for recursion, which is a kind of nebulous idea that I don't quite buy. In other words, now that universalism is reduced to claiming that recursion is the main thing that sets us apart from animals, and makes our languages more complex (read: better?), we have a system that is based on a number of false precepts. Besides, and this is what I've said all along, we don't know
anything about animal languages, or alien ones for that matter. How do we know if they have recursion? And what is it about recursion that makes it a masterful enough stroke of genius that it moves us up as a species into a class of our own? I just don't buy it.
What I'm saying is that linguistics at this point is like a glass castle. Once they start in on morphology, phonology, and semantics, they know what they're talking about, but when they start out, the first two weeks, with this universalism and recursion kind of stuff, I think they're learning to skip over it real fast before people start asking questions. And when I look back at my linguistics training, I find that I'm still asking those questions and not getting good answers.
To get back to my New Year's resolution, it is, to put it bluntly, to set the record straight. I hope to finish my book this year, and when I do, you will be the first to know. If Chomskian linguistics is a glass castle, it's time to build a realistic framework from which people can study the science of language. Let's let go of the "language acquisition device" until we find a device that actually teaches people language. Let's let go of "restrictions" that are supposedly genetic, that just tell you that you can't use a noun this way or that way. The genetic world does not go around making pointless restrictions; it doesn't do that with blue eyes or five fingers, so why should it do that with language? If you are trying to describe nature and natural actions scientifically let's start with what we know about human behavior and then say that language is a phenomenon that fits into human behavior as we know it. And there is order in this world, I swear to it. It's my resolution to show it to you.
Labels: chomsky, language, linguistics, personal, self-organized systems
folx & Latinx
People in my word group are sharply divided about the innovation in language that brings us
folx and
Latinx, the second of which I don't know how to pronounce. Words such as these are increasingly common in communities where people want to signal their general inclusiveness and openness to non-gender binary people.
As usual, as a language observer, I am more inclined to study the actual change in the language, than to bat around my opinions about what should or shouldn't happen. My general observation is that it will happen anyway, if it's going to, regardless of anything I say or want. And that goes for most of us in the word group too. We can rant and rave all we want about how something doesn't make sense in language terms, or is unnecessary, or whatever, but either people will find it useful or they won't, and that will determine the success of the innovation.
A case in point is the appearance of
Ms., which I clearly remember. I remember objecting on the grounds that it was an abbreviation but it didn't have a corresponding word. How can you have an abbreviation when it doesn't abbreviate a real word? But resistance to
Ms. was futile. It was useful to women to not have the way they were addressed reveal theri marital status, rightly or wrongly. It was useful to me because often I didn't know their marital status or didn't care, and I certainly never felt like I had to reveal it as part of addressing them. I began using it myself and liking it. After a while I forgot the absurdity of an abbreviation that doesn't abbreviate anything. Well, I guess I never forgot it. But who actually cares about that these days?
Now of the
x words, I have singled out these two for a reason. With
folx language purists argue that
folks is already inclusive and just informal enough to refer to everybody no matter what anyway. But you watch. Even though the pronunciation of
folx and
folks is exactly the same, as far as I can tell, there will be good reasons for
folx to catch on and survive in the written world. With
Latinx, there's a better reason for it to catch on: that
Latina and
Latino by nature reveal gender and force the speaker into a binary agreement. And sometimes you don't know the gender, or the gender preference, or what to do when forced into that kind of binary choice. But alas, with
Latinx, as I said, I don't know how to pronounce it. With time, maybe that will get easier too.
My last observation is that what matters really is whether it catches on with the vast majority of relatively non-involved language users. On my word group people are fighting like they are really invested in the outcome, like it's some kind of political movement that they either love or hate. It is political, I'll grant you that. But it's the non-political language users who will decide the outcome in the end. Either it's useful to them, or it isn't, and so, either they'll use it or they won't. In my opinion both will survive in some form or another, though they may not thrive like
Ms. has. Time will tell.
Labels: language, linguistics, vocabulary
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
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
Cultural Flexibility
I've written a little about this before, but I'm about to begin a serious inquiry and have lots of preliminary thoughts to put down before I start.
First, I was heavily influenced by a book on motivation that I reviewed for TESL-EJ. To me the essence of the book, my walk-away tip, was that motivation, or pure desire to learn a language, wasn't worth anything until it could be translated into measurable outcomes. For example, you would
like your language class more if you were motivated to learn a language, and this could be measured, simply by asking you if you liked to go to that class. You would
do more studying of that language, because your motivation had been converted, so to speak, into the juice that ran the engine, and that juice was measurable, in the sense that if you
did more than you used to, or more than the next guy, you were clearly more motivated. Your motivation had converted successfully into useful, measurable units of juice.
Now I didn't quite buy this at the time, and I still have trouble with it, a little, because in fact I believe you can really want something and still be unable to convert it, and then, in that case, what do you call the desire? You can be crying inside to learn a language and still be unable to sit in a class, for example, or learn your vocabulary words. Ah, but skip that argument. When it comes to cultural flexibility, the problem is the same, but it's much more fun to worry about. For example, some things about a language are more unpalatable than others. And, that unpalatable-ness (unpalatability?) can be measured, right? So, you learn to use
a, an, or
the, but you never quite bought into the idea that you should have to be bothered with such a thing. This would be unpalatable, and your cultural ability to bite the bullet, or just say to yourself, look, this is something I have to learn for cultural reasons, is going to determine your success. If you are stubborn in the sense that your feeling about the unpalatability of that characteristic of language is stronger than your cultural need to fit in, get along, do as everyone is doing, you will have more trouble with getting your articles right, and this will be one of the last features that you master.
Now, in the world of features, first, there are several kinds. There are unpalatable sounds, (like
th) which can be distinguished from sounds that are merely difficult to make (
zh as in
measure).
