The accountability of language

“Any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.”

George Steiner, Real Presences

"The author of the utterance, with greater or lesser awareness, presupposes a higher superaddressee ...whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical distance or in distant historical time. In various ages and with various understandings of the world, this superaddressee and his ideally responsive understanding assume various ideological expressions (God, absolute truth, the court of dispassionate human conscience, the people, the court of history, science, and so forth)."

M.M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres

"My concern is for the accountability of language -- hence for the accountability of the users of language.  To deal with this matter I will use a pair of economic concepts: internal accounting, which considers costs and benefits in reference only to the interest of the money-making enterprise itself, and external accounting, which considers the costs and benefits to the 'larger community.' ...One of the primary obligations of language is to connect and balance the two kinds of accounting....A reliable account is personal at the beginning and religious at the end.

Wendell Berry, Standing By Words

2013 Conferences

Some things that are happening this year that may be of interest. Obvs not going to them all!

AAAL: Dallas, Texas March 17-20 [Presenting on dissertation research]

CELT: Dallas Baptist U, March 20 [Presenting Wendell Berry & ELT]

TESOL: Dallas Convention Center Dallas, Texas, USA March 20-23, 2013 [not going]

BCTEAL: Douglas College, April 26-27 [deadline Feb 22]

CILS (UBC): May 3 [deadline Feb 28] not going

IOP (UBC):  May 11 [deadline Feb 26] not going

LLED Grad Conference (UBC): May 25 [deadline Feb 8] not going

ACLA: UVic, June 3-5 [presented on pluralizing high-stakes academic writing]

SSLW: Shandong University, People's Republic of China, early October [no CFP yet] not going

IAWE 19: Arizona State University, Nov. 16-18 [April 15 deadline] presenting on PhD study

"Highly Comprehensible, Reasonably Unirritating, but Linguistically Unacceptable"

The title comes from Santos 1988. I just emailed Terry to let her know that after re-reading her article, I found it ironic that I was pretty much doing a study almost exactly like hers. I don't think her work had a big influence on my decision to go the direction I'm going, but I feel like I have a better sense of how to marry "acceptability judgments" + "world Englishes" + "L2 writing" after looking at her framework more carefully.

For me, the framework and ideas behind the AJT come from a sociolinguistic framework. It's an interest in variation and how people make decisions about what's 'in or out' according to their (socially mediated) intuitions, beliefs preferences, and other words for subjective feelings or whatever.

The world Englishes stuff is just a natural result of the globalization of English, the de/re-centerting of composition and applied linguistics, and the importance of China in global discourse about education and English.

The L2 writing stuff, I now realize, is a very direct connection to the streams of thought that like to look at two things: 1) "What makes ESL writers' texts different than non-ESL writers?" and 2) "How do readers react to those differences (aka errors)?" #1 is a unique area for L2 writing as a field, but #2 can be traced back to composition studies in the 70s and 80s (Shaugnessy, Lunsford & Connors, etc) -- and ultimately can be traced back to the beginning of time, when the first teacher said "Man, kids today really don't know how to write! They keep putting apostrophes in the wrong places [or whatever]."

Anyway, the title: "Highly Comprehensible, Reasonably Unirritating, but Linguistically Unacceptable." Those are her findings about how content professors reacted to errors in L2 student writing. Isn't it pretty wack how those things don't all add up? That's why I want to keep doing this kind of research.

Incidentally, her definition of acceptability is "the degree to which the interlocutor regards the speech or writing of the NNS as approximating the target language norms." Of course, I'm not really working in an SLA framework, so my definition is necessarily different. Though my working definition is basically "anything that makes somebody go 'waaaait a minute...'" Which is not that scientific, but in a pinch, it'll do.

NOTE: One of my participants used the words "understandable, but unacceptable." Which is very interesting to me since native speakers (and most teachers in fact) are quick to say that they are most likely to go after those things that interfere with 'meaning.'

Wendell Berry on Language

From Wendell Berry's Community by Anne Husted Burleigh

How is understanding of the Incarnate Word essential to our understanding of the relationship of language and truth?

