The Inconsistencies are Interesting (More on Labov and AJTs)

After a detour into Patty Lather's article about paradigm proliferation, which was very difficult to read until the last 5-10 pages, I'm back and ready to talk a bit about Labov's stance on grammaticality judgments and where I want to go with them.


As a reminder, here are Labov's principles:

1. The CONSENSUS Principle: If there is no reason to think otherwise, assume that the judgements of any native speaker are characteristic of all speakers of the language 

2. The EXPERIMENTER Principle: If there is any disagreement on introspective judgments, the judgments of those who are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as evidence. 

3. The CLEAR CASE Principle: Disputed judgments should be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech community or be abandoned. (If differing judgments are said to represent different dialects, enough investigation of each dialect should be carried out to show that each judgment is a clear case in that dialect.) 

4. The VALIDITY Principle: When the use of language is shown to be more consistent than introspective judgments, a valid description of the language will agree with that use rather than introspections.

While I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't refer back to how he unpacks some of these (he's not uncritically accepting of all of them, nor does he expect all linguists to be, if I recall correctly), I do want to mention that Labov is working very much as a 'traditional' linguist here. There is nothing at all wrong about this. I have to stress both of those things, because the direction I suggest for AJTs is totally different than Labov's, but it doesn't mean that I think he is wrong or that my suggestion is the only way to make AJTs better. Labov is a descriptive sociolinguist looking for patterns of variation in speech communities, mostly by means of quantitative research methods. (E.g., surveys.)

On the other hand, the work I am doing is mostly situated in a qualitative tradition. I am still, to a point, interested in empirical evidence of language usage (though perhaps would be more likely to rely on corpus data for this), but I also take judgment data as empirical evidence: not of how the language is actually used (which is another matter), but how it is viewed/understood/accepted/rejected by stakeholders.

The world Englishes tradition takes "attitude" very seriously. Users' beliefs about the legitimacy of language, at both the conceptual (macro) and "real usage" (micro) levels, is of paramount importance in determining the status of a variety of English at home and abroad, as it were. We can use other terms besides attitude -- ideology -- but the fact is that people's judgements about language usage are very salient social facts that play an important role in the researcher's (and public's?) understanding of how language(s) exist and operate in society.

(Though this is not strictly related, I am thinking of Eric Henry's article on Chinglish from a couple of years ago which manages to show convincingly that labelling language use as "Chinglish" has much less to do with the linguistic 'stuff' of an utterance than it does with the position of the speaker and social/power differences between the perpetrator of Chinglish and the labeller of Chinglish. He discusses the language in question, but also how the language is reported and the reporter's attitude toward it/the speaker and ultimately how the latter is the most relevant in the labelling of the utterance as Chinglish.)

Language attitude research has a long history of quantitative studies, while language ideology research relies more on ethnographic methods. (The one coming from (socio)linguistics, the other from linguistic anthropology, as I touched on here.) I've chosen to use interviews and a kind of qualitative AJT to get at data about attitude/ideology toward Chinese Ss' English use, so I want to address how I modify Labov's last two principles.

#3: Disputed judgments should be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech community or be abandoned.

Because I am not using judgment data as a guarantor of actual usage or of proof that a particular dialect has a particular grammar, I would modify this one to something like : "Disputed judgments may point to shifts in attitude and/or practice; the dispute is evidence of something interesting happening, and it should be pursued further."

#4: When the use of language is shown to be more consistent than introspective judgments, a valid description of the language will agree with that use rather than introspections.

Again, this is totally right for researchers whose concerns are similar to Labov's. However, I would say something like "When the use of language is shown to be more consistent than introspective judgments, the judgments should be further investigated to probe the source of the inconsistency."

If my #3 and #4 sound similar -- well, they are. Because ultimately I think that studying the connection between judgment (which I take as a kind of "attitude") and usage in and of itself -- rather than taking judgment as a kind of backup for usage data, both in service of linguistic description -- is worthwhile, interesting, complicated, and ultimately quite important for understanding how language works in society.

Which, in the end, probably makes me somewhat closer to the sociology of language than it does to sociolinguistics -- but as I said, 'sociolinguistics' covers a multitude of approaches nowadays.

Labov on the problem with grammaticality judgments

You know, when I was an undergraduate writing papers about the Glass family and how they show us that we have to love everyone, I never thought I would end up in a career where I get really het up about something called "grammaticality judgments." But here we are.

