Teaching Precision Through Riddles and Problem Solving
When teaching ESL/EFL to the brightest middle and high school students, I often encounter the problem that they have nothing to talk about because they lack experience in anything. And so lately, I’ve been developing materials that are challenging, interesting, and get them speaking. Last month, I looked at getting students to be effective communicators using graded reading materials. This month, I am going to look at teaching students to be precise.
The activities for this technique are various but they are all centered on providing solutions to riddles. Why riddles? For one, riddles are intrinsically motivating. Students enjoy putting their problem solving capabilities to the task. More importantly, the solutions to many of riddles involve the language of logic and require precision.
The method used to introduce the riddle will vary depending on the riddle. In the upper right corner, several riddles are provided in different formats. With many of the riddles, one student can take five minutes to read the riddle. Once, the student understands what the riddle is asking, the student can pose the riddle to their group.
As a group, they will come up with a solution. This part is pretty much a free talking activity. The teacher will have to provide numerous hints, as most students will not be able to solve the riddles on their own. This is OK because the students will enjoy the solutions and getting the answer is not so much the focus as developing the skills to speak logically and precisely.
After the students have come up with a solution (maybe more than one — It’s good to let them explore different answers and debate whether they are in fact valid solutions, even if the solutions are not the canonical solutions). The teacher should have the students individually retell the solution (as a great fluency exercise). Here, teacher feedback is essential. This activity is better suited to a small group than a large class. The teacher will interrupt the student and show them how to be precise in describing their solutions. Students will retell their solution over and over again until they get it perfect.
If a student is too sloppy, the teacher should play the fool and force the student to revise their definitions and descriptions. And then the teacher should tell the student to start again from the beginning. Every student should take a turn explaining a solution to the teacher. The riddles should naturally draw out a lot of logical and repetitive language.
Two Sample Riddles and Canonical Solutions
To explain the concept of precision in detail, it is necessary to provide a few samples of riddles and their solutions. The first riddle that will be discussed is the ‘Switches and Light Bulbs’ riddle. The second riddle that will be discussed is one of the many ‘River Crossing’ riddles.
First Riddle: Light Bulbs and Switches Riddle:
You are in a room and there are three light switches that are turned off. The light switches are connected to three light bulbs that are in a different room. You do not know which switch is connected to which light bulb. You cannot see into that room. But you are allowed to go into that room exactly once. How can you figure out which switch is connected to which light bulb?
The Canonical Solution to the First Riddle:
Turn the first switch on and wait for twenty minutes. Then, turn the first switch off and turn the second switch on. Quickly go into the room where the light bulbs are. The light that is on is the second switch. Touch the remaining two light bulbs. The light that is off and warm is the first switch and the light that is off and cool is the third switch.
Second Riddle: Crossing the River:
A family consisting of a mother, a father, and two children was walking in the woods one day. They came to a river and wanted to cross the river so they looked for a way to cross the river. At last, they found a small boat. But the boat was too small to carry the whole family. It could only carry one adult or two children. How can the whole family the far bank of the river?
The Canonical Solution to the Second Riddle:
First, the two children get in the boat and go across the river. One child gets out and the other child goes back across the river. The child in the boat gets out and the mother gets in the boat and goes across the river. When the mother reaches the other side, she gets out of the boat. The child who is across the river gets back in the boat and goes back across the river. The child who is waiting on the near bank of the river gets in the boat and they both go across together. Again, one child gets out and the other goes back across the river. After the child in the boat gets out, the father gets in the boat and goes across the river. When the father reaches the far bank, he gets out and the child who is waiting on the far bank get in the boat. That child goes back across the river and picks up the other child and they go to the far bank together.
Precision:
Middle and High school students tend to economize when they answer. That is, they try to give the bare minimum that is necessary to answer a question or convey what they want to say. The problem with this is that sometimes a little more information will help the listener organize what they are hearing more effectively. More information makes for easier listening.
In the River Crossing riddle, a student could start it off by saying:
Two children get in the boat and go across the river. One child gets out. One child goes across the river.
This does convey all of the essential information but it would be easier for the listener if the speaker differentiate between the two children somehow. This can be done in more than one way:
Two children get in the boat and go across the river. One child gets out and the other child goes across the river.
Two children get in the boat and go across the river. One child gets out. And the child who is still in the boat goes across the river.