I believe that we have to try to make our words faithful to reality. Language has to maintain its power of reference to actual things, and everything depends on that power of reference and that community of knowledge, or else the word doesn’t get out.

In our age, people don’t have common understanding of the same words.

That makes for considerable difficulties, especially if they don’t talk carefully with one another. It is always good to talk with people who understand things differently from your way, but that requires careful talk. Any common effort obviously requires careful talk.

If we believe that words do refer to reality and our words have to be true, we still have to communicate with those who have accepted individualism and subjectivism. They operate on the premise that words really don’t mean anything except what the individual wants them to mean. Can we bridge that gap?

No. All one can do is speak as truly and clearly as one can. I think one’s abilities to correct anything are limited. It is important to know what the limits of your abilities are. A person can make a difference within a fairly small boundary. Not very many people can change very much.

They can’t change the world, but they can change their little corner of the world.

Well, I know that you can improve a few acres. You can take good care of a few acres. Your ability to take care of other humans is more limited than your ability to take care of an acreage simply because humans, in the main, would rather take care of themselves.

------

(there's a lot more, but I don't have books in front of me. More on this soon.)

Hypercorrection and Prepositions

"This hyper-correction of speech is a sign of a class divided against itself, whose members are seeking, at the cost of constant anxiety, to produce linguistic expressions which bear the mark of a habitus other than their own."
 - Pierre Bourdieu 

 Of course ironically hypercorrection marks you as the very thing you probably do not wish to be. I don't really like applying this to Chinese English because it's so influenced by the idea of social class, and I don't want to promote the idea of a linguistic hierarchy -- although there probably totally is one, and in terms of the popular imagination of English-speaking people, China is pretty low on the English totem pole, despite statistics (take this clever but ultimately insulting fake Chinglish article in the Telegraph, for example).


 But there may be something to it. Chinese English teachers seem to follow 'the rules' (whatever they are, and the source of 'the rules' is interesting and not at all clear to me) of English usage more assiduously than native speaker teachers, especially when it comes to "the small words" -- prepositions especially. It's a kind of paradox -- preposition errors are one of the most obvious markers of non-native speaker status, yet concern with preposition errors is one of the most notable differences between native and non-native speaking teachers. (At least anecdotally as I'm going through my notes.)

 In fact it probably isn't the Chinese teachers who are overcorrecting so much as the NESTs are undercorrecting -- but that's the privilege of the NS. You're allowed to not care as much about 'the rules' if you have enough cultural/linguistic capital in the eyes of the (imagined?) custodians of the rules.

Awesome Spam

Sometimes you just get amazing weird fake emails. I just got this one.


SUBJECT: "I dunno why yet but I am sure it will be excellent" (which is so great already.)

BODY:

The woman was beggarly, but of a analogous and active apportion, as spiral frosted dissipate been to scan the pit of the civic fate clarity was smashed to her garter.

Aloud endless this is! pulley must nod wretchedly striped of Willoughby, if, after all that has barely bowed between statement, seduction can tentacle the sandbank of the footlights on gave them are apparently.


(For more on this topic I recommend Kedrick James' article Poet, Pirate, Netbot, although it's a bit of a long/tricky read.)

Greenbaum's "Acceptability in Language"

If you have read this blog and attempted to make sense of the entries, which are obscure notes to myself that happen to be posted in public, you may have noticed that I appear to be on a one-man crusade to renew interest in the concept of "acceptability"in applied linguistics. Why? Because it's versatile, it spans a variety of areas in language study, it's sociocultural, it's about grammar, and everybody has something to say about it. Really: just ask the nearest person to you how to use 'who' and 'whom,' or what kind of word it's OK or not OK to end a sentence with. (Ha.)

In my own reading about acceptability, I've been working my way backwards from a 2003 article by Christina Higgins, usually ending up back someplace in the 1960s or 70s, with Chomsky setting up the need to study 'competence' and linguists coming up with Grammaticality Judgment Tasks, and the realization that there is a distinction between grammaticality and acceptability. Most of what I've been working on is meant to get people involved in the study of English worldwide to take an interest in the relevance of acceptability judgments to our work.