In my last post, which was ostensibly an attempt to "Harvard" a book -- it didn't take, really; I got too interested in specific arguments the book was making -- I touched on Carson Schutze's attempts to reform grammaticality judgment methodology in linguistics. I ILL'ed a monograph by William Labov that he references, and have been flipping through it. Schutze is great for getting a sense of what GJs are and why they are important (and worth reforming) in "traditional" linguistics; Labov is solidly a sociolinguist (he basically invented sociolinguistics while he was a grad student), so his purposes with GJs are slightly different than those of syntacticians -- he, like other sociolinguists, is more interested in studying patterns of variation that make up various dialects.

The word "sociolinguistics" is now used in a somewhat loosey-goosey way compared to what it meant in the 1960s. In my field of TESOL, it's sometimes invoked whenever anything involving sociocultural context of language is brought up. (You could argue that we're following the more Hymes/Gumperz currents of sociolinguistics, I guess, but we often aren't.)  But for Labov and his followers, it is essentially the study of variation in language through the use of empirical evidence.

His emphasis on empirical evidence leads Labov to be rightly skeptical of the reliance that some linguists allegedly place on their own intuition when making statements about language. Labov favors observation as linguistic data, for many reasons which I won't go into here. He makes some suggestions about how to reform the use of introspective metalinguistic data in his 1975 monograph What is a Linguistic Fact?

Here are the things he recommends for "continued exploration of grammatical judgments" :

1. CONSENSUS Principle: If there is no reason to think otherwise, assume that the judgements of any native speaker are characteristic of all speakers of the language
2. EXPERIMENTER Principle: If there is any disagreement on introspective judgments, the judgments of those who are familiar with the theoretical issues may not be counted as evidence.
3. CLEAR CASE Principle: Disputed judgments should be shown to include at least one consistent pattern in the speech community or be abandoned. (If differing judgments are said to represent different dialects, enough investigation of each dialect should be carried out to show that each judgment is a clear case in that dialect.)
4. VALIDITY Principle: When the use of language is shown to be more consistent than introspective judgments, a valid description of the language will agree with that use rather than introspections.

Next time I'll look more closely at these -- especially #4 and its implications for the notion of 'acceptability' in sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and written texts. ultimately, my goal is to show that the concerns of Schutze and Labov are appropriate for their fields but not necessarily so for researchers who (like me) have more socioculturally-oriented, discourse-based goals. Or something like that. Stay tuned.

"Harvarding" a book

Here, according to Kristin Luker, is how to "Harvard" a book:

1. Look at the table of contents and index, focusing your attention on topics you care about

2. Skim the introduction and conclusion

3. Skim the chapters that seem relevant

4. Decide whether the book is worth reading.

5. (Optional) Read 4-7 reviews of the book.

I would add that you can/should "Harvard" the book reviews, too.
=================================================
So here's my attempt to Harvard a book that I have already read part of: The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. I'm giving myself 20 minutes to do it. Go.

Preface: purpose of the book is "to demonstrate the the absence of a methodology of GJs in linguistics constitutes a serious obstacle to meaningful research" (p xi). I would say this is similar in sociolx/app lx, WEs, though the solutions will be different from those proposed for Lx.

"grammars of intuition" is a problem.

GJTs are "pseudoexperimental" but have "no experimental controls" and often only the linguist him/herself is the "subject"

NB: Schutze is critiquing GJs in "theoretical syntax" studies.

GJs are "not pure sources of data" but "instances of metalx performance."

4 reasons for using GJs:

1. examining sentences types that rarely occur
2. examining “negative information” about “strings that are not part of the language"
3. distinguishing grammatical knowledge from accidents of speech
4.  minimizing other factors in the study of the mental nature of grammar 


lx intuition is 'shifty and variable' Householder 1965 (awesome name!)

"I do not believe one can defend the sufficiency of judgments alone" p3

Lx judgments do play a fairly central role in our day to day lives. p4

GJs are just as much performance and confounded by just as many factors as other kinds of lx performance data p6

--- Note: Ultimately Schutze wants to reform empirical data-gathering processes of elicited metalinguistic performance for Linguistics qua Linguistics -- this is traditional linguistics in the sense that it is looking at language from a more or less structuralist, Chomskyan, cognitivist perspective. Right? Not that there's anything wrong with that! But it's not what I'm doing -- I want to re theorize AJTs from a sociocultural perspective. -- 

"A working hypothesis'

"we should start from the position that te entire behaviour of making GJs is the results of interactions between primarily language faculties of the mind and general cognitive properties, and crucially does not involve special components dedicated to linguistic intuition." (fine!) p14

language is like other behaviours p15

Cites Chaudron and Birdsong as previous treatments of the topic, though notes they are both L2 focused. Says no one has done what he has done "within the basic framework of generative grammar." p17

--- Note: skim Birdsong again! --

p25 "acceptability" isn't the same as "accepted" 

Defn of acceptability:

1. any particular instance of a speaker accepting or rejecting a sentence is an act of performance
2.ANy sort of generalization across many such instances is a generalization about performance
3. A judgment of one's disposition towards accepting or rejection a sentence is itself a type of performance.

