Teaching and Learning Vocabulary

The following book review originally appeared in the spring 2007 issue of TESL Canada Journal, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Elfrieda H. Hiebert & Michael L. Kamil (Eds.). Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing scientific research to practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (2005). 273 pages.

Teaching and learning vocabulary: Bringing research to practice (TLV) is aimed at researchers, and graduate students whose focus is children learning to read English as their first language. In fact, the U.S.-based National Reading Panel, whose investigations is largely the impetus for TLV, specifically excluded from its research database studies dealing with “foreign languages or non-English-speaking groups, or… special populations, including second-language learners” (NICHHD, 2000, p 4-16). A quick scan through the references confirms that the same approach is evident in TLV; the major TESL publications and vocabulary researchers are largely overlooked. This gap aside, there is a great deal of valuable research and insight but it all needs to be considered through the lens of an ESL environment.

Interestingly, the findings and recommendations of the various authors across the chapters largely mirror much recent L2 vocabulary literature (e.g., Nation, 2001; Folse, 2004). For instance, like Nation and Folse, TLV argues strongly that direct instruction in vocabulary is needed. Following Zeno, Ivens, Millard, & Duvvuri (1995), it identifies a core set of 5,586 unique word forms that establish the basis for further reading and vocabulary development: almost the same 2,000 high frequency word families promoted in the L2 literature (e.g., Nation, 2001). And it similarly identifies 95% as a vocabulary knowledge threshold below which independent reading is too difficult.

The structure of the book, with each chapter authored by different researchers, leads to some overlap and redundancy. Often, however, this is helpful in reinforcing and recontextualising the information. Unfortunately, inconsistencies, such as widely different estimates of vocabulary sizes do remain and are sometimes hard to reconcile. Part of the problem is that although there are many word counts and frequencies discussed, it is sometimes unclear what is being counted. Word is used variously to mean individual word forms (e.g., run and runs = 2 words) and “word families” (e.g., run, runs, ran, running, & runner = 1 word family) and it is not always clear which meaning is intended. Despite this issue, the text is generally precise and easy to read.

The first section sets out the empirical and theoretical basis for the rest of the book: why vocabulary is important for success in reading, why it needs to be taught directly, and why students need to read extensively. The second section then goes into how this should be realised in the classroom. In particular, the chapter by Stahl provides many techniques that could be used with any ESL class. The third section focuses on which words to teach. It is likely the one with the least direct applicability to ESL contexts although the theoretical basis behind it remains pertinent; focus on the “Goldilocks words”—those not to frequent and not too rare, but just right.

In short, TLV is not the kind of book that belongs on every ESL teacher’s bookshelf but it does fill a gap in the literature, and it does so with much scholarship and perspicuity.

References

• Folse, K. S. (2004). Vocabulary myths: Applying second language research to classroom teaching. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
• Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction: Reports of the subgroups. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved Dec. 16, 2006 from http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/upload/report_pdf.pdf
• Zeno, S. M., Ivens, S. H., Millard, R. T., & Duvvuri, R. (1995). The educator’s word frequency guide. Brewster, NY: Touchstone Applied Science Associates.

Progress on the journalistic front

It's been a while since Russell Smith published anything language-related in the Globe & Mail. But on May 17th he addressed the issue of try and...

I'm very pleased to say, it is a very different approach than he has taken in the past. First, he sets out the alternatives. Then he explores various syntactical variations that argue against the try and... formulation. Next he discusses other verbs that allow the same pattern. This is followed by a historical overview of usage by famous writers and a reference to Fowler's assertion that there may be a subtle difference between try and and try to. Finally, Smith presents his own opinion.

Bravo!

Cliché, that old cliché

Listening to Dr. Fowler's stirring aria about metaphors live and metaphors dead, I was moved to wonder about the origin of the word cliché. The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say,

"1832, borrowing of a technical word from Fr. cliché, printer's jargon for 'stereotype,' supposedly echoic of mould dropping into molten metal, thus pp. of clicher 'to click.' Figurative extension is first attested 1888, following the course of stereotype."

In other words, cliché was a new metaphor in the late 19^th century. While it is now dead, there must have been a substantial period during which cliché itself was a cliché.

Fowler's Modern English Opera

CBC's "And sometimes Y" presents "Fowler's Modern English, the opera". The character, Dr. Fowler, sings an aria about dead metaphors ("the only safe metaphor is a dead one"). Listen here.

More TOEFL problems

The L-test list has been buzzing with discussion of the TOEFL imbroglio. Apparently, the problems are not confined to Korea. Similar issues have come up in the US and China and likely other counties too. A little background:

When ETS switched from the paper-based tests to computer-based tests, they were seduced by adaptive test technology. That is, everyone gets a test that is pitched just at their level. This is a good thing. It means test-takers are neither bored nor frustrated with test items that are far below or above their level. It also means that tests are much shorter. At the same time, they moved from paper-based tests that were available only on scheduled dates (I don't remember what the intervals were, perhaps three times a month?) to testing on demand.

What ETS didn't realise was that the combination of testing on demand and adaptive testing would require a crippling number of test items. This decision almost bankrupted ETS.

When they moved to the Internet-based test (iBT), they moved back to regularly scheduled (roughly weekly) tests and to a one-size-fits-all format. Now the problem is that with so many people taking the test at the same time, it is much more demanding on resources. There also seems to have been an dramatic increase in the number of test takers. The result is that there are simply not enough spots available.

It's a little frightening how much power ETS wields and how poorly they've been wielding it. For anyone whose students are trying to get into an English-medium college or university, it is important to keep in mind that there are alternatives to TOEFL, including IELTS, MELAB, CAEL, CanTEST, COPE and others. There's also the Versant test that I posted about previously.

Korean TOEFL shortage

Su-Hyun Lee, writing in the New York Times, has done a good job of reporting on the ongoing South Korean "TOEFL crisis".

"Forget the North Korean nuclear crisis. What has many South Koreans in an uproar these days is the “Toefl crisis.” The Educational Testing Service which administers the test, reduced the number of slots for test-takers. So with demand for the test far outstripping the available slots, and with scalpers demanding exorbitant prices, desperate South Koreans have been hunting for possible test sites from Japan to Southeast Asia, and even Australia.
Travel agencies have begun offering “Toefl tours” that include test preparation courses, a guaranteed test slot and sometimes even a bit of tourism on the side. One test preparation school estimates that about 500 Koreans a month all told travel to other countries to take the test."

While ETS surely deserves some blame for this, much should rest on the national testing fetish. The test is being (mis)used for everything from hiring, to high-school entrance. I'm sure that very few of those responsible for interpreting the tests have read the score user's manual.

I remember when I was teaching in Japan, a culture with a similar test preoccupation, the high school was using the paper-based TOEFL to track learning in their sr. high school students. On a test with a standard error of +/- 15, and a bottom score of 300, our students were averaging about 320. In other words, they were doing little better than guessing. It was a 6-month struggle to get the school to understand how useless and disheartening it was for students to have to take this test. There were also the inevitable test preparation classes which focussed on sample questions. These were so far above the students' level that it was a complete waste of time.