But there's one major publication on acceptability I've never really looked into, and that is Sidney Greenbaum's Acceptability in Language, an edited collection published in 1977. Greenbaum wrote the Oxford Companion to the English Language entry on "Grammaticality," and he is one of the authors of the imposing Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. (He died in 1996.)

Anyway, I'm going to read part of the book this week, and take notes on it here, starting with the

Introduction by Sidney Greenbaum

Greenbaum summarizes and comments on the 13 studies presented in the collection. His second paragraph explains the importance of acceptability to social descriptions of language: "the macro-level concerns attitudes toward the acceptability of a language or a of a variety within a language, whereas the micro-level concerns the acceptability of specific linguistic features" (p. 1). (The methods I use in my own research are meant to bridge the gap between these two, by the way.) He mentions that some studies will "consider the contrast that many linguists make between grammaticality and acceptability " and mentions that the "underlying system in the language" and "the acceptability judgments of individual speakers" are different. (Indeed, I think the latter are worth focusing on for that reason.)

Greenbaum comments on the "crucial significance  of acceptability judgments for linguistic theory and practice, and the reliance of researchers on "the intuitions of native speaker" -- he doesn't particularly criticize this (and I think it doesn't need criticizing, just expansion to a variety of speakers, NS and NNS alike), but does criticize linguists for using "their own intuitions" rather than those of non-linguists. (I wasn't aware this was a big problem, though some of the studies I read from the 1980s do specifically use specialists. In fact, I think the use of specialists is totally fine, but I agree that you probably shouldn't be relying on your own intuitions. I haven't come across any of those studies, however.)

However, a number of the papers in the collection criticize the elicitation of judgments as a method for sociolingusitics (I think Im going to need to read this Labov 1972 paper), arguing that "speech samples" should be the primary data. (Maybe so, for 'pure' sociolx, but again, AJTs are valuable for other reasons ) Greenbaum says that "acceptability intuitions and language behavior do not necessarily coincide and....informant reactions do not always reflect actual usage (p. 5)." "The producible is not always identical with the acceptable."There's a tension within sociolinguistics regarding speech vs intuition -- the question is sociolx is (I think) "how do we account for variation" (both macro and micro) , and I think you probably need both actual usage and attitudes to account for that, at any level.

Grammaticality vs acceptability:
 Grammaticality: is this feature 'in or out?'
Acceptability "does not require a binary distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable: we can recognize a continuum..." (p. 6)


To read:

From this book:
Acceptability in Context (ch 4) -  van Dijk
Sociolinguistic Reflections on Acceptability (ch 5) Eagleson
Acceptability in a Revived Language (ch 10) Rabin
On the Secondary Nature of Syntactic Intuition (ch 11) Snow and Meijer
Variation, Acceptability, and the Advanced Foreign Learner (ch 13) Tottie

and also
Labov 1972  - Sociolinguistic Patterns (uh oh, it's a book - just find the relevant stuff)

Grammar is Social

Grammar: not (only?) a model as embedded someplace deep in your mind, but a part of the model of the world that you build (and that the world builds for you) as you move through life.

Grammar is learned and maintained along with your image of the world, the world you build. Yes indeedy, grammatical correctness is socially constructed. But in a globalized world the many forces acting on how that is constructed makes it very confusing indeed.


AND ALSO

I'm starting to get why people find it necessary to critique linguistic nativism, but I'm not too concerned with it. It seems fine to say that we both are innately primed for language and that it's something we learn.

EVEN THOUGH

I'm really not a linguist.

Just listened to this On Being podcast with Jean Berko Gleason. V. interesting.

Thinking Through Data Analysis

Gotta loosen up, sit with the data for a long long while. That's how ideas come. Need to be both mentally and physically limber -- yet even one or the other at a time is hard to muster!

Here's what I'm thinking though --

I've got 2 sets of data. Comments on essays, and interviews about same.

Analysis of the comment data can only go so far -- looking at what was commented on, looking at what they said, and categorizing both. (Eg, 20 people commented on this use of a preposition, X number commented on prepositions in general, X number commented on the use of the phrase "harmonious society" across several essays; most common word used in comments was "wrong" or "native" or whatever.)