--Sure -- again , performance is not a problem for what I am proposing.--


The first 20 pages of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax sets up all future GJ/AJ studies, no? (p28)

p212 "linguistics has nothing to lose by taking data collection, particularly judgement collection, more seriously, both with regard to the insights that will be gained and the theoretical issues that will be clarified, and with regard to the standing of the field as a scientific endeavor or in the larger academic setting. The realization seems to be growing that the psychology of GJs can no longer be ignored."

Again, I want to do the same thing -- but not for theoretical lx, and not about psychology -- I want to understand this data collection from a qualitative / sociolingusitic / discursive / sociocultural / etc perspective.

2014 conferences (to be updated)

AAAL: Portland, OR, March 22-25 (ACCEPTED)

CELT: Multnomah U, March 26 (ACCEPTED)

TESOL: March 26-29 Portland, OR, March (REJECTED 3X!!; presenting one thing as 2nd author; proposal in for poster to doctoral forum; CALL-IS deadline Nov. 30)

BCTEAL: Kwantlen (Richmond) May 23-24 (not sure about CFP)

TESL Canada: University of Regina (SK), May 8-10 (Oct. 30 deadline)

CILS (UBC): May TBA

IOP (UBC):  May TBA

ACLA: Brock University (ON), May 26-28 (deadline Oct 31)

SSLW: Arizona State, Nov 13-15 (I do like this campus!), (deadline 6/1/2014)

AILA - Brisbane, Australia, August (Paper accepted; I withdrew it)

IAWE 20: probably in India, sometime in 2014


---

The "do I still have another career or not" conferences

AWP, February 26 - March 1, Seattle (possible schmoozefest)

EMP Pop Conference: April 24-27, Seattle (Nov 15 deadline)

The Lexical Approach

In his 1993 book The Lexical Approach, which I just checked out from the library to look for a kind of taxonomy of lexical items but will probably want to hang onto for other reasons, Michael Lewis lays out some categories for lexical items. This is important, because for Lewis "language consists of grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar."  I don't know how hard this actually pushes against linguistic theory; Lewis is pretty strictly focused on pedagogy, though he does claim to be doing applied linguistics (and I think he definitely is); he cites Halliday on occasion, but in terms of his understanding of language as primarily lexical, he cites one article by linguists and one by an ELT specialist.

I am interested in how/whether grammar and lexis are categories that can be called separate in any meaningful way, and would probably like to do a short section on this in the introduction to my data analysis for my first research question, but at the moment I'm less concerned with a detailed taxonomy of 'types of lexical items' than I might have been before. I'm still thinking about this, though.

Thus Beginneth the Schoolyeare

2013-2014 is not an academic year I thought I'd still be a student, but here I am.

What's happening this year? Well, that's a little too broad. How about "What's happening this term?" Glad you asked.

1. As of about 3 weeks ago, something has come unstuck with my data analysis and I am actually swimming around in my data and working on it nearly every day. I can't tell you how good this feels after nearly a year of staring at a spreadsheet and feeling sick. I'm not necessarily that much closer to having something I feel totally confident about, but I'm getting somewhere. I met with my supervisor today and even though we agreed that I need to undertake what is now by my count my fourth round of (re)coding data for my first research question, it feels right and good to be concentrating on this.  To quote John Stackhouse: "One cannot hope to make progress on a problem, let alone enjoy a dramatic creative breakthrough, with half-hearted, on-the-fly attention. Focus, obsession, monomania: Pay the problem the attention it deserves."

2. So my main goal is obviously to continue with this. I have a pretty ambitious schedule for myself which involves a lot of analysis and writing in September, October, and November. To that end, I am not doing any teaching at all.

3. Having said that, I do have some limited teacher-y appointments at the moment: I am finishing up helping to mark assignments for some MATESOL courses at Trinity Western University -- probably the last work I'll be doing them for a while -- and I'm happy to say I'm also acting as basically a one-man writing center/academic coach for a small group of students in something called the Global Citizenship Program in my department's exchange program with Ritsumeikan University. I'm actually pretty excited about this role -- despite having now upwards of 5+ years of university teaching experience (including teaching graduate students), I have comparatively little formal writing tutor experience. That might sound sort of boring, but to me it's an important part of the kind of work I like to do and want to continue to do in the future.

