archived weblogs
Here is a problem I've encountered with trying to save weblogs from the old days.
This one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130420210206/http://violentdeer.blogspot.com/
is now only available by web archive (wayback machine). Somehow the scammers have taken the URL, so that when you try to go to violentdeer.blogspot.com, you get spam. When you find it on the wayback machine, you get what it was: a very interesting weblog set up for and by international students.
Another one,
http://eap2walmart.blogspot.com, has a project I'm very proud of, where students literally explored both sides of the issue of a new Walmart appearing between Carbondale and Murphysboro (nothing
new about it these days, I'm sure). It was an excellent project and deserves to be saved.
But I can't find any log-in information - no email, no password, no nothing. It too will probably be scooped up by the spammers if the site goes dead as Google promises - nobody logs in, nobody uses it, etc. I am still looking for email and login for this one. I don't want it to die.
If it does, thank God for the Wayback Archive.
Labels: cesl, internet, weblogs, writing
What keeps me off the street
I am finding retirement to be as busy as working if not more. It's partly because we still have three teens at home and they are all in sports; we live out at the end of a mountain road and there is quite a bit of rough driving and keeping vehicles going.
I am still a writing tutor at Texas Tech and they would like me to keep up a professional front, perhaps studying and presenting at conferences online. But mostly what occupies my time is that, having written a novel and several other books, I've become obsessed with marketing them. And I do that by reading other books.
The setup is simple: I agree to read and/or review someone's book; someone else agrees to read and/or review mine. I choose carefully so that I read a wide variety of things I like. I'm retired, so I should be able to read, right? I'm reading a wide variety of mostly indie books. I'm surprised at what gramatically passes for publishable, but I also realize that not everyone can afford an editor at a decent wage. I could edit myself, having years of proofreading and grammar experience, but I still have books I want to write myself.
The current one that I'm writing revolves arund my great grandmother on my mother's side; she was an elocutionist, and was part of a movement around the turn of the nineteenth century, whereby women wanted to become elocutionists to have a voice in national debates. There was a National Association of Elocutionists, and they met and discussed matters of the day. Elocution was, in general, much more integrated into our education system than it is today. It was, in fact, in its heyday, since the organization had just recently sprung up, soon to be changed into Speech Com, Speech Path, and other fields. My great grandmother was at the cutting edge of the trends, in other words.
Meanwhile I'm reading all this fantasy kind of stuff that in short, makes writing harder. It makes me fall asleep late at night. I have to make a better effort to get the books in front of me more to my liking, less disruptive to my general life setup. Life is busy, what with kids to drive around and a home to maintain - the winter's coming, and the deer and elk all give me the big eyes as they stand by the side of the road wondering if I'm just another hunter.
Labels: personal, reading, writing
TESOL session report
Session Report:
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.
This appears on my weblog which is specifically about the topic; unfortunately, this weblog was not advertised in my handout. The handout will appear on Google docs soon, but I'm reorganizing my google docs, and I'm not sure how soon.
Labels: grammar, internet, learning theory, personal, tesol, writing
concordance experiment
My writing class is high-level graduate students who really want to know how to polish their writing well and quickly. They don't have patience for things that don't work, or things that give you the runaround on their road to where they are going. We study social psychology, because it gives us something to study about that everyone's interested in, that we can do an actual survey on, and get real data - one result of this is that I, as a teacher, become a little impatient with vague pronouncements about our culture, since I am usually in the active process of studying it systematically if not scientifically. For example, one can say that Texas is full of Republicans, and anti-gay marriage, and all of this might be true in a general kind of way, but our studies have shown statistically what our student body is like, and this helps me talk about it more accurately and have some facts to back me up.
Now on this road I've also become attracted to the concordance, and specifically to Brigham Young's
concordance, because as far as I can figure, it's the best one around. The concordance delivers to you the facts about the words. So, for example, I tell my students that
so that is different from
so (and generally they believe me) - but, with the concordance I can draw up thirty, forty sentences using
so that and show them how people are using it. It draws from a large corpus (and one can mess with how large, or what kind), and simply pulls the facts about any given word. My favorite example is
interested in...why is it that it's not
interested with or
interested by?
So I gave them all an assignment...I told them you have grammatical issues. I want you to look at this concordance, and tell me what you find about those issues. Report to me about how it works in learning more about grammar and how it works.
But alas, at the language lab, BYU got onto us, and told us that with a group, many people making searches from a single location, there was a limit, and we were beyond it already. You have to log on, and you have to have an account, and if you are merely a student, you have quite limited access.
I understand their financial bind, and know why they might feel they need to raise money to keep the thing going. And, it seems to me, a place like our university ought to fork a little money over in order to grease the wheels, and keep the good facts coming, and provide a service much like the databases provide articles for us. I, however, have not written a proposal, or identified that need, or suggested that our department make that service available for our graduate students. Our students are still on their own: you log in once, on your own e-mail; you go as long as they let you; and, you see if you can use the facts to make yourself a better writer.
I stand by my assignment (this problem is not resolved yet) - it may be that asking them to try this tool is simply not realistic, because we
don't have a site license yet. But to me, there is something quite liberating about the facts. It's more than a teacher telling them, you need to connect two sentences with
whereas. It's twenty or thirty sentences that give the student a picture, a snapshot, of how
whereas is used in modern academic English. For them, they
have to read it twenty or thirty times to get a sense of how it's used effectively. This concordance, the provision of twenty or thirty sentences using the word, gives them the missing step. It will be a shame if they can't, as a group, just use what's out there effectively.
Labels: concordance, grammar, ttu, writing
My classes try the concordance
I had a graduate assistant this semester who was inspired by the concordance. I opened it up and showed her how it could be a tool for high-level, international writers who I was teaching, and I showed her how. I had to play with it a while because I personally am not all that good with it; for example, I have trouble finding that fine column of sentences that use any given structure - how do you
find that? Eventually we found it. Off she went; she was fascinated.
The one we liked best was the BYU concordance, and we showed it to both classes. She had better luck showing it to the class she taught in, while I showed it to the other class alone, though later I brought her in as a guest speaker, and she showed it to that class too. She did her best to show them how useful it could be in the process of writing. I'm not sure to what degree they bought it, or tried it. We kept pressing them all semester.
It's my belief, and I told my classes repeatedly, that as a tool, nothing could be more useful than a machine that delivers the facts about what people do in academic English. You have your dictionary and your thesaurus, I said...you have these online, right? (it's my guess that not all had heard of, or actively used, the thesaurus - but these are graduate students - most had)....it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk about what they actually
did when they wrote.