Here, ‘the other’ and ‘still in the boat’ help to define which child is being spoken about.
And instead of just ‘going across’ the river, as is used twice in the sample answer, the student could say ‘going across’ to represent going to the far bank and ‘going back across’ to represent going to the near bank of the river. Again there is more than one way to add precision to ‘going across.’ These additions may seem minor but they help the listener to follow what is being said.
Even ‘two children’ should really be ‘the two children’ because the student is talking about the two children that were already introduced at the beginning of the riddle.
The teacher can get the students to be more precise by playing the fool and interrupting the student by asking a lot of ‘which’ questions: “Wait a minute. Which child goes across the river?”, “Which way are they going across?”, “What children are you talking about?”
These kinds of questions prompt the student to define what they are talking about more clearly. And when they do come up with a more precise wording, it is useful to make them start the story again until they get a complete solution that is clear as day, without any possibility for confusion. This precision is important because you just never know what your listener will get hung up on.
Precision is largely the work of relative clauses, determiners, and other adjectives. In the ‘Switches and Light bulbs’ riddle, it is important to differentiate the light bulbs when a solution is given. That is done in a precise manner by introducing the relative clause ‘that’.
The light that is on is the second switch.
The light that is off and warm is the first switch.
And the light that is off and cool is the third switch.
There are a large number of determiners that add precision. These include definite articles; indefinite articles; quantifiers like some, both, few, and all; numerals like two and the fourth; possessive adjectives like my, your, her, and demonstrative pronouns like this, that, these, those.
Absolutely the best site for riddles I have ever encountered – especially the discussion forums. It is sometimes heavily mathematical, but there is stuff for the non-math majors as well.There is a healthy community of riddle solvers and for the most part it is populated by people who are interested in the process of riddle solving, not just the answers.
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COMPUTER ASSISTED LANGUAGE LEARNING (CALL) IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTERACTIVE APPROACH: ADVANTAGES AND APPREHENSIONS
INTRODUCTION
To begin with the question whether computers really assist second language learning, many teachers who have never touched a computer tend to respond with an emphatic no; whereas, the overwhelming number of teachers who give computers a try find that they are indeed useful in second language learning. No doubt, computers make excellent teaching tools, especially in teaching languages in any aspect, be it vocabulary, grammar, composition, pronunciation, or other linguistic and pragmatic-communicative skills. And the major benefits offered by computer in enhancing language acquisition apparently outweigh its limitations.
ADVANTAGES
Interest and Motivation
It is often necessary, in a language learning classroom, to provide repeated practice to meet important objectives. Because this can be boring, painful, and frustrating, many students lose interest and motivation to learn foreign languages. CALL programmes present the learner with a novelty. They teach the language in different and more interesting, attractive ways and present language through games, animated graphics and problem-solving techniques. As a result even tedious drills become more interesting. In fact, CALL motivates the students to go beyond the point of initial mastery and practice activity until they become automatic.
Individualisation
Many students need additional time and individualised practice to meet learning objectives. The computer offers students self-instructional tasks that let them master prerequisite skills and course objectives at a speed and level dictated by their own needs. Besides, additional programmes can be made available for students who master objectives quickly. These additional programmes can provide more intense study of the same objectives, proceed to higher objectives, or integrate the objectives covered in the unit with other objectives. In this manner, a computer gives individual attention to the learner and replies immediately to questions or commands. It acts as a tutor and guides the learner towards the correct answer while adapting the material to his performance.
A Compatible Learning Style
Students differ in their preferred styles of learning. Many students seem to learn much more effectively when they are able to use a compatible learning style than when they are forced to employ an incompatible one. Serious conflicts may arise when a teacher employs a style that is incompatible with a student’s. In this regard, the computer can be used for adapting instruction to the unique styles of individual students. To cite an instance, the computer can provide an exciting rapid-fire drill for one student and a calm, slow-paced mode of presentation for another.