4. Publication-and-presentation-wise, a few things going on, though again not too much due to #2. I had a methodology paper rejected by a major journal recently, mostly for reasonable reasons, and I have 2 more manuscripts in "in review" limbo (aka "no one has had time to review them yet"). The big thing this fall is the Int'l Association for World Englishes conference at Arizona State, where I'll be presenting stuff on my findings for both my research questions. I've essentially set this up to be the debut of my PhD study, and I haven't proposed it to any other conference (though I proposed something vaguely related for another conference, which I'm not super confident about), so it's a big deal and I'll need to put in a lot of heavy lifting to make it work.

There are also a couple of book proposals that need to get done this fall, too, both of which I'm excited about but which don't warrant much mention because they are very tentative and may not happen, and I won't have much time to think about them until December at the earliest. 

5. Incredibly, I am taking a class, which feels bizarre. It's in the Educational Studies department, where I've taken a course before, but it is a very loose, fluid course that essentially asks you to figure out where you are methodologically weak and work on that. The assignments can be tailored to fit whatever you are working on at the moment, so I'm thinking I will use it to get down into my second research question, which involves interview data, and to figure out what kind of analysis I'm doing for that, and then actually, like, do it. It is a class full of people doing very different kinds of research, though -- in fact, the majority of them are 2nd year students about to start their comps, so it's hard to relate to where they're coming from. I think I'll be able to do some good work if I really put my head down, though.

6. I'm quietly keeping tabs on jobs I might want to apply for for 2014-15. Nothing amazing is popping up yet, which is good, because I don't really want to start applying until I've already written a gazillion pages for my diss, which definitely hasn't happened yet.

What's a chunk?

I'm using the term "chunk" a lot in my notes and coding for my study.

I use the term "chunk" to refer to anything that a participant highlights or comments on as an 'unacceptable' instance of language use. I could argue that whatever they highlight with the MS word comments box thingy is the 'chunk,' but it's clear that they often highlight different things when they are actually all commenting on roughly the same few words of language.

The trouble I've been having with this is that it doesn't leave me with a very clear definition of what a "chunk" is. Is there a simple, easy-to-use taxonomy of basically all words and phrases that I can use to delineate the boundaries of chunks and describe what they are? My non-linguist gut tells me I could use SFL, but I don't know what other 'systems' / theories are in place to let me work on this easily. I guess there are some theories of 'traditional' linguistics but then I see scary things like this.

"This grammar defines the language  where  denotes a string of n consecutive 's." (From wikipedia)

My brain is broken after looking at that.

So I'm looking around for a framework that will be simple to use. On my way to check out "the Lexical Approach" by Michael Lewis, which I realize is pedagogical, but I'm just looking around.

---

On another notes, for RQ1 (which is the "what do people reject" question), I am faced with sort of splitting my codes into 2 parts: one part is for the chunks themselves (which is what I'm looking for a system for, as mentioned above), and the other is what is being commented on -- that is, what exactly is being objected to, or the "linguistic concern" that the participant voices, as my supervisor put it.

The latter of these two is actually much harder to pin down. I originally had some of my constructs tangled together -- in particular, I think I was combining this one -- "what is the particpant's particular 'linguistic concern' with this chunk that is causing them to reject it" -- with a larger one that will end up being RQ2 (something like "WHY do they reject what they reject," focusing less on specific 'linguistic concerns,' though that is obviously important, and more on ideological/belief/attitude things).

The question with both parts of RQ1 is, "what is being rejected?" how much of a lexical chain, or phrase, or whatever, is being deemed 'unacceptable' ?

And why is this causing me so much grief? I think it's because I'm afraid of being wrong.

A Brief Explanation of What I Do (as a researcher)

I study writing.

There are a lot of ways to study writing: the process (how is it done?), the product (what does it mean, what does it say, how does it say it?), the people involved (what do readers and writers do? How and why?).

There are also a lot of scholarly traditions which study writing: literary studies, Rhetoric and Composition, discourse analysis/discourse studies, applied linguistics, TESOL/ESL writing, etc.

I sometimes have trouble picking which one I'm coming from. For the most part I would say I'm a sociolinguist who studies writing, or a writing specialist who approaches the subject from a sociolinguistic perspective; that is, I am interested in how writing operates in society, or how social life and practices of writing (specifically the nitpicky ones -- grammar, lexis, etc) intersect.

I'm interested in how beliefs about grammar and sentence structure -- the way we conceive what is 'good writing' at the linguistic level -- affect the ways people perceive and judge writing and writers -- mostly in educational settings, but not always. (For example, I love pursuing nonstandard turns of phrase that show up in various places, like "every corn has two sides," which appears 79 times on the internet, figuring out how people are using them, and perhaps why, and how other react.)

