highly recommended reading

highly recommended reading | Francesca Michalski | April 1st, 2001

I've just read a fantastic article in the ELT Journal on my CD Rom. I recommend it to all participants and tutors as essential reading- read it and you'll see why. The reference is ELT Journal Volume 36 1982, Michael Swan and Catherine Walker, 'The Use of Sensory Deprivation'. It's really worth taking the trouble to look it up. Those of you who manage to read it, please give me your opinion.

Francesca

Re: highly recommended reading | Jonathan Clifton | April 1st, 2001

Hi Francesca- could you give us a quick summary as the title sounds very intriguing- sounds like something more out of a Special Branch training manual on interrogation techniques than TEFL but then again.....

Best,

Jonathan

April Fool | Francesca Michalski | April 1st, 2001

Sorry but I just couldn't resist it. Jonathan- the article is a lot of fun, check it out.

Francesca

Re: highly recommended reading | Thomas Bloor | April 1st, 2001

I am glad you mentioned this because it should be prescribed reading for all students of TESOL. I read this when it first came out and it remains probably my favourite academic article of all time. It used to be prescribed reading for an Aston MSc option on SLA I taught. I reread it last summer for an unpublished joint conference paper on a related topic at BAAL 2000 in Cambridge and it is as good as ever.

Tom

Editor's note: Here is the abstract:

ELT Journal 1982 36(3):183-185;

The use of sensory deprivation in foreign language teaching

Michael Swan and Catherine Walter

This article gives a detailed account of a methodology of language teaching that, though as yet not fully developed, has already aroused a lot of interest. The authors take the reader through the various stages of the method, and end with suggestions for those who wish to try it out informally in classroom settings before investing in the expensive hardware.

Re: Sensory Deprivation | Raymond Sheehan | April 14th, 2001

I came across an interesting reference to "The use of sensory deprivation in foreign language teaching" in Swales's book, Genre Analysis (pp.48-49). Swales goes beyond the level of seeing it as an April Fool's spoof and looks at it in terms of the difficulty of disentangling clever parody from the real thing.

"After all, the content is conceivable (just),and certainly not ludicrously inappropriate. Further, the Swan and Walter paper is of an appropriate length, uses standard style, has the expected information structure and is appropriately referenced, some of the references being genuine."

Are there any other examples of EFL researchers parodying "both their research methods and their publication formats"?

Raymond

Sensory Development | Francesca Michalski | April 15th, 2001

Happy Easter Sunday - I hope you've found a chocolate egg wherever you may be.

Raymond, I've never read an article which is such a clever parody as 'The Use of Sensory Deprivation', however, How To Be A Boring Teacher by Luke Prodromou in the July 1999 issue of English Teaching Professional (issue 12) has a few similarities. Prodromou outlines BTM (Boring Teacher Methodology) in this witty article, which is basically about how to do everything wrong in class, and ends up by requesting letters from teachers who practice BTM and giving an invented reference. Such articles would make excellent material for a TDA assignment (shame I've already done mine).

Francesca

Re: Sensory Deprivation | Thomas Bloor | April 27th, 2001

Certainly the Swan & Walter 'sensory deprivation' article serves as a valuable comment not only on the excesses(?) of some fringe LT methods (Suggestopedia, the Silent Way, etc.), but also on the style of academic articles. I agree with Francesca that it is probably as good as parody gets. Like most effective humour, it is serious and profound - and funny, of course.

You ask for other examples:

To go back a a long way (as I do), in ELT Journal 36/1 October 1981, Chris Brumfit wrote a short review of an actual book: Gertrude Moskowitz' "Caring and Sharing in the Foreign Language Class", which started as a parody of her touchy-feely approach. The review begins:

"You're an intelligent person! I know you are for you are reading ELT Journal, and I want you to know that I know because I'm a humanistic teacher! You want to know why I'm writing like this? Well, you certainly ask all the incisive questions! I need to write like this because I've got to give you some idea of the style of Gertrude Moskowitz's book. OK? Fine!" (Brumfit 1981: 63)

In similar vein, I wrote about articles in the field of philosophy of language and started with a parody of their style in Bloor T 1996 'Three hypothetical strategies in philosophical writing' in Ventola E & Mauranen A (eds) "Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues," Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. For an ESP conference in Venezuela, I wrote an overlapping article (i.e. partial rehash) (also Bloor 1996), which is included as part of Unit 11 in the TD file. This omits my own parodic efforts but mentions humorous parodies (of medical research genres) in the British Medical Journal, a regular feature of Christmas issues of that journal.

My wife Meriel and I gave a talk on parody in general at the last BAAL conference in Cambridge, Sept 2000, but we didn't write it up for publication, mainly because of the difficulty of getting copyright permission for extended citation- maybe later.

One invaluable source for this was a book of psychological research parodies, which I strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in parody or in academic genres, especially psychology/psychiatry, or anyone who just wants a laugh:

Ellenbogen, G C (1989) "The Primal Whimper," New York: Ballantyne Books

In our field, though, Michael Swan is the master. He wrote a couple of similar parodies in the 1991 newsletter of BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics). One was a review of the fictitious "Discourse Respiration: the State of the Art"; the review begins:

"It is almost exactly ten years since the appearance of Pierrette Machin's seminal paper 'La respiration - musique interieure du dialogue' and this book provides a timely overview of developments in the intervening decade. Machin was not of course the first to pay attention to communicative aspects of breathing - one thinks for example of Parker's work on the sneezing language of the Ojibway, or Sackbottle's account of the Lugardu, who resolve territorial disputes by seeing who can talk the longest without breathing in...."

