Open access publishing

I'm on the editorial adviosry board of the TESOL Journal, a newish journal that is freely available to anyone with a TESOL membership and which otherwise sells articles at the price of $US 35 for 24 hours of online access (+ $4.55 tax). The EAB will be meeting in March at the TESOL convention. Unfortunately, though, I will not be able to attend. Nevertheless, I have put forward a number of proposals for the board to consider:

Proposal 1:
Open access (OA) publishing is a growing trend with more an more schools adopting policies to provide open access to faculty-produced research. In 2009, for example, MIT adopted an open access policy under which faculty grant the school "nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination" (source). Harvard has a similar policy, as do many other schools.

Currently, my understanding is that TJ is published by Wiley-Blackwell and that copyright of the contents is held by TESOL. According to MIT's website, Wiley-Blackwell's licensing agreement with its authors is incompatible with MIT's OA policy and, I would assume, those of other schools. To publish in TJ, then, authors would be required to opt out of their respective schools' OA policies. 

The reality is that more and more authors are refusing to do so. You are no doubt aware of the growing boycott of Elsevier over OA among other issues. And an individual example close to our own field is that of Kai von Fintel, editor of the journal Semantics and Pragmatics.

Given this situation I propose that the TJ board pass a resolution supporting the rights of authors to freely post at least their final manuscript (postprint, after peer review, before typesetting) in open access repositories without any embargo (such as having to wait for 24 months before making the OA version available). 

Proposal 2:
When an author writes a book, typically they retain copyright. When an author publishes a journal article, typically they give up copyright. 

Given that, I propose that rather than requiring authors to vest copyright with TESOL, we allow them to retain copyright. 

Proposal 3:
Copyright is based on the premise that reproduction and distribution should be disallowed as the default option. Other licensing options exist, though, and allow for more flexible distribution options.
Given that, I propose that TJ be published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Proposal 4:
Science should be reproducible, and often the only way to make it so is to make the study's raw data available. With online publishing, technical barriers to sharing raw data have mostly been removed. 

Given this situation, I propose that TJ strongly encourage authors to make their raw data available through TJ for other researchers to use; that, if they choose not to do so, they provide a written explanation; and that this information be considered in deciding whether to accept or reject a paper.

iBooks Author straightjacket

I downloaded iBooks Author, considering using it to publish teaching materials. The license agreement, however, is rather a barrier. Particularly this section:

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows: (i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution. 

So, if you just plan to make your work freely available (like this blog), that's fine. But if you want to sell it at all, then you've got to create it, submit it to Apple, and hope that they will sell it for you. If they refuse, well, you can always give it away.

The exercise is not the game

In football, coaches will put cones on the ground and ask you to dribble the ball around them. This is supposed to improve your accuracy and fluency, but nobody believes that the purpose of this drill is to get better at dribbling around cones. Everybody understands that the purpose is a transfer of skills to a similar but different situation in a real football game.

Things are not so clear when it comes to the teaching of writing. It's pretty typical for writing textbooks and writing teachers to make claims like: "There are two ways of organizing a compare/contrast essay: the common traits method or the similarities/differences method."  Some of them might admit that there are many ways but then present "two of the most common" or some hedge to that effect. What students typically understand from this is: this is how you play the game.

Here's what I tell my students they really mean: When you're practicing to be a better writer, sometimes following a formula or copying a structure is a useful exercise. This simplifies things for you by allowing you to focus on certain elements and ignore others. Don't confuse the exercise with the game though. It's not common for academics, journalists, bloggers, or other self-directed writers to produce five-paragraph compare/contrast essays using "the similarities/differences method." Neither should this be your goal.

Economist wants to teach English

The "Johnson" blog at The Economist is looking for ideas about how the newspaper can make itself more useful to English (language?) teachers.

How do you even write a book like that?