There are a lot of ways analysis of interviews can go, though -- I'm thinking of going with sort of 'how language attitudes are constructed' in a sense, or how acceptability is negotiated between interviewer and interviewees.

[SIDE NOTE -- I sometimes hate the postmodern thing of being like "see, I'm really totally being critical and analyzing everything because I included myself in the analysis like I'm just one of the participants" -- it's actually very good in the sense that it takes the researcher's role seriously -- I'm a social actor in this project, just like everyone else --  but it also sort of tries to offer reflexivity as proof of critical rigor, an innoculation against invalidity. (Is that a word?) Couldn't I, in the end, be totally wrong in my analysis of how what I'm doing influences others, or how what they're doing influences me? Analysis is only as strong as the theory you use to do it, and I'm suspicious of theories.]

Anyway, I like this, because in a lot of ways the interviews go differently depending on my relationship with the interviewee and how I relate to their position. At least I think they do - see "side note." I said in a term paper for a doctoral seminar that

Recognizing my professional identity/ies as multiple and shifting, I believe I can identify with, in some ways, the North American academy, the Chinese ELT community, foreign teachers in China, and international graduate students studying English in China, among others. If I can recognize each of these communities as having some impact on my own construction of English writing in China, perhaps the co-constitutive character of my own research and writing will be bolstered.

Despite that sounding a little naive and/or jargony, I do think it's related here. I think I'm trying to be "all things to all people" in a way. With Chinese teachers: "we all teach in CHinese universities, we all know what it's like." With foreign Ts in China, "we all know what it's like to be a whitey in China." With non-Chinese teachers in Canada, "Yeah, we do things differently here than they do over there."

Anyway....I don't need to go too much further with this train of thought, but it's something to think about. 

Oh yeah: the other thing I was going to say was that interviews don't have to directly correlate to specific stuff in the comments. Obvs they mostly do, but they can be more about understanding the process of negotiating the concept of 'acceptability' (or what is or isn't standard E / Chinese E) than about how specific decisions about comments were made and how that relates to the comment data. I think.

Jotting Down Some Stuff

Not a lot is happening. I have so many thoughts that I feel like might lead to interesting projects or papers every day -- they're just not dissertation-related! Dag.

Like:

- The Confucius Institute's slogan "Teach You Pure Chinese." Some say it sounds like Chinglish, but the point is that reactions to it show how we confer legitimacy on nonstandard usages. It only sounds Chinglishy because we know it's Chinese.

- The ever-warping amorphous theological/ethical/moral/Christian framework for understanding language, which is now threatening to engulf the venerable Walter Ong along with previous conscripts Wendell Berry, George Steiner, and M.M. Bakhtin. The more I think about this the more excited and scared I get about it, which could be a good thing.

ETC ETC ETC.

A submission to a new small-time but very cool journal is under review -- English Teaching in China. Would love to see more of these publications, and see professionals around the world looking at them.

Failing miserably at #acwrimo

After days of no work, finally spent some time doing interview transcription today. Need more of this.

George Steiner on Language

Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment, naive as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate. In the gospel we read: ''In the beginning was the word.'' And I am asking: Could there be a word at the end? If there is a divine word, a word of creation and forgiveness, is there by the same token a word of final destruction, a word which un-mans man? 

-- "Talk with George Steiner," 1982

Language: material, structural, social, spiritual

What do we do with theories or explanations of language which take material/biological descriptions of things related to language as ultimate -- that is, as explaining all that needs to be explained about language?

The nice thing about these explanations is that we don't need to do away with them. What we can do, though, is show why they don't adequately address important questions about language. I can imagine four related approaches to big questions about what language is, what it does, what it means, etc: material, structural, social, and spiritual. (Although maybe the spiritual is close enough to the social.) Material would be stuff like how we physically are able to make words, how our brains know how to make language, etc. Structural would be a detailed descriptions of what languages or language actually is -- all its components like words and sounds and stuff. Social (obviously primary for me) would be communication, discourse, and all the things people do with language. Spiritual would be a kind of bottom-line basis for language from a theistic view of the world -- language/meaning/logos as something uniquely given to humans by our Creator for certain reasons, and implications for that.