Optimal Use of Learning Time
By using the computer, students are often able to use their Academic Learning Time (ALT) more fruitfully. Academic Learning Time (ALT) is the amount of time a student spends attending to relevant academic tasks while performing those tasks with a high rate of success. For example, not all the time officially scheduled for studying a foreign language is likely to be allocated to it. If an hour is assigned to working on a topic, but the teacher devotes five minutes at the beginning of the session to returning papers and five minutes at the end to reading announcements, then only fifty minutes have been allocated to working on the topic. Scheduled time merely sets an upper limit on allocated time. Likewise, allocated time merely sets the upper limit to engaged time, which refers to the amount of time students actively attend to the subject matter under consideration. Even though fifty minutes may be allocated to studying a topic in French class, students may stare out the window or talk to their neighbours instead of pursuing the assigned activity. Therefore, even when they are actively engaged in studying the foreign language, students learn effectively only when they are performing at a high rate of success. This smaller amount of time is the factor that is most strongly related to the amount of learning that takes place (Lareau 1985:65-67). Computers enhance second/foreign language academic learning time by permitting learners to acquire specific information and practice specific skills and by helping students develop basic tools of learning which they can apply in a wide variety of settings. This also subverts the relationship between time and traditional instruction. Traditional instruction holds time constant and allows achievement to vary within a group. Computer-assisted learning reverses this relationship by holding achievement constant and letting the time students spend in pursuit of the objectives vary.
Immediate Feedback
Learners receive maximum benefit from feedback only when it is supplied immediately. Their interest and receptivity declines when the information on their performance is delayed. Yet, for various reasons, classroom feedback is often delayed and at times denied. A deferment of positive feedback, though important to act as encouragement and reinforcement, may not harm the progress of the learners. Nonetheless, any delay in offering negative feedback, the knowledge that one is wrong, will become crucial. A blissfully ignorant student may continue mispronouncing a word or applying a misconception before discovering the nature of this error. In such case, the computer can give instantaneous feedback and help the learner ward off his misconception at the initial stage itself. In addition to this, the computer can look for certain types of errors and give specific feedback, such as, “It looks as if you forgot the article.”
Error Analysis
Computer database can be used by the instructor to classify and differentiate the type of general errors as well as errors committed by learners on account of the influence of the first language. And thus determine the most common errors cross-linguistically and more specifically, the particular form of a particular error type within a particular language group. One such study conducted reveals interesting findings, for example, that in subject-verb agreement errors the base form of verb was over generalised incorrectly more often than the -s form by all speakers. Also, Chinese writers typically omitted the articles a/an more often than the (Dalgish 1987:81-82). A computer can thus analyse the specific mistakes the student has made and can react in a different way from the usual teacher–this leads the student not only to self-correction, but also to understanding the principles behind the correct solution.
Guided and Free Writing
A word-processor in the computer can be very effective in teaching guided/free writing activities. The ability to create and manipulate text easily is the principle on which the word-processor programmes are founded. In this manner, the word-processor encourages practice in guided or free writing activities together with a number of sub-skills which comprise the writing process. Aspects of paragraphing, register, style, cohesion, rhetorical structure, lexical choice and expression can all receive attention without requiring the user to learn different programmes. The advantage is that the teacher can direct the student’s writing without exerting total and rigid control, allowing for freedom of expression within certain bounds. Insights into grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, can also be developed.
Pre-determined to Process Syllabus
One major advantage in using a microprocessor is that it can enhance the learning process from a pre-determined syllabus to an emerging/process syllabus. Even the ordinary ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ type of monotonous exercise on paper can be made an exciting task on the screen in the self-access mode, where the students themselves choose their own material. CALL thus facilitates the synthesis of the pre-planned syllabus and learner syllabuses “through a decision making process undertaken by teacher and learners together” (Breen 1986:51).
Other Prospects
As students and teachers become more sophisticated in their use of such CALL software, more complicated use of these packages become possible. For instance, the ability of the computer to handle data, and allow the students to become computational linguists, is very powerful (Hardistry 1988:42-43). The experiential use of Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN) can reveal unexplored teaching materials and untouched learning methods. By effective use of linking computer with internet, authentic material can be brought directly into the classroom. A reading text can be done using that day’s news item or weather forecast than using a news clipping of the previous year. The topicality of the issue can generate lot of interest and create authenticity of purpose. Correspondingly, the facility of LAN can be very useful for the practising of writing pithy telegraphic and telex messages. Of course, the joy and the excitement involved in the online communication process, both local and international, is an additional increment one gets from screen-based learning!