That's pretty much what I do, scholarly-wise.

Linguistics and Sociolinguistics but no Languages

For Chomsky, there are no languages; there is Language.

For Pennycook & Makoni, there are no languages; there is usage.

Please Don't Plagiarize more than 30% of your paper

"In order to ensure the quality of the article, English grammar and writing must be Specification, and the copy rate can not be more than 30%(include references ), and the article must be strictly typesetting in accordance with the template , otherwise the article will not be published, please respect the academic ethics！" (Quote from a conference CFP)


Got this spam conference email recently. It was hosted in Singapore but the way the CFP was written suggests that the conference is being run by a group from Mainland China.

Of interest to me was that the Chinese version uses a word for "copy" that is also translatable as "plagiarism" (at least according to Google Translate!).  I point this out not to make fun (though it does seem kind of funny at first), but to suggest what kind of everyday, normal practices are likely in place for the people involved with this conference. There seems to be an understanding that there will be a certain degree of "copying" involved in an academic paper, yet the editors are also concerned about "academic ethics." If I had more time I could try to say more about this, but for now I just think it's (wait for it) interesting.

Genre & empowerment

 I came from a home that elevated reading, argument and debate into a secular religion. Not a day went by when my parents didn't concern themselves with what I was reading, talking about reading, talking about talk, talking about what was coming out of the radio, talking about what they read out loud to each other or to us coming out of newspapers, Radio or TV listings mags - any bit of written text. They didn't stop telling stories about their lives, and relating those stories to the values that underlay them - as most people do, when they tell stories, actually!

Michael Rosen, "How Genre Theory Saved the World"

Me too, though we had a regular religion also. Reading was absolutely constant in our home. Books, newspapers, magazines, books on tape, radio, cereal boxes, etc. If I didn't remember to bring a book into the bathroom I'd studiously read the back of a shampoo bottle.

Rosen's point in the blog entry that quote comes from is that genre theory (in Australia and elsewhere) was meant to give poorer students better access to the 'language of power' by explicitly teaching occluded genres, but that it didn't really work, because the best way to really master those genres is to be immersed in them in your out-of-school life. (An interesting parallel to language learning, perhaps. Immersion seems like a pretty transferable concept.)

Let me think through this though.

language of power = language of elite/powerful/people with money/middle class and above?

I grew up in a house with tons of books, newspapers, magazines, etc. Was it because we had lots of money? Well, we didn't have 'lots' of money, but we had enough to buy books and stuff. And my parents were teachers. The point is, I was part of a culture that valued eduacation -- I don't know if this is just WASP culture or what. I guess it is. (Many of my aunts and uncles have PhDs or work in education as well -- though only one other member of my generation on both sides of my family works in education besides me.)

The argument I think is that you can't teach people to really absorb and swim around in genres they don't see being viewed as valuable in their everyday lives. So if my family was part of mainstream american WASP culture, that was my advantage because I got very easy access to the "language of power."

But doesn't this whole approach suggest that making or remaking students into "language of power"-people is the goal of education? It seems like a kind of crass goal. What if somebody comes from a community that doesn't give a crap about, I don't know, NPR or environmentalism? Isn't that their prerogative  

I mean, I guess my own somewhat romantic view of education as a whole-person kind of character-building thing (I'm pretty sure that's what I like about education) is similar, in that ultimately it results in a certain kind of person emerging with a diploma.

Or does it? To have read the right books, to know how to write effectively in various genres, etc. -- is this really the rote production of people? I don't even really believe people can be 'produced.' Regardless of your educational experiences, you have agency to do stuff. You make choices. Some of my friends from my private Catholic high school went to Ivies and med school, some dropped out of college.

So in conclusion I really have no idea what I'm talking about here, and I still need to find a chapter on genre theory for a class I'm teaching. So this didn't help a ton. But I had fun thinking about it.

Those last two sentences are the story of my life, and maybe because I grew up in a house full of books.

Notes to Self - coding scheme, lexis vs grammar

Thought: I've got 700+ lines that are coded with "word choice" (usually with something explaining that in more detail, like "verb form," or "preposition," or "?" when I'm not sure).

I've been explicit about making this study focused on lexis and grammar, so it's not at all surprising that "word choice" is a huge category. I wouldn't be surprised to find that "unusual phrase" is another huge category. (I'm sure it is, just don't know how many exactly.)

Last meeting with supervisor had some discussion about breaking it down into lexis and grammar. Seems logical, though I'm sure lexis will be more than grammar.

