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Mark Davies' new academic word lists
Published on 2012-04-10 16:13:00
Mark Davies, over at Brigham Young University, has developed some fantastic corpus-based resources. His most recent project, along with Dee Gardner, is a set of academic word lists > read more
Grammatically speaking and number
Published on 2012-04-01 09:07:00
I have often been critical of the "Grammatically Speaking" columns put out occasionally by TESOL, but the most recent is, I think clear, accurate, and interesting. It looks at the the question of why we say zero degrees instead of zero degree. Something I've brought up here before.Schmitt points out that the terms plural and singular may be misleading, and suggests singular and nonsingular. This I think, is a useful approach.As for his brain teaser, these usually strike me as fairly obvious, but [..] > read more
Effectiveness of LINC programs
Published on 2012-04-01 08:43:00
It's rare to find a study looking at overall program effectiveness. But Citizenship and Immigration Canada has conducted just such a study of their Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, and the results are interesting. They look at a variety of elements including costs, intake type, and provision of daycare. What interested me most, though, was the language learning outcomes, as displayed in the graph below.The vertical axis is gains by the LINC group, in terms of Canadian [..] > read more
2012 Language Learner Literature Awards Finalists
Published on 2012-03-23 20:25:00
The Extensive Reading Foundation today announced the finalists for the 2012 Language Learner Literature awards. They are reproduced below the jump.Some of these look well worth adding to the library. In particular, I'd like to check out > read more
Thneedvillians' Guide to Zen of Pronunciation
Published on 2012-03-15 23:56:00
If you are reasonably familiar with stuff like martial arts and flower arrangement, you may have heard about the three stages of mastering the art: Follow, Break, and Separate. > read more
Spacing around punctuation
Published on 2012-03-13 08:21:00
For years, my students wrote their assignments on paper with a pen or pencil. These days, I ask that almost everything be submitted electronically. One upshot of this is that I've learned that students either don't know or don't care about spacing around punctuation marks. Many students--typically, they tend to be writers of non-roman scripts--put no space after sentence-final punctuation, commas, semi-colons, or colons. Others put a space before these marks. I've seen open parentheses with a tr [..] > read more
That's why they call it "krazy"
Published on 2012-03-12 06:39:00
On this package of "skin guard" instant crazy glue, there is copy explaining that it features "delayed adhesion to skin." The warning, however, states that it "bonds to skin instantly." So, although the adhesion to skin is instant, it is a delayed instant? > read more
When you say "thneed"
Published on 2012-03-11 07:13:00
Yesterday, we went to see the Lorax. I must say I felt rather conflicted about the plot. A. O. Scott captures what was wrong with the movie well when he writes in the New York Times,"Despite its soft environmentalist message “The Lorax” is an example of what it pretends to oppose. Its relationship to Dr. Seuss’s book is precisely that of the synthetic trees that line the streets of Thneedville to the organic Truffulas they have displaced. The movie is a noisy, useless piece of junk, revers [..] > read more
The myth of FANBOYS redux
Published on 2012-03-02 15:29:00
The very first post I ever published on this blog was about the myth of FANBOYS, and it is still the most popular I've ever written. Now an expanded version of this post is available through the TESL Canada Journal. > read more
Open access publishing
Published on 2012-02-25 08:53:00
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 [..] > read more
iBooks Author straightjacket
Published on 2012-01-22 09:59:00
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 incompliance 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 anyavailable means;(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscriptio [..] > read more
The exercise is not the game
Published on 2012-01-15 11:14:00
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 [..] > read more
Economist wants to teach English
Published on 2012-01-11 06:55:00
The "Johnson" blog at The Economist is looking for ideas about how the newspaper can make itself more useful to English (language?) teachers. > read more
How do you even write a book like that?
Published on 2012-01-01 21:09:00
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)It's perfectly in line wi [..] > read more
Grammar and Beyond, a review
Published on 2011-12-30 12:02:00
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 gramm [..] > read more
Simple English Wiktionary
Published on 2011-12-27 11:00:00
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 [..] > read more
Vending
Published on 2011-12-26 12:13:00
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 [..] > read more
Number transparency and determiner choice
Published on 2011-12-07 08:15:00
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 nu [..] > read more
So, this bothers you, does it?
