READ 3

READ Issue 3 (ISSN 2221-3740) has been published, thanks to the hard work and tenacity of Tom Le Seelleur, the persistence, discipline and attention of Gill Knight & a few bits & pieces by me. We also owe a debt to Sudeep of IPP, who always ensures a professional appearance and finish.

READ 3 contains articles by well-known writers such as Charlie Higson, Helena Frith Powell,  Fíodhna Gardiner-Hyland, Peter Viney and Paul Nation as well as practicing teachers such as Louise Ragan, Susan Saafan, Ghassoub Mustafa, Alicia Salaz, Marion Engin and Shaheena Fazaldin.

Issue 3 also focuses on the charitable organisation 'Room to Read' and the Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature, which will the main focus of the next issue.

There are a few sample pages below.

Visualisation - Thesis:Topic:Sentence::Conclusion:MainPoint:Point

In an attempt to show how students can short-cut their learning, by applying the same concept at different levels of language (just like tense and aspect, but that's another post), I tried to illustrate the relationship between a Thesis Statement, Topic Sentence and Theme and their relationship with the Point, a Main Point and a Conclusion (and the relationship between those items), as the general progression from what you are talking about to what you want to say. The diagram came out looking like like the one here.

The idea, from SFL, is that Macro-Themes (aka Thesis Statement in academic writing / composition) project to Hyper-Themes (or Topic Sentences) which project to Themes in clauses. Similarly, a Conclusion is a Macro-New, or the accumulation of Hyper-News (main points of the paragraphs) which are the accumulation of the New from each clause in a sentence. This is not a new idea, as it comes from Jim Martin's "English Text" (John Benjamins, 1992). I just thought I could re-visualise it and apply it directly to the pedagogic context.

And then I thought, would it be possible to develop this into an animation. I have not tried to use Flash animation for a very long time (a few years at least) so I thought I should try and revive my previous very low level of skills. This may have been a very misguided thought, but since Blogger refuses to upload the Flash movie you will just have to take my word for it!

HumBox

Various initiatives to provide shared, open-learning objects have been proposed, particularly from disciplines in engineering and medicine. Now we have the opportunity to contribute, share and download learning objects from the Humanities, through HumBox. This is a UK-based project, and has shown steady growth since its start last year. The aim is as follows: "to publish a bank of good quality humanities resources online for free download and sharing, and in doing so, to create a community of Humanities specialists who were willing to share their teaching materials and collaborate with others to peer review and enhance existing resources" (from the HumBox website).


The HumBox website is supported by HEA (including the LLAS) and JISC, and hosted by Southampton University. You can browse and download materials at any time, and you can quickly create an account so that you can upload materials or add comments to what is already on the site. Linguistics currently has 33 resources, but you will also find other useful other tags such as Language, Language Learning, Language Teaching, Language Variation, TESOL, TEFL, Teaching English, Text Cohesion and so on.


The advantages of the website have been blogged at the LLAS site (see the feed on the top right of this blog) by Kate Borthwick. Kate explains how HumBox might help you in the following ways:

1. Use your OER repository as your personal website.
2. Avoid carrying paper/USBs with you when you present at conferences.
3. Refine and polish your teaching material following review by colleagues.
4. Find useful resources to adapt or use if teaching a class at short notice.
5. Enhance your digital presence and international reputation.
6. See how other practitioners approach particular topics and keep up with developments in your discipline.
7. Get good ideas for enhancing your practice and reflect on what you do.
8. Use OER early in your career to glean ideas, and showcase work and teaching experience.
9. See perspectives from other humanities disciplines.
10. Feel confident in adapting and re-using other people’s materials.

When they hear about shared online resources, a lot of lecturers believe that they will never have to prepare a powerpoint again. They naturally become very disappointed when they find out that other people teach the same subject in a very different way, that their students do not share the same assumptions as the materials or that the materials are not to the standard that they would produce (not to mention problems with logos, names and copyrights). What I like about the list above is that the comments are very realistic about the use of shared resources. Sharing resources does not mean using the web to cut-and-paste classes. It means sharing ideas, making sure other people (especially those that pay you) are aware of your work, providing inspiration and acknowledging colleagues and fellow professionals. 

Descartes' Error

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
by António R. Damásio
Penguin (Non-Classics), 2005 (first published 1994)

The book starts with neuroscience's cause celebre - a man whose head was pierced by a metal stake that passed through his neck and out of the top of his head. The fact that he survived is astonishing, and is where many neuroscientists in the past have stopped, having proven some point or another about neuroanatomical structure. Damasio not only provides us with gorgeous detail about the tragic accident that resulted in Phineas Gage's custom-made tamping rod exploding through his skull, he also follows Gage after his initial recovery into a tragic story of the downfall of a once-proud man. As well as Gage, Damasio offers many more intriguing stories of brain damage and other ailments that affect the way that we operate in our social environments and in doing so he makes a very strong case for the reintegration into science of emotion. Damasio complains that emotion has been ignored for too long - perhaps because of the over-riding desire to be logical and "scientific".

