GE Assignments

GE | James Hobbs | May 19th, 2002

Hi again,

Pinkie: good to know that you're still there, and hope you'll be getting back into the flow of regular posting on the list. I'm sure I'm not the only one who always enjoys reading your posts. Anyway, many thanks for the GE ideas. The suggestion of error analysis did indeed seem like a safe bet, and made me think of the e-mail list I run for my own students. I went through old messages looking for errors characteristic of individual students, expecting to find all sorts of assignment ideas, but I found that I had to look through an awful lot of text before I was able to identify recurring problems, and basically I felt that I'd be struggling to make a full assignment out of what I found. Still, it was a worthwhile task, as I learned that my students' grammar isn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it was!

As today is my self-imposed deadline for coming up with an assignment idea I've spent the day brainstorming, and eventually ended up back at the idea of looking at headline grammar, as discussed in unit 2 of the module. I went through 50 back issues of Newsweek and made a list of all the front-page headlines, and some patterns soon started to emerge - but I'm not yet ready to give a coherent explanation of just what they are. I'll try and throw my ideas together in the form of an assignment proposal, and Sue's response will determine whether I stick with that idea or go for the tasks.

Thinking through GE this week has made me notice something about my own approach to research; whatever the module, I always seem to prefer to start by taking a corpus of spoken or written text and looking for patterns in it. For me this has been the starting point for all the assignments I've written so far (MET, TDA, IIC and CSD). Perhaps the reason I find myself feeling reluctant to do the GE tasks (which involve analyzing one short sample of text) is because it's not the style of research I've grown accustomed to. Then again, maybe that's a strong argument for doing the tasks and forcing myself to try something different.

Oh, GE, GE, sometimes I don't know whether to love it or hate it...

James

Re: GE Assignments | Colin Graham | May 20th, 2002

Hi James, and other ICPs (Interested Course Participants:

You said:

The suggestion of error analysis did indeed seem like a safe bet, and made me think of the e-mail list I run for my own students. I went through old messages looking for errors characteristic of individual students... I learned that my students' grammar isn't nearly as bad as I'd thought it was!

What were you expecting to find or treating as errors? For example, some of my higher-level students write sentences that are perfectly correct grammatically but aren't connected to each other as much as they might be. I would consider that an error. Of course, it may be touching on TDA territory...

I've spent the day brainstorming, and eventually ended up back at the idea of looking at headline grammar, as discussed in unit 2 of the module.

I thought about doing this too and maybe getting students to expand headline grammar into standard full sentence grammar and see where they made mistakes - if any (a/an and the are BIG problems in Japan and headlines provide ideal 'authentic' practice materials for article use). Then maybe getting them to explain what rules or guidelines they used.

I did this [as a non-assignment task] with some high level students by getting them to expand the headline, guess the story and then talk about mis-cues caused because of ambiguities [puns etc], errors in their expansions or cultural references of which they weren't aware.

e.g.

Crowds Kew For Bloom With A Phew!

Crack Found In Australia

Try expanding those ones and guessing the story yourself, if you want to see how it works.

Tom's suggestion for the newspaper headlines task looks as though it fits the module pretty well (it should since Tom suggested it!). I also considered doing a similar kind of analysis to pull out a grammar of book, film and music reviews - using present to tell stories and so on - so as to get students to look at where writers change tense in a review to talk about their past experience of reading/seeing/listening and exposing features of the plot etc. then getting them to write their own reviews (a before and after kind of thing).

Thinking through GE this week has made me notice something about my own approach to research; whatever the module, I always seem to prefer to start by taking a corpus of spoken or written text and looking for patterns in it.

For me this has been the starting point for all the assignments I've written so far (MET, TDA, IIC and CSD). Perhaps the reason I find myself feeling reluctant to do the GE tasks (which involve analyzing one short sample of text) is because it's not the style of research I've grown accustomed to.

I'd say that pattern spotting is EXACTLY what grammar is and you'd be foolish not to make statements based on the presence or absence of certain patterns. Chomskian linguistics is symbolically based (some would say mathematically!) and focused almost entirely on grammar patterns, almost to the exclusion of lexical patterns (which they are beginning to realise also have a role to play).

The big problem I found with my GE assignment was keeping the focus on grammar and not drifting off into TDA or LEX. I did this by asking specific questions about how words are put together and used in a sentence (which may consist of more than one clause of course) and between neighboring sentences -i.e. at a mini-discourse level. I ended up writing something which I was happy with, then reading it 2 weeks later and deciding it was completely off track because it treated grammar as a separate element from lexis and discourse. A colleague, who was a lexicographer, read it and agreed with me that it wasn't really saying anything about anything.

