Archive for July, 2008

… and it’s not because of Interactive Whiteboards- see here for details. (more…)

All from the book The First Word, that rare gem- a popular science book about linguistics. It drags a bit at the end, but these are from the interesting middle bit (just after the bitchy beginning bit where she lays into Chomsky- hurrah!)

“it appears that dolphins name themselves. [They] produce a distinct individual sound that develops in their first year of life whenever they meet another dolphin. It’s always the same, and always distinct from any other dolphin’s whistle” pg 118

“dolphin babies also pass through a babbling phase [like human babies before they produce their first word]… baby bats babble as well.” pg 143
 
“elephants in Kenya have been recorded making almost perfect reproductions of the sound of trucks from a road nearby” pg 145
 
“Hoover, a harbor seal at the New England Aquarium… surprised visitors by saying ‘Hey, hey, you, get outta there!” pg 146

“researchers found that humans aren’t the only species with the ability to identify different [human] languages based on their characteristic rhythms” pg 151

“no animal communication system has an equivalent for ‘no’”
 
“vervet monkeys use a fall in pitch to mark the end of an utterance and… other vervets seem to interpret this as a signal to take a turn in vocalizing, like humans do” pg 155

Or not, but boy would they like you to read that article so quickly that you don’t realise that.

i-to-i is another organisation that gets all kinds of alarm bells ringing in my head, but can’t quite work out why… Just because it all sounds too good to be true??

I’m continuing to learn from and ponder on the information in the Cambridge Grammar of English, and as before testing the matters I’ve been chewing on against your native speaker intuitions would be appreciated (sorry for the very unpleasant mental picture from that metaphor first thing on a Monday morning!)

The (modern?) name for & is “and” (not ampersand)
{ } = chain brackets (they’ve always been squiggly brackets to me!)
< > = diamond brackets
 
American English uses commas before and or but more frequently than British English
 
“Subordinate clauses can be separated by a comma from a preceding main clause, especially when the relation between them might be obscured because the clauses are long.” (pg 842), so “We can get there for around six, if there are no problems with the traffic on the motorway” is okay with or without the comma, despite being in the reverse position of the usual first conditional with a comma
 
Colons are used to indicate subtitles, and to mark a clause in which reasons are given: “We decided against it: it wasn’t lightweight enough”
 
Single quotation marks are becoming more widespread in direct speech
 
Colons may be used to introduce direct speech when it is particularly long
 
There are apostrophes (becoming optional) in “for goodness’ sake” and “for appearance’ sake”
 
In informal writing multiple dashes may be used:
 
“Just got back from Mallorca— we really loved it.”

If punctuation is your thing, or really isn’t you or your students’ thing but should be, here are some links:

Wikipedia on the ampersand

Info on Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynn Truss- a funny book on punctuation!

A whole list of punctuation books on Amazon

Punctuation worksheets on ESL Printables.com

And that is all I could find of interest. For classroom activities, one thing that works well, especially with FCE and CAE classes, is for students to take a text that is correct and add spelling and punctuation errors for another team to find.

Another good game is to put a text on the board including punctuation and get them to read out the whole text (including punctuation) over and over as you delete it one word or punctuation mark at a time until they can no longer remember it or the whole text has disappeared.

The game above works well with kids too. A more physical game for kids on the same point is to write up a sentence with one piece of punctuation missing in large letters on the board, and get them to take turns throwing a sticky ball (= sucker ball) at the place they think the punctuation mark should be.

SLA- Second Language Acquisition- The theory that you are guaranteed to learn a language if you just spend enough money on it

STT- Stupid Talking Time- How long you should let a student talk after you realize they’ve got completely the wrong idea of what you are trying to elicit or the topic of conversation.

TLA- In his book “Teacher Language Awareness”, Stephen Andrews controversially claims that “in order to do their jobs well, teacher must be aware that there are languages”(pg.1729), to which the famous repost on the Humanizing Language Teaching website was “Hey Stevie man, chill out! Fascist!”

TBLT- Task Based Lettuce and Tomato The “strong form of TBLT” includes English mustard, while the “weak form of TBLT” only has mayonnaise

TEI- Teacher Effectiveness Index- Not to be confused with TIE-Teacher Index Effectiveness- a number to represent a teacher’s ability to put book in the teachers’ room back in order.

TOEFL- Test of English with Fluency Lacking- A test of English in which you can get full marks without speaking one word. Originally developed only for people who have physical problems with their voice box, eventually having been through an East Asian education system was accepted as a disability and it soon became one of the leading tests in Japan, China and Korea

TTT- Teacher Talking Time. According to modern SLA* theories, the amount of TTT should be reduced, preferably at the same rate as TEFL wages are going down. This is so that the amount of effort you put in per pound remains stable.

Universal Grammar-formerly “Miss Universal Grammar”

vocatives- the functions on a karaoke machine

Vygotskyan sociocultural theory of learning- The idea that if you tell students your classes are “Vygotskyan” and manage to pronounce and spell it right, they will trust everything you do from then, even if you and they have no idea what it means

Warmer- An activity that fulfills the role of classroom heating, such as star jumps, group hugs or burning vocabulary lists they have learnt

Weak interface position- A Japanese handshake, or the idea that pointing out how much contempt it gets could result in them learning a decent grip

ZPD- Zone of Proximal Development- The short period of time during which it is acceptable to ask a student out on a date

The whole dictionary (my life’s work!) is available here, now with links to more conventional definitions, if you are unlucky enough to be doing the DELTA or MA TESOL

There are a suprising number of TEFL blogs that make me giggle (you can find them under “Funny TEFL blogs” on my links page), but now that Chase Me Ladies is no longer TEFLing, the TEFLtastic prize for funniest TEFL blog will probably have to go to English Teacher X.