Even if (as Descartes would have us believe) it is possible to think and act logically, that does not mean that we cannot logically study the emotions. On the contrary, it is the passion, insight, intuition and inspiration that has produced the greatest advances in science - great innovators just knew they were right even when nobody else believed it. More specifically, Damasio argues that it is precisely when people lose their ability to evaluate emotionally that they become paralysed by logical thought. Certain syndromes result in people being unable to choose the right option, even when one may involve losing a job or a friendship. Damasio's answer is to propose a model of thought that gives the emotions a key part in cognitive processes, and demanding that the Dualism so popular in science that follows Descartes is consigned to the history books.

If you are not entirely convinced that emotion plays a part in our most logical thought processes, consider these 2 points:
1. Descartes reasoned that the only truth any of us can be sure of is that "I think therefore I am". One error he made was that he did not take his logical analysis 1 step further. How do we know we think? We feel we know. Without the feeling that we know we would not be so sure that we think. This is not how Descarte's error is explained in the book, but it is what I have learned from it.
2. Our primary sense is not vision. It may be the one we are most aware of using, but vision depends on another sense: Touch. Not touch at the end of the fingertips, but touch as our whole skin. We touch our environment by taking a position within it, and only when we know where we are and how we are situated in our environment can we start using our other senses as comparative measures. We feel who we are and where we are. Without touch we have no awareness, and without awareness we have no thought.

You guessed it... another Goodreads review

Project Nim

A film about linguistics... in the cinema. Who woudda thunk?!?!?

Nim Chimpsky has refound fame - albeit posthumous. (Nim died of a heart attack in 2000, aged 26.) From James Marsh, the man who brought us the brilliant 'Man on Wire' documentary as a 'heist', comes Project Nim about the chimpanzee who was taught by humans to sign as a story of  abandonment by (almost) every human who was supposed to care for him. Based on the book by Elizabeth Hess, this is a story of the inhumane treatment by humans of an animal that became a member of a family, the subject of a scientific experiment, a laboratory test animal and a legal test case.

Originally envisaged as a means of showing how animals can acquire syntax, thereby disproving Noam Chomsky's (hence the name - geddit?!?) assertion about unique human abilities to learn language, and apparently as a way to make the main investigator, Herbert Terrace, famous, it seems Nim never conformed to humans' expectations. Surprisingly, he turned out to be a chimpanzee - but one who was able to communicate with humans.

(More clips from the film available here.)

The film was thoroughly enjoyable and comes highly recommended. If you can't get to a cinema in time, the DVD is on its way.

Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus

Alex Clark & Shalom Lappin critique the Argument from the Poverty of Stimulus (APS) in this new book from Wiley-Blackwell.

This is certainly not the first attack on the bedrock of TG and its decsendants, and I fear not the last, but having read the first few chapters, I feel that it is taking the argument to formal, generative linguists by using just the arguments that they would understand.

With Pullum & Sholtz (see here and here) working hard to discredit the theory, Tomasello working full out to empirically disprove the hypothesis (see examples here and here and his homepage), and Luc Steels (see his homepage) demonstrating that you do not need any kind of hard-wiring for language to evolve, not to mention theories of embodiment, emergentism, and evidence from autopoiesis, you would think that the APS would be a thing of the past. I expect that there are too many people (and research grants) dependent on this hypothesis so we cannot expect it to disappear too soon.

Review for LinguistList on its way, and there is a GoogleBooks entry.  Serendipitously, Prof. Pullum of Edinburgh University recently posted yet another refutation of most of Chomsky's arguments to Linguistlist after the MIT professor delivered a lecture at University College, London.  Meanwhile, here are a few pages from Clark & Lappin, courtesy of the publisher's page. (To read these pages, click on an image, and then right click to open the image in a new page/tab. Then it can be magnified to a suitable size.)

                                         

ISFC38 Plenary - Frances Christie

The eminently practical  and ever-reliable Frances Christie offers her views on "Knowledge structures and school literary studies" in this plenary session from the 38^th International Systemic Functional Congress in Portugal, on 25^th July 2011. Prof. Christie focuses on how the subject of English literature is represented in knowledge structures (from Bernstein).

The link  to the Flash version  is a much better version than the Quicktime link  which is provided only for those unfortunate enough to be accessing the internet through a handicapped Apple device.Flash version: https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/6cs00bsxg/flash.html. Quicktime version: https://educast.fccn.pt/vod/clips/6cs00bsxg/quicktime.mov

For more ISFC38 plenaries, watch this space or, to find out more yourself, go here.