AE as in
bat or
hat is another example; it may sound unpleasant, or you may know that people in England don't have to bother with it, or are able to make it in a slightly less offensive way. Sometimes the grammar, as in
a/an/the/0, is routine, and you'll bump into it twice per sentence; other times it's a little more rare. Sometimes you can get away with errors a lot longer in certain areas, than in others, because certain mistakes are more repairable on the part of the listener (or the reader as the case may be). So errors or features have characteristics of their own: frequency, importance, etc. that influence the necessity of learning them first, later, or not at all.
In Korean you actually speak a different language to people who are older than you, people who are the same age or level as you, people who are below you, and children; this fundamental division of the human race before one opens one's mouth is unpalatable to democratic Americans who basically use the same language for everyone, and are proud of it, although sometimes they're fooling themselves. Nevertheless one would have to admit that this is a
fundamental characteristic of the Korean language; you won't go far if you don't master it. You'll be corrected in a
fundamental kind of way, and that's because you have violated a very important rule. That's not to say this can't be done; English speakers eliminated the
thee/you distinction at one time, but it could be called a social revolution and was no small deal. What I'm saying is that features of a language can be foundational, or more of whatever the opposite of foundational would be.
Now I'm inclined to say that one of the primary considerations here is that often what we are watching here is subconscious. People detest the
a/an/the situation because it seems so trivial, yet they know it causes problems, and they have trouble integrating the awareness into their systems so as to correct the problem. When it is subconscious, I like to bring it to the front and ask them about it. For example, I have high-level students who
never make a
th correctly and I
know they can do it, so I'm in the habit of asking them if it's just too embarrassing to stick their tongue out in public, and are they really unable to do that just because they are stubbornly cultural about doing something that, back in their home culture, one would never do. By the way, I feel this way about walking around someone's house in my socks; I really don't want to do it. I kind of feel like feet stink, especially when they're in socks, and it's better just to keep one's shoes on, as dirty and muddy as they might be. But the question of cultural flexibility is simple: how much are you willing to give up, just because you know that it's what is done, it's what this culture has decided is necessary, it's what you do to become "fluent"?
What I am trying to prove is that, first, the sense of discomfort you feel with customs (like leaving one's shoes at the threshold, or sticking one's tongue out to make a
th) can be measured. Your cultural flexibility, therefore, can also be measured. We should be able to predict how well you will do with learning a language by measuring your cultural flexibility, in the same way that if we could measure the size of your memory, or your ability in retrieving what you want out of it, we could measure your success in mastering vocabulary. These are characteristics that make good language learners. Pure intelligence, I am convinced, is not really one of them, because we are not really talking about rocket science, as puzzling as another language's grammar may seem.
It is not made to be too complex for the average person to figure out...on the contrary, languages must be accessible, or they would be virtually useless. That doesn't mean they're easy, though. Geniuses have trouble with them. And I intend to get to the bottom of
what is most difficult in mastery of them.
Here are some research questions that I would like to explore, refine, and/or answer:
1. Language features clearly can come in different kinds: grammatical or phonological, to start with. But what about semantic? Are there more? What am I missing?
2. So we test you, and determine that you are quite stubborn, unwilling to stick your tongue out, so to speak, so you are doomed to years of trouble mastering any given language that requires this or that cultural concession. Are you doomed to failure because of your basic nature, or can you actually teach yourself to be more flexible? I suspect the latter. I suspect that it is difficult, but it is the key to language learning.
3. OK, so we set about making subconscious problems conscious; for example, I point out that the reason you are having such trouble with
a/an/the/0 is that deep down, you feel that it's a pile of horse pucky and you shouldn't have to be bothered with such triviality. You readily agree, and now realize why you've had such trouble for so many years mastering such a trivial feature. Does your awareness of your own feelings help you master the problem? Is this a useful teaching tool? I can ask everyone about the relative unpalatability of various features of English or the language that they are embarking upon learning, but will that matter?
Labels: language, languages, learning theory
international education at tech
Texas Tech has never gone out of its way to attract internationals, but like most universities, it attracts a fair number anyway. They like Texas: it's sunny, friendly, warm, reasonably-priced in terms of living expenses, and diverse enough to make them not stand out too harshly as they go around town.
But the story is a little unbalanced. Tech has 1700 internationals, depending on how you count them; out of 1400 on this campus, over 80% are graduates; only 260 are undergraduates. Unlike UT-Austin, Texas A & M, or Univ. of Houston, all in the top 25 for serving internationals nationwide, Tech has gone down; whereas internationals were 6.7% in 2011, 4.7% in 2012, down 30%, and no telling what they are now, in 2013. Tech's overall retention rate is 80%, which is pretty good, but with internationals their goal is to reach 70%, which appears to show a difference, if I am reading the right numbers in the right way. My guess is that our 260 undergraduates are struggling. In many departments they say, sink or swim, we aren't set up to accommodate you well.
This highlights a huge difference between Tech and, say, Texas A & M, where internationalism is a well-established part of the culture. People come and stay to places like A & M because there is an established community, and people have seen internationals before, and know how to deal with them. It's a little harder in Lubbock, which is much more provincial.
A little over a year ago, Tech lost its Intensive English Program to ELS, a private storefront school in downtown Lubbock. ELS has branches in various places, such as Houston, some well-established, but because it's not part of Tech, many internationals were dismayed by this switch and aren't sure that ELS can train them appropriately for success at Tech. One disgruntled student wrote a "Google review":
ELS Lubbock center is very bad for to many reasons, First, the final SSP/LS exam is not from the book you study before its very hard to pass, because you didn't study SSP book and test you for same thing did not study it . second, the the teachers is not ready to teach us, and didn't have any expensive. next, its very expansive 1730 a month ? for what for all that money . last thing, if you are from muslim you have hard mistreatment. I would not advise anyone to a join ELS Lubbock center
You expect a certain amount of disgruntlement anyway, but you would hope this storefront would be integrating students into Tech life, able to show them the student culture. In fact, they do go to pumpkin patches, or volleyball games, or whatever they can. I'm not disparaging them; they are doing their best. Their website tries hard to show that. Conditional admission into TTU says to some degree, that they
are part of the culture, they are accepted, Tech likes them. There are only about 60, though. They hope to climb over a hundred; they hope to get Tech over 2000, in the next four years. Good luck!