The Sisters Bothers by Patrick deWitt is a fantastic read. Or at least it is so far. The incongruity between the character of the brothers, two hired killers in the 1850s, and the formality of their dialogue is jarring but somehow fully appropriate.

'What's the matter?' asked Charlie, leaning up on his elbow beside the fire.
'A horse.'
'Where is the rider?'
'There is no rider that I can see.'
'If the rider appears, you may wake me.' He turned and fell back asleep. (pp. 76-77)

Grammar and Beyond, a review

Cambridge has a new grammar series called Grammar and Beyond out/in the works. I got a review copy of the level 2 book by Randi Reppen. I first noticed it at the TESL Ontario conference in October and was interested in it because it's the first grammar series for English language learners I've noticed that employs the concept of determiner (please tell me in the comments if you know of others).

Unfortunately, they make a hash of it.

Let's start with the shocking mismatch between the level of grammar and vocabulary knowledge needed to read and understand the text and the level of knowledge that is being conveyed. Anybody who can understand "singular count nouns always have a determiner before them" (p. 82) already knows as much. There is no point in telling them that they should "not use a or an with plural nouns." The people who need to know this won't even be able to read the chapter with its introductory reading which begins, "identity theft is the act of using someone's personal information without permission." I mean, come on! Permission is ranked as lemma #3,254 in Mark Davies' new Word and Phrase Info corpus interface. The indefinite article is #5. For most language learners, that represents a gap of over a year between when they figured out what a means and what permission means. This problem of explaining English grammar in English to people who don't speak much English is a difficult one, but there is no excuse for completely ignoring the issue.

Simple English Wiktionary

About five and a half years ago, I started contributing to the Simple English Wiktionary project. I wanted a good collection of definitions and examples for use in EAP classes, and I didn't want to be tiptoeing around copyright issues.

Why would I do this? There are already some great dictionaries for English language learners (ELLs). My favourite is the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, but it's covered by copyright. English Wiktionary is also very good, and it's copyright free, but it's generally not appropriate for ELLs. I could have just put together my own materials, but I thought I might as well make my work widely available, since the government pays much of my salary, and I hoped that by doing so I would be able to draw in like minded people and benefit from their contributions.

Vending

I won't be out fighting the boxing day crowds today. I saw my family off at the airport. They're already somewhere over Manitoba as I write this and well on their way to Japan. So, now that I'm here at home, I'll sit and do some reading and some blogging, and maybe go in to the gym.

But one this day of sales, I was thinking about vending. I noticed that although the verb vend lives on through its present participle, its other forms are dying. Here's what I mean:

No doubt, vending has been kept on artificial life support by vending machine, which is recorded from 1895, but its other forms are essentially dead. I don't think I've even encountered the word vended; it doesn't show up at all in either the BNC or the COCA. And yet no dictionary I've checked sees fit to point out this morphological lacuna. The blithely list the various forms without comment. Anybody who looks up this word and tries to use, say, the past tense, has been sold a bill of goods by the dictionary. They certainly haven't been vended one.

Number transparency and determiner choice

A noun is said to be number transparent when the verb doesn't agree with it even when it functions as the subject in constructions like, A number of people were there. In this case, the head of the subject is singular number, but nevertheless, were agrees with plural people. What I just realized recently is that there's a big difference between a number and the number. In the COCA, [a number of * are/is] turns up 353 instances of are and only 19 of is, for a ratio of 18.6:1. In contrast, [the number of * are/is] results in only 16 instances of are and  291 of is, for a ratio of 1:18.2, almost exactly inverse.

Other determiners have other patterns. The are to is ratios are:

• any number:  7:2
• this number: 0:2
• that number: 1:4
• some number: 1:0
• etc.

So, this bothers you, does it?

I thought I was reasonably aware of common linguistic peeves. I generally don't like them because I don't like to dislike things, but I do understand them. Some people don't like 'free gift' as well as 'for free' - I understand. Some detest 'literally' used non-literally - all right, I get it.

