Tag Archives: NYT

Seoul Ascending – NYT – I like the article, overall.

Thanks to Adam Turner for pointing me to this.

I like this article overall. It paints a good picture of Seoul, and one that I think is accurate. It’s a picture of a city (and country) that is emerging quickly as a global powerhouse. This come complete with the requisite tensions that come with such a metamorphosis: personal, social, corporate, and so forth.

The article itself is certainly a slanted view of the city and larger culture of Seoul and Korea. The author seemed to be hanging out with the urban bohemians and yuppies that, while representative of one part of the culture, are surely not representative of the greater Korean culture. If one spends their time primarily in the cafes of Gangnam, they will get the culture marketed both at home and abroad. Affluent, trendy, and not so much different than any other urban area.

A friend pointed out that the author should have spoken more to expats. I don’t really agree with that, though many knowledgeable and thoughtful expats could provide excellent insights into Korea and Seoul. However, I do believe that the author should have spoken to some people who don’t live on the 20th floor overlooking the Han.

On Language – Learning Language in Chunks

Chunking

I wondered how much — or how little — his grasp of basic linguistic etiquette is grounded in the syntactical rules that structure how words are combined in English. An idiom like “Make yourself at home” is rather tricky if you stop to think about it: the imperative verb “make” is followed by a second-person reflexive pronoun (“yourself”) and an adverbial phrase (“at home”), but it’s difficult to break the phrase into its components. Instead, we grasp the whole thing at once.

Ritualized moments of everyday communication — greeting someone, answering a telephone call, wishing someone a happy birthday — are full of these canned phrases that we learn to perform with rote precision at an early age. Words work as social lubricants in such situations, and a language learner like Blake is primarily getting a handle on the pragmatics of set phrases in English, or how they create concrete effects in real-life interactions. The abstract rules of sentence structure are secondary.

In recent decades, the study of language acquisition and instruction has increasingly focused on “chunking”: how children learn language not so much on a word-by-word basis but in larger “lexical chunks” or meaningful strings of words that are committed to memory. Chunks may consist of fixed idioms or conventional speech routines, but they can also simply be combinations of words that appear together frequently, in patterns that are known as “collocations.” In the 1960s, the linguist Michael Halliday pointed out that we tend to talk of “strong tea” instead of “powerful tea,” even though the phrases make equal sense. Rain, on the other hand, is much more likely to be described as “heavy” than “strong.”

First, the They Might Be Giants children songs the author talks about will soon be in my collection. I’d never heard of them before.

Second, I’m a big believer in chunking. Interest and research findings ebb and wane in this area quite regularly. Regardless, of contrarian findings on the pedagogical focus of chunking, I think it is essential for the improvement of fluency and is a good approach to vocabulary learning.

Also, his suggestion that corpus-based findings will drive language learning materials for the near future is right on. Why wouldn’t it. One can argue about the corpra being used, but not with the approach. Don’t learn the language though up in the author’s mind. Learn language that is being used for non-learning purposes (authentic materials).

Nice to see this piece in the NYT.

On Language – Social – NYTimes.com – and a short post on language change and variety

Leslie David

In our Web-driven era of social media and social networking, we are all learning more sophisticated ways to “socialize” that go far beyond cocktail-party chatter. But being social in the 21st century can sometimes be downright unsettling.

Consider the anxieties over a linguistic trend that The Wall Street Journal’s Overheard column expressed last month. “A new catchphrase in meetings is ‘let me socialize that,’ ” The Journal wrote. “No, they aren’t suggesting they will see if they can get a government bailout. Or introducing some left-wing political theories to business. Instead the phrase means ‘I’ll discuss this with my colleagues and circle back to you.’ ”

Fun (for the linguist in me) treatment of the word “social”.

The changing uses of words makes it difficult to teach language. Regional, age, and SES differences (to name a few) all influence language use. This is why learners fluent in English can have such a difficult time communicating at a fast food restaurant, in the dorm with undergraduates, or with any language variation outside of the standards they have had exposure to (difficulties many native speakers face as well).

How can I teach a language that is always changing? As with most teachers of English, I focus on academic language that, while it changes over time, is more much resilient to change than less formal domains. I fall back on standards (as ephemeral as they are) to provide a foundation.

The foundation is not enough, though. Standards create expectations that, when challenged, cause communication to falter. This is where variety comes in. Language variety increases exposure to language outside of your classroom standards. It’s faster/slower, drawl/clipped, enunciated/mumbled, male/female, formal/informal, and all the other wonders of language variety. Working outside of your classroom standards can encourage skills to process non-standard varieties, thus providing tools to learners to interact with the greater world of English speakers.

Most of us in EFL contexts are preparing learners who are less likely to interact in English with someone who sounds just like us than they are to encounter a fast network of global English speakers. In my neck of the woods, Korea, learners are more likely use English with Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, and Thai speakers of English than they are with Americans, Canadians, and speakers from the other (preferred) English-speaking countries. The reality is that we do them a disservice if we teach them otherwise.

This post went way off topic, but I’m procrastinating, so whatcha’ gonna do? 😉

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