Out of Texas Tech's 34,000 students, less than 1% come from over 500 miles away, and that number includes students from Brownsville, TX, and Port Arthur, TX, both over 500 miles away. Tech is not used to attracting students from Louisiana or Illinois, much less China or India. It could. The President recently expressed commitment to the idea. He might, in fact, commit the university to trying to recruit, which is a complicated business, but which is possible. Where would he look? I have no idea, but I have suggestions: Vietnam, China, Brazil, South America, Korea.
What constitutes adequate support for these students? Mainly, they like to have others from their same country around, so that they have someone to celebrate the major holidays with. To that end we should support the student groups and associations that already exist, and encourage others to form. Some universities make separate freshman writing courses for internationals, or provide writing assistance. We
have a center where they support internationals, take care of their visas, etc. I'd like to see those numbers go up; it would be good for Tech, and good for Lubbock. Here are some more questions I have:
1. Will it really be possible for
a storefront IEP to deliver to Texas Tech a rise in enrollment, as promised, or will we continue to flounder, as we have been? What's the secret to attracting them here; what can we promise them that will work?
2. Are students as well prepared, after a year or so of education off campus, as they were in the floundering IEP that was
on campus, before it gave up the ghost & closed down 15 months ago? That IEP was unable to do the paperwork necessary for accreditation, and just closed instead; I've never been satisfied with the story, but that's what I know. I also don't know which IEP, that one or ELS, would be more responsible for our present retention figures. I assume this stuff is tracked.
3. Presently our 1400 students are from about 100 countries, starting with India (34%), China (16%), and Korea. Where else? How does the present (60) population at ELS compare to the TTU population...in other words, what kinds of students will ELS be feeding into TTU in the coming years? Of course I'm more interested in their general preparedness than their countries of origin, but I might have to know the latter to make some stereotyped guesses about the former.
4. Presumably our biggest supply of internationals is coming in through the graduate school, and they already have pretty good English, pretty well prepared for their graduate study. These grad programs are doing their own recruiting, I'd guess. So what are they saying? How are they doing this? How does this recruiting system work?
At a time when international enrollment is at an all-time high in US universities (USC has over 7,000), TTU appears to be missing the boat, but not too concerned about it. They've set out as a goal, to do something about this, and I'm sure they're trying. I'm actually very curious about how it will all work. As far as I can tell, it's one step backward for every step forward.
Labels: language, personal, ttu
translation plateau, cont'd
A lot of times on the first day of class you get very interesting questions; these are the better students, who have been studying during the breaks, and have been saving up these questions because they're really stuck. In this case it was a Sri Lankan woman, with very good English, who is going to be an international teaching assistant here and thus is almost ready to actually teach in English.
She said the following, roughly: "I don't have any trouble thinking and using English when I'm in my own field, because I learned everything in that field in English. But the rest of the time, I have trouble thinking in English; I always think in my native language and then translate. Why do I have such trouble? I know I
can do it, I just can't bring myself to do it?
My answer was roughly the following. People have trouble at this point switching over to thinking in English. My guess is that you are afraid of losing something related to your native language. If you think about it, you won't really lose your ability to speak and remember your native language. You might forget a few words, or not have as good access to it, when you bring English to the front and use English all the time. But you won't actually
lose anything.
I suspect the answer lies more in fear of losing an aspect of your native culture that you
really are afraid of losing, for example, some part of its values, or its code. People at first look at American culture as if it's like the movies - it's wild, and violent, and immoral, etc. When they get here they are genuinely attracted by certain aspects of it: increased freedom and respect for women, more liberal attitudes toward the disabled or different groups of people; Americans have different attitudes toward guns, toward extramarital sex, toward racial differences. These are all bound together in what it means to you to "become more American." But it is not necessarily related to the language you speak. It is theoretically possible to speak English 100% of the time, and not really change your values or your morals at all from what you had when you got here.
What happens, though, is that we change our values little by little, subconsciously, and in some cases we are even aware of changing our values a little. And that scares us; we feel now truly cast adrift from the native culture, looking back on it and being somewhat apart from it. It reminds me of a story an Asian told me about how he went back home, possibly to Korea, and someone told him he looked like he was
walking like an American, possibly taking up too much of the sidewalk. Could it be that he actually
walked differently after a stint in the U.S.? If so, it could have been subconscious. The point is, we are sometimes aware we are changing, and sometimes not aware, but in the same way, we fear this, we dig in, we react to our own changes within ourselves.
I am not a counsellor, I told her, so I can't address how you talk to
yourself to alleviate these fears, and absorb yourself more deeply in your new language, so as to make your life more efficient, and integrate yourself better into your new community. As you speak to yourself, separate language and morality - you can speak whatever language you want, and still keep the values that you yourself have chosen to live by. Second, assure yourself that you will not lose anything of substance - you will know your native language forever, regardless of how long you speak with something else. Finally, efficiency, ease of speech, and clear communication are enough of a reward that you will soon see that this change is worthwhile, and overdue; what is a little harder, maybe, is getting at the true differences between cultures that
do involve values and morals, and decide for yourself what you want. If it's related, even in your mind, to the language you are speaking, it doesn't have to be. You learned it once purely for the ability to participate fully in your field, and teach in it. Now, use it also to really know the culture you are in. You can suspend your acceptance of all the values you presently associate with it, and take those or leave them at will.
The decision to think in a new language all the time often comes after it's efficient, easy or even possible. It ties people up because they can't do it and they can't even identify their reasons for being unable to do it. So, it seems inevitable here that we accept the idea that sometimes we are at war with ourselves subconsciously, and we have to have a good talk with ourselves to resolve it, and come out with a kind of working peace treaty. At times the next step is a very large one, and has to be taken with the entire body.