But starting a sentence with 'so'? We all do, don't we? Who among us has never uttered 'So how are you?'?

Well, apparently, it is worse than I thought. Or at least it appears to be trendy to detest it - here is an interesting clip from BBC Today. There is also a New York Times article on the subject, reflecting the rise of the usage.

For now my biggest question is, will I now be able to enjoy listening to the immortal piece 'Wish You Were Here' by Pink Floyd (which starts with a double 'so': 'So, so you think you can tell ...') like I have done so many times -  or will this stupid peeve thing somehow ruin the tune?

Complex determinatives

[Somewhat edited after Ran's comment]
A colleague asked if the structure of the following phrases was the same:

1. a group of the students
2. the groups of students
3. one of the students

I told her, much to her relief, that I thought [1] and [2] were basically the same, but that [3] was different. She had been discussing this with some PhDs in linguistics who had been arguing that all three were partitive constructions and that what preceded student(s) was a (complex) determiner.

This brought to mind a section from a paper I've been working on, which is reproduced below. Here, I'm discussing the category of determinatives as presented in The Grammar Book 2nd edition by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman.

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Questions are treated in chapter 13, which implies at least the following additions: whose, which, what (p. 249). Quantifiers are covered in chapter 17. "Quantifiers can be determiners or when the referent is clear, pronouns" (p. 330). The following list is given: Positive: some, a few, several, a couple of, a little, quite a few, quite a little, (a great) many, a (good) number of, a lot of, a great deal of, a good deal of, almost all, most, and all; Negative: none, no, not any, few, hardly any, scarcely any, little, just a few, only a few, just a little, only a little, not many, not much, not all, many… not, and most… not. Other quantifiers are listed in TGB on pages 277, and 334-335.

Clearly, this list represents a significant expansion on what is considered a determiner by the dictionaries. The inclusion of adverbs such as hardly, just, and not suggest those expressions including them are determiner phrases rather than determiners per se, but it is harder to account for the complex items such as a good deal of and a lot of. [7] Far from being determiners, these items are not even constituents. Rather they are sequences of the form a (adj) N of, differing from other combinations like a box of, or a carload of chiefly in that they do not typically dictate subject verb agreement in cases like A lot of students understand the value of a university degree (not *A lot of students understands…).

The main reason to believe that they are not constituents is that unlike the core members such as many, every, and this, you cannot remove the following noun and have them stand on their own. Compare:

I ate too much sushi.      à        I ate too much.

I ate a lot of sushi          à        *I ate a lot of.

Moreover, in relative constructions, the of is placed at the front, before the relative pronoun:

a lot of the damage remains unseen      à

the damage, of which a lot remains unseen

It is clear that of is part of the preposition phrase of which, in which case it cannot be part of a complex determiner a lot of. Add to this the fact that these exist in both singular and plural versions (e.g., a lot/lots of), and that they may be internally modified (e.g., a very great deal of), and it becomes clear the constructions with couple, number, lot, and deal are simply the structure a (adj) N of.

            Beckner and Bybee (2009) argue that these kinds of chunks often become constituents over time. One could hardly question this claim, given such words as everyone, breakfast, and nonetheless. They further claim that changes are gradual rather than abrupt, which also seems undeniable if we're dealing with language across populations. But the simple observation that some strings become constituents is not evidence for any particular string having done so. In building their case, they take the example of in spite of, which bears some similarity to a lot of, and argue that it has become a compound preposition. In particular, they point out how commonly spite appears in this string: in spite is followed by of in 99.50% of its occurrences in the Corpus of Current American English (Davies, 2008-). It is possible that strings like a lot of, are on their way to lexicalization, but currently a lot is followed by of only 72.12% of the time (Davies, 2008-). They further argue that the meaning of in spite of is far from the original meaning of spite. The same cannot be said of a lot of and lot, in particular the meaning of the plural lots. So, while these are certainly collocations worth bringing students' attention to, they are not yet constituents, and thus, not determiners. In this respect, the dictionaries had it right.