Published on 2011-12-04 00:17:00
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 [..] > read more
Complex determinatives
Published on 2011-11-23 12:20:00
[Somewhat edited after Ran's comment]A colleague asked if the structure of the following phrases was the same:a group of the studentsthe groups of studentsone of the studentsI 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 sectio [..] > read more
Studies about international English proficiency
Published on 2011-07-04 14:51:00
This appeared a few months ago in the `Johnson' blog at The Economist, but I only stumbled across it recently. It seems that company called EF Education First, which teaches English along with other subjects, has published a large-scale international > read more
The history of English in ten minutes
Published on 2011-06-29 20:16:00
A witty series of shorts from the Open University: > read more
Amirite?
Published on 2011-06-26 19:50:00
Tag questions were the topic of a recent edition of "The word" in the Boston Globe, a column shared by Jan Freeman and Erin McKean, now of Wordnik. Writes McKean,Some days it seems that the most common kind of understanding is misunderstanding: > read more
Status
Published on 2011-06-22 13:56:00
Today, English, Jack hit one of those meaningless and yet somehow notable milestones: 100,000 unique visits. I often wonder who these people are and how many of them really intended to end up reading about English, but I hope we've interested, entert > read more
In spite of a lot of evidence
Published on 2011-06-21 20:44:00
Some grammar books will tell you that a lot of is a determiner (e.g., The Grammar Book, p. 330). The problem is that these books haven't decided what they mean when they say something is a determiner. They haven't made a clear distinction betwee > read more
Errors and noticing
Published on 2011-06-19 09:35:00
Yesterday I spent a good deal of time trying to figure out the constraints around the type of relative construction in the following sentences:This is the town that I grew up in. That's the room that we're going to use. This is the town where I grew > read more
Ben Zimmer at the Boston Globe
Published on 2011-06-17 21:21:00
At the Boston Globe, `The Word' is usually written by Jan Freeman, but she's recently been sharing duties with Erin McKeen, former dictionary editor. Now Ben Zimmer, late of the NYT Magazine's `On Language' column seems to have joined the team. He's > read more
NSA style guide
Published on 2011-06-13 20:22:00
In case you're a style guide aficionado, you might want to know that BoingBoing has just released a PDF of the US National Security Agency's style guide which was acquired under a freedom of information request. It includes such models of clear > read more
The last and the most important word
Published on 2011-06-12 18:49:00
How are we to analyze the two instances of the in the title? On p. 395, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language deals with the and the superlatives. It takes the in examples like this point is [the most important] as being a dete > read more
Being selling
Published on 2011-06-11 23:54:00
A while ago - in fact, a few years ago - I saw this and wondered, 'Being selling? - hmm':It occurred to me that this 'being' might be a typo for 'begins'. Still, I thought 'being selling' made sense to me (if not appropriate in the given context). Wh > read more
Per + bare NP
Published on 2011-06-03 15:53:00
I just noticed two things about the preposition per. It is usually followed by a bare singular noun phrase (i.e., one with no determiner aka specifier). This is odd because singular NPs almost always require a specifier unless the head noun > read more
Repeated discussions
Published on 2011-06-03 10:18:00
Another activity post:Many years ago, Paul Nation, one of the nicest people in language teaching, though now retired, introduced me to the idea of the repeated discussion, or what he calls the 4-3-2 speaking activity. You can see him describe it begi > read more
Words as a measure of hope
Published on 2011-06-01 17:00:00
Here's the talk I gave today at TEDxHumber as scripted. (Of course I deviated in the actual talk, which I'll link to when it goes online).------Ezra Pound wrote, "A man's hope measures his civilization." But how do you measure hope? Words are pa > read more
TEDxHumber talk
Published on 2011-05-25 19:03:00
I'll be giving a TED talk at the independent TED event being organized by a bunch of Humber folks. My topic is "Words as a measure of hope". Details follow:Assembly Hall1 Colonel Samuel Smith Park DriveToronto, ON, M8V 1K8CanadaMore about t > read more
Engineering interaction
Published on 2011-05-25 18:56:00
Here's a quick idea:Sometimes my students are more focussed on their textbooks and handouts than on interacting with each other. Let's say we're working on something like this: Match the word with its definition and with the most appropriate se > read more
Proved/proven
Published on 2011-05-20 06:51:00
There seems to be a lot of uncertainty about the past participle of prove. I regularly notice the NY Times waffling between has proven and has proved, sometimes even from one paragraph to the next, as in this article:Ryan’s medical update on S > read more
Some teaching activities
Published on 2011-05-19 14:53:00