Labels: language, learning theory, ttu
book report - The Self-Organizing Economy
Krugman, Paul (1996). The Self-Organizing Economy. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell
I'm just finishing a term here, and I just taught American students from two very interesting books which I will review soon. One reason I review them is to remind
myself of the interesting ideas I encountered, that I might want to build upon in my own writing.
But before I write my final (which I should give on Mon.), I have this book (above), which I took out of the library in maybe February, and which I really should get going on, since it was, at that time, my goal to tackle the nature of self-organizing systems and apply that to language.
My first insight from the book is that the term
self-organizing is by nature better than
self-organized, since the latter implies that it's finished, done, it made itself and it's over. It's never over. As long as we're using it, it's changing. But Krugman's book is not about language; it's about economies.
There are two very inspirational characteristics of the book. The first is that it's all written in a very conversational style, as if he's sitting there at your kitchen table explaining his work. The reason this is inspirational is that it's probably the best I can do as I go about trying to explain language.
The second is that he actually does the math that is involved to determine and predict why the modern city would spread out in the way that it invariably does. Now once you start in with those sigmas and the function signs, I'm over my head, not because I can't do it, but because I generally won't. I would probably need a math textbook to really get into, and master, what he's done with his mathematical models of how businesses spread out over an area like what you have in LA, or say Lubbock. And in fact this has a lot in common with the way we do the math in order to keep producing language. My book is basically about the model we use in our heads to determine which form of a word, for example, is the "standard" or "unmarked" one. It's all in the math, I'd like to say, except that I myself can't or won't do the math. Others will have to follow upon my work and do the math themselves. I must say, however, that I am impressed that Mr. Krugman, who is essentially a journalist (I read the book because I had liked his newspaper columns), could go so far out of his way to figure this stuff out.
Here are some other interesting tidbits from the book:
He defines features of self-organizing systems as, first, order from instability, and order from random growth. In the first case, order spontaneously emerges because the system orders itself naturally, given the forces from both directions that influence it. In the second case he shows that even when the rate of growth is random, or independent of the size of the city or they system itself, the system will adapt to that growth or change in a direction toward order.
He mentions percolation theory, which is a part of self-organizing systems that has caught the fancy of researchers, perhaps because they drink a lot of coffee. This essentially seeks to answer the question: How far will water penetrate into porous rock? by showing that this theory and its derivations can be used to predict the distance that any chain reaction spreads, since the likelihood of the holes in the rock being connected, increases the likelihood of the water spreading from one side of the rock to the other.
In language this becomes a complex equation, but it might be worth looking into. Let's say you have a language innovation, so that young girls are now saying "think you" instead of "thank you" as is favored by my older generation. Let's assume that the likelihood of language change increases with the increased amount that any young girl hears the newer form. She is therefore more likely to change her speech, regardless of what her parents say or do, if the majority of people she hears has changed their speech. There's an element of "porosity" here that is crucial to language change. The parents have much less contact with the forces of change, and are left behind saying "thank you," the old fools.
But back to Krugman, who said nothing about language, by the way, but concentrated on percolation and its effects on businesses. He credited Per Bak, by the way, with coming up with the idea that "many physical and social phenomena are percolation systems that tend toward criticality" (I'll find the page).
Another interesting part had to do with phase locking. This is when two different systems get into the same phase for no other reason than being in touch with each other, or having some, however minimum, relation with each other. For example, he says that since the US and Europe don't really trade that much, it doesn't follow at all that when Europe is down, we should be down as well. If we only do say 1 or 2% of our business with each other, then why should the depression in Europe cause one here? Only this: that we lock phases, and carry on together as if we were in tune with each other.
I see that my research was actually quite poor, and that I have to go back and look up some of this stuff. I may even have to master, at least in my own shallow way, percolation theory, just for my own benefit if nothing else. It is my belief that in looking toward these mathematical models we can better understand a "non-linear" system like language.
Labels: language, languages, self-organized systems
linguistics papers
My undergraduates have just finished writing term papers which were, to me, very interesting. They had three choices: 1) choose an uncommon or endangered language and write about it, 2) take a stand on whether "Spanglish" can be considered a language of its own, 3) investigate linguistic forensics and its application to a court case. About six jumped on #3, and it could be assumed that they are forensics majors; many of my students are. Only one took #2 (so far - in fact I have only received 34 out of about 40 papers); and the rest did endangered or obscure languages.
So let's talk about those. There were Native American languages and their programs to survive and teach their children; similarly, there was an Australian one. There were two on Ainu and some other Asian ones; there was also two papers on European languages, one in Poland and one in Belarus.
One was on Klingon, which was invented by a guy in response to enthusiastic reaction to Star Trek and a group of aliens who appear on it. The guy supposedly was
less concerned about grammar than about other elements of the language, which he spelled out very carefully. Classes have been held in Klingon, and Hamlet was rewritten in Klingon. It has an enthusiastic fan base,
but no group of native speakers. It has a tension between people who believe that
only what the originator specified is valid, versus people who would experiment, change and adapt the language. It raises questions about whether it is a language, partly because interest in it is growing, and even maturing, yet it has restrictions on settling in to being a huge language.
Another paper was on Boontling, a language spoken in the small California town of Boonville. Apparently these rural people, in the late nineteenth century, started systematically making up new words and using them in place of English words, until their Boontling slang was indecipherable by outsiders; ultimately it became like a souvenir, glorified in YouTubes and in tourist literature. But the question is: did it ever have its own grammar, or was it just new words being plugged in systematically in places where English would have content words? My question really is whether it can be called its own language if it has used English grammar and phonology entirely, and simply replaced all the words. In the case of this language, there were generations of people who grew up within it, unclear about what common things (such a phone) were really called; however, these native speakers ended up with a huge vocabulary, more than with two separate languages.
