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
in a third kind of way
I've been thinking a bit about teaching writing and how I do it, partly because I've been accepted at TESOL for a
demonstration that is primarily about teaching writing in both paper and online worlds simultaneously. This of course leads me to compare the two, mull them over, make little comments in class about paper versions ending up in the recycling bin, while "blog posts are forever," at least until you delete them.
But that's not what this post is about. I want to reflect on the process of teaching writing in general, all aspects of it, and one aspect has been weighing on me a little. Part of being a writing teacher (two classes, all day) is basically reading lots of essays in all your free time; reading essays sometimes until I fall asleep at night, my mind shuts off. My students come up to me trained to make their points in order and say First, Second, and Third...In fact I get a little sick of this, and wish they would just have the confidence in their writing to
know that they are able to communicate the order of their points without those words at the top of each paragraph. One term I actually said that to my class, and had the feeling that going against what a previous teacher had told them, was not going over all that well. Well, i said, what works at the lower levels, might not always serve you perfectly all the way through your writing journey. Even this didn't go over so well. Students, I could tell by their faces, felt like saying, well, is it right or is it wrong? Because if it's wrong I've just lost my respect for one of my teachers...
So now, I just tolerate it. It's ok. Let them use First, Second, and Third until they've seen enough essays without them to know, with confidence, that they could leave those tricks in their bags. Let them use a successful writing strategy, clear, blunt, orderly, until they genuinely, easily, effortlessly feel they can live without it. And until then, I may just have to read upwards of a hundred each First, Second, and Thirds.
But here's where it gets interesting. Some students actually become aware of the little -ly endings. Firstly, Secondly, and Thirdly are actually words. I can't imagine using them myself. I find myself thinking, why would anyone need to say, in a second kind of way? Not me. I read these with even more firmly clenched teeth-on-lips. Finally I snapped the other day, and said to a student: Why would you want to say, in a second kind of way? What's up with this?
It so happens that there are some people, who, when given the option of making something a little fancier, a little longer, a little more complicated, will take it, just on principle. And that's interesting. I think they may have a very rudimentary conception of the difference between second and secondly (I may not be correct myself)- but, they have chosen this option for a reason entirely within their own head. They surely didn't learn it from me!
It could be a grammatical issue- the feeling that an adverb goes here, so one should use the adverbial form- not knowing that
second will work just as well. This would actually be giving them some credit- it could come from hours of TOEFL study and learning that words like
fortunately/fortunate appear on the TOEFL at the beginning of the sentence, and the adverb is right. Possible?
Whatever it is, it provides a window into their learning/acquisition path. And, I suppose, into my twisted mind and waning patience, given an endless stack of essays...
Labels: cesl, sla, vocabulary, writing
vocabulary project
I thought I'd get down a record of my version of this, a project we in EAP1 did as part of a unit on stress, health, effects of stress on one's life, stress management, etc. We'd gotten to talking of the TOEFL and how stressful it was, and I'd mentioned to them that I'd noticed after years of giving vocabulary quizzes alongside oral presentations, that students' vocabulary scores dipped on days of their own oral presentations.
I was thinking in terms of the fact that whatever words I'd sent them home with, they had to brush up on them before the quiz; that, in many cases, their ability to use short-term memory was therefore upset to some degree by the high stress of the oral presentation. In EAP1 we weren't studying vocabulary discreetly; there was too much to do. Instead, we assumed that they had a high level of reading and were taking care of it themselves. Part of it is this assumption I carry along from my communicative days: that exposure is really enough; that students will figure it out, if given enough exposure and use. I will deal with this hypothesis below. One side of me never quite believed this. Nevertheless, EAP1 is very busy with reading reaction journals, unit exams, article presentations, and a number of other things, so I just hadn't overloaded them with vocabulary quizzes which, by the way, students invariably spend a lot of time studying for, and never complain about their inherent value. I figured it would be a good opportunity to discuss how (and if) they were actually acquiring these words; it would be a good review of the term's concepts; and, we could study if stress actually interfered with short-term memory.