And that's my focus; it continues to be my focus today. My working philosophy comes down to the following:
-Everything that is written is a product of what a student can create, and what technology does to it; it includes the ways the student negotiates with the technology to find compromise forms and structures that
appear to be ok.
-Students are reluctant to talk about the technology they use, since they are conditioned to be afraid of their copying
anything from online sources; in general, they expect their teacher to have a negative view of online "help"
-Students are protective of the system that they use at home; they will occasionally beg to be allowed to write something at home (as opposed to an on-campus site, with a different computer/different tech) for reasons related to technical support, but they will rarely even admit this;
-This system we refer to (depending on Word grammar-check, spell-check, or whatever paid or free grammar programs they use; or, in some cases, dependence on wife, friend, neighbor) is well-established, a habit. Asking them to change it is really asking them to
experiment with changing it and
adapt what works well. It will be a slow and painful process to even get to the first part. It may have to wait until break.
We asked them, when it was all over, to write about their systems, and to write about learning. What follows (soon) will be a general analysis of what they said.
Labels: grammar, internet, plagiarism, ttu, writing
2015 report
OK, I'll be the first to admit it. I got one foot into retirement (I am now teaching 3/4 time, writing 1/4 time), and I realized how tired I was, after about thirty years of teaching. I still have lots of ideas. I do lots of things in my class. But a lot of times, I come home from teaching, and all I want to do is rest.
Part of the problem is that, having ten children, I never get that rest, whether I do extra ESL stuff or not. In fact, the ESL tends to be kind of a break from the children, an enjoyable, academic kind of break, like having conversations with interesting people I know, but I don't have time for it. I'm taking kids to their sports practices, or to the dentist, or getting groceries, etc. But another part of it is that I really
love writing, and I also
love music, and these are sides of me that went undeveloped for many years. So, when I apologize for failing a little at this end, just consider me as backing off a little. I can't possibly keep up the pace I kept for many years.
Nonetheless, here are some interesting things I've been doing in 2015.
First, I became almost entirely a writing teacher, so I had two advanced writing classes. My students are very high level graduate students who are trying to maintain and improve what they consider their weak point. The stronger ones take the class on their own, knowing that there's always a lot to learn. The weaker ones are pressured to take it by their departments, where they really don't want to teach graduate students writing, but just want them to crank out good useful dissertations and articles regularly. It's high-level; the students are bright. I had one do a blog on
gay marriage (their choice) and the other
campus carry (gun control, also their choice). We published everything we wrote, and it was good, and interesting. I helped teach them formatting things online, as well as the usual writing things - citation, reference, etc. I had the usual run-ins with plagiarism. I taught a lot of students a lot of things.
One of my graduate students became interested in the concordance movement, so I became reacquainted with it. The first step was learning more about it as a tool, how to use it, whether it really works. I am genuinely interested in the process of learning how students integrate tools into their writing process - how, why, how easily, etc. They are not especially forthcoming about the tools they use, being convinced, I guess, that so many of them are illegal. Nevertheless, as a class (both of them, really), we discussed opening up the concordance, seeing what it can do, applying the simplest of grammar problems to it, etc. It was interesting. My Graduate Assistant was fascinated. And, interestingly, even the students found one aspect of it interesting: they are stats people. They like to run the numbers. To be able to run the numbers on the words you use, that's an interesting concept. They are still shaking their heads.
We have a conference in the spring; there is some doubt about whether we'll do it this spring, with its main organizer gone now. Last spring, I was caught unprepared, and didn't even present. There are many things I could present, but I presented zip, I didn't even go. I believe I was out of town, but I don't even remember where; perhaps New Mexico. But I
did present at TESOL, the usual, and I could have presented on various subjects of interest, if I could keep from being drawn into the world of personal fiction publishing.
The first would be on cultural flexibility as a requirement of good language learning. I feel that the characteristic of cultural flexibility, being able to unhinge your self-image from its cultural trappings, is measurable, and crucial in the process. I'd like to define it better, and work toward writing about what I mean. I gave a presentation at our 2014 spring conference, and very easily could have given another. But I was interrupted, and, I'm sorry to say, I dropped the ball.
In the course of doing that one, I became interested in Order of Acquisition as a given construct in Language Learning. Actually, I'm more interested in proving that there
isn't one; it's part of my constructivist belief that each learner decides for himself/herself what order to acquire anything in, and each learner has his/her own idea of what is crucial, or what should go first. And, it would be possible to manipulate the system. For example, one could convince a learner to learn all the religious words first (salvation, heaven, savior, etc.) and skip the ones having to do with cooking, if that learner were proselytizing ten hours a day, and never cooking. One's viewpoint determines what one acquires, not an innate natural order. But I'd like to prove that, if I had time.
My TESOL presentation is basically about how grammar programs have messed with people's heads. That's putting it lightly. But something has come up that is tangentially related to this. The War on Passive is something we researched, and wrote a little about, and learned how to teach. In essence some departments, specifically social sciences, dislike the passive intensely; others, namely the hard sciences, still cling to it. There is a wide variety. Read about it on this blog. I could easily ride this one to another TESOL, but I haven't...why not?
Finally, there is the language-as-a-self-organizing-system project; this has been dormant for a while now, and is beginning to fossilize in its dormant phase. I have written voluminously about it. I haven't given up on it. It needs to be published before I give up altogether. Hello?
Meanwhile I help out at the office. My classes are full. I enjoy teaching, and I also teach American students these days; I like that too. Texas Tech is benevolent and enjoyable to me. I avoid politics. This year, due to wife's surgery, mother's near-death health experiences, and family issues, I avoided all office parties, poetry readings, etc. as well. I am in demand at the poetry reading, as people like haiku, and believe it or not, one
can write bilingual haiku that pulls on both language universes in seventeen short syllables; I am one who could do it as I've been literally immersed in poetry for months now. However as I said,
I was busy. Life is full here, the nights are beautiful, and there are lots of stars out, even in the city. And the mountains are even better; the 9000 feet woods beckon. I am, in the end, partially retired.
Labels: creative, krashen, personal, plagiarism, self-organized systems, tesol, ttu, weblogs, writing
short stories
Available at
Amazon and soon on Kindle
Labels: personal, writing
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
Social media
Sometimes after a long and difficult class it takes me a while to get its blogs in order, because I'm so burnt out and rushed by the Christmas holiday that I put everything aside, and then it takes enormous effort to reopen the situation. But this time, I had seven very good papers, and had a lot of fun putting together
the class blog for my writing class, ESL 5301. These seven students all took different approaches to studying social media, and together we collected data and they wrote the papers you see in the blog.