Elsewhere, Korea's Chosun newspaper bemoans the "fact" that Koreans are some of the worst English learners on the planet. How do they know? Just look at the rank of their average TOEFL score.

"According to a report released in 2003 by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy in Hong Kong, which provides information on the management environment in East Asia, Korea ranked the lowest among 12 Asian countries when it comes to communication in English. From 2004 to 2005, the TOEFL scores of Korean applicants ranked 93rd among 147 nations. And last September, when a speaking section replaced the grammar component in the TOEFL exams, Korea’s rank dropped to 111th. In the speaking section, Korea ranked almost rock bottom, at 134th."

But if we put two and two together, its not hard to see that in a country where anyone from elementary school students to the local grocery uncle takes the test, you're going to have a lot of very low scores. Consider that South Korea, at about 50 million people [corrected, per comment], appears to have more TOEFL test takers than Japan, a country more than twice the size. They even have more test takers than China.

Clearly, then, the low average test score is not due to a national learning deficit, but to the fact that in more sane situations only people who intend to apply to a post-secondary institution in an English-speaking country and who feel they are likely to get a high mark apply. In other words, it is the result of a serious selection bias.

Ladybug(gery)

I was reading Nonsense Animal Rhymes, a silly and fun--if not really inspired--set of doggerel, to my kids, when the following verse reminded me of a NA/UK difference that hasn't appeared on Separated by a Common Language.

The Insect Race

Ready, steady, off they go!
The beetle's in the lead!
The grasshoppers are gaining,
With a sudden burst of speed.

The worm has turned the corner,
And the crowd begins to clap,
But the spider and the ladybird
Are closing up the gap!

I was aware of ladybird as the British version of ladybug, but I fell to wondering which came first. I finally got around to checking the other day. The Online Etymology Dictionary says, "ladybug (1699; cf. Ger. cognate Marienkäfer) which now is called ladybird beetle (1704) in Britain, through aversion to the word bug, which there has overtones of sodomy."

I don't suppose that's the origin of the phrase 'having a bug up your ass'...

Singing into reading

Andrea Gordon has an article in today's Toronto Star about a new kind of software for struggling readers. The software is described as being karaoke-like.

There were apparently three studies by Susan Homan (and others). I can't track down the actual papers, but Homan has links to three "abstracts" on her site. They're rather more elaborate than your standard abstract, especially the first one, which includes the full data set.

The gains do seem to be impressive, the motivational factors are obvious, and the premise makes sense. The words to the songs are already known or mostly known. As they are recalled, the eyes are being presented with the written version. The brain puts the two together and poof! And you there's all that repetition, but it's fun.

I wonder what kind of songs they use and how this could be adapted to an ESL situation.

I've written Homan asking for copies of the original papers and will report back if there's anything to add.

「いる」だよ

My wife is Japanese and we use Japanese at home with the kids. Of course, my Japanese isn't always perfect.

Last night, I was telling my 3-year old for the fifth time to drink her milk. When she retorted that she was drinking it, I pointed out that her milk was in one location and she was elsewhere. In Japanese it went like this

牛乳はこっちにあるけど君はそこにある。
gyunyu wa kotchi ni aru kedo kimi wa soko ni aru.
milk (topic) here at is but you (topic) there at is.

Without looking up my 5-year old says「いる」だよ ("iru" da yo). You see, the Japanese copula distinguishes between animate and inanimate objects: ある (aru) for inanimate and いる (iru) for animate. This is the first time, I believe, that my kids have corrected my grammar like that. I'm sure it won't be the last, though.

Funding schools through scams

One big story here for the last couple of days has been the report by People For Education (see here for earlier reports) that shows Ontario's students shilled for their schools to the tune of over $500 million last school year. The possible inequity of richer neighbourhoods providing better funding is getting a lot of play in the media, but the fact that our children are being turned into touts for the fund-raising industry hasn't gotten much attention.

The really scary story, though, is that most of the junk that schools sell to raise funds--things like chocolate covered almonds, cookies, and assorted trinkets that nobody really wants--returns only a tiny fraction of the revenue to schools. Of course, the $500 million is not solely the result of selling $15 billion dollars of chocolates, but if the money all went to the schools instead of 98% of it going to these fund-raising scams, how much cheaper it would all be, and how much less chocolate our overweight society would be fattening itself up with!

Yes, yes, all overly simplistic, I know. But good to get off one's chest all the same.

Significantly impactful incetivisation

Today, Laurel Broten, being interviewed on CBC Toronto's 'Here & Now' about the govenment's lame plan to reduce the number of plastic bags, got my attention when she described her plan as "significantly impactful". She followed this up by talking about the need to "incentivise" consumers.

Both impactful and incentivise are from the early 1970s, but Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says that a second sighting of incentivise in the wild isn't recorded until the 1980s. By that time we had the even newer but shorter version incent. Neither seem to be particularly common. There are no instances at all of incent, incentivise, or incentivize (or impactful for that matter) in the British national Corpus. Google, on the other hand, has 434,000 hits for the -ize version and another 370,000 for the -ise spelling, while incent trails in total google hits by about 100,000. These usages seem to be ghettoised to the speech of business and political promotional purposes.

As Mr. Verb's tagline says, "Language changes. Deal with it. Revel in it." Somehow, though, I had trouble reveling in Broten's language.

Homework without the tools?

Jan Freeman's column from this weekend is about an assignment for high-school students.

"Their AP English class had read my Word column about the history and uses of tart (both pastry and prostitute) and its various connotations, they said. And now they were supposed to research and write something similar, on a different subject: a short paper comparing two words with overlapping senses, like art and craft, club and gang, labor and work."

Jan concludes by saying how much fun the assignment sounds, and what a delight research is.

Well, yes, if you're interested in it and have been given enough guidance to carry it out. But if either of those conditions haven't been met, it can be pretty awful.

Now, I don't know what instruction this class have been given, but too often I've seen students set loose on a task that seemed obvious to the instructor (sometimes me), but that simply hadn't been well enough thought out. I wonder what I would do if somebody asked me to write a short paper comparing two engine parts with overlapping roles, like the, um, well, I'm sure you can come up with an example.

(BTW, I'm not saying it's a bad assignment. I think I might actually use it myself.)

Happy belated birthday Thomas

The Ridger has a wonderful birthday homage to Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin's friends and staunchest backers. To be honest, I'd never heard of Huxley before, but among other things, he coined the word agnostic.

Don't even mention the word

Citizenship Minister Mike Colle, in response to questions in the Ontario Legislature has been evasive and dishonest all week. But, one of his responses struck me as particularly odd. "The former minister (Klees) was in a government that, if you look through Hansard in their nine years in power, see where they even mention the word newcomers or immigration. It was totally ignored."