Swan also wrote some abstracts: "Brief Abstracts (supplied by the BAAL abstract- abstracting service)". Participants may find this one apposite:

"Aligote, Carlos and Colophon, Eulalia. Interlanguage in MA students. South Shields Journal of Prophylactic Linguistics, 22,3 (1990)

Utterances of Applied Linguistics students can be sited along a continuum running from pure L1 forms (e.g. 'We have to teach them to understand English') to pure TL forms (e.g. 'Our prime pedagogic task is to encourage strategies which will enhance learners' capacity to attend to the pragmatic communicative semiotic macro-context'). This paper offers a choice of five models to account for non-systematic variability in the data, treating L1, IL and TL as hierarchically independent semipermeable systems in each case."

Parodic items often show up on the net, especially in discussion group exchanges. I expect there is a website somewhere dedicated to parody. One such may be the website which was mentioned to me recently by Pinkie but I haven't managed to open it up yet: it is called 'the Annals of Improbable Research'

I leave you with another Michael Swan abstract (from BAAL Newsletter No. 39 1991: 39)

"Sackbottle, Caliban Q. Does instruction work? An in-depth study. Occasional Papers from the Seville Colloquium, 16. (1990) A group of four Spanish-speaking nuns from Tierra del Fuego was exposed to comprehensible input containing numerous instances of English quantifiers over a period of six hours. At the same time they were given explicit instructions in the semantics of English attitudinal disjuncts. A test to determine whether their command of quantifiers had imoroved more or less than their command of disjuncts was inconclusive: x2(1, N = 4) = .68, p>.25. "

Best

Tom

Re: Parody | Pinkie | May 3rd, 2001

Re Tom's very detailed and very interesting post on parody in TESOL, I'd just like to clarify that the "Annals of Improbable Research" is far from being an Internet arrivée- in fact it's a long-standing print journal, formerly the Journal of Irreproducible Results. These folks are also responsible for the annual Ig Nobel Prizes: I particularly recommend one of last year's winning articles, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" (from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). This is an unusual parody in that it appears to be entirely truthful: as far as I can see, nothing in it is actually invented. Though I may of course be wrong!

As well as "truthful parodies", how's about "hostile parodies", GENUINELY intended to fool: most famously Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Has there ever been a parody of this type in the applied linguistics literature?

Just for the record, there's a whole chapter on parody in science in "Opening Pandora's Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientist's Discourse" (N Gilbert & M Mulkay, CUP 1984). Also Unit 11 of TDA, which Tom doesn't mention.

That's all. Best wishes from Galicia, where the cherry blossoms are rotting in the rain and the once-yellow dandelions struggle to survive in the ankle-deep mud!

Pinkie
Spain

Re: Parody | Raymond Sheehan | May 4th, 2001

Thanks for this wonderfully informative response. You've given me one more good reason for awaiting the arrival of my ELTJ CD Rom... and an interesting trail to follow.

Of course a parody does not always have to be written... or does it (since there is an inherent script somewhere)? At a recent conference, I saw one of the keynote speakers perform a hideous parody of the teacher who employs a PPP-cum-structural-cum-teacher-centred approach. His agenda was to promote a lexical syllabus (and, by the way, a book).The audience were squirming in their seats and laughing uproariously at the same time. We were able to recognise, from our task-based/lexis-based learner-centered perspective that what we were being offered was not a pedagogical model but the contrary. Yet, we recognised the value of(and felt the pain of )the parody because those of us who've been around long enough have all been that stigmatised teacher once--and perhaps now believe that our belief in "a best method" was touchingly naive. Should such parody offer us a yardstick to measure our professional growth??? I mean the growth, the evolution, of our whole profession. And how will today's "beliefs" be parodied in years to come?

Perhaps one of the great advantages of action research is that we no longer hold dear to our beliefs but investigate our doubts. Have we become less strident and more reflective? Does this, in itself, offer grounds for parody???

Personally, I find such parodies (unless they're brilliantly clever and poke fun at the writer him/herself) undermine and devalue, or fail to recognise, what may have been achieved. They make me feel slightly uneasy. Generations of language learners DID learn language even if deprived of the benefits of our current insights. Sharing and caring DID have an impact on how we view learners, interaction... I have no opinion, though, on Hispanic nuns.

A very recent MET (i.e. Modern English Teacher) article (is it January's? I'll check) parodies (or rephrases) a whole range of assumptions, methods, cherished beliefs... It's a beefed-up version of a list of EFL beliefs doing the email-jokes circuit. Was it written by jaded people for jaded people? Does such parody (pretty poor stuff actually) really enable professional development? Are there not better, more constructive, ways of making ourselves aware of our limitations (methodological, stylistic...). If they provoke a healthy laugh (Swan's?) or a cynical snigger (the MET article)...what does that tell us?

Raymond

PS: What is the difference between parody, pastiche and respectful sequel? They all require skillful execution. A follow-up to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is written "in the style of Jane Austen." Because it's not intended as parody or pastiche, it's seen in quite different terms. Why?

highly recommended reading