Though I conceived English, Jack as "second thoughts on English and how she's taught," it seems I do a lot more thinking and writing about English than I do about how it's taught. I'm not really sure why that is, but the bias is quite obvio > read more
The exact opposite
Published on 2011-05-17 18:56:00
"It's all a matter of keeping my eyes open. Nature is like one of those line drawings of a tree that are puzzles for children: Can you find hidden in the leaves a duck, a house, a boy, a bucket, a zebra, and a boot? Specialists can find the most incr > read more
Google Books Corpus with BYU interface
Published on 2011-05-12 10:30:00
Mark Davies has now provided a new way to search the Google Books corpus. That would be the 155 BILLION word Google Books Corpus. His interface allows you to search not just for simple strings, the way the NGram viewer does, but to search by part of > read more
Applied linguists just aren't serious about statistics
Published on 2011-05-11 20:51:00
I'm not a statistician myself, and I've never published a quantitative study, so I'm not claiming any higher moral ground here, but it's sad to see just how lax our field is when it comes to statistical reporting. In the most recent issue of Language > read more
The prevalence of first-person pronouns in books
Published on 2011-05-10 10:46:00
There has been a good deal of discussion recently about C. Nathan DeWall et al., "Tuning in to psychological change: Linguistic markers of psychological traits and emotions over time in popular U.S. song lyrics", Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, > read more
Complementing an adjective
Published on 2011-04-19 08:06:00
There are very few examples of English adjectives that take noun phrase (NP) complements. The CGEL lists four: due, like, unlike and worth.Prepositions typically take NPs as complements (e.g., up the ladder) as do linkin > read more
Dismissive "thing"
Published on 2011-04-07 10:02:00
Again, following up on a Mark Liberman post, "The thing thing", this morning, I went looking for early instances of the dismissive use of thing, as in I'm not too keen on that vision thing. The first clear instance I found was from a 1914 p > read more
Bas Aarts, grammatologist
Published on 2011-03-31 09:56:00
Oxford has recently published the Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts. It is a relatively slim and accessible reference grammar at a reasonable price. It is modern both in that it looks at modern English and that it takes a > read more
Needs and aspirations
Published on 2011-03-22 07:24:00
This is just a quick graphic followup to Mark Liberman's recent discovery of the Great Victorian Wistfulness Bubble. Make of it what you will.hope, wish, want, desire, need > read more
Radical Radiational Pragmatics - Japanese Nuclear Edition
Published on 2011-03-21 09:47:00
Like everybody else in Japan (or elsewhere), I have been reading and hearing about radiation levels around the troubled nuclear power plant. It cannot really be good news - I mean, what do you expect from a nuclear plant that has been hit by a huge e > read more
More possessive than...
Published on 2011-03-15 14:44:00
Language Wars: the Empire Strikes Back
Published on 2011-03-08 23:57:00
The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by Henry Hitchings is out now. It is one of those books that I would definitely like to have a look at. You can take a look, and even watch the author talk about it here. I would love to order a copy rig > read more
Or is it "Turk"?
Published on 2011-03-07 06:11:00
Yesterday, I thought I'd scored a bit of a coup by finding the earliest known use of jerk to mean a stupid person. But Ben Zimmer posted it to the American Dialect Society mailing list, where Doug Wilson suggests it's Turk, not jerk. Listen here > read more
Antedating "jerk"
Published on 2011-03-06 15:38:00
Another musical antedating! Last year, as I was working away with music in the background, something in the back of my mind went sproing, and I realized Art Blakey had just used I'ma in an unexpected way. I notified Mark Liberman who brought it up on > read more
The FBI and splitting infinitives
Published on 2011-03-05 05:23:00
John Markoff has an interesting article in yesterday's New York Times about the legal uses of natural language processing. Apparently, companies have begun using software to scan documents and e-mails for information relevant > read more
A word for these kinds of words
Published on 2011-03-04 15:50:00
From the Jan 22 issue of New Scientist's "Feedback" column:AT THE end of last year, Alastair Beaven asked if readers had examples of people using words in a novel sense without knowing their original meaning - and he wondered if this phenomenon > read more
Mandating the subjunctive
Published on 2011-03-03 08:53:00
The other day at the school council meeting, the principal of my kids' school told us that the board "mandates that there is" ...I forget. I was just struck by that is. Even knowing full well about the decline of the subjunctive, that sounded we > read more
Another "Grammatically Speaking", another error
Published on 2011-03-02 08:59:00
In this month's column Leo Schmitt takes up a question about relative pronouns, who or whom.And gets the answer wrong.The question:In the following sentence: Harold prefers contestants _____ he can sense are facing him.Which would be the pr > read more