Sure, there were some ways in which the study wasn't perfect. In an attempt to put the whole survey on a single piece of paper, both sides, I put the demographic info in one line, thus causing us to lose a few people who simply didn't fill out the whole line. We had a limited number of responses anyway, so it wasn't a truly representative study. But it gave us some insight into people's use of social media and their attitudes toward it. Here are some of the things we found:
YouTube, which was studied in the first paper, is really one of the more interesting social media, in the sense that people use it for a wide variety of things besides purely entertainment. In language learning alone it has become an enormous library of speech samples, studied vigorously by almost all internationals here in the US and used for a variety of purposes including supplementing their class lectures, learning how to fix things, etc. Since our population, including ESL teachers by and large, is mostly oral, but the world population is generally more oral than visual, we tend to overlook language resources that aren't little read-along visual things that assume people learn the language by knowing how things are spelled. YouTube puts the language in their laps. Read that first paper.
Facebook is still king of the social media; people may be more enthusiastic about SnapChat or Instagram, but everyone has FB much like everyone has a phone. Twitter is not dominant, but rather occupies a small but vocal piece of the picture. Read the facts, not that our 158 people accurately represent them.
Hashtags - I was really interested in what I could find out about hashtags. Really there should be a separate study of hashtag linguistics, because people use them for different purposes. On Twitter, it was once said that using a hashtag was shouting out your topic so that, in a crowded room, people could know that you, over in this corner, were talking about that topic. On FB though, there is no point attracting the world's attention; you have only your friends, and don't generally
use it to get more. A second use of hashtags is to represent your out-of-the-side-of-your-mouth attitudes, as in #whyshouldIcare or #fml; these would be more common on FB, since you are talking to your friends, and obviously not using them to attract a wider community. But a third use comes from Instagram, or at least is better represented on Instagram, which I don't use heavily, so it took me a while to get onto this. On Instagram you put your main subject under the photo, and you do try to attract random visitors, so you can put up to thirty hashtags under a photo. And, you separate them from the message itself; that is important. Why? I don't know.
Ice bucket challenge - It's surprising how many people knew about it, but didn't participate. One got the impression that
everyone did it, since it was all over the place on FB. But not everyone did it. And, a surprising number of people thought it was "pointless" or "ridiculous". It brought up a point about how a dramatic event (throwing ice on one's head) can make a strong impression, way beyond the fact that it's an isolated experience.
Backlash in general - A lot of people are upset by social media's takeover of our social experience. One person said to me, "Facebook is the devil." Others said things like "I use it only to message people who I can't reach any other way," or some such comment. People know that they are limiting their own use of the media, but see it overall as a time-sink anyway, and so don't mind knowing that there are a lot of clever things they can do, but just don't do. Most are like me - amazed at the range of possibilities, but only beginning to scratch at the surface of actually
using them.
People don't always report exactly what happens - Sometimes you can measure it, as in, are women more likely than men to post pictures? But you can't trap a man into saying that women are different from men. They seem to be well conditioned to deny differences between men and women unless they are quite obvious, and even then, don't say it unless you have to. The computer can measure such differences, and measure whether things happen the same way people say they do. People are a little off the mark, I think.
Labels: facebook, internet, ttu, twitter, writing, youtube
grammar checkers
I'm going to start putting things here, instead of the previous site, which was http://thisisyourbrainonweblogs.blogspot.com. The main site for this presentation is
here.
Wright, N. (2013, Dec.).
Does grammar checkers work? Style Writer.
Though this is a commercial site (pushing Style Writer itself), it's interesting because the author believes that just trying to "correct" grammar is not only futile but also is the wrong approach. He's very critical of not only Word but also the similar ones, because they have very little to make them better than Word. It's the wrong approach, he says.
Krishnamurthy, Sandeep.
A Demonstration of the Futility of Using Microsoft Word’s Spelling and Grammar Check.
Good bibliography of 'scholarly work'. Actually there's a dearth of scholarly work; I'm still looking.
Labels: grammar, internet, writing
Toronto 2015
I've accepted an invitation to present an Electronic Village Classic at the TESOL 2015 Convention in Toronto, which brings up a number of other topics. The presentation is called
For better or worse: Grammar technology and the language learner and in brief it shows how technology changes the student's process of learning, as well as the process of writing, the final product, etc. I often show free grammar-check programs and show what they do to the writer. Ironically teachers often stop by hoping to just get computers to fix the problems; it's as if nobody really wanted to deal with grammar in the first place. The site for the presentation is
here though obviously it will need to be updated.
So here are a couple of other issues related to Toronto. First, are my good friends the Webheads going to be there? I hope so. Toronto is one of my favorite cities. The Webheads are my favorite people. This would be wonderful.
Second, do you need a passport to get into Canada nowadays?
Third, what about the SIUC reunion? I feel like I'm sitting on a lot of information, and I don't know what to do with it. Last year, I couldn't organize a reunion, because I didn't go to Portland; I'm not sure if they even had one. I have all these e-mail addresses in my inbox, and information from SIU alum...
I need to forward it to someone. Nobody was interested in keeping track of people when I took it over, but I said,
SIUC, your international alumni are your most valuable resource. Even now, what I have is a set of e-mail addresses bottled up in an e-mail box that has become impossible to maneuver, due to the fact that SIUC put it all on Outlook Express, and I can't seem to view the entire mailbox. There are hundreds in there, but they are deep on the inside, constantly covered up by more recent correspondence. Time to clean out the box, Tom!
But it's also time to dust off this presentation. I was pleased to be invited, pleased to accept; I hope it can happen. Oh Canada!
Labels: grammar, tesol, writing
documenting the war on passives
To make a long story short, I am teaching a class in dissertation writing for international students. They bring me projects representing years of work, and they need help with the language required by their disciplines to get a dissertation accepted and passed. Sometimes their advisor tells them, "Using words like
I, me, we, our, etc. is the mark of an inexperienced writer." One would think this is an injunction to use the passive, but there are actually several ways to deal with this command.
Other departments scorn the passive, or at least tolerate active constructions like
"I will show that..." or
"We found that..." In fact it could be said that there is a wide variety of dissertations being accepted at this university today, and essentially a wide variety of commands being given to internationals and others writing dissertations, so that you have to tease out of the dissertation writer what is expected, before you can reasonably assume that you are giving him/her good advice. As a dissertation proofreader I find myself knowing several grammatical ways of talking about what happened in a project, but not necessarily knowing which will fly within the department or, at a wider level, which will sound good in the field. The social sciences are the home of the war on passives, which basically overhauled the traditional paradigm and replaced what could be termed as expectation to use the passive with scorn for the passive; international students are in essence caught between. They don't know what Microsoft Word means when it encourages them to avoid passive in favor of active; they also don't know what an advisor means when he/she says to "never use
I"...