So, I did. Here's a typical instance:

Hon Helen Johns (Minister of Citizenship, Culture and Recreation, minister responsible for seniors and women): I'd like to thank the member for Ottawa-Orléans for the question. Ontario welcomes all new Ontarians to its borders, whether they come from another country or from another province. But it's important to recognize that although new Canadians coming to Ontario consist of about 55% of all new Canadians, we only receive 40% of the funds from the federal government for settlement services. Of course, this becomes a substantial problem. If you think about the number of new Ontarians we get in the province, we should be receiving about $134 million from the federal government; as opposed to that, we receive about $100 million. So it's really important that Ontario receive its fair share of the settlement dollars from the federal government, and we're looking forward to being able to work with the federal government to get our fair share.

With that money, we invest in newcomer settlement programs which make sure that newcomers are settled as quickly as they can be into Ontario. We also invest in cultural interpreter programs to make sure that violence against women is minimized, and we help new immigrants-

Dissembling in English

To be honest, I'm stretching to make this fit into a blog about English and English teaching, but it pissed me off enough that I sent a letter to the editor of our local paper.

On Monday April 30 2007 a letter from Bob Gordanier, Dufferin County beef producer, board director, Ontario Cattlemen's Association was published expressing his "disappointment with an advertisement placed in the Orangeville Banner on April 17 (page 22)." He characterises the advertisement as a kind of 'force-feeding of misleading information'. I hardly see how consumers are being forced to read advertisements in the Banner, but this kind of hyperbole is a good way to start your attack when you really have no substantial points to make. This is but the first of Gordanier's standard rhetorical ploys in his dissembling letter.

He begins his "clarification" by providing nutritional information about lean beef. Ploy number 2: when you have no pertinent information to add to the discussion about the environmental effects of beef, change the topic. He continues along this line by saying that "Canada's Food Guide encourages Canadians to enjoy one to three servings of meat and alternatives, such as lean beef, every day." The implication is that people should eat meat. Yet, Canada's Food Guide explicitly supports a vegetarian diet.

Gordanier "explains" that "livestock production (is) sustainable (humans have been farming animals for 5,000 years, after all)." Ploy number 3: us false analogies. What this argument ignores is the fact that the means of production has changed dramatically. What's more, intensive and unsustainable agricultural practices have been the downfall of numerous civilisations throughout history.

Finally, consider Gordanier's claim that grazing animals "more than doubles the land area that can be used to produce food." Ploy number 4: distract with statistics. The above claim may be technically correct, but consider the difference between doubling the land area that can be used to produce food and doubling the food produced in a given land area. Current agricultural land use could be dramatically cut if livestock farming disappeared. According to the USDA, growing the crops necessary to feed farmed animals requires nearly half of the United States' water supply and 80% of its agricultural land (source). Additionally, animals raised for food in the U.S. consume 90% of the soy crop, 80% of the corn crop, and a total of 70% of its grain. I expect the numbers would be similar in Canada.

The facts remain that, for most Canadians, moving to a vegetarian diet will reduce our environmental impact.

---------
Next week, I think I'll take Gordanier's letter and feed it to my level 6 class to see how far they can go in identifying all the BS.

Clitics and affixes

This afternoon, I caught the last few minutes of CBC's And Sometimes Y, hosted by Russell Smith's. (These half-hour programs on English tend to be much better than Smith's occasional language pieces in the Globe & Mail.) In the bit I caught, author Michael Winter was justifying his abandonment of quotation marks and most apostrophes in his novel (novels?). Smith asked him about his practice of writing don't as dont. He said something to the effect that he just didn't see the point in constantly reminding readers that two words had been sandwiched together.

Indeed, the apostrophe does commonly occur in situations that can be rewritten as two words. But mostly it's there to stand in place of missing letters. It turns out that Winter actually knows this. On his blog, he writes,

"I just decided one day, what's up with this symbol that tells the reader of a contraction. That two words have been sandwiched and a letter or two left out. Why do I have to remind the reader of this grammatical omission."

Still, Winter's characterisation isn't entirely accurate. The fact that something can be decomposed into two words is merely coincidental to the apostrophe. Consider workin', ma'am, and gov't. In most of the seemingly combined words, the apostrophe doesn't even come at the boundary of the two words. It does in can|'t, but not in words like is|n't or does|n't.

I didn't write this to nitpick Winter's minor misstatement (he's got some good points and makes them in an engaging way; you can listen here from about the 20-minute mark.) No, the interesting part of this is that the n't ending on auxiliary verbs isn't really a contraction at all. Rather, it's an inflection.

In contractions, we have constituents, like the 're in we're, that are called clitics. It's often hard to distinguish between clitics and bound morphemes such as -ing, or -tion, but there are a number of good reason (discussed in Pullum & Zwicky, 1983) to argue that the n't ending has become an inflectional affix. I'll look at a few here.

1. Clitics are promiscuous, attaching to a wide range of words, but affixes are picky and arbitrary.
2. Phonological and semantic changes in the root are more typical of affixes than of clitics.

First, here are some clitics: 's = is, 're = are, 've = have. These can attach not just to nouns, but to prepositions, verbs, adjectives, even conjunctions:

• The horse you rode in on's leaving.
• something specific happening which relates to the press release but's not part of it
  

Affixes, in contrast, only go with certain classes of words: plural -s only with nouns, -ing only with verbs, and n't only with auxiliary verbs. It won't attach to other verbs (e.g., *maken't). In fact, it won't even attach to all auxiliaries. You find amn't only in certain dialects and *ben't just doesn't work at all.

Second, when the clitics attach, you rarely have to change the pronunciation of your root. For example, you don't get something like I have, changing to *ee've or any other such thing. With affixes, however, you have oddities like won't, don't and ain't.

Perhaps the most relevant point for ESL teachers, is that you can't always just switch a not to an n't. In sentences like the following, the auxiliary simply isn't directly followed by the not.

• Can you not see what's before your eyes?
• *Can youn't see what's before your eyes?
• Can't you see what's before your eyes?
  

And sometimes even when there is a not right after a verb that can be an auxiliary, the n't chooses to go with the actual auxiliary. (fixed Aug 17, 2008)

• Could they have not done something else?
• *Could they haven't done something else?
• Couldn't they have done something else?

There's more in the paper, but that's enough for now.

Colour perception/discrimination/categorisation

New Scientist Magazine's Roxanne Khamsi reports on a recent study that claims to support the Whorfian hypothesis. The lead author is quoted as saying, "this is the first time that evidence has been offered to show cross-linguistic differences in colour perception in an objective task." That seemed a striking claim to me, so I tried to get a look at the original paper. Unfortunately, it's subscribers only, but here's the abstract (a good summary is here).

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues ("goluboy") and darker blues ("siniy"). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

The keywords linked to the article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where the study is published are "categorization | cross-linguistic | Whorf".

So, is perception the same as discrimination / categorisation? When I first read this, I took perception to be sense 3a in Merriam-Webster's, "3 a : awareness of the elements of environment through physical sensation [color perception]". Given this meaning, it strikes me as quite different from discrimination. But according to A Dictionary of Psychology, "In psychology, a distinction is conventionally drawn between sensation , the subjective experience or feeling that results from excitation of sensory receptors, and perception, sensory experience that has been interpreted with reference to its presumed external stimulus object or event."