Like all comic geniuses (or should that be genii from the Latin?) though, the writer has quite a lot of off days. For example, I found teaching Russian slappers funny for about 10 minutes, and that’s about all I can handle reading about them as well. Luckily for you, I’ve trawled through the whole site and come up with the best bits so you can snigger about them on the teachers’ room computer and then say “Nothing, just an email from my brother” when people ask you why you are giving off an evil laugh: (more…)

My first surprise was introducing students to the piece of ELT jargon “speech acts”, something I only vaguely remembered from my reading for my DELTA myself, but more about that when I get round to reviewing The Cambridge Grammar of English…

Some of the above were some I had never thought about, some are ones I still doubt, and the rest are just vaguely interesting (something that is worth celebrating when you are reading your way through a grammar book!) Any comments after testing these against your “native speaker intuitions” (also known as “TEFL teacher prejudices”) gratefully received:

“You must” and “you’ll have to” are often used to give non-specific invitations
 
“And you must come down to Barr at some stage or another”
 
“You’ll have to come round for a coffee”
 
What if…? is used for How about…? in “standard British and Irish English”
 
“What if I set the table?”
 
“What if we had it here?”
 
How’s about…? for How about…? in informal contexts in standard British and Irish English

Informal lexis softens a speech act:
“pop in” instead of “visit”/ “wee” in “a wee favour”
 
“Please” is usually used at the end of a question, but children often put it first:
 
“Please can I have some more bread?”
 
“so” and “then” are common in declarative clauses functioning as questions
 
“So you had a good day at work then?”
 
“Didn’t it just!” is part of a general pattern of interrogative structures used as explanations, like “Was I exhausted!” and “Hasn’t she grown!”

“Would you mind if one of our representatives comes and gives you a free demonstration?” Would you mind + present

“You want to sound-proof your room with egg boxes”- “want to” for advice in “standard British and Irish English”

Bruce has replied to all the questions below, so thanks to the few people who helped me with those rather than repeating the same old “I have evidence but I’m not going to show it to you” comments. I’m going to ask quite a few back up questions, then the finished interview Part Two will go up in maybe a week. In the meantime, all comments on Bruce V, TEFL International etc will be deleted as all the recent ones have already been answered in the interview and there doesn’t seem to be much point in tackling them twice.

When the interview goes up, there will be a 24 hour period with no comments so that people can write up their detailed and evidence-rich responses on Word at home first, rather than firing off the first things that come into their heads. After that time, you will be allowed to comment only on the things said in the interview. Any other comments will be deleted, and persistent offenders will have all their comments deleted (also in previous posts) in order for it to be technically possible to block them through Wordpress. If you have any other comments or questions about TEFL International, you may of course email me.

Comments are open for this post so that you may, if you wish, comment on the policies described above. Any other comments will be deleted.

Anthropological linguists- Studying the feuds and other interactions of linguists as if they were a Papua New Guinea tribe

Contrastive analysis- trying to work out what the picture on a bad photocopy is when asked to talk about it in class

Deterministic grammar rules- ones you are destined never to understand

Drilling- (more…)

I’ve been reading through the new Cambridge Grammar of English. Not something I usually do for pleasure (honestly!), but got a free copy for TEFL.net reviews and so felt like I ought to examine at least some parts in detail- and now I am reading it for pleasure!

Maybe the most interesting thing is that the use of corpora rather than just common sense (otherwise known as native speaker intuition) means there are bits on almost every page where you go “Really?” Below is a list of the “Oh yes, I suppose so.” and “No, I really don’t think so” moments so far based on British and American English. Most good science throws out counterintuitive things like this. Unfortunately, so does most bad science, so I’d appreciate it if you would comment on how the things below match with your own experience and instinct- there are a few I have doubts on myself.

- In AmE, the score in “The Seattle Sea Hawks beat the Cincinnati Reds 7-O is pronounced” “seven nothing” or “seven to nothing” or “seven zip”
 
- “Four from nine is/leaves five” is okay in BrE
 
- The form in “Eleven hundred pounds” (rather than “one hundred one hundred”) is more popular in AmE than BrE

- “isn’t” (rather than ’s not) is many times more frequent in BrE than AmE

- Interrogative tags are about four times more frequent in BrE than in AmE
 
- The “do” in reduced clauses with modal verbs
“Are you going?”
“I might do”
is only used in British English
 
- She lives on/ in Leonora Street is a Br/ Am thing

- “Must” is much more frequent in BrE than AmE
 
- “Had better” is six times more frequent in BrE
 
- “Going to” often used for direction giving (finding your way) in AmE: “You’re gonna go two blocks…”
 
- “I suppose” is much more frequent in BrE

If you ended up here wanting to find more more traditional stuff about British and American English, try:

Wikipedia (of course) American and British English differences

The American’s Guide to Speaking British English

BBC America British American Dictionary

If you are interested in worksheets for classroom use on British and American English, look here:

How British is your Financial English?

ESL Printable British and American English page

British and American English elesson from the (recommended) textbook Inside Out

British and American: The main differences from the (equally recommended) vocab book Word for Word

And if you’d like your own shiny new TEFL book hot off the press for free, see here.