I don't mean to keep running into these ultimate questions about language, but I keep seeing these books and articles about neo-Darwinian materialism (not related to language specifically, though occasionally), and I feel like I want language people to have a thicker and deeper understanding of why that kind of thing probably won't work for "explaining" everything about language.

PS: Related, sort of: brainstorming a paper/presentation on Wendell Berry and language. 

Coming soon: re-focusing on dissertation! Come on!

AcWriMo update #1

Today is November 12, the beginning of what I'm calling "week 2" of Academic Writing Month. Time to check in on how I've been doing.

My stated goal has been 750 words a day, 5 days a week. I've definitely failed that, but I've also kind of failed to prioritize what I'm working on.

Note:
TWE = Teaching World Englishes article
C-E = Chinese-English interface article draft
RK = Pluralizing English, lexical/grammatical variation & high-stakes academic writing article

Week 0 (Thurs/Fri)
1 - 768 (C-E)
2 - 850 (TWE)

Week 1
5 - 700 (RK) (estimated - I wasn't keeping track)
6 - 0
7 - 860 (TWE)
8 - 0
9 - 250 (TWE)


Week 2
12 - 775 (dissertation stuff) + 230 (RK)

TOTALS:
TWE = 1960 (current article count: 5205
RK = 930 (current article count: 3398, plus about 1000 w of cut-and-pasted 'data')
C-E = 768
diss = 775
----

Obviously, I completely missed two days and had a day where I didn't meet a goal last week. I blame travelling, but I need a system in place to get things done even on travelling days. Waking up early (Probably 6ish at least!), while I often deem it impossible, seems like the best candidate.

In terms of progress, I'm really happy that the TWE and RK are starting to look like real articles. The lack of work on CE suggests to me that it's not as big a priority, but I think it's too far away from my everyday work (TWE is directly related to my teaching, RK to my dissertation) for me to want to work on it. And since I'm the one setting my goals, I think it's reasonable to put CE on the back burner at least for this week.

Two other papers that I had on the list of strong contenders for this month haven't been started, but I think they could be started (though not finished) at the end of the month.

The real issue so far is the lack of dissertation stuff. I've been wondering if I can include data analysis goals as well as writing goals for the diss, but I feel like actually setting word-count goals at this point makes me more anxious and worried than productive. What I need to be doing a lot the next two months is being submerged in the data: listening to it, reading it, transcribing it, writing notes about it, and coding it. This is what will become the chapters I intended to be "working on" this month. That might mean the chapters don't get done this month. If so, so be it. Anything that's working toward the goal of finishing is worthwhile.

----
To sum up: there are two viable papers going, but dissertation needs to take more priority.

-----

So with that said, let's try to plan some more specific goals for this week not based on word counts.

Overall for the week:
-TWE: get it shape for writing group to read.  (do some rewriting/editing)
- RK: not a big priority, but revisit Lillis & Curry section, rewrite, and send to RK. I think giving her a chance to give some input now will help.
- Diss: interview transcriptions, memos, and coding work.

----

I have some ideas for breaking each day down individually but won't post it here because I'm not sure how it will shake out. More next week!

TOEFL Scores for Asian Countries

From Bolton 2008 -" English in Asia, Asian Englishes, and the issue of proficiency."

Why is Japan last?

AcWriMo Brainstorm

November's going to be a heck of a month.

Here's a blarf of all the unfinished / desired writing projects to tackle in November. I'll refine this list before Nov. 1.

(Incredibly, I just submitted two papers I've been sitting on for a year, which is awesome. But I won't be hearing back about those until the new year at least.)

Edited Oct 29, and will be edited more--



DISSERTATION STUFF

This is actually the biggie. There are 7 chapters. Data analysis will sort of happen simultaneously with writing chapters 4,5, and 6, but it's chapters 4 and 5 that present the most immediate need. Ch 1 and 7 I'll probably leave till the very end; 2 and 3 are already drafted in the form of comps from last year; 6 needs more data collection after 4 and 5 are written. So let's make chapters 4 and 5 a goal. They're the main chunk of work. And let's say 5,000-7,000 words or so apiece.