What about the "meaning" categories? Eg, "this doesn't make sense" (though that is usually lexical or grammatical at heart). Prob should have semantics as a part of lexis? What about stuff that actually refers to discourse features?

Is "wrong preposition" a lexical issue or a grammatical issue?

Pretty sure "verb form" is grammar, not lexis.

People will describe their rejections in term of "word choice" but that doesn't mean it is strictly a 'lexical' problem.

Still need to think about this a lot. More coming soon.

Notes to self (mostly on pivot tables and things)

Incredibly, I find myself having to know how to do Pivot Tables for this project. I first encountered Pivot Tables about ten years ago when I started my first job out of college at Catholic Community Services. I thought I'd never need them again. Oh how wrong I was.

Anyway, just some notes:

I've now coded 4/7 of the data (initially at least) and am starting to see what works and what doesn't. The Pivot Tables allow me to nicely nest things like this:

Type
Subtype
Group number
Chunk
Comment

Having Group Number, Chunk, and Comment together are nice. I can basically look at any given Chunk and its comments very quickly and easily. It also eliminates the need for an additional field called "description" which I was using to go along with group number. (Eg, group 1 is X chunk)

Type and Subtype are trickier. I've been playing around with how to do types, and I have about 200 differnt things entered, but in reality probably more than half are duplicates. The problem is what to do with huge categories like "word choice." That is by far the biggest 'type' category, and it's so big as to be meaningless, I think. I tried to solve that by creating subtypes, but I'm not sure how well that's working. The thing is, I do want to have some pretty big overarching concerns -- or I did, at least. I thought lexis would be a category (word choice), and grammar/syntax/word order etc would be another, but it's all pretty ambiguous. There's a different between a "weird word" and the "wrong word" and the wrong form of a verb, so I don't think that's all really 'word choice.' Maybe it is.

It would help to have a rubric to use, and I kind of have one in Lunsford & Lunsford, but I'll have to modify it since they are explicitly going after things they deem errors. I do need to keep plowing through, but it might be nice to stop and tidy up a bit before I accidentally create 200 more "types." So I'll consult that Lunsfords article in the morning.

Anyway, I'm tired and not finished yet but I have something to work on tomorrow. This is far from statistical analysis, but the pivot table stuff is starting to look pretty cool.

No sociolinguistics of writing?

I'm amazed that it is only literally just now that the first major consideration of writing through the lens of sociolinguistics is being done -- Theresa Lillis' book The Sociolinguistics of Writing having just been published this month. The written/spoken divide is wider than I thought, I guess!

Let me try to trace this.

Old-school structural linguistics is all about language as a system, a mental abstraction in your head. Not actually that interested in 'usage' per se.  Interested in the 'ideal speaker/hearer' (after Chomsky) -- the abstracted native speaker whose brain has in it the standard native language he/she acquired from birth.

Standard, idealized language, of course, is something that people rarely produce. (Hence the distinction between competence and performance in theoretical linguistics.) But it is something we can codify -- NB, write down -- and it's here that a weird paradox emerges, which Per Linell calls "the written bias in linguistics." Even though writing is a technology, a cultural innovation that allows us to represent language (that is, speech) in an abstract way, there is somehow a deep connection assumed between standard language, written language, and (crucially) that idealized NS speaker/hearer language deep in our brains. Linell's book points out that "language" is essentially conceptualized as a "structured set of forms, used to represent things in the world" in linguistics, and that this has led to an equation of written language with language, period.

Sociolinguistics, on the other hand, is not interested in 'pure language,' and though this might muddy the waters a bit, many social approaches that could be vaguely subsumed under sociolinguistics are not. Sociolinguistics is the natural result of years of thinking toward a conceptualization of language as a social practice rather than (or in addition to, to be more charitable) a set of forms.

 Sociolinguistics concerns itself with language usage -- data from real people using language, usually in the form of speech. So I'm wondering if it's because of the huge gulf in focus between language as a social practice people and language as forms people that sociolinguists don't ever seem to have considered written texts worth examining when it comes to to the central concern(s) of sociolinguisitics:  language variation and language change.

Is it really only in 2013 that this is seen as a reasonable thing to study, or is this something that disciplinary boundaries hath wrought? In other words, is it that texts are seen as the property of rhetoricians, philologists, literary theory people, or even structural linguists (stylistics?)? Is it that applied linguistics has come up with its own ways of analyzing written texts that doesn't really care about why certain groups of people use language differently in writing than others, or why writing practices change?

Is this a brand new field that is wide open, or has it just been taken for granted that the work is already being done by different people under different names?

Paul Brians on Common Errors in English

The following is a section from Paul Brians' retirement address. Brians is best known for his website "Common Errors in English Usage."Emphasis is mine.