This choice of a technical sense of the word over the everyday one is probably second nature to the psychologist (just as a lawyer might go for conclusory without knowing that it would mean nothing to most of us), but it might throw off the layperson.

ESL/ESD funding in Ontario schools

The 2005 Report of the Auditor General of Ontario's had a section dealing with ESL/ELD (English Literacy Development) in our public schools. The summary is reproduced below.

We found that while the Ministry provides school
boards with approximately $225 million a year of
English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) and English-
Literacy-Development (ELD) grants, it had no infor-
mation about whether students whose first lan-
guage is not English were achieving appropriate
proficiency in English. In addition, the Ministry had
no information on how much school boards were
actually spending on ESL/ELD programs. Infor-
mation we received from one board indicated that
more than half of its ESL/ELD funding was spent on
other areas.
This lack of oversight of ESL/ELD program
delivery resulted in some concerns similar to those
raised in our 1993 audit report on Curriculum
Development. Specifically, the considerable discre-
tion that school boards and in some cases individ-
ual schools have with respect to ESL/ELD programs
increases the risks of students with similar needs
being provided with different levels of assistance
depending on which school or board is delivering
the program. In addition, the lack of a centrally co-
ordinated process to develop ongoing training pro-
grams for teachers and various instructional aids
results in under-investment in these areas and may
lead to some duplication of effort by school boards.
In particular, we found that:
• The Ministry had not established a measurable
English-proficiency standard that ESL/ELD stu-
dents should attain before ESL/ELD services are
discontinued. Some teachers we interviewed
were concerned that services to ESL/ELD stu-
dents were discontinued prematurely due to
budget considerations.
• There was a lack of tools to help teachers to
properly assess the starting point and progress
of students in achieving English proficiency and
to determine whether additional assistance was
needed.
• Although the Ministry has recommended that
teachers modify the standard curriculum expect-
ations for, and provide accommodations (for
example, extra time on tests) to, ESL/ELD stu-
dents, it did not provide much guidance on
how to adapt the standard curriculum expecta-
tions for students who are learning English. The
lack of guidance has resulted in inconsistent
practices.
• Neither report cards nor student records had
sufficient information about modifications to
standard expectations or accommodations pro-
vided to ESL/ELD students. As a result, parents,
principals, and school boards were not in a posi-
tion to evaluate the appropriateness of the modi-
fications and accommodations or their impact

Note the reference to the 1993 report. Anyhow, this time around all would be fixed, according to Dalton McGuinty. In December, 2005, responding to a question from Frank Klees, McGuinty said,

"the Minister of Education did meet with the Auditor General and asked if he might receive specific advice on how we can better track those dollars. We have, moving forward, sweatered (sic) all new ESL funding so that it must be spent on ESL. But we want to make sure now that we are in fact doing the kind of independent tracking that absolutely assures all of us, but especially the parents of children affected, that this money is going to benefit them." (I assume that sweatered is a transcription error and that McGuinty meant something like earmarked.)

Yes, well, in 2006, a report from People for Education (echoing their 2002 report) went like this:

• "The number of schools with ESL programs has declined from 58% in 1997/98 to 36% in 2005/06.
  
• The number of schools with ESL teachers has declined from 41% in 1998/99 to 27% in 2005/06.
  
• In schools with ESL students, 51% report this year that they have no ESL teachers, compared to 33% in 1999/00.
  

The results are even more dramatic in schools in the Greater Toronto Area.

• 71% of all Ontario’s ESL students are in the GTA.
  
• Only 51% of GTA schools have ESL teachers, a decline from 55% last year, and 68% in 1999/00.
  
• The percentage of GTA schools with ESL students but no ESL teachers has more than doubled over the last five years—from 16% in 1999/00 to 42% in 2005/06.
  
• Despite recent increases in funding for ESL, the number of GTA schools reporting ESL students but no ESL teacher increased from 32% in 2004/05 to 42% in 2005/06.
  

The report says that school boards are forced to use their ESL funding to cover overall costs for things like teachers’ salaries, school principals and secretaries, and heat and light for their school buildings. It cites figures published on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) website showing that the TDSB received over $80 million in funding for ESL in 2005/06. Of that, only approximately $35 million actually was spent on ESL programs."

But that was only a few months after the Auditor General's report. No time to actually implement those changes. Surely by they next year though...

So, can you guess the contents of a report released today? I won't even bother posting a summary.

Coincidentally, CBC reported on April 18^th that the Ontario government is planning to do something about this issue.

"According to the draft policy obtained by CBC News, ESL funding from the Ministry of Education will be for the "direct benefit" of English language learners.

Education Minister Kathleen Wynne has confirmed the government is developing a new policy for ESL, but wouldn't say whether boards will be forced to allocate ESL grants to those programs. The policy will be put into place in time for the new school year in September."

I wonder if this is the same policy that in 2005 ensured that "all new ESL funding... be spent on ESL". I hope not.

In through a second language

New Scientist Magazine has an interesting piece (requires subscription) about an autistic girl named Isabel.

"She couldn't read or write and, like many autistic children, didn't like talking to anyone but herself. At 5, she could speak only 200 words, all nouns, mostly Disney characters or Thomas the Tank Engine trains. She had just learned to say "Mommy" and "Daddy". For three years, my wife Joyce and I had battled Isabel's inability to relate to people, and she had made steady progress."

When Isabel's teacher introduced her to Linnea in Monet's Garden, it started the family on a journey to the garden in Giverny.

"Call the trip extravagant, but that single day in Giverny transformed her in a way we never anticipated. She started saying words in French so often that we enrolled her in a French class. It was like speech therapy - simple conversation in pretend social settings - and she blossomed. She absorbed the vocabulary and pronunciation with such speed that her teacher asked if her mother was French.

One day, she approached a stranger walking his dog and asked: "Le chien est gentil?" I translated: "Is your dog nice?" He nodded yes, and Isabel, who had been terrified of dogs for years, touched the top of its head.

Few experts would suggest that a child with autism study a foreign language, but it worked for her. She applied the French lessons to new situations, at home and in public. The people she spoke to didn't speak French, but it didn't matter to us. She was interacting with the world."

Shibboleth

John McIntyre, the Baltimore Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk (long title), in shooting down complaints about a split infinitive, writes

It is a "rule" created by grammarians that has no foundation. H.W. Fowler, writing 80 years ago, and Theodore Bernstein, writing 40 years ago, made plain that opposition to the split infinitive is a mere shibboleth.

To me, a shibboleth is a pronunciation or other linguistic peculiarity that marks its user as belonging to a given group. It refers to the episode in Judges xii:5-6.

5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;

6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.

The American Heritage Dictionary provides this definition:

1. A word or pronunciation that distinguishes people of one group or class from those of another. 2a. A word or phrase identified with a particular group or cause; a catchword. b. A commonplace saying or idea. 3. A custom or practice that betrays one as an outsider.

But clearly this is not the sense that McIntyre has in mind. Of the AHD definitions, only 2b might fit in the situation, but saying that something is merely a commonplace idea is not an attack on its veracity.