We asked our students to provide model dissertations, and then we read them carefully. Most were accepted by Texas Tech in the last ten years. Not all had perfect grammar; in fact, a wide variety of grammatical mistakes were tolerated and in some cases, it was clear that grammar wasn't important at all, in comparison to the ideas or the study itself. The dissertation, though, is important; it represents a scholar's arrival in the field, the cornerstone of his/her expertise, authority, and reputation in the field, and it lasts forever as an ongoing record of scholarship and work.
My wife is a full professor in sociology, and maintains that the war on passives dates back to the 90's and has its roots in feminist theory. How can you remove the agent or the one who saw or did the action, when that agent will so clearly color the results? To her it was incredible that a professor who called herself feminist could still tell students to remove
I from all writing, since it contradicted an ideology that insisted on taking responsibility and noticing the actor who found, collected, studied the data. Remember that it was tradition, the advice of the elders, to remove
I, we, etc., from this kind of writing. Throughout various departments, tradition was maintained even as the content of studies became rigorously more modern, up-to-date, and radical. The professor in question had simply passed on traditional academic advice to writers, not questioning whether this advice might also change along with the adoption of modern ideologies and their integration into academia.
One can avoid
I, we, our, my, etc. and still avoid the passive, which one's computer is now reminding us is archaic, undesirable. One does that by animating ideas, studies, and projects.
This research concludes...This study found...This data show...etc. It's hard to tell whether modern language has made this kind of construction necessary, right, or even more common. Does anyone else cringe when studies become able to do such things? This kind of construction results, often, when the writer has acquired both the distaste for the passive (encouraged by Word grammar-check)
and the traditional injunction against using the personal pronouns. Does this mean the
formal academic writing now requires a certain detachment from reality, in the sense that you have to let inanimate actors do the work that they shouldn't do, or take on life that they don't have? I intend to find out.
My wife says another thing, however, that I found interesting. She said, it's not the dissertations that matter, since virtually anything can be accepted by a committee, and much of it is not read very widely outside of that committee. It's the journals that matter, and what they require. It's the journals that you should read, because they are setting the standards, and defining academic language as it is. Training to be a PhD student is essentially training to write and express oneself in a discipline, and if this process is not up to a standard, the newly-minted Doctor, who goes off to be a professor somewhere, may never publish again. My internationals are protected from this sad fate, mainly by being so good in what they do that they get a lot of help in the other areas, until they truly understand how to publish and keep publishing. It's interesting, and it's what keeps diversity in our world.
Labels: grammar, ttu, writing
report from Lubbock, Aug. 2014
Another International Teaching Assistant Workshop just ended; this is the one 3-week stretch in which I teach absolutely full-time, but it's a whopper of full-time. There is SPEAK grading, Performance test grading, and six hours a day of teaching, all crammed into this three-week gig, and I more or less have to tell the folks at home that they're on their own. Some observations about the state of ITA's and Texas Tech will be found if you scroll down a little.
First, I want to say a little bit about the relative silence of this blog. In fact this blog didn't really move with me and my professional career to Texas Tech; it has stayed behind, really, as a repository of all good stuff that happened over an 18-year span in Illinois. But it's about time it moved, and I'll tell you why: I seem to be stuck in the process of converting all my interesting experiences into professionally-written, book-worthy ideas, and one reason is that I don't really use this blog actively enough anymore. Instead of pulling, bending, changing, etc., I just took a break and went into fiddling for a while. That has been successful; I have a band, I play bluegrass, I'm happy. But I don't intend to let my professional ideas rot on the vine back here. It's time I dredge stuff up and either publish it or drop it.
Now the nature of a blog is, it's fairly casual, and it's published, whether it's polished or not. I'm ok with that. If this is as far as some of these ideas go, that's ok. But I'm taking the red and gray of this blog and remaking it in the Texas Tech red-and-black soon, and that's because I want to keep it current, and keep using it instead of letting it collect dust. That's my first announcement. Look for some changes here soon in the design aspect. A person has to change once in a while.
Lubbock is at the searing peak of its summer; though we took a break for about a week in the mountains of New Mexico, I am now back crossing my beloved 19th street four times a day and in the process of so risking my life, I've decided to make sure that whatever feelings I have about language, acquisition, etc. I'd better get them in print sooner rather than later. So I'm thinking of devoting some energy to that process in the near future. And I hope you'll see evidence of the following: 1) a book about language as a self-organizing system; 2) a collection of essays and other writing about language acquision, and 3) a book or collection of writings about how technology and grammar intersect. I've been talking about these things for years. The heck of it is, I know where this writing is (on my blogs, in my Google docs, etc.), but it just collects dust where nobody sees it; if it were in book form, I could at least get it out there, where it might do some good. Not that anyone buys my books. But, books collect ideas under one cover. Blogs don't. Google docs simply maintain them. Books publish them.
Walked to the ITA workshop on its last day; walked home; walked to the pool, swam, and now I'm about too drained and exhausted to even do the multitude of organizational tasks I've set out for myself, for my afternoon and what little free time I'll have before the semester comes crashing in. But, I got some pictures uploaded, below, at
my home weblog, and my
lubbock weblog, and those are really my most immediate organizational task. I'm still finishing my
ITA workshop blog, which has three entries. This last one has social media, teaching philosophies, and a tour of world cities. Most of all, in my opinion, it still proves that to me at least, the blog format is one of the best places to simply publish interesting stuff. Nobody takes it too seriously, yet by simply remembering a well-chosen URL, you always have access to the best of people's creativity, the things you can get them to say. Teaching philosophies, in particular, help them to crystallize their feelings about what they're about to do, and, since they are graduate students, they take their writing seriously and give you a good picture of various departments and issues of teaching within them. I'm proud of the work my students are still putting on blogs, and in this case I'll say one thing: in three weeks, all we could do was write the stuff and put it up there, really; we didn't worry too much about "revision." But, organization and perfection were less important than simply getting it up there. Students were coming and going the entire three weeks; this blog represents the time they spent in that classroom, discussing writing and the issues of social media, as well as talking about their own cities. I'm proud of that memory and will fix up the blog to reflect that, as soon as I have time.