I want to conclude by making a few remarks about the work that I’m best known for outside the university, my Web site Common Errors in English and the various publications derived from it. A standard objection to this sort of thing is that correctness in English usage is a social construction, and that the proper role of the professionals should be confined to tracking changing usage and celebrating diversity. Yet English professors are not the gatekeepers of usage, and their permission to stray from traditional usage goes unheard by the general public. Instead, people want to know how they can make themselves clear, impress their readers, communicate effectively.

It is precisely because language usage is an artificial social construction that one needs a lot of information to navigate the dangerous waters of modern English to avoid embarrassment and disdain. We can tell bosses that they should ignore the tendency of their job applicants to write “for all intensive purposes” and “one in the same.” They are not listening. The pronunciation by eastern newscasters of our neighbor state’s name as “Oregawn” alienates listeners. The tendency to call a slash a “backslash” confuses computer users. Mistakes are essentially social, but that does not make them unreal: we need to know the social reality which our words encounter when others read or hear them. Some English teachers are happy to critique the obfuscatory jargon and and cliches of bureaucrats but not to address the verbal gaffes of the downtrodden: but who needs more help? Who is more endangered by linguistic patterns that arouse contempt?

Alot (ha!) of this is very well put. I think Brians overstates it a little, though. The first part I've bolded may be a sort of objection, but it's not one that, if pressed, most professional applied linguists or others will make. I'm in a department with many well-known critical and socioculturally oriented scholars, and I frequently get comments on my papers which could be construed as "nit-picky" and as pointing out the very sorts of things that Brians lists on his site.

I'm inclined to push back a little and to say that some of the things he views as errors are very unlikely to be stigmatized (for example, in passing, he suggests that "firstly" isn't OK), and some things are very difficult to me to imagine anyone ever saying ("soup du jour of the day," "volumptuous"), but what I'd like to see is some empirical research about whether these are indeed common. Somebody should be able to do some pretty efficient corpus studies, no? That would be an interesting MA project.

And what I'd really like to know who these people are, the ones making these errors. I'm an overeducated, hyperliterate English teacher, so it's hard for me to imagine a world in which lots of people think "fowl swoop" is a thing.

Recent publications (by me) (with links!)

Heng Hartse, J. & Shi, L. (2012). Investigating acceptability of Chinese English in academic writing. Contemporary Foreign Languages 384(12), 110-122. Download here.

Heng Hartse, J. (2013). Foreign teachers, Chinese students, and 'English for Different Purposes.' English Teaching in China 2, 52-55. View or download the whole issue here.

Language attitude vs Language ideology

Sociolinguistic research has long used concepts such as stereotypes or attitudes to characterize sociocultural beliefs about languages and their speakers. Yet these notions emphasize individual psychology at the expense of the sociocultural level at which belief systems contribute to the structuring logics of power. 

(Bucholz & Hall, "Language and Identity")

...language ideologies are defined as explicit metalinguistic discourse or talk about language. From a traditional sociolinguistic view, language ideologies, for instance under the label of attitudes and beliefs, have been treated as representation fo internal mental processes and phenomena...attitudes and beliefs are subjective, stable experiences located in the individual. However, this notion is rather limited. Instead, the focus is is now turning to the variable nature of beliefs and attitudes and their discursive construction as well as their real-life contexts.... statements containing beliefs or attitudes are often produced among others, in particular recurrent interactional contexts to resist a certain view or a possible counter-argument. 

Gal (2006)...defines the field as a form of discourse analysis exploring the cultural, metapragmatic assumptions of how language is connected to its speakers and to the social world.

(Laihonen, "language ideologies in interviews: a conversation analysis approach" 2008)

...the observation of language attitudes in discourse - and more specifically language attitudes in interaction -- can provide the researcher (with things) that quantitative, statistics-based methods cannot.

(Liebscher and Dailey-O'Cain "language attitudes in interaction" 2009)


Remember:

'Language ideology' is primarily a term that comes out of the tradition of linguistic anthropology, while 'language attitudes' is from sociolinguistics. There is very little overlap between the two in terms of keeping to their separate academic silos. They are also likely to use each other's terms interchangeably. You can see that the third quoted article here is basically arguing what the first two are, but is more solidly locating itself in sociolinguistics by sticking with the term 'attitude'. (The article also mentions that this discourse approach can be used in conjunction with matched-guise technique, which is a quantitative sociolinguistics method.)

It also seems as if 'ideology' has a more explicit connection to larger social discourses (hence the emphasis on various kinds of DA for studying this stuff), which 'attitude' seems to be pretty limited to individual expressions -- but this might not be true for everyone using these terms.