Merriam Webster gets closer.

1 a : a word or saying used by adherents of a party, sect, or belief and usually regarded by others as empty of real meaning shibboleths come rolling off their lips -- Joseph Epstein> b : a widely held belief shibboleth is a myth -- L. A. Wood> c : TRUISM, PLATITUDE shibboleth that crime does not pay -- Lee Rogow>
2 a : a use of language regarded as distinctive of a particular group shibboleth of social class -- Vivian Ducat> b : a custom or usage regarded as distinguishing one group from others shibboleth, its hour dividing mankind -- Osbert Sitwell>

1a is almost what we're looking for, but "opposition to the split infinitive" is nether a word nor saying. Interestingly, the three learner dictionaries that I consulted all provide definitions that match McIntyre's use exactly:

• an old idea, custom, or principle that you think is no longer important or suitable for modern times -Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (this is the only sense they define)
• 1 an old idea, principle or phrase that is no longer accepted by many people as important or appropriate to modern life: the crumbling of old political shibboleths -Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
• If you describe a popular idea or belief as a shibboleth, you mean that it may be meaningless or wrong although many people believe it -Collins COBUILD English Dictionary.

(Whether this proves it or not, British ESL lexicography is really leading the field.)

The Online Etymology Dictionary explains, "Figurative sense of 'watchword' is first recorded 1638, and it evolved by 1862 to 'outmoded slogan still adhered to.'" The interesting thing about McIntyre's use is that it may help us see how shibboleth got from there to here. Use of the split infinitive by one group is used as a shibboleth by another (we have progressed from slaughter to mere disparagement.) However, a third group looks at this test and points out that the shibboleth has no factual basis.

It makes a good folk etymology at least.

English, Jack in the second century

This is just a gratuitous, self-congratulatory, self-fulfilling remark to recognise that English, Jack now features over 100 posts.

3500 or so English grammar rules

David Crystal has been blogging for about five months now. In one of his recent post, he explains his assertion (not to be taken too seriously) that there are 3500 English grammar rules. It's a factoid I think I may pass along to students if the opportunity arises--with caveats, of course.

Today's most unfortunate analogy

This morning, Federal Environment Minister John Bair, speaking on CBC's The Current, said that if, in the future, the new climate-control plan doesn't appear to be doing enough, "we can always put our foot on the gas."

Flick off campaign

Driving in this morning, I heard a number of Ontario's politicians on the CBC complaining about the new anti-global warming flick off campaign promoted by Environment Minister Laurel Broten. The campaign is targeted at teens and young adults, and it's just a bit too edgy to be appropriate, they say.

On the radio, the link between flick off and fuck off didn't jump out at me at all. When you look at the stylised logo, however, it becomes clear that the association is intentional.




The website also includes heading such as "ARE WE FLICKED" and "GO FLICK YOURSELF".

I can't say I find it offensive, but it does strike me as gratuitous and puerile.

Foreign Languages at Drake University

An article from Inside Higher Ed, describes the drastic changes in Drake University's approach to teaching foreign languages (note, this doesn't seem to apply to teaching English). In their DULAP program, they have removed most of their language faculty and replaced them with native-speaking informants.

Before they begin their language studies, students take a course in language-learning strategies, taught by a faculty member. This, I think, is a great first step in a situation where you have many speakers of one language planning to study other languages. It would be much more difficult to implement in a many-to-one situation like ESL, especially with low-level students, but we already try to incorporate some of this in our program here, admittedly, at a very limited level.

After that, students meet their native-speaking informants regularly in groups of 5 (4:1). This is certainly a great opportunity and is something else that would prove popular and useful in most schools.

Of course, the contentions are around the role of professional faculty, specifically regarding accountability and quality. Not all the faculty is gone. There remains a skeleton staff. The program is supervised by a faculty member, and faculty also act as a consultants to the students and oversee their progress. Presumably they are in charge of assessment and grading, if such is part of the program.

But I think that removing most of the faculty is drastic and unwarranted. It devalues their role as anything but instructors (I assume that the informants are not carrying out research duties.) And it ignores much recent research showing the value of judicious instruction in grammar and vocabulary (again I assume that informants are not doing this kind of teaching.) All in all, it does look very much like a move motivated largely by the cost-savings.

The interesting part is that it seems to have been the university faculty themselves who voted to scrap the old structure. This likely speaks to the low regard in which the teaching and learning of languages are held. I know this is confounding TESL and the teaching of foreign languages, but few universities in Canada or the states give credit for English language classes. In fact, many English language programs are completely ancillary to the rest of the university. They often have no professors, only instructors, many of whom have only an unrelated B.A. and a TESL certificate.

Getting back to foreign languages, it would be interesting to see a program that combines the best of DULAP with the more traditional models. That, however, would probably cost more money, not less, so it's not likely to appear any time soon.

English, Jack = State?

On a narcissistic search for blogs that link to this one, I typed in [link:english-jack.blogspot.com] and Google's Blog Search asked,
Did you mean: State

I can't get it to replicate it though...

(Oops! I tried again and this time they ask, Did you mean: rugby)

Extensive Reading Awards

This from Tom Robb:

Every year, the Extensive Reading Foundation recognizes the best new graded readers in English. The finalists for the 2007 Language Learner Literature Award were announced last Saturday at the IATEFL Conference in Aberdeen, Scotland (see list at the end of this message).

The ERF solicits teachers with students who can help evaluate the finalist books. This year the Award will be given in four categories: Young Learners, and three categories for Adolescents & Adults: Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced.

In cooperation with the publishers, the ERF will arrange for two copies of each finalist book in one category to be sent to ten teachers per category who meet the following criteria:

1) The teacher or school has an extensive reading class or program in place to which the supplied titles can be added.
2) Students can read, evaluate and vote for the books by the July 20 deadline.

Students who read all the books in the category may directly cast their vote at the URL at the end of this message. Alternately, groups in the class, or the class as a whole may discuss the merits of the books and cast a group vote.

To apply, send your request to trobb@cc.kyoto-su.ac.jp stating the category for which you apply, with a brief description of your class, the number of students and their general reading level. Include your postal mailing address and contact telephone number. In the event of more than 10 teachers applying in one category, we will select for balance of country and geographical area. Preliminary decisions will be based on requests received by May 5, 2007 but requests after that date will still be honored for any categories that have fewer than 10 recipients.

We apologize that the timing of this announcement may preclude the participation of classes in parts of the world where the school year is about to close.

The finalist books in each category are:

Young Learners (3 books):

"The Boy Who Burped Too Much" (Stone Arch Books); "The Goose Girl" Classic Tales Elementary 2 (Oxford University Press); "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" Classic Tales Elementary 2 (OUP).

Adolescents and Adults

* Beginners (3 books): "Blog Love" Scholastic Readers Starter Level (Mary Glasgow/Scholastic); "Let Me Out" Cambridge English Readers Starter Level (Cambridge University Press); "The Story of Chocolate" Easyread Level One (Black Cat).