Unfortunately, however, I lost the password and even the logon of
the last one, which also held teaching philosophies, and this brings up an organizational nightmare of the blog world: one loses passwords, especially if one is ADD or trusts the old pen-and-paper method. I'm working on it, folks, I promise.
Which brings me to my last point. The CESL weblogs, also, are collecting dust, turning into a museum of the era in which we used them. Blogs are ok for that. I guess it's ok if people at CESL simply forget that they're there, and they sit there with all their beautiful pictures and show what people did way back in the early 20-aught years. I have them rigged, I think, so that if anyone jumps in with crude comments, I'll know. As they get stale, they move down on Google indices, and people are less likely to stumble upon them. But even now I use them. Students have research papers on them, and I call them up. They reflect the idea that you can take a corner of a public discourse environment, you can make an interesting project, and you can leave it posted indefinitely, for its creators to use, and for anyone to see and comment upon. If anything, it's making the web more civilized, and calmer. And that's no small change in today's world. My last organizational task is to link up these weblogs, so that one can more easily have access to them, or see them in the order that I'd like you to see them. Look for more on that, here.
Labels: cesl, internet, self-organized systems, ttu, weblogs, writing
Neofunctionalism
I just had another experience which I would assume is common to ESL teachers: you teach an entire semester, and at the end of it, in that busy rush and exchange of e-mails with students, you realize that, as high level as they may be, and focused on whatever the class covered (in this case writing), they still don't know how to write a proper e-mail, or how to address a teacher properly. This infuriates me, because they are often highly competent in their own fields, if not others, and pretty good at English overall. But they can't address a teacher?
My idea is to reorganize all my teaching, all teaching, according to the functional value of things that they need to know. If I had done this, I would have made sure they sent 6-10 e-mails during the term, since being able to send an e-mail to a teacher is far more important than writing a good bibliography. I would have pounded it into them so that every student in that class knew how to write an e-mail. I would have made them address me so often that they would think twice before addressing me the wrong way.
In grammar, a good example is questions. Questions are hard, grammatically; we might put them late in a curriculum and I've seen them overlooked. But, from a functional standpoint, they're essential. I have high-level students who are uncomfortable asking for things. Why? Because they know their grammar may be wrong? Somebody should put questions first in the curriculum. Ram it down their throats. Make sure that, no matter what level they are (above 0), they know how to ask for a bathroom. Especially in an emergency.
In the old days, functionalism meant setting up lessons on ordering in a restaurant, or making a phone call. But I had some students who said, essentially, they never went to a restaurant, period. In a way I'm saying, take the things that are essential; rate them high; organize curricula around them; don't let anyone get far without knowing how to function in a basic way.
In a sense we can see the culture as a big blanket that covers the language. If you have no sense of the culture, the language to some degree won't get you very far. For example, if you don't know how to shake hands, or how to address someone, every interaction gets off to a bad start, and the subtle effects of being outside the culture or being inappropriate tend to overshadow all the good stuff or the human natural tendency to give you a break for being an outsider. In the same way, people who are trying to learn pronunciation are sometimes hampered by the fact that the very way you hold your mouth - its tension, its setting, etc., influences every sound - so that if you are too tense nobody can understand you
no matter how well you make the words...neofunctionalism is my way of saying, if people can't walk out my classroom door and address someone, or ask a question, then maybe I've failed them in a fundamental way and should rethink my priorities. It doesn't matter to me as much if they can't tip at the restaurant, that's further down the list, because my priorities start with the stuff that's most essential for their survival and which should be clear to them, life is
really easier for you if you learn this stuff.
Krashen used to say that basic social interaction, the oral kind, was the foundation of language skills and thus should be taught until it's mastered,
before one attempts reading and then, later, writing. This was what he was after too, the idea that once a student understood and could respond appropriately to the teacher, then serious class-learning of such things as reading could commence,
not before...Today's world is much more writing-oriented, with so much business happening by e-mail, etc. Sometimes I think the best thing I could do with these high-level students (powerhouse readers, adequate writers, clueless listeners) is to separate them into an immersion experience where, when it was over, they could at least ask for help in any area, they thought in English
often, they were used to addressing people; they spoke up
often to get what they need, etc. Concentration on immersion/needs/questions first. If they walk out of your classroom and know how to get stuff, they'll probably be ok.
Labels: krashen, learning theory, personal, reading, ttu, writing
instant karma
When I was in graduate school, all teaching methods that involved instant feedback were out. If you were to jump on a student for pronouncing "three" as "tree," for example, he would stammer, make the correct "three" word again, lose his train of thought (not to mention his confidence), etc. Theory favored the affective side of it: let him speak as much as he is capable of speaking; let him string entire sentences together; correct him later, if at all, privately, and let him know that his pronunciation and/or grammar are impeding meaning, or should be worked on before the others. Naturally, those that impede meaning are more urgent than those that don't. Also, we are well aware that with much feedback in general, there is not a direct relationship between what you tell them to work on, and what actually gets improved on the following day. They like feedback, and appreciate it, and are especially grateful to know when it is responsible for their grade's being a little lower than they'd like, but, even when they apply themselves to changing their pronunciation or grammar, often they can't, at least not right away. Or, they will change it on a prepared speech, but immediately get thrown off when asked a question or expected to produce language spontaneously.
Now I am in a situation where I am teaching high-level learners; grammar and pronunciation are sometimes an issue, but usually not. The issue for them is often lack of tone, poor tone, long thought groups or poorly broken up thought groups, lack of prominence or no stress on important words. Tone, I think, is extremely important. They drift into a monotone, and people fall asleep, losing not only the information but also a sense of how important it is. Tone doesn't come naturally to speakers of other languages. They're head is full with creating sentences, recalling what they meant to say, making correct pronunciation (which, as I've said, is not bad at this level.
But a graduate student, A.H., has taken to giving them instant feedback on their DI (discourse intonation), mostly with their permission, and her partner, R.R., now jumps right in there beside her. They'll stop a student in the middle of the second sentence and say, "No tone!" or "Why are you using a rising tone? Are you unsure of yourself?" or perhaps, "Mind your prominence! Stress on the important words!"
Students, as I've said, liked this, and agreed to it willingly at first. They needed to know their faults and the sooner the better, they figured, even at the expense of obviously losing their train of thought, getting rattled in front of a crowd, etc. Generally they would be teaching in front of their peers. Generally their presentation was limited - maybe ten minutes at most. Generally they would stumble upon being corrected, but get back on their feet fairly quickly. Sometimes the fault that was pointed out would be corrected in what they produced after the feedback. In those cases, we could say it was a success. They were directed to mind an aspect of their DI (often one they weren't paying attention to); they would mind it; they would improve, and presumably they would learn the skill of considering DI simultaneously with the other things they were trying to juggle.