DRAL Proceedings

The proceedings for the DRAL conference held at King Monkut's University of Technology, Thonburi, in Thaliand, April 21^st & 22^nd 2011 are now available online.

There are 2 'volumes.' One is a CD and one is a publication, but online they are the same. Below are the TOC for each volume. (Click to enlarge)

  

And you can read about my experience of DRAL here:

GRAMMAR PATTERNS 1: VERBS (Collins Cobuild)

Just to let you know that, thanks to Collins Cobuild & Oliver Mason, GRAMMAR PATTERNS 1: VERBS is available in its entirety online for FREE!!!

All you have to do is navigate to this part of Birmingham University's website, et voila! Here's the TOC: Chapter 1: Simple Patterns 1 V 2 V n 3 V pl-n 4 V pron-refl 5 V amount 6 V adj 7 V -ing 8 V to-inf 9 V inf 10 V that 11 V wh 12 V wh-to-inf 13 V with quote 14 V so/not 15 V as if, V as though 16 V and v Chapter 2: Simple Patterns with Prepositions and Adverbs 1 V prep/adv, V adv/prep 2 V adv 3 pl-n V together 4 V prep 5 V about n 6 V across n 7 V after n 8 V against n 9 V around/round n 10 V as adj 11 V as n 12 V as to wh 13 V at n 14 V between pl-n 15 V by amount 16 V by -ing 17 V for n 18 V from n 19 V in n 20 V in favour of n 21 V into n 22 V like n 23 V of n 24 V off n 25 V on n 26 V on to n, V onto n 27 V out of n 28 V over n 29 V through n 30 V to n 31 V towards/toward n 32 V under n 33 V with n 34 Less frequent patterns

Chapter 3: Complex Patterns 1 V n n 2 V n adj 3 V n -ing 4 V n to-inf 5 V n inf 6 V n that 7 V n wh 8 V n wh-to-inf 9 V n with quote 10 V n -ed Chapter 4: Complex Patterns with Prepositions and Adverbs 1 V n prep/adv, V n adv/prep 2 V n with adv 3 V pl-n with together 4 V way prep/adv 5 V n about n 6 V n against n 7 V n as adj 8 V n as n 9 V n as to wh 10 V n at n 11 V n between/among pl-n 12 V n by n 13 V n for n 14 V n from n 15 V n in n 16 V n into n 17 V n into -ing 18 V n of n 19 V n off n 20 V n on n 21 V n onto n, V n on to n 22 V n out of n 23 V n over n 24 V n to n 25 V n towards/toward n 26 V n with n 27 Less frequent patterns Chapter 5: Link Verbs Chapter 6: Reciprocal Verbs Chapter 7: Ergative Verbs Chapter 8: Ergative Reciprocal Verbs Chapter 9: Verb Patterns with it 1 Introductory it as Subject 2 Introductory it as Object 3 General it as Subject 4 General it as Object Chapter 10: Patterns with there Chapter 11: Auxiliaries, Modals, and Phrasal Modals 1 Auxiliaries 2 Modals 3 Phrasal modals Chapter 12: Combinations of Patterns

ISFC38 Plenary - Jim Martin Speaks Out

The 38^th International Systemic Functional Congress (ISFC 38) in Lisbon, Portugal may not have been the most well-attended event, but it certainly produced some interesting talks. It was also interesting for including a number of non-systemic linguists as plenary speakers who were employed well for summarising, responding to and engaging with the plenary speakers. (While ISFC 37 had non-systemicists they were generally not linguists.)

The good news is that the influential and often controversial Jim Martin was given a microphone that actually worked. (Unfortunately for him, he had to hold it throughout the talk.) This means we can see and hear him from here.

His talk is "Modelling Context: Matter as Meaning" and attacks the issue of how SFL deals with context. Although SFL considers that it accounts for context better than most linguistic theories, this talk points out that SFL still has a long way to go before it can consider that it has a satisfactory description of the 'interface' between language and context.

Thanks to Carlos A. M. Gouveia & his team for making these videos available. I will (as with last year's videos) review and post them when I get the chance.

phpSyntax

phpSyntax is a handy online resource that allows you to draw tree diagrams.

Through a very simple interface, you are asked to enter your syntactic strings. The example given is

[S [NP phpSyntaxTree][VP [V creates][NP nice syntax trees]]]

The interface tells you if you have closed as many brackets as you have opened, and if you have then you can ask it to draw your tree diagram. The example here produces:

The options offered for the drawing are:
Font Type - Font Size - Colour (or b/w) - Smooth Lines (look better on screen) - Auto subscript (to number each token) - Triangles (or open boxes).
So, for example, from this input:
[S [NP [Det The] [NP [Adj quick] [Adj brown] [N fox] ]][VP [VP [Aux V1][V jump] [Adv over]][NP [Det the] [NP [Adj lazy] [N dog]]]]]
all the different choices produce this image:

I know I am not the world's number one fan for syntactic approaches to language (just look at this blog), but sometimes you just have to work this way and I like the great results offered by this programme. (All images are png and so can be used in a variety of programmes). But don't just take my word for it. Latest figures tell me that nearly 120,000 graphs have been drawn since November 2003. It is also possible to download the code and set up the program yourself (or with a little help, as I had) online or using a virtual php server. Thanks to Mei Eisenbach for the idea and linguistic guidance and to André Eisenbach for coding & design.