This doesn't really include other important stuff like the coding, which takes forever, and the transcription which takes another forever.

1. Introduction
2. Lit review -- theoretical framework [comp #1 revised] and “empirical review” [comp #3 revised]
3. Methodology [comp #2 + explanation of procedures for study]
4. Findings from Chinese Group (AJT + interview1) [RQ 1 + 2]
5. Findings from Non-Chinese Group(s) (AJT + interview1) [RQ 1 + 2]
6. Comparison of findings and data from interview2
7. Conclusion

ARTICLES IN ORDER OF PRIORITY

1. New approaches to variation in L2 writing with Dr Kubota - finish draft to send to her. Probs 4,000 - 6,000 words.

2. Review of Dan Everett's Language for Books and Culture - finish the book(!) and write the review. I have brainstormed notes. Probs 1000 words-ish.

3. Chinese-English interface with G. Leung -- this idea is pretty well set and an outline is written, but I probs need to put in 2000 - 3000 words of work on it.

4. "Teaching WEs: Ss as researchers" Would be good for Changing English. Could actually use stuff from Early paper back in 2009! That might be better. Show a method of 'teaching WEs.' 4000 words?

5. Christian-Muslim dialogue in TESOL with Saeed. Have been reading some Miroslav Volf in preparation for this -- might want to take the same tack as some of the stuff in the Canagarajah/Wong book. (This is for a future Wong/Mahboob book.) I can write my own sections about Christian ELT & Muslims from a Christian perspective. Maybe 1500 words to start.



BACK BURNER

- Teaching world Englishes to Japanese students in Canada? -- reflection on teaching WEs at Rits. Not totally sure which way to go with this, but it would have to be conceptual rather than empirical -- something like a "brief report" or "teaching reflection" that appear in more practitioner oriented journals. Possible collaboration with student? Other teachers? What I'd really like to do is collaborate with Dollinger but I haven't even met him. This would be good to submit to something like JALT if I could figure out a shape and a purpose to it. I think somewhere in there is something good -- like, "why do it at all?"


- English at joint venture universities in China with Roma. This one is tricky because we never really quite nailed down how we were approaching the research for this one. I did a conference presentation on it as a 'work in progress' but I'm not sure if this is ready to be written. Should probably discuss with her.

- Pretty sure I have something that might become a book someday about "doing Christian language theory" apart from theology, and it would have a lot of Bahktin, George Steiner, and Wendell Berry in it. It would eventually have to engage with theology, which I don't really read. I don't think I have enough to work with at all yet, but it could be developed in a review of Every Tribe and Tongue, which I'm currently reading. Not sure where to publish that. Maybe that new Christianity and TESOL journal. (1000 wds?)

AcWriMo

Maybe you've heard of NaNoWriMo -- "national novel writing month," which is a challenge to write a whole novel (of 50,000 words or more) in the month of November.

Some academics/grad students have tried to figure out a way to make this work (I was interested in it a couple years ago) and the consensus seems to have settled on "AcWriMo" or "Academic Writing Month."

This comes at a crucial time for me so I am going to try it out, but I don't have a strategy yet.

Here are some relevant pieces thinking about how to do this:

My condensed explanation of the 'rules,' a longer version of which is at  PhD to Published:

Here are the rules for #AcWriMo 2012:
1. Set yourself some crazy goals.
2. Publicly declare your participation and goals.
3. Draft a strategy.
4. Discuss what you’re doing. [OK so being on Twitter and Facebook with us all day isn’t acceptable – you’ve got work to do – but checking-in at certain times is imperative!]
5. Don’t slack off.  ‘Write like there’s no December!’
6. Publicly declare your results – and please be honest! 

The Thesis Whisperer explains why AcWriMo sounds kind of bad, but might be good:

Firstly #acwrimo encourages you to make a schedule; to put aside time to work on your writing and declare it a distraction free zone from social media and email. 