A final question was about saving native languages, and Hawaiian came up as one that has significant attention put to saving it. Hawaiian is an interesting and unique language and attracted this attention partly because of that. The University of Hawaii set about teaching Hawaiian as a second language and soon built up a culture of non-native speakers who were very interested in perpetuating the language. Meanwhile a group of native Hawaiians holed up on one of the islands, where outsiders were prohibited and where they could successfully perpetuate the language and a culture. But the inevitable happened, or is happening: this culture survives only by being isolated. Its elders die; its young generation seek more action in the larger cities. Now, of the two populations who speak Hawaiian, it can be argued that the university one may be more vibrant, or, that due to lack of contact, the variations inevitably split
from each other. And either group is just as likely to change anything in their variant, as we saw in English in colonial days. The set of changes that befall a language invariably create a different language, when and if they don't maintain contact.
I'll read these papers more carefully as soon as I can, and report back. I find it an interesting subject, and want to pursue it more.
Labels: endangered languages, language, languages, ttu
annals of y'all, continued
There is no question that we northerners hear singular "y'all" often down here in West Texas. A couple of examples will help. First, and this one is common: I'm standing alone at the schoolhouse entrance waiting for my children and a school official says to me, "How are y'all?" The answer is clear:
We're fine, because she was clearly referring to me and mine, all of us, even though only I was present. OK, I have no problem with that. Second, I'm in a restaurant with a 7-year-old, and the waitress says, "Do y'all want some coffee," and I say
yes, I do in order to emphasize that it's just me that wants the coffee, no thanks for the seven-year-old. I'm ok with this too: I'm still a stranger, she doesn't know if I have family, she'd rather assume lots of possibilities than assume I'm alone in this world. But the second time around, she says "Do y'all want cream with that?" and now, I feel like I've already
told her I'm alone, she
knows the seven-year-old doesn't want cream, etc.
In the lab yesterday morning I found the quote where there's nothing more likely to start another Civil War than a notherner telling a southerner that they use y'all singular. When I found that I pressed "print" and should have known that 37 pages would print out before it was over. The passage was interesting though, not least for its comments, in which people weighed in on other you plurals (my favorite "you'ns" as well as "youse") and their distributions. But it gave several interesting reasons worth chewing over that we hear so much of this. One is that since "y'all" is a mark of southerness, a northerner is more likely to hear it in
any context as if to say, I'm southern, and we're in the south, and this is how we reach out to you. Another is that it's a mark of familiarity; one of its functions is to reach out and be friendly and polite; in that context it could be said that politeness and hospitality are clearly more pressing than details like singular/plural (this alone being a concept somewhat alien to northerners). So, it's not that y'all is singular, it's not, it's more that politeness trumps grammatical accuracy in some or many circumstances.
A fair swath of my class, maybe a third of about thirty people, said they only use "y'all" to
mean plural. The article bears out that educated southerners generally say this, believe it, and for all we know follow it (one point made was that they argue passionately about it, generally opposed to the possibility of singular y'all, yet the facts don't bear them out; apparently there are
plenty of people using singular y'all, for whatever reason, and these are very likely the same people). I have not heard
these particular students use singular y'all, in opposition to their expressly stated rule, though I've challenged them to listen carefully. I have found some who admit to using it freely singular
and plural, who interpreted it as singular/polite and used it for everybody, and some who aren't really sure.
Surprisingly, wait staff is a definite subculture for everyone. Waitresses and waiters have their own rules, because they deal with hundreds of people, have to be polite, and don't have time to worry about details of customers' personal lives. They talk about the "rhythm of working" and admit to using "y'all" much the same way as the waitress used it with me.
The author of the article pointed out other more serious problems with finding and tracking singular y'all, though: half the time we (even linguists who care passionately) don't really keep track of what we really say, and, the other half, we are in the role of hearer, or receiver, and don't really know what the speaker
meant; presumably, even if we could ask, they might not know whether they were primarily motivated by grammatical accuracy, politeness, intimacy, southern pride, or whatever. I suspect, and this is the bottom line, really, that this is a case of rules that are in opposition: one says y'all is plural, the other says, when in doubt, be polite, and allow for other unseen people in the picture where you might not be familiar with them (the unseen spouse, for example). When asked about the rule (y'all is plural), there's no question: y'all is plural. If asked in another way, the answer might be different.
I have to relate a good story; four rough northern men are in a North Carolina diner. The waitress says to one, "Y'all want cream in your coffee?" to which he says, "how do I know if you mean just me, or all of us, since you said 'y'all'?" To which she replies, "If I'd a meant 'all-of-y'all, I would have said 'all-of-y'all'. Now, do y'all want cream or not?"
Back to our point: if y'all were so clearly plural, what would the point be of even
having all-of-y'all?
On the national scene, I'd like to point out that
you guys of my home dialect is doomed, a victim of literalism that no longer allows referring to any mixed group of males/females with a male pronoun of any kind.
Youse and
you'ns are clearly marked as "hick" (or "working-class" which is a kind of bizarre euphemism for "lower class" or as my student called it, "white trash". She was intimating that it wasn't the geographical association of "youse" that bothered her so much though as a waitress herself she didn't really care that much for Jersey manners or food snobbery. She was saying, she wouldn't or couldn't use "youse" because of that class marking alone, but, to her relief, living here offered her the opportunity to use "y'all" which can be done much more freely among all classes and at all levels of society. Sure, we know it's not formal English. But, our phones seem to know we are in Texas, and, if we leave out the apostrophe, my phone at least will supply it, and even put it in the right place.
Liberman, M. (2009).
Singular y'all: a "devious Yankee rumor"? Language Log. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2009. Available 10-12.
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
singular y'all
My class and I go back and forth a little about language; they're pretty much all from Texas, although I have one from Australia, and another from Italy, and a third from Albany NY which thank God lends me some credibility about Northernisms like "you guys." I ask them honestly what they mean by certain things and they usually tell me their true feelings.
So I said to them, I'm trying to figure out "y'all," and I really want to know how you feel and how you use it. I had introduced the topic once earlier when I said that when I typed "yall" into my phone my phone actually
added the apostrophe as if it was a standard word and everyone should know how to spell it right.