APPREHENSIONS
Man versus Machine
In spite of its glaring merits, the prospect of computer-assisted language learning has troubled teachers more. Perhaps, the major cause of their worry might have developed from the basic problem of accessibility. Often the computers have been kept in Science or Maths department causing a real and psychological distance in the minds of the Arts faculty. Nevertheless, many see computer as a threat not only in terms of its power to replace the traditional skills, which the language teachers promote, but also its eventual replacement of the teacher himself. Furthermore, shifting the control centre from the authoritarian teacher to the need-based learner and accepting the humble role of a facilitator/moderator instead of being a veritable dictator does not come easy for the traditionally clad chalk-talk teacher. In addition, the computer-student interactive learning not only allows the possibility of role changes, but also the potential for role-reversal, endangered by physical reversal by students. That is, the students literally turn their back to the teachers, and silence is now on the part of the teacher until called for assistance. Yet this role reversal can be exploited, since, it allows the classroom to become far more “learning centred” (Hardistry 1988:39). This term rather than learner-centred, has been used, to indicate that the central aim of the language lesson is to enable students to learn.
The Language Lab versus Computer
Another reason why teachers and sanctioning authorities alike are uncertain about the use of computers in language learning is that computers too, like language lab and other technological innovations, despite large investments, may remain unused and stored in some dark and abandoned room. After all, language laboratories in many countries fell into disuse, as they were too tied to one particular form of methodology, which limited the awareness of the potential. One real danger is that the computer could be used, like the language lab, as an instrument of Skinnerian behaviourism to facilitate the structuralist approach with an emphasis on “correctness,” negating its flexibility and potential as a teaching aid to liberate the imaginations of the learners (Moore 1986:18-19). In this perspective, often CALL courseware has been restricted to drill and practice, with the screen equivalent to the textbook. Much software, like a textbook, is static both in presentation and in content. Another major criticism of CALL software is the lock-step design of the lessons. This, in turn, means that CALL software is missing a chance to exploit the computer’s potential, with the result that computer power is not released to the student adequately.
CALL versus TALL
Computer-Assisted Language Learning(CALL) contrasted with Textbook-Assisted Language Learning(TALL), demands certain extra-skills such as typography, graphic design, or paper making and the lack of which panics the teacher and the taught alike. For instance, an inadvertent typographical error on the part of the student input may be classified wrong although the grammar of the student’s answer is correct. Further, in terms of communication of ideas, a book is a means of communication between the author and the reader. In the same way, the computer is a means of communication between the programmer and the user. However, in this analogy, the author and the programmer do not mostly share similar concerns. While the author is bound to be a subject expert, the programmer is mostly a technician combined with the likely motives of a businessman. This gap between the author and the programmer is responsible for inappropriate lesson content, poor documentation, errors in format and content, improper feedback, etc. Likewise, in most software, there is little chance for the teacher to add to or modify the existing programmes, even if he wishes too, since most of it is locked to prevent pirating. And for the few of those who develop their own material, the time spent on programming and typing in the lessons can be quite lengthy.
PROBLEMS OR CHALLENGES?
Yet, these apprehensions should be seen in the backdrop of a developmental stage of computerisation of individuals and institutions and as a temporary phenomenon. The next generation of teachers and learners will be part of a computer generation. They will take for granted the skills demanded by computer technology and handle it as coolly as switching on a taperecorder or watching a television. Similarly, the pupils will need no readjustment of attitude when faced with a computer in a classroom and their familiarity and frequent association with the machine would replace the sense of awe and alienation felt by older people. Then planning pre-, actual and post-computer activities would be easily possible. The teachers would ensure that they are the ones in control of educational software by becoming involved in the development process and rejecting those programmes which do not serve their needs. For that reason, the onus is on the present CALL-disposed teachers that in order to convince the CALL-deposed teachers about the potentiality of CALL courseware, they must prove that it is not only perfect in every way, but that it is far better than any other existing teaching aid.
CONCLUSION
An ideal CALL courseware remains not an alternative but a complementary tool in reinforcing classroom activities. Apart from relying on the ability of educators to create suitable CALL courseware, the effectiveness of CALL depends on the teacher’s readiness to adopt new attitudes and approaches toward language teaching. The teacher should avoid being skeptical about the use of computer in language teaching and begin to re-evaluate his methods in the light of computer’s tremendous teaching potential and boldly address to the challenges offered. The computer can best assist teachers if it is seen not as a replacement for their work but as a supplement to it. By the way, the computer, will not replace the language teachers, but, used creatively, it will relieve them of tedious tasks and will enable students to receive individualised attention from both teachers and machines to a degree that has hitherto been impossible.