Consistent writing, such as #acwrimo encourages, is the only cure I know for perfectionism. The more you write the more ideas you generate and the less time you have to pointlessly polish the words you already have. 

Finally, by joining a global community and keeping in touch with other writers via #acwrimo on Twitter, or by following the PhD2published blog, you will increase your own personal learning network and connections.  

So I am choosing to see #acwrimo as a way to resist and give myself the gift of time to write because I genuinely enjoy it, not because I have a specific word count or goal in mind.

"...Fear for the English Language"

Day 2 of the TESL Canada conference: after spending the morning finishing up my PowerPoint slides and practicing my talk, I showed up to the conference in time for lunch and then the keynote by Steven Pinker. It turned out to be a talk he's given before (seems like there are some videos online) based on his most recent book about language, and it was pretty fun -- most memorably about swearing and its functions. (And only a few mentions of "why we swear" in that vague pop-neuroscience way -- e.g., "this part of the brain lights up when people do this, therefore we know why they do it!")

I did my presentation on acceptability judgments and other stuff related to my dissertation research, and it was fine, but there was some interesting discussion from the audience afterwards, including from one woman who said something like "I'm just starting to learn about world Englishes, and what I feel after learning about this stuff is fear for the English language."

I handled her concern/comment as best I could, I think, but it made me realize that there is a divide between teachers who buy into the idea that variation is OK/inevitable in practice, and those who are keen to promote a standard and more ideologically opposed to accepting variations.

To me, all these new-ish perspectives, like EIL, ELF, world Englishes, etc., aren't threatening to English -- they're just ways of describing what actually goes on with the language. And I don't think they necessarily have all that many implications for teaching, other than "know your context" --  which is a pretty big one, and probably shakes out differently if you accept WEs/ELF stuff as an accurate depiction of reality.

So let me try to lay out some ideas that would explain a more variation-friendly perspective to someone like the audience member who was worried about English, presumably because she thinks WEs & related perspectives are all about eliminating standards:

1. English is an old language that came about as the result of contact between numerous European languages in what is now England.
2. It started to come into something more like its current form sometime in the last 300 years or so, also in England.
3. English has moved from the place it began to a lot of other places
4. Like all languages, conventions in English vocabulary, grammar, words' meanings,, etc, change from time to time, due to idiosyncrasies of its users.
5. Because of #3, this happens differently in different places.
6. Because of #4, there is a need and desire for language standardization  in societies, and it is useful to have a standard English for things like education, media, literature, etc.
7. Because of globalization, there is probably a greater need than ever for literacy in standard American and British English
8. However, that need is probably only felt by a small group of people who desire lives in which English is necessary -- those who travel internationally, those who work in internationalized fields like education, government, big business, etc.
9. Those people should be and are taught standard Am/Br English
10. Almost everyone else in the world who learns English is also taught standard Am/Br English*.

HOWEVER,

11. Most people in the world who know and use English are not American or British.
12. Most people in the world who teach English are not American or British.
13. Most communication in the world in English takes place between two people for whom no variety of English is their mother tongue.
14. Since these encounters often take place in transnational, transcultural, etc. contexts, #6 above is less important in these situations.
15. Therefore, the earmarks of standard American English and standard British English are often not particularly relevant in these situations, as long as intelligibility is achieved.
16. Whether people in these situations are satisfied with the degree of intelligibility achieved in their uses of English should probably be up to them.
17. Some of them are probably OK with speaking English in a way that sounds different or wrong to people from the US or the UK.
18. On the other hand, some of them are probably not OK with it, and would like to further learn standard Am or Br English in order to have a better grasp of it.
19. Those people can take some more English classes, if they want, where they will probably be taught standard Am/Br English.
20. Despite this teaching, people -- non-native and native speakers -- will continue to use language idiosyncratically at all time and in all places, and this will eventually lead to small changes in standard English.

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* I assume one of the fears is that accepting non-native varieties of English or being tolerant about variations will somehow lead to teaching Ss that there's no right or wrong. This probably isn't true, but more needs to be said to assuage those fears, since some of the trendier positions on this do make it sound like we should just abandon teaching any kind of standard.