But today I had read something by Mencken, of all people, who said something to the effect that out of 100 times you might hear it to refer to someone who is alone (it's common, for example, for people to say, 'how are y'all?' to people who are alone), it can be interpreted as a polite, you and yours, as in, 'how are you and yours?' (now this interpretation is very much in fitting with our Latin, Spanish/French roots where referring to you in the plural is always more polite than referring to you in the singular). But the 100th time, Mencken says, it's just plain singular, no two ways about it. There's no possible "you and yours" interpretation that could go with it. So I said to my class, what's up with that? Can it really be truly singular? I'm well aware of "all of y'all" which is a definitive plural, emphasizes the inclusiveness of a group. And locals are quick to point out that, although y'all easily moves from singular to plural (same way 'you' does), all-a-y'all is
always plural.
No, says one, a student who I trust to think carefully and give a good answer. It's used in the singular, but it's polite, and it refers to the plural; its
meaning is plural.
So it occurred to me that one reason to account for the other 1%, is that some people
interpret the singular y'all is simply something you use for everyone, as a gesture of politeness; it's marked as polite, but not necessarily marked as plural. So there are a number of people around who go around calling everyone "y'all," not realizing that someone who didn't have a family might actually get offended.
And sure enough one woman said, after class, that she was a waitress, and was in the habit of calling everyone "y'all," when one day someone got offended; that person was overweight, and clearly alone in the world, or at least in the booth. And that customer assumed that "y'all" was a reference to his/her obesity, since there wasn't any other plural around.
Students were interested in what I had to say about "you'ns," "youse" and "you lot," other you plurals that are out there. In fact I have read a bit about them, but when it came to "y'all," I never quite understood the singular/plural controversy. Now, I'm surrounded by it (that, and "yes sir" and "yes ma'am" which I've reinterpreted as "polite"). I always tend toward polite and non-confrontational, as I explained to my students, so it's only a matter of time before I start in with some of this "y'all" and "all-a-y'all" as long as I can feel like I've figured it out well enough. We talked about other language changes: Ms., everyone and "their" book, etc. Some of my serious thinking about language and language change I'll put
here as I'm trying to corral my thinking about linguistics in general and put it in one place. But, at the same time, I'm learning another language. Fixin' to learn it, anyway!
Labels: dialects, grammar, language, linguistics, ttu, y'all
self-organization again
Leverett, T. (2012, Jan.)
Right metaphor, wrong conclusion. Google docs, self-published document.
So I wrote this in January, but hit another busy spell and didn't follow up on it. I want to follow up, write my book; I even took a number of classics out of the library, but this was maybe in late January and I've had to renew them twice without producing much more than this. Ah well, as I've taken to saying, life goes at its own pace.
So I might as well present this, slap it down on the table, and bluff you. There may be more soon, or there may not. You'll just have to stick around & find out.
Labels: language, self-organized systems
writing on self-organized systems
Leverett, T. (2006).
Principles of self-organized systems. Available https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=19qycnSQfOgxurzHtI4f_3AL0-2BpMHYFUhimUQAthAc&hl=en#.
Leverett, T. (2006).
Principles of language and language
change. Available http://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1w-K6VnsbixP_oMwc4GhY0stIx5nDO8wRoO3bY94TJyA.
Is this really available? I hope so. I'm new to Google docs, using them, putting them on the web, sharing them, etc., but I hope to make old writing about self-organized systems available, and this is how I've chosen to try it. One by one, I'll put them here.
Labels: language, self-organized systems
traffic as a second language
My latest interest is something I've written about before but never explored entirely. My thesis is that language is a self-organized system, one in which the perceptions of the users play a key role: the "rules" which appear to govern everyone's behavior are actually a part of that perception, and play a role, but not a major role. In this respect language is a lot like traffic, and therefore I've been looking into traffic psychology. To this end I'd like to introduce a fascinating study I've found, but I'm not quite sure yet how it relates to language, so first I'll write a little about traffic and language: how are they similar? how different?
Both are everyday actions involving a large variety of choices; in both cases the choices are governed primarily by perception of how others are behaving. In both cases we are trying to get from one point to another: communicating meaning is ensuring that what we
mean is in fact delivered to another spot. Many of our decisions are gambles, based on previous experience, and our theory about how something will be interpreted or received.
Here are the differences: in traffic, risk can be fatal; in language, the greatest risk is misinterpretation (of course, misinterpretation can be fatal, but generally it's not, and this is why traffic risk is studied far more carefully than language risk). Second, in traffic, each operator operates a car, which weighs tons, and has behavior patterns of its own, including the possibility of malfunction; in language, we deal primarily with our mouths, although a whole branch of language is communicated through the written word in venues such as this. The vowels that we make with our mouths change over time and occupy space in the mouth relative to each other, but there is no corollary to this in the world of traffic, except maybe cars occupying large spaces such as parking lots that are unmarked, yet still maintain a kind of order that allows for each member's ability to move. Finally, in the world of traffic there
is an actual set of laws, which determines what is legal and what is not, whereas, in grammar, for example, we have good
models, like the NY Times, but we don't really have
laws, as such, or if we do, nobody knows where to find them (even we, the community of teachers best prepared to find something that resembles a
law...would be hard pressed to agree on a single set).
So here's the reference:
Wilde, Gerald J.S. (1994).
Target Risk: Dealing with the danger of death, disease and damage in everyday decisions. Accessed June 2010 from http://psyc.queensu.ca/target/index.html#contents.
I read part of this one night when, actually, I was preoccupied by something else; nevertheless, I got a number of things from it which stuck with me, and then, later, I had trouble finding it. So now I've gone back, found it, and documented a few interesting facts. Here they are.
First, our day-to-day decisions are based on the concept of "risk homeostasis," which not everyone agrees with, but which is laid out pretty clearly here and elsewhere. It's a kind of balance; we want to get the most possible, or the farthest, or the fastest, not without risk, but with as little as possible, so we seek the balancing point beyond which the risk becomes too much; below this, however, the risk is quite low but life is too boring.