I stuck to my traditional method, which was to point out their weaknesses on a grading sheet, to be given them after (well after) their presentation, which often pointed out both DI weaknesses and traditional, pronunciation/grammar problems. My theory was that private, separated feedback could be handled more rationally later, could be separated from the plain view of peers, and allow their immediate observations more room to develop as they were speaking.
The instant feedback system had several negative consequences. One is interesting and worth noting. One poor girl, frustrated at being criticized for lack of tone, had adopted an uptalk kind of style. This actually is quite common. Students hear others doing it, and adopt it, and notice that they do better with uptalk than with nothing. I actually encourage it, although I know it's rather grating to the ears of a native speaker, it makes us say, "you're from the valley?" or "you're asking me?" or some such. But it
is a tone, developmental as it is, and it helps them begin to hear them, hear their consequences, etc. So A.H. jumps on her for her uptalk, and says, basically, "You're giving out your syllabus (true). You're telling them how you're going to grade them (also true)...and you make it a question? WHY are you using uptalk?" The poor girl, flustered, starts over again. She realizes the feedback is intended to help her, she's not overwhelmingly embarrassed. But she really doesn't
know how to vary her tones, or she would have done it. She is more embarrassed by not being able to make what she wants, than just being mistaken.
And this, in general, is probably the biggest problem. Tone becomes fluent in developmental increments, which are now disrupted, and not allowed to be half-perfect. If she develops a fear of uptalk, or picks up the disparagement on the part of native speakers in the room, she goes back to monotone. The disruption of the process sets back the entire thing, and, as a result, she can't use varying tones at all until she is entirely ready to make them all right.
I have often pointed out this tendency in the development of grammatical structures, for example, present perfect continuous. A student, in trying to say "I have been going to the Rec Center" says instead "I have been go to the Rec Center," producing an intermediate, developmental form. The computer tells them that's bad, go back to square one, or, the student is corrected and set back by an aggressive grammar-cop type of ESL teacher, who jumps on him, marks him down, publicly shames him, or whatever. Bottom line: avoid that structure altogether. Avoid trying it, avoid developing it, avoid putting it out there. Correction can have an opposite effect of stifling ordinary natural developmental progress. And it certainly doesn't reward experimentation, the risk-taking required to master anything.
These may be the traditional arguments against
all feedback, and they remind me a bit of the writing "Error correction wars" in which some theorists argued strenuously against
all error correction, and even those who were in favor of it were reduced to saying how much and how strenuously they would couch it in positive terms, save it until the end, devalue it or absorb it into larger meaning-expression issues. That kind of feedback, in writing, was
out and was staying
out as far as I could tell, last I checked. Those who wanted to know
principal from
principle were left looking online for one of those online proofreaders.
I should mention, by the way, that A.H. and R.R. tried to set up a study; they asked students how they felt; they tried to determine whether this method worked, and how students actually felt about it. While getting accurate results on its efficacy may be extremely difficult, the controlled environment under which they asked students their true opinions might yield interesting results; I'll keep you posted.
Labels: grammar, ita's, learning theory, ttu, writing
report from Lubbock
It's been almost two months since I posted here; you might think I'd died, or fallen off a cliff, for as much as I've had to say about professional matters in general. It's true that I post a little on my other blogs, which I'll mention, but most of all, I've just been busy, and as I get older, I get a little more tired, and find it more difficult to go out of my way to point out something interesting.
But it is a new term, and I owe you an update, which I will provide. I teach a new class in writing dissertations and theses, for high-level graduate students. I used my eap2 skills to set up a writing project such that we would study a public issue (in our case Lubbock water crisis) and investigate how people feel about it; it's a fairly straightforward project on the perception of people toward an environmental condition (again, eap2 prepares me well) but the class is developing the project together, though they will write reports individually. If it ends up online (which I'd prefer), I'll keep you informed. Otherwise I'll just tell you what I've learned. In essence I've learned how theses look different in different departments, and use different styles, and carry different expectations depending on what any given department would call "data".
The other class is a high-level ITA speaking class, but the difference at Texas Tech, from other places, is that we (and the self-made textbook we use) identifies and graphs out discourse features that are crucial in the conveying of meaning and intent, features such as prominence, tone, thought groups, etc. We actually categorize and measure these things so as to give students, many of whom have adequate pronunciation and grammar, more insight into what is really hampering their ability to communicate successfully. It's very interesting and, in my view, somewhat cutting-edge, since other programs don't even really know how to
talk about some of these.
My last assignment is at the Univ. Writing Lab, but it's really my favorite, because I enjoy the people and it's more like working as part of a collective of very smart people who all practice a craft together; this also is a little more like CESL, and a little less like an academic department. Frankly, my office building is a little like Europe, with teachers of Portuguese, Italian, German, French and Spanish but about as much true camaraderie as the EU as well, and you have to give the office staff 24 hours to copy anything, and sometimes I long for the more free-wheeling ESL life.
It was at the writing center, however, where they actually assigned to me
this set of youtube clips which finally stirred me up to post in this blog. It's an interesting set on the problems in writing that ESL students have when encountering and trying to master writing in English. It stirred lots of memories in me, and awakened my passion for ESL writing, which in fact I am teaching, both at the lab and in the dissertation class. In this movie I saw my old friend Deb Healey, and was reassured that my skills, developed over decades, were valuable. I think the movie deserves its own review, which I will provide above, but in the meantime, I just want to say, I'm still here, still kicking, still teaching, basically, and walking home, since somebody lifted my bicycle in May.
I have two projects, both somewhat shelved, because it's so hard to get to the kids' schools, and soccer practice, in the time available to me. And, the walking, even the six blocks that it is, across a ten-lane road, exhausts me, for some reason. My shoes got to the point where nails seem to be sticking up into my foot but I've been to busy to simply buy new ones, or more appropriately, buy ones that are better designed for long walks at night. My two projects are as follows: I'm writing a book on language as a self-organized system, and in general I store my work
here, though I have the book itself elsewhere. Also, I have begun a serious study of text linguistics, which is really the linguistics of texters, as opposed to the linguistics of big books and entire tomes, which some people think it is, and which appears when you google "text linguistics." The fact is, this new field, the study of human communication behavior when phones and computers are mediating it, needs a name, although "computer-mediated communication" is close to acceptable. I struggle with it, because I'm really after text linguistics, yet I can't call it that; the name is taken.