* Intermediate (4 books): "Crossroads to Love" Teen Readers Level 3 (Aschehoug/Alinea); "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" Penguin Readers Level 3 (Pearson); "Rabbit-Proof Fence" Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 3 (OUP); "Strong Medicine" Cambridge English Readers Level 3 (CUP).

* Advanced (2 books): "The Age of Innocence" Bookworms Library Stage 5 (OUP); "Barchester Towers" Oxford Bookworms Library Stage 6 (OUP).

See The Extensive Reading Foundation for further information about the LLL Award and how you may order your personal copies of the finalist books.

I haven't read any of these books, but I'll be ordering the adolescent and adult ones for our library.

Ordinate tests

I received this e-mail recently:

I am the assessment teacher of the Calgary Board of Education. My job is to assess the English level of new immigrants from all over the world who come to Canada and then recommend a grade level for them to attend school. Last year our department (of 2 teachers) assessed over 2 thousand students! We have about one hour or so for each student. Can you suggest some "quick and dirty" assessment tools for elementary and / or secondary students?

I asked around and John H.A.L. de Jong suggested what seems to be the closest thing to a solution: Ordinate's Versant test (keep in mind that John works for Pearson Language Assessments, the competition [In 2008, Pearson acquired Ordinate, so John likely had his eye on the acquisition at the time of his recommendation.]). This 10- to 12-minute test is done over the telephone or using a computer and is automatically scored. It is designed for K-12. Although there is likely to be a lot of skepticism about it, there has been a lot of research gone into validating the test (though I can't find any validation data for anyone under age 12) and it has been adopted by the Dutch government, which has concluded that in its use there is "no difference between human and machine scoring".

I remember seeing Jared Bernstein, Ordinate's president, explain his products at a JALT conference about six years ago. Everyone in the room wanted desperately to believe him, but most of us couldn't really bring ourselves to do so. When I actually tried out their PhonePass test, though, I was quite impressed with the results.

Bernstein said at the time that they had a longer version of the test, but it was no more accurate than the shorter version. Still, they made it available as a security blanket. The other odd thing that I remember about it was that the scores were out of some odd number like 13 (that may not be right). Their current tests report scores in the range from 20 to 80, but it seems to me that score users would prefer scores out of 100.

For Better Grammar or for Worse

Is "good grammar" really that difficult to learn? I suppose it depends how far your primary dialect diverges from the target dialect. There's probably a Goldilocks distance. If your dialect is already very close, you're less likely to notice any differences. If, on the other hand, it's too far away, then there will be many things to learn.

This is likely to be true in both directions. But it will depend on a certain awareness of your own dialect as being distinct. I've never been able to identify a Canadian merely on their pronunciation of out or about, but I've been tagged as Canadian because of it a goodly number of times--and by people who have far less interest in language than I do.

ELT Business News

A few notables from the corporate world of English Language Teaching:

1. Lado language schools in Japan have gone bankrupt. There are rumours that the union had just reached some sort of deal with the management days before the bankruptcy.
2. It seems that Thompson Learning, will be bought out by Bertelsmann.

Both items via ELT News.

The frogs are singing!

No, nothing at all to do with English. Just a beautiful spring evening.

Slant Room

Excitement about my brother's first collection of poetry, Slant Room, being accepted for publication by Porcupine's Quill (PQL)! It's not coming out until 2009, mind you, but that's the pace at which these things proceed I'm told. In fact, Michael had been shopping the book around for well over a year but had received few responses. A fortuitous exchange with Zachariah Wells at Career Limiting Moves, though, led to an offer within days.

Michael has won numerous awards including Fiddlehead's Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize and the John Haines Poetry Award from Ice-Floe. He was also shortlisted for the 2005 CBC Literary Award. You can read his poem "Translations of Willow" here, and "Castor Gulo (poem of a beaver becoming a wolverine)" here.

I enjoy his adventurousness with language. One of the distinctive ticks of his style is bold anthimeria, as in this excerpt:

The tightship freshet lifeboats overboard to sea,
floats the saltlick surface glassy green.

Or this:

The hinge of ladder stepped
beneath the window kilters on the grass, and flies the woozy
shadow from the kitchen trying to stop it

Kilter, now there's a good verb. In practice, and in Michael's poetry, anthimeria mostly takes the form of making verbs from nouns, or verbing.

He also plays with licensing nonstandard complements, for example, by using intransitive verbs transitively, as he does here:

The houses round the cul-
de-sac are gutted, all the windows smashed,
poplars suckering the yards.

It would be nice to have some more intact poems to look at. I'll try to convince him to let me put a new piece online.



By the way, it seems that there are too many people with the name Michael Reynolds out there and he's considering using "Michael E. Reynolds" or "Michael Eden Reynolds." Any thoughts?

Sequencing vocabulary

Bob Parks is an educational lexicographer with Wordsmyth. He was exploring the idea that

"a less frequent term might be more important (to receive attention in an ESL class) if it is a superordinate of other more frequent terms whose similarity/semantic relations might not be obvious...

The point is that although "fruit" might be less frequent than "apple" or "pear", it could be considered more "important" because it acts as a vessel into which other instances can be organized and remembered. And conversely, "apple" may be more frequent than "pear" but equal in its "importance" for vocabulary learning."

My feeling is that although his idea is intuitively appealing, it depends on choosing the right examples. As a general rule, hypernyms will be more common than their hyponyms (up to the point of abstraction*). Fruit occurs 40 times per million words in the BNC, while apple occurs only 26. Cooking apple turns up but once, and newtown wonder (a kind of cooking apple) occurs not at all. If we take this the other way, food comes in at 187. This certainly looks like a good rule of thumb.

But it isn't the only possible relationship. If we look at rhetorical tropes, we get a very different pattern. Metaphor scores 9 to figure(s) of speech's 0.5 and trope's 0.18. If we drill down, we get mixed metaphor, dead metaphor, frozen metaphor and synesthetic metaphor, all of which are necessarily less common than metaphor itself.

I think it would be a tough job to convince anyone that trope is a more important word to teach than metaphor merely by dint of its being a direct hypernym. Nor would you get many takers for zeugma or synedoche just because they're sister terms. I don't think it is semantic relationships that matter but frequency.

*When I say "up to the point of abstraction", I mean that once you get higher than 'food' you start dealing with more abstract concepts like substance, matter, or physical entity, none of which are likely to be particularly common.

Theyaculpa

Marvin Kitman takes a humourous look at the recent paroxysm of American apologies.

"Wow. What was going on here, I asked myself. Was this National Apology Week?

The guilty were standing up and taking the blame for mistakes. It was Mea Culpa, instead of the usual Theyaculpa, where the culprit blames the media or anybody else."

Indeed, mea culpa is often preceded by theyaculpa. (There's more ~aculpa play on Language Log.)

Fading eh?

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The Toronto Star has an article about the retreat of the Canadian eh. It was prompted by a study (summarised here) by Sali Tagliamonte, a sociolinguist at the University of Toronto.

The article compares the frequency of I, and, like and eh in the speech of Torontonians, concluding that eh occurs "only" 519 times "accounting for a piddly 0.02% of the total."