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Lesson Plan Competition

The TESL Toronto blog has just posted a link to the IATEFL BESIG & Cambridge University Press Lesson plan competition. If you've never commercially published teaching materials and you teach business English, this might be an interesting opportunity to get some recognition.

Different of the people

A number of years ago, when I was still struggling to understand, even at a fairly basic level, what a determinative was, I suspected that different might be one. Not always of course.  Clearly different is usually an adjective. But I had a feeling that it also had a secret life as a determinative. Try as I might, though, I couldn't find any evidence that it was. Until now.

At dinner tonight, my mother was telling an anecdote, and she said "different of the people commented that Marg could be unpleasant." I'm not surprised about Marg--most of us can be unpleasant at times--but I was elated to hear different used that way, and from my own mother nonetheless.

You see, adjectives just can't do that. You can't say happy of the people or good of the shirts. You can't even say brown of the crayons or interesting of the movies. But you can say different of the people. Or, at least, my mom can.

Even you surrender

New Grammarology 2.0 post up at the TESL Toronto site. This time I look at the common misuse of even by English language learners and some interesting properties of focussing adverbs.

The evening/that evening

We just finished reading Salman Rushdie's Luka and the Fire of Life, and the kids and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But just as we were wrapping up, I stumbled in my reading, and that cool evening came out as the cool evening. Those of you who have read the book will know that a small stumble can take you out of one world and into another. In this case, it briefly took me into the world of syntax.

You see, even though, decontextualized, most of us don't see much difference between the evening and that evening, my slip actually made the entire sentence ungrammatical. I'll let you think about what context that might be true in and then explain after the jump.

Feedback on English Accent Coach

A few days ago, I posted about a site called English Accent Coach. I've had a bit of feedback, which I passed on to Ron Thomson. He's given me permission to post it here.

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This is very useful info for me. Thanks so much. It will help me build an FAQ page for the site. It also confirms that the best way to make this effective is to really train teachers or better help them to understand the science behind the site as some of these comments reflect common misconceptions about how pronunciation develops – and I wouldn’t expect any teacher to know this. I’ll try answering some of these in turn if it might be of help to teachers/learners.

Kids have trouble with language too

A recent research paper from StatsCan by Miles Corak shines an interesting light on the general assumption that, although immigrant adults from a non-English/French background will struggle with language when the arrive in Canada, their children will just soak it up like sponges. The abstract says,

"The education outcomes of a cohort of immigrants who arrived in Canada as children were examined using the 2006 Census, and it was found that there may be a distinct pattern in the risk of immigrant children graduating from high school according to age at arrival. The risks of not completing high school do not vary according to age at arrival up to about the age of 9, with children arriving after that age appearing to face a distinct and growing increase in the risk that they will not graduate. Children who migrate may face different challenges in attaining high school credentials, according to their age at immigration, as a result of sensitive periods in the acquisition of a second language or the structure of the education system."

English Accent Coach

Ron Thomson at Brock U has put together a  website to help students learn to distinguish between English vowels and consonants. It's currently in Beta, and will be changing a bit in the next few weeks, but it looks quite useful. It's also likely good for TESL students learning about phonology and pronunciation.

It's a game-like interface that plays syllables or words containing target phonemes that have to then be identified. The sound quality is high and the the pronunciations are varied but natural. I would strongly recommend using earphones rather than speakers.

"Third-person singular voice"

My students have an assignment to summarize a chapter from an introductory textbook in their field, and I recommend that they vet the chapter with me before proceeding. One student brought me Civil Law and Litigation for Paralegals by Neal R. Bevans (McGraw-Hill, 2008), which had the following blurb in the front matter:

"The author has adopted the convention of employing 'he or she' whenever the text demands the use of the third-person singular voice." (p. ix) 

Almost vs most

I have a new "Grammarology 2.0" column up here on the TESL Toronto blog.