Vocabulary, reading, and hockey sticks
Published on 2011-03-01 11:54:00
Yesterday, the Modern Language Journal published new online content, among which was an interesting paper entitled "The Percentage of Words Known in a Text and Reading Comprehension" by Norbert Schmitt, Xiangying Jiang, and William Grabe. (The p > read more
More on semicolons
Published on 2011-03-01 09:40:00
Mark Davies has fixed the COCA and COHA, so I can now look more closely at historical uses of semicolons. Click here for a chart. It tells pretty much the same story as yesterday's post, but you can click it and find the actual usages from each decad > read more
Enumerating the semicolon
Published on 2011-02-26 09:11:00
The semicolon has an interesting history, which is traced rather well by Paul Collins in his 2008 Slate article. I thought I'd go back and have another look at some of the numbers, which can now be calculated with somewhat better reliability. Th > read more
Train your brain to be a memory athlete
Published on 2011-02-21 08:35:00
The New York Times Magazine has a fascinating article by Joshua Foer on memory training. It documents how he went from a reporter looking for a story to a participant to a the new U.S. record holder in speed cards (a memory event in which you me > read more
Prescriptivist Today
Published on 2011-02-11 02:30:00
If you are reading this, then you may be interested in Deborah Schaffer's article that appeared in a recent issue of English Today, entitled 'Old whine online: prescriptive grammar blogs on the Internet'. I'll say no more; go ahead and take a look if > read more
Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning
Published on 2011-02-05 09:56:00
In one of my earliest posts, I discusses how the fine work of Endel Tulving has been misunderstood by many in ESL, leading to vocabulary lessons that group semantically related words together. This is a problem because, as I wrote at the time, the se > read more
David Paul's blog
Published on 2011-02-05 08:33:00
David Paul has done, perhaps, more than other single person in the last decade else to support English teachers and English teaching in Japan. Now he's started a new blog. In his first post, he talks about his creative process in writing textbook dia > read more
What's the plural of Prius?
Published on 2011-01-27 09:21:00
Toyota is asking what the plural of Prius is, and they've got a catchy video to go along with the question:This recalls the question about the plural of octopus, which was dealt with quite nicely by the folks at Merriam-Webster.I'm with Stamper here, > read more
Adjectives and past participles
Published on 2011-01-26 08:33:00
Returning to Leo Schmitt's most recent Grammatically Speaking column, I'd like to take up the issue of when a past participle becomes an adjective. This point comes up in the "Brain Teaser" section:The following two sentences are grammatical. They bo > read more
Guest post from Leo Schmitt
Published on 2011-01-26 05:56:00
The following is a guest post from Leo Schmitt, the new Grammatically Speaking columnist whose column I complained about here.---------------It is nice to know I can count on one regular reader, even if you are only looking for fodder with which to e > read more
Intentional misunderstanding as a self-aggrandization strategy
Published on 2011-01-16 10:02:00
In today's Retail, Val nicely explain's Grice's cooperative principle. > read more
Grammatically speaking, the zombie edition
Published on 2011-01-15 19:53:00
Grammatically speaking is dead. If only...Back in September, it was announced that Richard Firsten would stop publishing his monthly column for TESOL. After years pointing out his mistakes, I thought this might be good news. When he let on that the c > read more
Language Corpse/Corpus
Published on 2011-01-03 20:07:00
Ever heard of the 'Bad Writing Contest'? If you haven't, take a look. It really is wonderfully amusing and amazing. We are accustomed to seeing linguistic studies/analyses based on large corpora. We hear so much about word frequencies and collocation > read more
Google reading level
Published on 2010-12-20 12:36:00
Google advanced search now has a reading-level feature which groups search results in to basic, medium, and advanced reading levels. According to Nudu, a Google employee, "The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the he > read more
Award-winning Whodunit
Published on 2010-12-03 06:43:00
Hugh and Al Graham-Marr are friends from my Japan days who started up a publishing company called Abax. This year, they published Fiction In Action: Whodunit by Adam Gray and Marcos Benevides, which recently won the Duke of Edinburgh E > read more
The subjunctive from the mouthes of babes?
Published on 2010-11-26 07:50:00
My six-year-old daughter told us at dinner the other day that her teacher generally allows her class certain privileges "if we be good." The first thing that struck me is that it sounds like the subjunctive. An example would be If we be faithful to C > read more
What's up?
Published on 2010-11-24 07:12:00
A correspondent writes, "What's up?" and " Not much?" come from African-American hoods... Teaching such phrases to kids is not appropriate, I believe. They will sound "Black". I am 46 years old. When I came up, we, African-Americans, were the only on > read more