So that's a report from the Hub City. The clouds come over in enormous colorful gusty-looking monsters but it rarely rains. The painters have moved in and sprayed chipped paint all over our yard thus causing us to suspect that our sunflower crop will have lead in it. Finally, the boys are both on soccer teams, thus causing a flurry of cross-town transportation issues not to mention finding matching shin-guards, a ball, filling a water bottle, etc. All for the purposes of activity, which supposedly makes them sleep better, but in fact, it's usually me who falls face-down on the pillow long before they do. I've found that wearing a fine-looking hat on nineteenth street increases my chances of being seen across ten lanes, so I do, and now people look at me oddly but go around me, and I limp across those lanes getting in the bicyclists' way.
Labels: cesl, chat, ita's, linguistics, self-organized systems, toefl, ttu, weblogs, wikipedia, writing, youtube
Thank you, Tapped In
Tapped In was probably a victim of the sequester, whatever that was, where they cut off all those government funds for useful projects. I really have no idea, but I suspect it was started from a government grant that was designed to see if academics could use an online environment, like a campus, and enter it virtually, and talk to each other, and benefit from all being in the same virtual space.
I used to meet my friends there and chat on Sunday mornings about various educational technology topics, like how to make webcasts, or use skype in class, that kind of stuff. Generally my friends knew way more than I did, and lived in places like Abu Dhabi, Ottawa, or Argentina. That's what I liked about it; I could ask them, for example, who they thought would win the World Cup. Or how was the weather way out there? There was no shortage of topics. It was like being on an international flight.
One time, a couple of people entered a room we were in and started a lightning-fast conversation in a language totally foreign to me, except that it used English letters and an occasional English word. It was just understandable to arouse my curiosity, but I never figured out what they were doing. I went back and got a record of it, quick while I could (TI made transcripts available, but it was always hard for me to figure out how to get them). Someday this could be seen as the early days of online communication. These languages can probably use their own scripts now; people have other chatrooms, and have apparently found other venues.
A couple of times, I took my classes into TI, and insisted that we talk by chatting in its virtual rooms. They were a little confused about why I'd want to do this, but I told them, and it generally worked out all right. I was kind of a pioneer that way, in using chat in classes, but I didn't perfect the process so much as just try it out and see how I could use it. I still today think it would be useful, from a writing standpoint, to lure students into just producing, spontaneously and communicatively, lots of writing, but I haven't really followed through. Once a woman from Harvard came in and observed, and we explained to her what we were doing. My students would link to their papers (which were also online) in there, and people would then go read them. Another time some people just came and joined us and they were forced to talk about their papers a little. Various memorable things happened. It was like the train station in Manhattan; you would probably never be bored, as your next visitor could be from anywhere.
Except that, at some times, the workers and volunteers probably were bored. One problem was that it ran for 24 hours, but someone had to monitor it. This I'm sure wasn't always fun. I suppose you could set your computer so that you'd be warned about anyone's arrival, then go cook dinner, but it seemed to me it would be like graveyard shift at the parking garage, lots of waiting for maybe one person, sometimes. I'm really not sure how much traffic it had on a regular basis.
I was there, though. I loved it. Its landscaping was all virtual, but I made good friends there. To BJ, and Michael W., I hope I meet you in person someday. To the government grant agency, thank you for making it possible. For me at least, it did what it was intended to do.
Labels: chat, internet, writing
War on passives
This year for the first time I am teaching international students and American students simultaneously. One difference is that internationals generally know what the passive is. The passive is a way of saying something (like
I am involved in intramural sports or
I have been struck by the incongruity of this situation) where the verb has a
be in it more or less beside the past participle, and the victim of the action now lies in the subject position. It is very useful in sentences like
2000 were killed in an earthquake or
employees were informed of the layoffs when the bad guy is horrible or doesn't want overt recognition; one could argue that simply emphasizing the victim, by putting him/her/them in the subject position, one is not necessarily hiding the perpetrator so much as de-emphasizing, but, passive takes the rap for being used by those sneaky perps to cover up their actions.
The lamp is broken is one sentence I used to use in order to teach it; the child learns this as part of his/her increasing sophistication with the language, thus learning how not to admit to one's crimes.
So in the sixties, or thereabouts, social science writers in particular led the charge to iron out all
it was observed that... constructions, in science reports, and just own up to who did it, as in
we observed that.... Where this turned into a tidal wave of denigration of the passive, I'm not sure. Today in English classes throughout the land, graduate assistants are using "eliminate the passive" as code for "make your writing as powerful, assertive, and direct as possible." This is in general good advice. Saying "We observed..." is more assertive than saying "it was observed" and leaving it to the reader to figure out who did it. For writers to systematically weed out these constructions may be unrealistic though. One big problem is that by and large they don't know what they're doing.
I'll start with the internationals. The machines, namely grammar-check, have taken to telling them that it's wrong, and advising them to use active sentences. Thus we see a lot more "I involve in that." The more sophisticated machines can tell them that it's "Intramural sports involve me" but that also is awkward, and it removes the flow of an essay that focuses, for example, on what they have been doing this semester. There are many words, like
involve, that need passive in order to be used properly or smoothly. But internationals don't know this from the advice the computer gives them. In the last few years I began noticing, as I taught passive, a quizzical look on internationals' faces, as if to say, is this real? Can you do this? (if not, why does my computer keep saying you can't?)...Are you serious?
Internationals, at least, can see the reasoning, and the history, of the war. Steeped in grammar, they can see why you'd use it, why you'd reject it, why it might be necessary sometimes, and why the computer can't tell when it's necessary and when it's not. They get disgusted by the whole mess, but grammar is like that anyway, and they've been studying TOEFL, for example, weeding out exceptions and irregularities; they've become expert on these things, and have picked up some speed in building the background knowledge necessary to process it.
Americans are another story. The GA's in freshman English classes themselves don't always know the passive, and mark sentences like
This is appropriate and
That is exorbitant as passive, when they're not. The war on passives is extended to all
be verbs and comes to be somewhat like the war on terror: A huge outlay of time and effort for an unknown enemy. Freshmen writers are even more clueless; they often don't know when they've used it, what it looks like, how to make it active. Sometimes the teacher doesn't give them the guidance. Truly getting caught in a grammar dispute makes the grad assistants quite uncomfortable, so they tend to stick to higher ground, the content, or analysis of a work, and leave the grammar for the red pen to make a single mark on it, often indecipherable, or vaguely criticized.