I set up a simple system that turned out to be not quite as easy to explain as I'd hoped. I made two batches of 40 words, and divided them each into two. I divided the students into two groups- the Odds-Evens and the Evens-Odds. First, I gave the odds 1-40 to the Odds-evens on TUE.; the evens 1-40 to the Evens-Odds. On WED. I gave 41-80 odds to the Odds-evens and 41-80 evens to the Evens-odds. Notice that in the first two days I'm giving the Odds-evens ALL the odds and the Evens-odds ALL the evens. I used the results of these two days to take ALL the odds and make two equally difficult tests from them, and did the same with the evens. In other words, the Evens-odds group normalized the evens words, so that I could make two equally difficult tests for the Odds-evens, and the odds-evens did the same for the 40 odd words, so that I could make two equally difficult tests for the Evens-odds. Both groups took supposedly equally difficult quizzes on THU and FRI, the two days that counted; FRI would be a high-stress day, having a unit test, and supposedly the high stress of FRI would show up in scores being slightly lower on FRI, where stress had presumably interfered with their short-term memory.
The quizzes took place in week six, toward the end of unit 2, but most of the words came from unit 1 and the first part of the class, weeks 1-3, so for the most part were not part of what they were studying for the unit 2 exam that Friday. They were given lists of twenty words each night, MON, TUE, WED, & THUR. and told to study them for the following day. They were also told to study each list the same amount of time, and in the same way. They were also told that the scores would not count as part of their class grade, except as participation points, since their studying was being controlled. They were, however, told that the vocabulary was useful; that they should know it; and that, in general, their ability to pick up and hold the vocabulary was a crucial skill. The quizzes asked only for the meaning; it did not test grammatical knowledge or ability to use the words. The distractors were simple and were not intended to confuse anyone. The two groups of students also were intended to be equally divided, by reading score, with the intention of splitting up language groups as evenly as possible also, so that each group would have roughly equal numbers of each language group. With only fifteen students, one group had eight while the other had seven.
One clear variable among the 80 words was exposure; words were distributed also so that words from chapter one, for example, went into both even and odd words; and so that, in general, words that they had seen five weeks ago were equally distributed, as were words they had seen four weeks ago, and a few words they had never seen, to my knowledge. I knew that they had three other classes besides mine, and made no attempt to find out which words had been covered or even tested in those; at the same time, I figured that as a cohesive class each member of the class at least probably had roughly the same exposure to each word as each other member. There were words on there that were repeated frequently in my own class, like
risks and
likely; words that appeared in only one reading and were most likely never seen again, like
ergonomics. I tried to distribute these evenly between the even and odd lists.
So we took the quizzes, and noticed, in the process, that several things surprised us. Our scores came out like this:
Odds-Evens (first two scores are TUE/WED, then THU/FRI
A 17/17. 20/11
B 7/5, 9/10
C 11/13, 10/19
D 6/15, 9/9
E 3/3, 4/7
F 19/17, 18/19
G 16/16, 16/15
H 4/8, 5/9
Even-Odds
J 7/5, 12/12
K 11/13, 14/10
L 14/8, 5/3
M 18/19, 9/5
N 18/19, 15/20
O 16/17, 16/18
P 13/13, 11/16
In the process of taking the quiz we noticed that for a variety of unrelated reasons WED. was a very highly stressful day for the class also. The stressful days did not seem to lower their collective scores much, however, except in isolated cases like students A and L. One student, N, had maintained that stress would make scores go up, and it did make hers go up. One, G, got scores that I would have expected in an ideal trial, which showed a drop on the last day, due to an entirely new word or two being not learned well, because the stress of the unit exam interfered. We had concluded, from our reading, that stress could not make us unlearn something we had successfully committed to memory already; it could, however, interfere with the process of committing routine things to memory. And we had further learned that deep, traumatic, unexpected stress was far more likely to do this than the expected, normal stress of a difficult but normal reading exam. Looking closely at the numbers, however, we had to conclude that our hypothesis, that stress would interfere with memory, had not really panned out very well or very clearly.
Some students admitted to not studying equally all four nights. Others did so poorly on all tests that I had to question whether they had in fact ever read anything, much less study the four lists of words. How could you sit in this class for six weeks, I asked them in my mind, and not know words like
threaten or
exceed? They had no good reason to subvert the project, yet some students, most notably E, H, D and possibly L did so poorly as to make me question whether they were able to read or understand the distractors, let alone the words. It was, in fact, possible that they couldn't. More common, though, were students like F, G, N, O and P, who were fairly good at picking up words all along, and missed some for somewhat random reasons, unrelated to the stress of WED & FRI's papers and exams.