Well, Zipf's law tells us that the percent of the total for any given word drops off very quickly. Let's look at a more meaningful measure. First of all, we should standardise our count. In Tagliamonte's corpus, 519 times is 228 times per million words. Now we can rank that against other counts, such as the frequency of words in the spoken conversation subcorpus of the British National Corpus. Doing so would put eh at the 364th most common word, right between everybody and paper. Not so piddly. On the other hand, eh in the BNC is almost twice as common, occuring 460 times per million words, or ranking 236th, so maybe the unique Canadianess of eh is questionable.

Tagliamonte's research just looks at eh at one point in time, so it's hard to make strong claims about any changes, but in an attempt to get around that problem, she's looked at use at different ages. The following chart is from her site:

I'm not sure what exactly the left axis is a percent of. Most likely it is a total of all the tags, but unless the age groups sample sizes were balanced, this could be hard to interpret. [April 17th, I now have confirmation that it is total of all tags, and that the sample sizes were balanced.] Whatever it is, it seems that eh is very unpopular among 17-29 year olds. Does that mean that eh is changing over time, or just that people prefer different tags at various stages in their lives?

For more about the meaning eh, see Mark Liberman's post here.

Verbless clauses with garden paths

CHRYSLER RECALLS PT CRUISERS. Chrysler Group
will begin recalling 38,500 PT Cruiser sedans next month to
replace rear quarter glass with defective fasteners that can
allow the glass to fall out.

With can be a complement to the verb replace in the form replace x with y. It can also occur as a comitative adjunct ascribing a property to another entity. In other words, it can mean x that has y. The latter is certainly the intended meaning, but it wasn't the one that first jumped to mind.

I often suggest to lower-level students that they combine two sentences, such as those below, using with.

• I have a nice watch. It has three buttons on one side.
  
• Becomes: I have a nice watch with three buttons on one side.
  

Generally, you can do this with a simple sentence that has have as the main verb. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language calls these "verbless clauses" because they have subject + predicate structure.

Clearly, though, it's not always the best choice, as Chrysler's recall notice shows.

Clogging your machinery of comprehension in Mauritius

English language education seems to be decried the world over. Mauritius is no different. Writes Raj Paneken,

"The downward trend in English language is attributable to three factors, namely grammar errors, usage of correct tenses and vocabulary spiced with orthography. With an anaemic vocabulary along with a sketchy knowledge of grammar and verbs, the student writes but gropingly."

Rote learning & vocabulary

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Over on the TESL-L list there has been a renewed round of skepticism about the value of rote learning as applied to vocabulary learning.

Before the idea that language acquisition is an innate human ability became widely accepted, rote learning was among the most common methods used by people studying foreign languages, just as it was and still is for acquiring a wide variety of other knowledge and skills. The innateness theory, however, led people to believe that language was somehow special and different, and rote learning fell out of favour. However, language is not the inseparable entity that this idea suggests. Phonology, syntax and vocabulary are all interrelated, but the learnability of each is different.

When researchers talk about an innate language ability, they are not talking about vocabulary. There may be a critical period for acquiring syntax and phonology, but vocabulary is not constrained in this way. Indeed, while a normal child of six has mostly mastered the syntax and phonology of their first language, they have learned only a fraction of their adult vocabulary and will continue to pick up new words and expressions at a fairly constant rate until they complete university. Even then, the deceleration in vocabulary learning has more to do with the dearth of new words in the environment than with the brain.

What I take from this is that vocabulary is learned more or less like any other kind of knowledge or skill. If you look at experts in most areas, from golfers to chess players to doctors to painters, they have spent massive amounts of time observing other experts, massive amounts engaged in the performance of their craft, and massive amounts of time practicing independent aspects thereof, that is learning by rote. This suggest that rote learning, done well, potentially has a significant role to play in learning vocabulary.

The difference between learning chess or painting and learning a language, is that with the first two, you can actually try them out almost right away. You may lose your first five chess games, but you will have spent an enjoyable afternoon doing so. Moreover, most people have no expectations of mastering chess. They're quite satisfied to stay at or near the level at which they began. Not so with language.

Comparatively speaking, there is much more needed in terms of second language vocabulary before you can really start to employ it either receptively or productively. And many people have this notion that they will one day be fluent in the language that they are studying.

Yet far from receiving an instant payback, language learners often find the horizon of proficiency receding into the distance as they progress and the tedium of rote practice begins to overwhelm them before they notice their results. People trying to exercise and be healthy run into similar problems.

This is a long way of saying that all the research we have tells us that rote learning, DONE WELL, is a powerful way to increase vocabulary quickly, but that it is only the disciplined student with sufficient motivation who is likely to travel this route very far.

In my Language I am Smart

Language Hat links to this 2005 audio-art piece by Serbian-born journalist Dragon Todorovic. Anyone who has had to function in another language knows exactly what he means.

Goldilocks

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Mr. Verb's Mr. Verb (variously characterised as mysterious, enigmatic, and ever-vigilant) ended a recent post about the line "Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for intermission. Please intermiss" with the apt observation that intermish would have been too odd and intermit too bookish, but that intermiss was "like Goldilocks' third bear said: 'just right'."

I think my first encounter with the Goldilocks trope was quite recent, and at the time I found it rather arresting. It seems that I wasn't alone. Recently it has been been spreading like a bad BBC science story. Just to make sure this isn't a recency illusion, I did a quick search of Canadian news sources.

The oldest instance I could find was: "The food fits the Goldilocks formula: not too good, not too bad, just right" in The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Aug 25, 1979. pg. P.7 by Adele Freedman, who used it a number of times in the late 70s and early 80s.

The trail then goes cold until the late 80s when we find: ''I call it the Goldilocks approach _ not too big, not too small, but just right." in The Ottawa Citizen. Ottawa, Ont.: Dec 6, 1988. pg. D.16 by Tony Atherton. From then on, there are a few hits a year, but more and more of these are in titles, such as "Goldilocks jury finds sentence is just right"; [Final Edition] The Gazette. Montreal, Que.: Feb 11, 1989. p. A.7.

Most recently, there have been multiple uses per month, one example being "Goldilocks scenario proves right tonic for stocks" John Heinzl. The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: Feb 1, 2007. p. B.15. And a Google news search for [Goldilocks "just right" -"three bears"] turns up multiple hits per week.

Perhaps Paul Davies' book, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life?, which came out in 2006, is one major vector for the recent popularity of this trope. Or not.

The thing that makes the Goldilocks fad, amusing though it is, rather ineffective is that the allusion itself doesn't appear to be very Goldilocks; it's too opaque to dispense with its accompanying "just right".

Bain on rhetoric

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My weekend encounter with Alexander Bain reminded me of my second posting on this blog. At the time, I mentioned my confusion about the writing instruction that was part of our EAP program. When I came to my current position, our 8-level intensive English language program had upper-level students write "extended paragraphs" of 300-500 words. These were not merely monster paragraphs forming part of an assignment; each was to be a complete mini-essays.