Maybe the last thing I'd like to do, a dream I've had for some time, is to make a little book that explains this in simple words, and helps these poor students understand what the grad assistant is saying. You can't do much about grad assistants who abuse their power, or who don't know what they're talking about, or whatever; they could use a book like this too, of course. I could put lots of things in it, like why it's considered a dilemma when writers say, "The student brought their book;" it's surprising to me how many of them
don't even see the problem. It's one thing to make an informed choice, to go against the grain, or do what's easiest and take the rap. What amazes me is the perpetuation of cluelessness, as if mentioning that passives are not as direct or assertive as actives, will actually change people's language. Maybe it would, for the one or two percent of us, but, we weren't really the primary audience.
Labels: grammar, writing
The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten (part 2)
When you translated, by machine, from English to Russian, "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," then, turn around and translate the same expression back into English, you would get "the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." This was used for many years to demonstrate that machine translation would never pick up the nuances of metaphorical meaning.
Metaphorical meaning is in fact a hard part of machine translation, but perhaps not as hard as you would imagine. It is not impossible, for example, to notice that
most of the time, when the four words the+spirit+is+weak appear together, there is generally a metaphorical meaning. It is not impossible to identify that meaning. It is not impossible to get the computer to just deliver the metaphorical meaning upon command.
A whole supply of metaphoric expressions work this way; for example, "off the hook", "up the creek without a paddle," or "at loggerheads with each other". The computer looks foolish if it tries to translate one word at a time; you might lose that metaphoric meaning altogether. It becomes humorous to try to find metaphors in the jumbled productions that machine translate gives you. Songs, which are full of metaphor, are the worst; try crunching a few of them through a machine translator.
So this brings to mind several process that inevitably follow from this weakness. First, somebody has to go through the language, word for word, expression by expression, and make it so the computer can identify metaphoric ones with reasonable accuracy. Some, for example the one with the creek and the paddle, appear in pieces, or with different word combinations. Some, such as "off the hook" could have been written, originally, in absolute seriousness, with no metaphoric meaning whatsoever. The machine has a problem here, which is to make a statistical guess at the likelihood that you have a metaphoric meaning. But fortunately, machines are good at statistical guesses. A concordancer can give you the last 1000 times anyone used "at loggerheads with each other" and tell you with certainty how many of these actually had to do with sea turtles. Of course, the best metaphors are suggestive, and mean only what they say, but suggest other things, or don't, depending on the feeling of the writer. You could accuse me, for example, of making the title of this post metaphoric. And I could deny it. How is the computer supposed to know if I, the writer, don't know? Or lie?
So, there are times that the best the computer can do is point out that
this is often used metaphorically or
this could be metaphoric. Let the reader decide. Give the reader the whole picture. That's called good, careful reading; getting the whole picture, and deciding yourself. By the way there is another phenomenon that I should point out. Businessmen who use Google Translate, for example, for every trade, get out of the habit of using metaphors. In effect they say, "Well, I would use 'off the hook,' but the computer will butcher that (so to speak), so I'll just say, it's not your responsibility". And so their
language and style actually change to fit the medium. Computer-translated language becomes less metaphoric naturally and by necessity.
But back to the main point, which is that what appeared to be a fairly inviolable line (computers will
never be able to think metaphorically) turns out to be quite fluid, easy to beat, left behind (in the better programs) in a trail of dust. The better programs are flagging metaphoric expressions and identifying them as such. These programs have other problems, some of which impede meaning, but that isn't one of them.
It brings up the question of what happens when language learners stumble upon these machines, and use them in the process of learning. It's the
teachers, by the way, who have trouble recognizing when a given body of jumbled up text has been created, essentially, by a computer dealing either with a student's original work or some other body of writing. Generally nobody has told the student that this is wrong, illegal, or whatever. Generally the teacher looks at the high-level vocabulary (translated directly from native words), the jumbled-up word order, metaphoric gaps, etc., and gets angry. How could a person of such limited awareness (of sentence structure) use such big words? Or, how can I possibly unravel this to figure out what you
mean? Once I had a student who, asked to produce an English newspaper article, produced one that had run through the machine from Chinese. I looked at it and knew instantly that it was not standard English. But he genuinely didn't see the problem. One article full of English looked pretty much like the other to him: incomprehensible. He generally produced work similar to what is mentioned above, and he had flunked more than once up to that point, probably having made some teachers quite angry. It was his problem that he was at the cutting edge of the new technology.
I would call these learners
false positives in the sense that they show great sophistication in areas where they really don't have the skill. The skill of turning high-level words into computer-generated glosses is a computer skill; often they have that skill, but not the one where you look at a simply misformed sentence and
know it's wrong. And sometimes they'll slip each piece through several machines, hoping that more translation can only improve it. Start with google translate, then go through Ginger or Grammarly, and see where you end up. Teachers, unfortunately, are generally too busy to foresee what could have happened, or why they have a student with a paper that he or she can't even read. To the teacher it smacks of plagiarism, cheating, paper-buying. But it's not. The computer is like the purple pen, the fancy paper or the pretty font. It's part of the environment, and it's not labeled with a sign that says, "this tool will discourage your language learning" until we label it that way and actually prohibit it. But even then, even the
phones are picking up skills. Why can't we just tell the phones what the problem is?
Labels: google translate, internet, writing
emotikanji
I'd like to open up these questions to a worldwide audience who might have the answers. I became genuinely curious when one of my students showed me a huge alphabet of maybe a couple hundred Japanese emoticons that were easily loaded right onto his phone. An entire novel,
Emoji Dick, was written in emojis, and people are presumably stringing together whole sentences with emojis and actually reading them. So here are my questions:
1. Is this just a fad? In other words, will people stop actually making entire sentences with them (or rather, fade back into doing what's easier), or will people move into these emojis as a new language, work it out, and start fresh with a new batch of symbols, that they presumably agree upon?
2. My friends say that emoticons are very common here, at the rate of maybe one per text, especially to prevent having texts seen as sarcastic, and to add or express emotion that would otherwise be hard to discern in a text. But by and large Americans don't seem to be using five, ten, fifteen of them in a row as say Japanese do. OK, so what's the difference really? Is everyone worldwide using them by the bucketful and I just don't know it? Are there common meanings across cultures (aside from smiley face and frowney face, which I presume have about the same meanings everywhere)? Is there something about the Japanese language or culture that encourages more use of emoticons, or, is just more taken by fads?
3. Finally, what are the chances that, worldwide, people could come up with an emoticon language that everyone would understand and be able to use? Interesting idea, huh?
Labels: chat, emojis, twitter, writing, writingmatrix