The students stared at their results in order to write quantitative analysis reports that included hypothesis, method, results and conclusion; we will never see these, since they didn't make it onto the weblogs. They did, however, comment a little on the process of studying vocabulary and on what happened during the project. Those comments I list below.
A related question that I reallly was curious about was to what degree certain amounts of exposure would ensure their knowing certain words, absent any kind of quizzes or recycling efforts on my part, short of a single list appearing a night before a quiz. Various practitioners have maintained that exposure alone is enough; if that were the case, I would not have to even give them the lists on the night before, and they should get reasonably good scores on a quiz that asks only to choose the word with the right meaning. I studied the scores for the words themselves and didn't find much of a pattern. They did well on words like
obesity and
aroused that seemed intensely personal; they did poorly on words like
stoic,
ergonomics and
posture, that very likely weren't seen much outside of the particular readings they were in. For a subculture of the class, exposure didn't matter; they clearly hadn't acquired much of anything, and their results, if anything, threw off the validity of any statistics I could have mustered.
It's ironic that you could get
exposure only to words, without ever enrolling in an intensive language program, and if this were enough, presumably you would then not need classes, because, having acquired everything directly, grammar, style, idioms etc. would fall into place. In other words our students
pay for the stress of regular well-made tests/quizzes and the feedback that comes with them, and thus are signing up for the voluntary stress of not only the unit exam, but the vocabulary quizzes or whatever other evaluative task I put in front of them. Overall, I did not see anything that would lend me to change my basic approach to vocabulary, which is as follows:
-Vocabulary is extremely important, as a base of all the skills; without vocabulary, for example, its pointless for a student to work on reading skills. Vocabulary is also the single best measurement of overall success. It is well borne out by experience, that students like F, N and O do better on the TOEFL than their counterparts who have simply not bothered to pick up the vocabulary from the units.
-Most students, though not all, need a system to actively commit words and their meanings to memory. Those systems in my experience are of several kinds (besides the student with essentially no system)- marking native language on the textbook, above the new word; putting the word and its translation on a separate piece of paper; putting the word, Eng. definition & Eng. sentence on paper (this is the system I recommend); and, marking up one's bilingual dictionary. There may be other systems that I am not aware of. Students whose TOEFL scores stagnate at about 420-450 (paper-based, institutional) very frequently have no system or a very rudimentary system. They also frequently translate every word, run out of time on the reading section, and trip up on word forms in the grammar section, due to living in their native language and not clearly having and English-use, English-sense of sentences. A student's vocabulary system should teach the student how NOT to translate, how to stay in English and use the word in its English environment.
-Exposure is crucial to learning, as our minds are inherently utilitarian, and each student is more likely to remember anything that he/she is convinced he/she will need repeatedly. One student one time told me that he learned vocabulary by looking up words in a bilingual dictionary, but marking the word every time he did; therefore, when a word got enough marks, he'd get mad and finally determine within himself to learn it. After years of stewing over that suggestion, I've noticed that it seems to have worked for several reasons, one being that a student has to build a personal relationship almost, with each word, determining to learn all parts of it, its grammar, its sound, its meaning, the environments one is likely to see it in. And that personal relationship can
start with its relationship to the corresponding word in one's native language; we all know that L1 and L2 words don't always correspond exactly, semantically or grammatically, and that's part of the problem. But for a student who already understands the world through L1, it's hard to avoid funnelling knowledge through it, at least at first. The trick is successful weaning oneself away from L1- I always ask the student: how are you doing that? Is it working? Are you mastering these words successfully, in terms of being able to
use them successfully when you need to?
Thus the book closes on Vocabulary project, 075, CESL EAP1.
Related posts (from EAP1 students, during 075):
Trouble with learning vocabulary (Corina)
This makes it difficult for you to remember (Renzhi)
Studying vocabulary (Herve)
Learning Vocabulary! (Patrick)
The best way to study vocabulary (Corina)
The best way to study vocabulary (Jasim)
The best way to study vocabulary (Renzhi)
Studying vocabulary from shows (Yalanda)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Tez)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Mohammed A.)
