Author Archives: Mary Mason

Critical Discourse Analysis

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I’m dismayed to find that I have not blogged for over two months! There’s been plenty going in my work with the school using BtL and also in my studies with my friends, but I have forgotten to share it with the world.

My friends and I have chosen a new book to work through and it has proved a winner. It is The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis by Meriel and Tom Bloor.  I was recommended to it by an MA student in Applied Linguistics and it is excellent. Briefly, it makes the reader aware of how all the attitudes and beliefs about ourselves and others  that we take for granted are not natural but socially constructed largely, though not entirely, by language. Continue reading →

Escoffier

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Recently I watched a television programme about Auguste Escoffier, the French chef who changed eating into dining, making the food of the rich not only opulent but delicious.

The programme reminded me that Escoffier was one of the innovative artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries  considered in Jonah Lehrer’s book  Proust was a Neuroscientist. It is surprising to find a cook alongside such practitioners of the high arts as Cezanne, Stravinsky and Virginia Woolf. The book argues that avant-garde artists of that period anticipated the findings of twenty-first century neuroscience, and Lehrer describes how Escoffier elevated eating into an art form by exploring the sense of taste. He invented haute cuisine. Continue reading →

Nominalisation

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Nominalisation is a key feature in my analysis of abstract language. The school texts which I analysed for Breakthrough to Learning contained many instances of nouns made from verbs (processes, such as condensation from condense) and nouns made from adjectives (conditions, such as warmth from warm). This linguistic mechanism (together with metaphor) makes it possible to consider abstract entitities and the relationship between them. Continue reading →

Chris Kennedy: Learning English in a global context*

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In the twenty-first century it is clear that English is the uncontested world language. Although Chinese is spoken as a first language by the largest number of people, English is much more widely spoken as both a first and an additional language. For instance it is one of the four official languages of India. In this paper Kennedy points out that the spread of English is associated with the rapid globalization of economic and cultural activities and discusses some of the implications of English having become the world language.

It is no longer easy to recommend that learners aim to acquire a clear single standard of spoken English. There are several varieties of standard English, even among native speakers – Australian, as well as American and UK English. In addition, many different varieties of spoken English have developed, especially in Africa and the Far East, which are heavily influenced by the phonetics, grammar and vocabulary of the local areas.

I came across the difficulty of teaching a standard variety twenty years ago, when I was part of a team of linguists and teachers writing a textbook for secondary school pupils in a newly independent Namibia. The teachers wanted exercises on pronunciation on tape as part of the course and I found myself organizing this. We used the Namibian teachers as the informants and, of course, they spoke the South African variety of English, which makes no distinction between “set” and “sat”. There was horror among the linguists when we played this tape back to them. What were we to do? The problem remained unresolved.

*Chapter 8 in Introducing Applied Linguistics ed. Susan Hunston and David Oakey

 

 

Introducing Applied Linguistics

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Susan Hunston and David Oakey:Introducing Applied Linguistics: concepts and skills (2010)

This is the book that my friends and I are studying at the moment. Our idea in reading it is to bring us up to date on what is new in Applied Linguistics.

One chapter follows nicely on our study of Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming: namely, the use of a corpus. A paper by Svenja Adolphs: Using a corpus to study spoken language delighted me  by its description of what is to people of my generation the extraordinary use of “like” in the informal conversation of young people. It is in fact a discourse marker introducing direct speech (the oral equivalent of quotation marks). I wonder where that came from.

Michael Hoey: Lexical Priming

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We have now reached the end of this fascinating book, which proposes a new description of the way language works. It is based on the new information offered by new technology – the huge databases of authentic language offered by computers and their ability to analyse them.

This enables Hoey to question fundamentally the grammar-dominated model of language put forward by Chomsky. Hoey argues that the meanings of language are built up, not primarily from grammar, but from semantics. This he describes systematically, using as evidence the information and analyses derived from these databases. Chomsky’s model, by contrast, has never been supported by evidence. Continue reading →

Lexical priming (continued)

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We have arrived at chapter 6 of Michael Hoey’s book Lexical Priming. In earlier chapters he showed how each word is related to others by semantic patterning, grammatical usage (“colligation”), lexical connections (such as synonymy, antonymy etc.) and textual co-occurrence.

Chapter 6 is entitled Two claims:

The first claim is that words are patterned over a larger stretch of text than the context of up to seven words either side by the mechanisms of cohesion.

The second is that words are patterned together in order to make the major meanings of discourse structure: problem / solution, general / particular, compare / contrast, time order. (These structures, first propounded in Hoey’s early book On the Surface of Discourse, are taught in Book 3 of Breakthrough to Learning.)

We look forward to seeing if, by the end of the book, Hoey has justified his claim that his theory will make linguists re-evaluate the primacy of grammar as against a semantic description of English.

 

 

Lexical priming

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With some friends I have been working through Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming (2007).

Priming is a psychological term for experiments in which subjects are presented with lists of words, one of which is primed to trigger a response in another word later. For example, the word table is given in the earlier list of words, and this primes a later response in which subjects are asked to give a word beginning TAB. More than chance numbers of subjects offer table, as a result, the psychologists argue, of the earlier priming.

Hoey “tweaks” this meaning of priming for his own purposes. Lexical priming becomes a property of the word. Each word in his analysis is primed to collocate* with other words. This information is only accessible because of the power of computers to process enormous databases and yield hundreds of examples of any word in its contexts. Continue reading →

GCSE reading (French) continued

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This is a very odd piece of writing. For a start, the title is Mother’s Day, but without explanation the first sentence introduces grandmother’s day. Further, the passage is paragraphed incorrectly. It is organised: introduction, history, dates in different countries. Here is the text uchanged except for proper paragraphing:

6 Mother’s Day

For several years we have had a special day for grandmothers in France. It is a way of showing them that we love them. It is much the same for mothers. There is a special day to thank them for all that they do for us.

It is far from being a modern day. The Greeks and Romans had a ceremony every spring to honour the mothers of their gods. In the nineteenth century the Emperor Napoleon had the idea of honouring mothers who had a lot of children. It is only after his death that his idea became a reality and that these mothers have been given a medal. During the second world war France suffered greatly and lost a great many of its young men. That is why Mother’s Day as we know it was set up.

Mother’s Day is always on the fourth Sunday in May. In the United States it is on the second Sunday in May, and in England they celebrate Mother’s Day in mid March. In Germany mothers do not work on that day, so fathers and children do all the housework. In restaurants in Spain they give mothers a flower. In Canada it is a tradition for little children to give their mother a present they have made themselves.

The text still does not make any kind of sense. It is a collection of random facts about Mother’s Day without any obvious reason for writing it (hence for reading it).

Michael Hoey’s work on discourse structure offers a framework for showing up the inadequacies of this text. It is taught in Book 3 of Breakthrough to Learning (Part 2 of the Fasttrack) to enable students to grasp the structure of written texts. Texts are not mere collections of words and grammatecal forms: they have to make sense at the higher level of discourse. For example: problem / solution, general / particular, compare / contrast, time sequence.

Mother’s Day does not conform to any meaning structure at this level. It would be possible to compose texts on this subject, with no more advanced vocabulary and grammar than the original, but which make sense. For example, in the text below the basic structure is general / particular. Note that the only “new” words to be taught are for example, which is recognisable enough!

(to be continued)