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National literatures
Although their names imply otherwise, national literatures often emerged before the emergence of modern nation-states. Dante, famously, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, his defense of writing in Italian, declared that literary Italian must be “curial”, or “of the manner of the Italian court”" – even though, at the time he wrote there was no such singular Italian state. Like Chaucer and other medieval poets, he wrote before the language of his compositions reached its modern form. The writers of the Renaissance were a vital part of the emergence of their respective national literatures, though some, like Sir Thomas More, eschewed their own vernacular in favor of Latin. Even writers whose works now seem essential to their national literature, such as Goethe or Shakespeare, only became legitimate subjects of serious academic consideration very late in the nineteenth century, when national vernacular literatures became subjects for schools and universities. Today, at a point when literary works are frequently translated into other languages soon after their publication, and literacy rates around the world are at historic highs, there is a growing sense of an international audience for literature.
Not all the study of literature takes place along national lines; comparative literature is one academic discipline that engages in the study of literature in an interdisciplinary and transnational context. The relationships between the national literatures of former colonial powers has also led to postcolonial literature‘s emergence as a significent area of study. Other interdisciplinary fields with close ties to literature, such as film studies and cultural studies, also move readily across the old boundaries of national and ethnic literatures.
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Literary media
Literature was first recorded in pictographic and alphabetic systems of writing, which were either incised on clay tablets or stone, or written with inks or dyes on various flat organic media such as papyrus or parchment. The development of alphabetic systems, in which characters stood for sounds instead of things, by the Phoenecian and Greek cultures, enabled a rapid advancement in the variety and dissemination of written literature. In earliest times, such documents were generally prepared and stored on long sheets rolled into scrolls, but beginning in the second century CE, the codex, a bound set of trimmed sheets with a cover, began to predominate; this is the ancestor of the modern book.
The introduction of paper to Western Europe in the later Middle Ages greatly reduced the cost of written manuscripts, and the invention of movable type in 1450 led to to the printing of books in large numbers, and still further reduction in cost. Further refinements to the printing process, such as machines which could cast whole blocks of type at once, led to the emergence of print as a mass medium in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with new formats such as magazines and newspapers printed in thousands of copies, both for subscribers and for sale at booksellers and newsstands. Genres such as the novel gained tremendous new audiences through appearances in periodical and serial forms, bringing writers such as Poe, Dickens, Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs to a mass audience, and establishing literature as a popular medium.
In the later twentieth century, the field of popular literature continued to expand, both through the introduction of mass-market genres such as the dime novel and the illustrated press, and via the new commitment to public education and developing a literary curriculum of standard school texts. Established genres, such as detective fiction and science fiction, gained new audiences through the introduction of the paperback book, printed on inexpensive paper with a thin cardboard wrapper, and sold for a small fraction of the cost of a hardcover book. The large number of young readers led to a great expansion of children’s literature and adolescent literature, as well as to new popular forms such as the comic book, which in recent years has emerged as a medium for adult fiction in the form of graphic novels.
With the advent of new media and technologies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, texts are often stored and transmitted electronically, magnetically, or digitally, without ever being printed on paper; they also often include, or are linked to audio, video, or multimedia content. Speech can now also be recorded, stored, and transmitted, so that some literary historians, such as Walter J. Ong, regard this as an age of “secondary orality”. Such changes will doubtlessly expand and alter the definition of literature, just as did earlier technological developments.
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Scope of literature
In its broadest sense, literature came into being with the first use of pictographs, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, or alphabetic scripts, although it is more common to designate as “literature” only those texts which contain a degree of imaginative, emotive, allegoric, didactic, or descriptive content. Thus, business records, tallies, or lists are not generally included, even though such texts, which can be found in the earliest civilizations, are significant from a historical and archaeological perspective. The earliest literature evolved from the transcription of pre-existing oral traditional narratives, and progressed gradually to a point where such materials were first composed in written form.