Second, our most common perceptions about cause and effect are often misguided; for example, we believe that the more traffic stops the police make, the less accidents there will be. A famous Nashville study, reported here, discounts that; but, my wife the sociologist agrees. Deterrence theory doesn't wash, she says, because the people who commit crimes are not really thinking of the likelihood of getting caught. Mr. Wilde would agree with part of that: that though accidents are caused by risky behavior, and risky behavior is influenced by the possibility of being caught, that is only one, and a very small one, factor in the choice one makes.
The experiences of Iceland and Sweden in changing lanes was a story that stuck with me, for some reason. Everyone assumed the accidents would skyrocket on the day each country changed the lanes they would drive on; this happened in late sixties, by the way, when each country decided to "drive on the right." In fact accident rates went way down, because everyone was very alert; even the pedestrians got a break during this short period. But after a while, "driving on the right" became normal, and people began to focus on other things. Eventually, the accident rate came back to where it had been, more or less.
There's more to this than meets the eye. It's about how a system is composed of the perceptions of its individual operators, and those perceptions determine the amount of risk, etc., that is going to determine the statistics and the way things play out. The system has self-correcting tendencies, but the system can also be changed for good in certain ways, never to be able to return to what it was. The idea that our behavior is "controlled" by a law or by fixed rules even, is an illusion; it might be influenced by the law, or at least by our perception of the law, but isn't controlled by it. Finally, our behavior is specific to each interaction; thus, we can be more careful in some environments than others, or, given some facts, we might alter our behavior from one place to another. Linguists have noticed "register," or formal language vs. informal, and used it to point out that people are basically the same way. But the system is made up of the sum total of everything everyone does, so we have to find a way to express, or calculate, the different kinds of behaviors (and changes in them) that people show as they go about their daily lives.
This, more or less, is what I'm after.
Labels: language, self-organized systems
up alton way
I was up in Alton in early May, and forgot to write something important about my experience. It was rainy, and we got lost; it was green, and warm, and the waters rose. But here was my experience: I heard "youse" coming from three different people, some more than once. It appeared to be a simple plural, as "y'all" is used: "Would youse like to sit over here?" I am not sure exactly of the contexts I heard it in; I would love to go back, but it has now been almost three weeks since it happened, and I simply don't remember that clearly.
What surprised me was that I had thought of this as an entirely local (NY, NJ, Bronx, Philly maybe) expression that didn't travel well and certainly got very little currency outside of its limited area. So what was up with this?
I was aware that this area was settled by people from Maine (unlike here, where many of the original settlers are from mountain areas; thus, you are more likely to hear "you'ns") - could this be related? Good question. More research is obviously required.
Labels: grammar, language, personal
East brain, west brain
Begley, S. (2010, Feb.)
East brain, west brain: How different cultures shape the brain.
Newsweek. http://www.newsweek.com/id/233778. Accessed 4-10.
I actually found this article in a magazine, while staying with my parents, and read it there. It's profound and disturbing at the same time. Profound because I've always claimed the power of culture and language to shape the brain; also, the power of what we
do to determine
how we organize (see post below). I can't, at the moment, remind you of what I've already written about it; it's not available. But language is best seen as a large traffic jam, in which people's perceptions of the world are dictated mostly by how they see it, namely, the bumpers immediately in front of them. We
do watch, organize, become more efficient, etc.; we also lose sight of that which we don't see regularly. There's more to this than meets the eye; stay posted!
Labels: language, self-organized systems
linguistic intelligence
The other day a group of Taiwanese students were having their last day of class; they were five in a class of fourteen, a sizable minority. They were nice; I liked them, yet I knew that most of them would never be back to the USA, or even study English very seriously again, chances are. So, I made a mini-lecture for them which I have written below, more or less, telling them what I believe and making a kind of listening exercise out of it. We had been talking about whether "linguistic intelligence" is actually a different kind of intelligence, as is "emotional intelligence" or "motorkinesthetic intelligence".
The question of whether linguistic intelligence is really different from the kinds of intelligence we already know and test, such as memory and physical dexterity, relies mostly on knowing exactly what kinds of skills language learning really involves, and it depends mostly on the question of how unique that process is, compared with the other things we learn and master. I believe that it is hard, but that the
skills that it involves are skills we have and learn in other realms as well.
The process of speaking well, and pronouncing carefully, is a matter of mind-body coordination, more akin to learning to ride a bicycle or skateboard, than learning abstract physics or rocket science. In other words, the pronunciation of a new language, though confusing and enormously frustrating, is not that way because of abstract structure or something that is impossible to understand. It is more because the set of movements we need to make- in this case in our mouths, in coordination with what we hear- is totally unfamiliar to us, and goes against habits and movements we've already established. It is like skateboarding in several crucial ways: it involves coordination of several senses at once; the younger we are, the easier it is; and, when we miss, or do something wrong, a certain stinging pain sets in that gives the whole process a rather steep price.
You might protest with all of those analogies: skateboarding involves coordination of balance, sight, and physical movements, while pronunciation involves coordination of the tongue & mouth, with what one hears, and at the same time what one notices others hearing and responding to. Well, that's a kind of balance, a balance of one's attention, if nothing else.
What about the 3-5% of language learners who get perfect pronunciation? (This percentage is elusive; I don't know where this has been studied or quantified; I am not sure at all about the percentage; yet I am confident that, as we move about the world of language learning, we find this small group of people who just pick it up, learn it and master it as if sounding perfect were the only consideration in the world). I compare this group to the skateboarder who goes to the Olympics, or the piano player who goes on to become a concert pianist. We can all master the skill to some degree; we can all learn a minimum of what's necessary, at great price, to make the right sounds and get by. But only a small percentage of us cares enough to follow through all the way on the sound angle of it, to truly
perfect what we produce, so that others cannot tell we are not native. It is to me a kind of musical intelligence, similar to wanting to hear a violin play exactly the right note.