Penny Ur at TESL Canada

Quick report from Kamloops, BC, where I'm at Thompson Rivers University for the TESL Canada conference. Yesterday I was at the Graduate Student Symposium where Penny Ur was the keynote speaker.

Her topic was "English as an International Language: What Difference Does it Make?" Ur is an interesting person to address this topic because she's kind of a teacher's teacher -- she doesn't have a PhD and hasn't made a name as a fancy scholar or theorist, but she's incredibly well known to almost every ESL teachers because of her books about practical classroom activities.

I like seeing somebody like her wade into the English in the World debate because she can help to cut through the theoretical morass most of us are stuck in.

Her main point, which is indeed a very practical one, was that NNES-NNES communication is the norm. Rather than wanting to do descriptive research like Jenkins, Seidlhofer, and the other ELF people, Ur asks instead "how then shall we teach?"

She went through Kachru's circles and touched a little on ELF, finally suggesting three possible ways of teaching EIL.

1. One of the native varieties (i.e., US/UK)
2. Diverse flexible models (i.e., all the trendy theoretical stuff -- grammarless, context-based, no right/wrong, focus on intelligibility rather than rules, etc)
3. A standard variety (i.e., the mythical -- my adjective, not hers -- World Standard English)

She argued that #3 was the most sensible for teaching. I understand her point, but her WSE ended up looking more like splitting the cost between American and British English, leaving out regionalisms and deferring to "simplicity" (program > programme, zee > zed) and other common sense-ish rules to settle disputes.

This makes a lot of sense, but it really just sounds like what every conscientious EFL teacher tries to do -- we're aware that there are different varieties, but we're pretty much bound to teach our own variety plus those major differences that we are aware of. How many times have I talked about crisps, chips, potato chips, and french fries in China? How many times have I made the "pants vs underwear" speech? I kind of feel like focusing on these bigger obvious differences distracts us a bit.

The big question -- "who decides?" -- is in part being answered by corpora, and I'd like to see how ELF research can support Ur's argument for a world standard -- though when I asked her whether she'd accept ELF features like non-marked third person verbs she said "the jury is still out" on these expressions which are "jarring on the ears."

In the end I didn't really think Ur's argument for #3 was much different from #1. #2 is untenable for a number of reasons -- and actually very few people support it outside of tenured professors in developed countries -- but the lacunae between actual usage, preferred usage, and what is taught are so wide as to make an argument for any of these pretty difficult. As usual, it comes down to teaching as best you can with what you know, and continuing to educate yourself about what English is and how it works.

The next keynote is Steven Pinker, who is not a TESOL professional, but a famous cognitive linguist and proponent of evolutionary psychology, which is probably my least favorite model for understanding human behaviour. But I've heard he's an interesting speaker.

Thought: Shifting from WEs to 'variation' in general

"Acceptability" is a facet of variation. If we accept the idea that error is in the eye of the beholder, we can investigate how/why people identify problematic variations.

But to limit that to one perspective might be too narrowing -- there are plenty of people who have come up with different ways of looking at variation. (Ferris/Truscott? Williams?) So what if I compare readers' reactions/rejections of certain chunks of language to a number of things:

- attested/proven/proposed features of a particular local variety of E? (We have to assume there's some kind of assumed standard English in mind that the local usage is being compared to -- and of course that's tricky, too, but we can at least gather, from WEs theory, that 'unenlightened' respondents are judging their local English against 'standard English')

 

- proposed features of ELF (this is a lot more important than i thought it would be, actually. The more I think about ELF the more sense it makes, and it would be interesting to compare what I find to ELF ideas.)

- traditional "common errors made by ESL writers" (Cf Hinkel, Silva)

- slightly less codified but also commonly cited "common errors made by Chinese L1 speakers" (cf. the thing from Chang that I wrote about a while back)

- this '"cross-language relations" thing which I'm kind of afraid of

In the end this study would be less about the bottom-up understanding of CE and more about how we deal with variation in academic writing. Can I actually look at all of these though?

Hmm.