Religious texts, while they have of course an entirely different significance to the adherents of the faiths to which they pertain, may also be considered literature when their narrative, figurative, or compositional qualities are foregrounded. The earliest instances of literature, therefore, those termed “ancient”, include a variety of texts ranging from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to the Hebrew Torah, and onward to the Hellenistic Odyssey of Homer. These texts, though clearly recognized as literature, share an origin in pre-literate cultures, and thus predate, in some sense, the modern use of the term. Later in human history, the deliberate writing of imaginary or fanciful texts, disseminated in written form to a literate audience, marks the first fully self-conscious literary traditions. In this context, although still considered ancient, might be placed such compositions as the Latin Aeneid of Virgil, the Chinese Songs of Chu, or the Greek lyrical poetry of Sappho. With improvements in the production and dissemination of written texts, from Roman copyhouses to the invention of the printing press, along with the increase of a literate reading public, a third sense of “literature,” and the one most commonly used today, came into being. Specifically, literature encompasses all imaginative writing in any language, as well as essays, criticism, travel writing, biographies, memoirs, diaries, and collections of letters.
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The study of literature
In its modern descriptive sense, literature denotes written texts; by extension scholars have also applied the term to spoken or sung texts (“oral literature“), writings in particular subject areas (“medical literature“), other collections of material in a given language or national tradition (“English literature“), visual texts such as video and illustration, and published ephemera (“campaign literature”). It is often divided into historical periods (“Victorian literature“) as well as into formal categories (prose, poetry, or drama) and genres (such as the epic, the novel, or the folktale).
In its more traditional prescriptive sense (that of the 1911 Britannica), literature connotes a particular quality found in the written culture of humane learning, the profession of “letters” (from Latin litteras), and written texts considered as aesthetic and expressive objects. In that sense, the art of “literature” differs from the science of “language,” as studied by theoretical linguists and cognitive psychologists such as Steven Pinker.
Literature as a subject worthy of academic study was first identified in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) traces the English word itself back to the 1200s (when it described familiarity with classical learning); not until the early 1800s was it used in the more modern sense. Classical authors of ancient Greece and Rome generally never recognized the study of “literature” as a discipline per se; rather, they looked at forms such as drama, history, poetry, philosophy, and mythology on their own terms, or in terms of various schools of philosophical or religious thought. With the revival of advanced learning in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, though, the focus of study became classical literature itself—the sense first recorded by the OED; a person of “letters” was one who knew the classical traditions, and could read the classics. Only after literature in modern vernaculars became too significant to ignore did the current sense of the word develop.
European universities long resisted according writers working in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other vernacular languages the same status in their curricula as that given to writers of classical Latin and Greek. Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries were always conscious of the perceived inferiority of their native language, even as they rivaled and surpassed the literary achievements of their classical precursors. As scientific learning began to supplant classical learning in the early nineteenth century, universities added philology (the predecessor of modern linguistics) as a discipline, but that field focused more on the historical relationships between languages than on their literature.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the first institutions to offer instruction in literature were not the elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, but those geared toward students seeking to move up in the world, such as the London Working Men’s College (founded in 1854). There, much to their surprise, sons of London bricklayers and artisans encountered teachers such as F.J. Furnivall, an early editor of the OED, who opened his classes with the dramatic announcement that he was about to return a national literature to its citizens, and then commenced reading aloud in Middle English from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching, J.C. Collins stressed the influence of classics on English literature, shifting studies of the language away from philology and toward the present-day discipline of comparative literature[1]. In the United States, the study of literature was introduced at normal schools (schools for the preparation of teachers, mostly women at that time), and subsequently at land grant universities, where English literature was given the place assigned at older universities to reading in Latin and Greek.
First Edition of Quiller-Couch
Early professors of English literature, among them Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and Henry Morley, devoted much of their attention to establishing a canon of suitable texts for study. In the twentieth century, this led to standardized anthologies, such as the Oxford and Norton anthologies of English literature. With the rise of the New Critics in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, scholars began looking at the literary text as a cultural object—a living repository of tradition extending across ages and civilizations. This movement coincided with expanding post-World War II college populations and helped elevate literature’s place and prestige in university curricula. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, proponents of poststructuralist theory began questioning the traditional literary canon and accepted hierarchies: Why, for instance, should lyric poetry be regarded as worthy of literary study, when comic books weren’t? Couldn’t we learn important things about contemporary culture from native American storytelling traditions as well as Italian opera? Practically speaking, this has meant that while college English departments still teach courses in Shakespeare and James Joyce, the sense of a highly exclusive canon of “great writers” is much diminished, and more kinds of literature are fair game for scholarly inquiry.