A new grammar is extremely confusing and frustrating to a learner, but again, it's not because it's rocket science, or abstract physics. Quite the contrary; a grammar is made by the masses, like a traffic jam, with each individual actor doing what is best for him or her, and collectively creating a difficult but moving system that will take you where you want to go. In this sense grammar is confusing because you may not know
why things are the way they are, yet you still know you have to do what others are doing in order to get anywhere. A new grammar is enormously frustrating, and to feel that we can only sense how much we love traffic in our own big cities, much less one where we
really don't know the rules.
This brings me to my last point. Memory and motivation are by far the two biggest considerations or factors in language learning. But the third is a sense of
cultural flexibility. It is hard to describe this except to say that, at various points, you have to separate yourself from what you picked up from your culture; see what is cultural about the new language and the new situation, and adopt it without questioning or worrying about why. To explain this point, I told a story of standing in a threshold in Asia, worrying about taking my shoes off in a local family's living room. Taking shoes off inside is a custom in Asia, but makes many westerners, including myself, uncomfortable. This is partly because my socks sometimes have holes in them, but also just because it feels rather personal. So, I was standing in this doorway, feeling uncomfortable, when along come these men carrying a piano, and walking right through the doorway. One man stopped and removed his shoes right in front of me, effortlessly,
while still holding the piano. I was stunned. I thought, well, one gets used to this. After a point one just does it, and doesn't even think about it.
(end of lecture)
Later, I went over some of the points with the class. They were very interested, but in general found it hard to grasp the analogies that I had presented, and in fact, I was not so comfortable with all of them myself, on review. But, I put them down here, for the sake of record, because I think relating the skills we must develop in order to learn a language, to skills we have developed for other things, helps us to normalize the process and realize that it's within our grasp. I don't really believe that successful language learners live in a class of their own, as Michael Jordan does, by the way, or Einstein. Nor do I believe that we are somehow born with a mysterious skill that doesn't really get used anywhere else, or have any crossover with the rest of life. On the contrary, any part of it that you can explain using other things we already do, is one more thing that people can use behavioral machinery to function successfully in different groups. The key is behavioral: we watch, we practice, we do the best we can, and we're capable of doing it in different groups, in different places.
Having said that, I wished them godspeed, a safe trip back to Taiwan, a happy life for all.
Labels: grammar, language, learning theory, self-organized systems, sla
virtual piranhas
One thing a good interviewer does is keep the interview focused and make sure that all the questions are answered precisely. I'm a lousy interviewer, so what I'm about to show you doesn't really do this. It's what you get when you try to do this stuff after a long week or a long term, in a window of free time late Fri. afternoon.
But Thom Thibeault is my friend, runs the language lab here at SIUC, and is actively using Second Life in his German class; I can see some of his graduate assistants use it as I share the lab some days. They get in their avatars, walk on down the virtual line, and set up language classes for whoever happens to be next in line to take them.
The interview is about what he does and what the possibilities of SL are, and it's worth reading just for the account of the lake with the virtual bridges over it, and the piranhas in it, ready to devour any unfortunate avatar whose partner forgets the difference between "left" and "right"...it adds context (virtual) to what most of us would recognize as a familiar lower level exercise.
What it's missing is any sign of what the rest of the university thinks of it, including the students. So, at a German Club bake sale, I bought a cupcake and asked. Nobody had been in that particular class, though one guy said it made him nervous; he wasn't comfortable with 3d controls. At the swimming pool, I talked with another German professor, this one 30 but intimidated by iPhones. He gave the other side: as long as there's a teacher in the room, the virtual will not replace the teacher, he said. This is a common rebuttal, and I didn't argue with him, though on hindsight I can think of lots of things Thom can do that I can't.
I'll end it here. Read it for yourself, it's just a blog post.
Leverett, T. (2008, Oct.).
Second Life and language learning: an interview with Thom Thibeault. http://whereuatwchat.blogspot.com/2008/10/interview-with-thom-thibeault-lets.html.
Labels: chat, language, second life, siuc
from out & around
FACEBOOK
Lady Zee (2008, Feb. 3).
Facebook redefines the word "private." e-controversy. http://www.e-controversy.com/Facebook_Privacy_1a.html. Accessed 10-08.
Boutin, P. (2008, Sept. 22).
Million-member march begs for old Facebook back, valleywag. http://valleywag.com/5052891/million+member-march-begs-for-old-facebook-back. Accessed 10-08.
Lacy, S. (2006, Sept. 8).
Facebook learns from its fumble.
Business Week. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2006/tc20060908_536553.htmchan=top+news_top+news+index_technology. Accessed 10-08.
Spool, J. (2006, Sept. 13).
The Facebook controversy: A lesson about embraceable change. User interface engineering. http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2006/09/13/the-facebook-controversy-a-lesson-about-embraceable-change/. Accessed 10-08.
OTHER TECH:
Shankland, S. (2008, Sept. 10).
Flickr revamp spotlights photos, social features. cnet news. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10038016-39.html. Accessed 10-08.
Kuchera, B. (2008, May 6).
Second Life a danger for children? Lawmaker trawls for votes.
ars technica. http://arstechnica.com/journals/thumbs.ars/2008/05/06/second-life-a-danger-to-children-lawmaker-trawls-for-votes. Accessed 10-08.
Paul, R. (2008, Mar. 19).
Twitter breaks down barriers in the classroom. ars technica. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080319-twitter-breaks-down-barriers-in-the-classroom.html. Accessed 10-08.
CNN.com (2008, Apr. 25).
'Monotonous page turning helps digitize books for Google. http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/04/25/google.books.ap/index.html. Accessed 10-08.
Waldrop, M. (2008, April 21).
Is open access science the future? Scientific American. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&print=true. Accessed 10-08.
LANGUAGE
Belin, P. (2008, Sept.)
Monkey brains hint at evolutionary root of language processing.
Scientific American. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=monkey-brains-hint-at-evolutionary-root. Accessed 10-08.
MISC.
empty bottle weblog. (2008, July).
My home is dying, story of forests dying in British Columbia.
Cui, Weiping (2008, Sept. 28).
Behind the milk scare, a frightening silence. Washington Post online.
Labels: bib, facebook, language, second life