What is clear is that social constructionist theory is making inroads with people who study 'beliefs' about language (whether they call those attitudes or ideologies), as are the methodological tools of discourse analysis.

UBC's International Pathways Program: A new model ?

I don't know much about this new initiative at UBC, but it is going to be big -- they are spending $200 million on it.

UBC serves a local, national and international community and efforts are currently underway to strategically expand international student enrolment so that campus life and the student experience are universally enhanced. UBC’s International Pathways Program (IPP) as an adjunct to our expanding International Students Initiative (ISI) will allow UBC to significantly diversify the student body and increase the number of talented international students at UBC. The IPP will combine innovative teaching techniques with cultural and language support to provide a transformative program that will allow us to invite promising students from a more diverse array of countries while maintaining our base of direct entry students from traditional sources.

(That's from the "UBC 5-Year Capital Plan.")

The UBC student newspaper reported last year that Pathways would be a "separate but affiliated college," a kind of first-year program which would eventually allow students to enter UBC as 2nd-year students. "Separate but affiliated" worries me a little. The ideal situation, I think, would be to have credit-bearing language/culture/study skills courses, and this might be closer to that. I think of the first-year English programs at the Chinese joint-venture universities and wonder if this might be something like that. The JVU programs, however, seem to be much more integrated into the actual university. There's something a little off-putting about building a larger, more glorified "you're not actually a real student" style institution, of which there is already one at almost every university -- an English language institute. Incidentally, UBC's large ELI is supposed to be involved in Pathways, though I don't know how.

Anyway, something worth keeping an eye on. It could be a good thing (and even a place for me to look for a job in the future, maybe).

UPDATE: I note that this program has also been referred to as "A Bridge to UBC" and it does seem to provide actual credit courses despite the students not being enrolled in UBC. UBC's vice provost presented a sketch of the prospective program to the UBC student body association last fall and laid out the following steps (see the whole PPT here), with my emphasis:

We are proposing:
• An educational program developed for international students from domestic school systems that are significantly different from those found in North America and Europe
• A program to enable these students to complete first-year equivalent coursework, and
be prepared to enter UBC degree programs as second-year students:
- Preparation programs tailored to individual needs, with longer preparation programs for some students
- Development of English language skills for academic success, integrated with the  broader curriculum
- Course content based on UBC first-year credit programs and curricula
- The majority of instruction will be provided by full-time academic staff in a variety of teaching configurations
- A “living lab” for innovative undergraduate teaching
- A “high-touch” in-residence experience for all students, with strong social support, to address cultural acclimatization issues specific to different countries
 - A program that broadens our reach and enables students from diverse backgrounds to attend UBC 

NYU Shanghai and Sino-Foreign Universities

NYU Shanghai is being touted as the first/only Sino-Foreign cooperative higher education institution in the media lately, though it isn't -- there are literally hundred of joint programs, ranging from dual-degree programs to genuinely independent institutions jointly managed by Chinese and foreign entities (e.g., Xi'An Jiaotong Liverpool University, University of Nottingham Ningbo, United International College, SIAS International University, and others).

NYU, though, is the highest-profile American university to start a program, and is following what you might call the Nottingham model, where the foreign university essentially dictates the entire curriculum (aside from P.E. and Marxist thought, one assumes -- traditionally required courses for all Chinese university students).

So while it isn't the only or first university to start such a program, it is possibly the biggest, highest-ranked (#43 on the QS Rankings!), most prestigious (just the words "New York" command attention), and most PR-savvy. A lot of people will be watching to see how it succeeds or fails. A number of facets of this institution will probably be under scrutiny: academic freedom, success of graduates in terms of employment or grad school admissions, treatment of language (English proficiency of local students, and, one hopes, Chinese proficiency of foreign students*), and so on. It will be really interesting to see what comes of this venture.


*I'm not yet clear on how these will be treated, but so far there does not appear to be a "first year English" program in place, which is mandatory at many other joint-venture universities.

Wendell Berry on Global Thinking

“…love defines the difference between the ‘global village,’ which is a technological and totalitarian ideal, directly suited to the purposes of centralized governments and corporations, and the Taoist village-as-globe, where the people live frugally and at peace, pleased with the good qualities of necessary things, so satisfied where they are that they live and die without visiting the next village, though they can hear its dogs bark and its roosters crow.”

(“Standing by Words”)

“There can be no such thing as a ‘global village.’ No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.”

(“The Unsettling of America”)

“In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.

Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.

Put the interest of the community first.

Love your neighbors--not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.

Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.

As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household--which thrive by care and generosity--and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.

 Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.”

(“The Futility of Global Thinking”)