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World Englishes and applied linguistics
ABSTRACT: This paper addresses the issue of the relationship between world Englishes (WE) and applied linguistics. The diffusion of English is seen in terms of three concentric circles: the Inner Circle (L1 varieties, e.g. the USA and the UK), the Outer Circle (ESL varieties), and the Expanding Circle (EFL varieties). The discussion is essentially restricted to the Outer Circle in which the institutionalized non-native varieties of English are used in multilingual and multicultural contexts. The discussion is about four major issues: theoretical, applied, societal and ideological, and focuses specifically on: (a) attitudes concerning the ontological status of the varieties of English, (b) generalizations about the creative strategies used for learning English in multilingual/multicultural contexts, (c) descriptions of the pragmatic and interactional contexts of WEs and their implications, (d) assumptions concerning multicultural identities of WEs, (e) assumptions about the role of English in initiating ideological and social change, and (f) assumptions about communicative competence in English. This paper is divided into the following sections: ontological issues, conflict between idealization and reality, acquisition and creativity, the ‘leaking paradigms’, cultural content of English, ideological change, where applied linguistics fails the Outer Circle of English, and types of fallacies about WEs. This study does not view applied linguistics as divorced from social concerns: the concerns of relevance to the society in which we live. This view, then, entails social responsibility and accountability for research in applied linguistics.
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Corpus-based Approaches to Issues in Applied Linguistics
DOUGLAS BIBER, SUSAN CONRAD and RANDI REPPEN
Northern Arizona University
The present paper illustrates the use of corpus-based analytical techniques to address a range of issues in applied linguistics. Two main strengths of the corpus-based approach are identified: text corpora provide large databases of naturally-occurring discourse, enabling empirical analyses of the actual patterns of use in a language; and, when coupled with (semi-)automatic computational tools, the corpus-based approach enables analyses of a scope not otherwise feasible.
These strengths are illustrated with respect to three areas of applied research: (1) English grammar; (2) lexicography; and (3) ESP and register variation. Throughout, the paper argues for the importance of a variationist perspective, comparing the patterns of structure and use across registers, and it shows how analysis of large corpora provides the empirical foundation for such a perspective.
Two general points are discussed in relation to the illustrative analyses. First, corpus-based analyses frequently show that earlier conclusions based on intuitions are inadequate or incorrect–that is, the actual patterns of use in large text corpora often run counter to our expectations based on intuition. Second, corpus-based analyses show that even the notion of core grammar needs qualification, because investigation of the patterns of structure and use in large corpora reveals important, systematic differences across registers at all linguistic levels.
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On the limitations of linguistics applied
HG Widdowson
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitätscampus AAKH/Hof 8, Spitalgasse 2-4, A-1090 Wien, Austria E-mail: henry.widdowson@univie.ac.at
Linguistics has changed a good deal over the 20 years since this journal was founded, and this raises questions as to what implications this has for applied linguistics as, in some degree at least, a dependent area of enquiry. One obvious change is that linguistic analysis appears to have got closer to language experience in that it has broadened its scope to take in the externalized language of actual use. Since applied linguistics is concerned with language problems as experienced in the real world, it might appear that the two areas of enquiry in effect converge into one. This article examines two examples of such apparent convergence, corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis, where linguistic description makes claims to be directly relevant to ‘real world’ problems in language use and learning. It argues that in both cases what we have is linguistics applied whereby such problems are reduced and resolved by the imposition of necessarily partial linguistic account on the reality of language experience. This, it is argued, needs to be distinguished from applied linguistics, a mediating activity, more ethnographic in character, which seeks to accommodate a linguistic account to other partial perspectives on language so as to arrive at a relevant reformulation of ‘real world’ problems.
Add comment December 23, 2009 sriwahyuni90
Linguistics: An invisible hand
Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, linguistics was considered a thoroughly historical science, focusing on how languages such as English or Sanskrit changed through time. By uncovering rules governing phonological change, historical linguists reconstructed dead protolanguages such as Indo-European — an ancestral dialect spoken some 10,000 years ago that diverged into a wide variety of modern languages, including Hindi, Russian, Spanish, English and Gaelic.
Add comment December 23, 2009 sriwahyuni90
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