Journal of Academic Language and Learning

Journal of Academic Language and Learning (ISSN: 1835-5196) is a peer-reviewed online, open access journal. That means - it's good quality and FREE!!!

JALL 5/1 has just been published. Here is the TOC for this edition:

• How effectively and consistently do international postgraduate students apply the writing strategies they have been taught in a generic skills based course to their subsequent discipline based studies?            Janet Elizabeth Counsell
• Apprenticing students to academic discourse: Using student and teacher feedback to analyse the extent to which a discipline-specific academic literacies program works.          Tessa Kathleen Green          Cintia Inès Agosti
• A historical literature review of Australian publications in the field of Academic Language and Learning in the 1980s: Themes, schemes, and schisms: Part One           Kate Chanock
• A historical literature review of Australian publications in the field of Academic Language and Learning in the 1980s: Themes, schemes, and schisms: Part Two           Kate Chanock
• Peer feedback on writing: Is on-line actually better than on-paper?           Josephine Ellis
• When a pass is not a pass           Keith McNaught
• Speaking and listening in the multicultural University: A reflective case study           Helen Fraser
• Identifying the needs of students with English-as-an-additional-language for pharmacist-patient counselling: an interdisciplinary research approach           Beverley Anne Kokkinn           Ieva Stupans
• Co-constructing academic literacy: Examining teacher-student discourse in a one-to-one consultation           Kate Wilson          Garry Collins          Judy Couchman          Linda Li

You can also find more good quality papers from the archive.

Help the Apes

You may have heard about Kanzi, Panbanisha or other apes at The Great Ape TRUST, you may have heard about the enormous advances made by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues in communicating with another species, or you may have seen a talk on the amazing developments made in reducing the misunderstanding that many people have about what makes human language different from communication systems of other genetically closely-related species. If not, please check out the TED talk by Sue here and on an earlier blog entry here and from The Great Ape TRUST.

Did you know that despite the amazing breakthroughs that they have made, this exemplary research centre is under threat due to a lack of funds? They are asking people to make donations, small or large, to help with research projects, day-to-day running of the centre and feeding programmes. This is hopefully a temporary situation as the centre makes the transition from depending on a few benefactors to a wider range of donations and sources of funding. You can find out more from here, and you can make a donation by clicking on the small window on the right of the home page for  The Great Ape TRUST. It looks just like the one on the left.

Ways and Modes of Human Communication

a small plug

Editors: Rosario Caballero Rodriguez & M. Jesus Pinar Sanz.
Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla La Mancha
Publisher's page is found here (When I say found, I really mean it - the book was not listed for a long time after publication and it is not easy to find this publisher.)

Description: The present book starts with the work of five well-known scholars on the topic: Gunther Kress (University of London), Salvatore Attardo (Texas A&M University-Commerce, USA), Charles Forceville (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Alan Cienki (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam) and Mª Luisa Villanueva (Universitat Jaume I, Castelló), all of whom explore the diverse aspects of multimodality (i.e., those forms of human communication which do not rely exclusively on verbal expression, such as gesture, images, etc., or which combine various modes such as images, language and sound).
The rest of the papers included in the CD attached to the volume offer a rich and interesting ongoing discussion about these questions, as well as about topics related to the various disciplines that conform to what is known as Applied Linguistics (Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Language Learning and Acquisition, Languages for Specific Purposes, Developmental Linguistics & Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, Corpus & Computational Linguistics,Translation & Interpretation and Lexicography) and some of the hot topics in Applied Linguistics –for instance, Content and Language Integrated Learning or CLIL.
ISBN 13: 978-84-8427-759-0

CL2011: Modelling the flow of discourse in a corpus of written academic English

This is a Prezi of the presentation I gave at CL2011 (Corpus Linguistics 2011).

Modelling the flow of discourse in a corpus of written academic English on Prezi

I aim to prepare a paper for the proceedings which will be available online. Watch this blog for a link to the paper.

CL2011 (Corpus Lnguistics - 'Discourse and Corpus Linguistics') was very enjoyable and there were a great many high standard sessions. I really look forward to seeing the proceedings to review the sessions I saw and to learn about some of the sessions I missed.

Congratulations to Paul Thompson, Nathan Wadell & all the team at Birmingham for a well-organised event. CL2013 will be held in Lancaster & should be very interesting.