New issues of Contact available

I'm now into my second year as editor of TESL Ontario's Contact magazine. You can download issues for free as far back as 2000. I've been the editor for just over a year now (volumes 38 & 39). We just put out the conference issue today, as we do every spring. I hope you enjoy it. Please, leave me a comment to let me know what you thought.

Education First's English Proficiency Index

Last year, I blogged about the first English Proficiency Index here. Education First has now released their second index, and they're getting some good publicity out of it (I'm linking to them). The same problems as last year occur: self selection of participants, and need for a computer with internet access to do the test. There's also no data on test reliability and no validity arguments. Still, with 1.7 million participants over three years in more than 50 countries, you wouldn't want to completely dismiss the results either.

ER-Central.com

Another new and potentially useful site:

Extensive Reading Central is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing an Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening approach to foreign and second language learning. It was started by Dr. Rob Waring of Note Dame Seishin University, Okayama, Japan and Dr. Charles Browne of Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, Japan as a free service to the EFL community.

Tutela

Tutela has been in beta for about a year but had its official launch during the TESL Canada conference. From their terms of use:

Tutela.ca (“Service”) is a Canadian not-for-profit online repository and community for ESL (English as a Second Language) and FSL (French as a Second Language) professionals registered to use the Service (“Users”). As a repository, the Service provides Users with access to ESL and FSL materials including classroom materials, lesson plans, assessment information, and reusable learning objects. As a community, the Service enables Users to share materials, discover new approaches, locate solutions, and network including through the use of the online meeting and webinar conferencing capabilities of the Service (“Conferencing”). The Service is supported by funding from Citizenship and Immigration Canada (“CIC”) and is owned and operated by Citadel Rock Online Communities Inc. (“Citadel”). (my bold)

I'm not really sure how this works. Tutela itself is not for profit, but Citadel is a privately owned corporation, for profit as far as I can tell. It has received a number of grants from the federal government. Just so as you know...

More Google Ngrams 2.0 POS tagging

As I wrote yesterday, there are some strange tagging decisions concerning determinatives in this corpus. It seems though, as I added in an update, that these are largely the fault of the Part-of_Speech Tagging guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project.

The problems, though, are not limited to determinatives. Subordinators are also affected. The words that, whether, and if (e.g., They told me that it was OK and They asked me whether/if it was OK) are tagged as _ADP_ (short for ADPOSITION, a more inclusive term for prepositions.) The guidelines say:

"We make no explicit distinction between prepositions and subordinating conjunctions. (The distinction is not lost, however - a preposition is an IN that precedes a noun phrase or a prepositional phrase, and a subordinate conjunction is an IN that precedes a clause).
The preposition "to" has its own special tag TO."

This makes good sense for words like because, after, and since, which have been treated as "subordinating conjunctions" but really are prepositions and function as the heads of preposition phrases. It doesn't work, though, with that, whether, and if, which function as markers of subordination and not heads. Consider the difference between these two clauses:

Language Learner Literature Award Winners

Somehow I missed the announcement, but the 2012 LLL Award Winners for books published in 2011 have been announced.

Google Ngrams 2.0 and POS tagging

As Ben Zimmer blogged yesterday, there's a new and improved version of the Google Ngram viewer. The "improved" bit has a number of elements, but one is POS tagging. This is a wonderful thing, and I'm inordinately happy about it. Unfortunately, there are some very odd quirks to deal with.

Impacting (on) complement choice

After 20 years of teaching English, I've only recently become consciously aware that my students may be applying the complementation pattern of one word to its derivationally related partner. That is, they regularly say and write things like *it influenced on the situation using a prepositional phrase complement headed by on where the verb should really just take a direct object. Notice, though, that the noun influence licenses the on PP complement that the students are using (e.g., it had no influence on the outcome).

An adverb caught modifying a noun

This morning, CBC Toronto's Metro Morning program was being broadcast remotely from the new arts and culture hub of Regent Park. Shortly before 6:00, I believe, the host, Matt Galloway, said something along the lines of "We're here at the opening officially of the new arts and culture hub." I'm going from memory, but I'm certain about the opening officially of....

What we have here is an adverb officially post modifying a noun opening. Most grammars will tell you adverbs aren't supposed to do that. It even sounds vaguely obscene. But I tell you, it's the truth.

Now, obviously, opening is deverbal, but you could say the official opening of... with the expected modification by an adjective, and you couldn't say *the officially opening of... with the adverb before the noun. More importantly, an example like *the running quickly of the race seems highly unlikely, so being deverbal isn't the whole deal.

You may think that officially must be modifying something else in the sentence, but since this is between the noun and the modifying of phrase, it's clearly internal to the noun phrase and the most obvious thing for it to be modifying in there is the head noun. When they post the podcast tomorrow, I'll try to find the exact sentence. I think you'll find that there's really nothing else in the sentence that officially could possibly have been modifying.

[Update: the podcast is now available, but it's only 25 minutes of highlights, and apparently interesting grammatical features don't qualify. A google search, though, turns up a number of relevant instances elsewhere.]