We've managed to move away from assigning paragraphs, but there are many other questionable rules of writing that continue to permeate college writing textbooks and seduce composition teachers. Alexander Bain appears to be behind a number of them.

According to James A. Berlin's Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges, paragraph writing (as opposed to composition broadly speaking) got its start in the (North) American college system in the 19th century at a time when college writing was growing in popularity--growing to the point where many classes had daily compositions. The move to paragraphs was partially as a response to the overwhelming amount of marking required from longer compositions. Berlin writes,

"Alexander Bain, a Scottish rhetorician, was the first to discuss the (paragraph) systematically. Having studied actual paragraphs, Bain prescribed a set of six rules:

1. Each sentence must be related to that which preceded it;
2. parallel thought must employ parallel structure;
3. The first sentence of a paragraph should indicate the subject;
4. Each sentence should be appropriately situated within the paragraph;
5. The paragraph must display unity, and;
6. Principal and subordinate parts must be appropriately arranged...

Bain also tended to look upon the six rules as principles without exception, as did those who followed him in their use in the classroom."

He goes on to say that A. D. Hepburn, under Bain's influence, was likely the first, in his 1875 A Manual of English Rhetoric, to argue that a paragraph was a “discussion in miniature”, proposing paragraph types such as definition, contrast, and illustration.

Bain on restrictive relatives

Over at Language Log, they've taken to calling the restrictive that rule "Fowler's Rule". And from what I recall, Merriam Webster's Usage also attributes this to Fowler (1926).

I was trolling Google books for more on coordinating conjunctions, when I came across Alexander Bain's An English Grammar (published in 1863 by Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, one of the various incarnations of Longman). A section in the introduction caught my attention (click for larger images):

This is followed up on p. 23 with the following:

Interestingly, in the examples that Bain supplies to show how which can be ambiguous, he seems to completely overlook the comma, which--at least from this twenty-first-century viewpoint--removes any trace of doubt at all.

So, even if Fowler popularised the rule, Bain claims it as a novelty over 60 years earlier.

The Same in Japanese

Kieran McGovern edits a web site with reading material designed for English language learners. He was recently asking around for materials, so I sent him a short story that I wrote with a language-learner audience in mind. The story, called The same in Japanese is here. If you use it with your students, please let me know what the reaction is.

With 'should', expect the best

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Someone over on the ETJ list asks how to explain the problem with should in the following sentence: If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should die. The intent is not to express some kind of moral outrage about Bombardier, but to suggest that their airplanes are likely to drop from the sky at any moment. Yet, that's not how most native speakers of English would interpret the above.

I'm not really sure why this should be so, though I believe that it must depend to a certain extent on the ability of the addressee to comply with the utterance. Compare:

• If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time for your flight. (advice)
• If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time at your destination. (prediction)

Given this, "...you should *expect* to die" fixes the problem, since expectations are, as long as you're pre-warned, somewhat within your control.

Where the verb denotes something outside of your volition, there seems to be a difference between positive outcomes and negatives (at least in this particular sentence.)

• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should survive. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should die. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should be satisfied with the service. (prediction/advice)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should be dissatisfied with the service. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive on time at your destination. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should arrive late at your destination. (?)
• A. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should have a pleasant trip. (prediction)
• B. If you fly on a Bombardier airplane, you should have an unpleasant trip. (?)

I'm not sure how far this observation can be generalised, but there it is.

Learning languages and lobes

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Merton Bland regularly posts to the TESL-L list. Unfortunately, little of what he has to say is helpful. One of his favorite arguments goes something like this: "If our job is to bifurcate the native and target languages, any instrument (such as a bilingual dictionary) which forges chains to tie the two together is counterproductive." He backs this up with arguments like this: "A true bilingual does his processing of each language in a different hemisphere of the brain." Sometimes he changes hemispheres to lobes.

If there's a need for "bifurcation", it is in separating evidence from ideology.

The claim that a second language is processed in the other hemisphere of the brain is completely absurd as the studies cited below will show. The idea that it is processed in a distinct lobe may or may not be more correct, but it remains misleading.

It is generally agreed that there are five major lobes in the brain. The definition of 'lobe', however, is rather ambiguous and minor lobes are discussed, but not always agreed upon. Furthermore, two areas of the brain that are mainly involved in language are Wernicke's area, which spans the region between temporal and parietal lobes, and Broca's area, which is in the frontal lobe. In other words, language activity usually occurs in different lobes in monolinguals, too, not just in bilinguals.

While late L2 learners do seem to activate different (though typically adjacent) areas of the brain, the research on the overlap or lack thereof of L1 and L2 brain activation is equivocal. A summary by Vivian Cook of some available studies is here.

Bland's point is that teachers should avoid connections between the L1 and L2 (through translation) to dissociate them in the brain. Yet, one idea that seems to come from these brain studies is that the most successful bilinguals are actually those who seem to have the greatest overlap, not the greatest separation. This might mean that connections are good, not bad. Or not. Either way, they are likely inevitable.

Personally, I don't think the brain studies are ready to tell us much about how we should go about teaching language, but they're fun to look at.

If Murdock was right...

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Back in February, Deroy Murdock wrote an article in which he quotes and then incorrects John Kerry.

"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened," John Kerry said during Hezbollah's war on Israel last summer. As 2004's Democratic presidential nominee should know, he should have said, "If I were president ..."

I wrote to ask Murdock what he bases his claim on, but I'm shocked to say, didn't hear back from him. So, I'll explain here why I think Kerry is right both grammatically and politically.

Murdock asks, "is it pedantic to expect linguistic excellence?" "No!" he says, and I agree, no. It does, however, seem pedantic to insist that were in counterfactuals is the excellent option.

We have been using was here for over 400 years, among the earliest-known instances being in the writings of Christopher Marlowe. It was common by the end of the 17th century and was thought acceptable enough to be employed by Defoe, Swift, and Addison and many other great writers.

A search of the British National Corpus (sorry, the American National Corpus isn't completed yet) shows if I was to be about 35% more frequent than if I were, though I have no automatic way of identifying which are actually counterfactuals. Still, it seems safe to say that counterfactual was is common both in speech and in edited prose.

Even prescriptivist usage guides support it. H.W. Fowler wrote, "Subjunctives met with today, outside the few truly living uses, are either deliberate revivals by poets for legitimate enough archaic effect, or antiquated survivals as in pretentious journalism, inflecting their context with dullness, or new arrivals possible only in an age to which the grammar of the subjunctive is not natural but artificial."

In fact, Kerry may have carefully chosen was over were. Where the present tense is the natural choice for clauses we view as facts, the past tense, when it is not indicating past time, often presents hypotheticals. Indeed, since be is the only modern English verb with a distinct irrealis form, most verbs actually rely on the past tense to indicate that the predicate does not currently obtain. But be, with its multiple possible forms, presents us with options. These options may simply be the choice between a formal were and a more colloquial was. But it may be more insidious than that. Formality is distancing, and such distance may create a perception not only that Kerry isn't president, but that he has no hope in hell of ever actually taking office. Possibly true, but not a proposition Kerry would be keen to voice.