Fluency Ex. #4 (David)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Moon)
Fluency Ex. #4 (Mohammed R.)
Labels: cesl, learning theory, reading, vocabulary
vocab. project/vocab. study
What I need to do now is back off, and let my students actually write about this, because it was done for them, and done on the subject they chose. It stirred in me, though, the desire to both lay out what I consider standard fare- what I usually say about vocabulary- and, a challenge to discuss any of the various issues that the discussion raises.
These are the things I tell most students:
Vocabulary is the most important element of your language study. Your ability to pick up, retain, and use successfully and quickly a large number of words will be the key to your ability to solve grammatical problems, improve your listening, and read fast enough to survive a test situation. Nothing is more important than knowing the words, and knowing enough to make a difference.
Some teachers claim that exposure alone will do it for you- if you read it and hear it enough, you'll get it. I don't believe that. I think most learners need a system and need to commit new vocabulary to memory. Your system is up to you- and if you choose to go without one, that's up to you also. If your TOEFL score has plateaued out at about 460, though, you could have vocabulary issues. If your TOEFL has plateaued at 430, you have much more serious issues, but that's another post. If you feel like you are treading water, think about how you are learning vocabulary. Do you have a system? Does it work? Is it time to change it? The system that worked in the lower levels no longer does.
I believe your system should teach you to stay in English rather than always lead you back to your native language. Put your list entirely in English. Make sentences that use the words. Study by reading the sentences, covering up the words and their English definitions on the left. When in doubt, find the definition of the word, in English, on the left side of your list, and go back to reading the sentences. Sentences should be easy except for the words you are learning. Add words from everywhere; study the list often.
Finally, it's entirely your business. I never collect the list, though I avidly watch and question what my students do and how well it works for them. I also watch to see who passes and how well, how quickly. I actually wanted my students to study this but had to admit that the effects of stress on vocabulary was closer to the class topic.
Let's go back to the teacher that claims that exposure is enough. You know who you are- maybe 50-60% of the profession, I have no idea anymore. I freely admit that exposure is a crucial element of the picture. Our minds organize by how important we consider things to be- and we judge that by exposure. But, unless my tests, 80 questions for a high-level class of 15, were mistaken, exposure isn't enough. There's always the possibility that I'm an alligator of a vocab-test maker, but I don't think so. It may be a weakness of the communicative system that now a person with the first five out of the six communicative skills- listening, responding nonverbally, speaking, asking for help, test survival, and reading, have made it as far as they have, without reading. I gave them the words beforehand, words they'd seen and used, and they still had trouble with it. Some of the words, I said to myself, how could you sit in this class all term and not know this? Yet some could & did. Non-readers, maybe, or deliberate project saboteurs. More likely, just people who have trouble with words.
This is why I crank out those vocab. quizzes in every class, that the better students keep requesting. They aren't, in fact, alligator-tricky, they're pretty straightforward. There's one other thing I say: There's no way I could cover more than 10% of what you need. The best I can do is challenge you: bring it to your attention, that you may be learning in an inefficient way, you may want to reflect on how you hold the football when you run, as the Salukis might say. My goal is to use my time in the best way possible, so that, if enlightening you about your own methods is a possibility, I'll make that more likely. If it flushes out the non-readers, so be it. Overall vocabulary scores, over the years and terms, have been very very accurate when it comes to TOEFL scores. I heard this one time, long ago, in ESL- that vocab. mastery is the best predictor of overall language mastery- but haven't been able to find a source, or prove it.
More about exposure soon- I don't intend to let that one go. Mark my words- I
like exposure- the more the better. That's partially my rationale for the quizzes- if new, simple, relevant sentences can add to their exposure to a word- that alone is good, whether they get the answer right or not. This presumes that they can read the simple sentences the words appear in, and have no trouble with the four simple choices. I'm interested in how having seen the word or not, elsewhere or in an isolated situation, affected the score. A word that came right off a list, the day before a quiz, and a stressful day at that, might be harder to learn, one would think, than one that had been committed to memory previously, and only recalled later. More later, I promise.
Labels: cesl, learning theory, reading, toefl, vocabulary