I am now just finishing off a complete rewrite of my assignment which incorporates my understanding of where the boundary between discourse and lexis is for one word- "own." I found it helpful, having made a mess of my first attempt(!), to keep the idea that grammar is about the structure and patterns that words form and how changing that structure affects meaning, and identifying lexical chunks formed by that word and treating them as words in their own right i.e. outside the scope of the assignment. It took me nearly 9 months to make the first mess. This rewrite has taken about 3 days so far and is 90% done. Hmm, I wonder if that has anything to do with having well-focused questions to answer....

I'm not sure what Sue, or Tom, would say, but the area between lexis and discourse (i.e. the region where grammar lies) is not as clearly defined as people think. Maybe if you can do something to make it clearer in a very small way, then that is worthwhile. That to me is what teaching and studying grammar is about and why I think it should have a higher profile. However, that's just me!

Good luck with the assignment!

BFN

Colin
:-)

GE/TDA: of-phrases, mostly | Pinkie | May 21st, 2002

Hi C, J, ML and anybody else who enjoys the linguisticky bits...

James: Glad to hear you've found a good GE focus, sorry if my idea wasted your time. I should also note that GE perhaps REQUIRES a Hallidayan angle, so I've got no business to be suggesting ideas from other angles! By the way, I agree with Colin that untangling the multiple meanings of the terms "lexis", "grammar" and "discourse" is central; though I guess that you have more or less well-formed ideas of your own on this!

Pinkie
Spain

Student errors & stuff | James Hobbs | May 23rd, 2002

Hi Colin, Pinkie, Mary-Lynn and everyone,

I'm afraid I'm way behind on the ongoing "defining text" debate. I'm not in a position to match the quality of your posts, and won't even try.

Getting back to the thoroughly selfish topic of MY assignment.....

Pinkie, thanks again. Your ideas didn't waste my time at all. You suggested a very sensible avenue of inquiry, which I took a good look at- all part of the process of narrowing down a focus.

Colin, thanks a lot for the reply. What was I expecting to find or treating as errors? I was looking for the sort of thing you suggest, but at the level of sentence; things which are grammatically acceptable, but somehow have a non-native flavour. I looked through the messages on a mailing list I run for my students, and the sort of things that caught my attention were things like...

"Dr. Ozeki, thank you for your kind message about hay fever for us."

"My voice changed to a different person with gargling."

"On September 15 th , all my relatives met to celebrate her long life at Oshukuonsen."

....in which "for us", "with gargling", and "at Oshukuonsen" clearly function as adjuncts, but sit rather awkwardly in the sentence-final position because of their resemblance to postmodifiers; 'hay fever for us', 'person with gargling' (?), and 'life at Oshukuonsen'. Of course it's very unlikely the reader would choose this interpretation in these cases, but it's easy to imagine cases where such grammatical ambiguity could be a problem. It would certainly seem worthwhile to sensitize students to the potential ambiguity, and teach them ways of avoiding it. This could be an interesting area to research, but I'd be very reluctant to put such examples under the umbrella of "learner errors". I can find plenty of examples of more serious "errors" in native English. Consider the following two examples, from Yahoo news stories yesterday and today, respectively;

"But after showing rapid recovery, Dyer was given until Tuesday, FIFA's deadline for the naming of squads, by England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson to prove his fitness."

"The Lakers still think Bryant is suffering from food poisoning (sic)."

In the first example, I'm sure I'd tell a student that "by England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson" just doesn't fit there. But this was actually written by an AP reporter, presumably a native speaker, who is paid to write such stuff.

The second one, a caption under a picture of (basketball's Los Angeles Lakers' point guard Kobe) Bryant, may seem fine, but in fact isn't. The fact is that the said Mr. Bryant DID have food poisoning two days ago, and nearly missed an important game because of it. Given that he vomited several times during yesterday's practice, obviously the point the writer is trying to make is that Bryant PROBABLY STILL HAS food poisoning, not that some people STILL THINK this.

Perhaps that's a fairly obvious example, but I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that I have trouble deciding when to attribute an 'error' to the fact that the writer/ speaker is not a native speaker. In some cases, it may be just that the learner has successfully acquired the ambiguous grammar of the target discourse community.

Well, I've rambled on much too long here without saying anything particularly useful, so I'll get back to those Newsweek headlines another time. I still haven't written up my proposal (my deadline was just to THINK of an assignment idea :-)). I'd like to do it in the next few days, but then my kids want to go camping this weekend, and the World Cup starts next week, and.........aaarrrgghhh, will I EVER finish GE!!!