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CONTENTS
SAAL Quarterly is under the editorship of Dr T. Ruanni F. Tupas. Please address your correspondence and contributions to: Dr T. Ruanni F. Tupas (elcttr@nus.edu.sg), Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260.
The 2004 SAAL AGM FORUM The Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics (SAAL) Executive Committee 2002-2004 invites all SAAL members to the forum entitled: The Mother Tongue Issue in Multilingual Communities held in conjunction with the SAAL Annual General Meeting.
INVITED PANELISTS:
The forum will tackle issues related to the 'commodification' of languages and the impact that this may have on the mother tongues in Singapore and other multilingual communities. For more information, please contact Dr. Low Ee Ling at ellow@nie.edu.sg. ↑ Top | ← Publications NEW BOOK
THEME AND RHEME by Alvin Leong Ping Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Min, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2004. 329 pp. European University Studies: Series 21, Linguistics. Vol. 266. US$ 65.95. This book argues for the inclusion of a cognitive psychological component in the analysis of theme and rheme, the basic building blocks of the message structure of language. The inference-boundary (IB) model is presented and justified as an explanatory model of the message structure of the clause and, above it, the text. It views theme as an element that is capable of generating a boundary of acceptability within which it is permissible for the rheme to occur. It explains why and how an initial element is considered to be thematic. The IB model also acknowledges the operation of a principle -- the principle of acceptable message development -- that underlies all that we say and write. This principle forms the basis of a simple test to identify and delimit the thematic portion. Contents: Major approaches to thematic studies -- Controversies surrounding the Hallidayan approach -- Respondent study on theme and rheme -- On schemata and inferences -- Inference-boundary model -- Themes of texts. The Author: Leong Ping, Alvin, is an Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore). He obtained a Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2001 under an NUS research scholarship. His current research interests are in systemic functional linguistics, hypertext theory, and stylistics. Alvin is the webmaster and current Assistant Treasurer of SAAL. ↑ Top | ← Publications
Bids to Redefine 'Literacy Education' in Globalised Economies and Cultures: by Prof Allan Luke
27 February 2004 Prof Luke started the lecture by presenting two views of literacy: the traditional view and a view that emerged more recently called the New Literacies Approach. The traditional view of literacy and language learning developed on the foundations of research by well-known psycholinguists such as Chomsky, Piaget, Vygotsky as well as other linguists, educational psychologists and educationists. This view basically regards literacy skills, or the abilities to read and write, as discrete skills which are neutral in nature and universal in language learning. Hence, it can be said that literacy skills comprise sets of "smaller" skills which can and should be learnt by all language learners, regardless of the target language. A more recent and contrasting approach to literacy finds support from sociolinguists such as Halliday, Hymes and Gumperz, who promote the concept of literacy as that which is situated in context. Such a perspective forms the basis of the New Literacies approach, viewing literacy as social practice that is ideological and therefore influenced by the social context in which it is located. Works such as Heath's Ways with Words, Scribner and Cole's The Psychology of Literacy and Street's Literacy in Theory and Practice have helped to develop this approach. While he recognises that the extension of the definition of literacy to include the social context in which it is located is valid, Prof Luke argues that such research has so far been narrow and limited to concerns within the countries and domains in which such studies have been conducted. To quote from the abstract of the talk: "The world, everyday life, and indeed, social science has changed in some substantive ways since the 1980s -- and we are, particularly in Asia, coming to grips on a daily basis with the concomitants and flows of cultural, economic and sociodemographic globalisation. What this means is that how nation states, education systems and communities engage with 'literacy-in-education' planning is not a matter of improved 'pedagogic method' for teaching print literacy but instead, will require new understandings, conceptualisations and definitions of what it means to be literate, how, where and in what globalised and local contexts and modalities in the new millennia." He thus proposes a hybrid of the above approaches: one which not only recognises the significance of literacy within a social context, but which also realises that functional literacy ultimately involves the teaching and learning of skills. In current on-going research at the local schools, Prof Luke is leading a team that is looking into academic literacy in the classroom, a study he hopes will shed more light into literacy in the local context and enable better planning at the governmental level. As anticipated, Prof Luke delivered an interesting and thought-provoking lecture, which was followed by a lively Q&A session. His take on literacy provides a new perspective, which will no doubt stimulate more discussion and research in this area. References
Reported by Jessie Teng
Doing Conversation: Dominant Exchange Structure by Prof Erich Berendt
16 January 2004 There is a piece of text of a late-night radio call-in programme involving a conversation between a radio host and a telephone caller which I have used for many years to show student teachers the difference between spoken and oral language. The text came from Wilga River's (1983) book, Communicating Naturally in Second Language. Last week, I got to meet the collector of that data, Erich Berendt. Erich has spent a great deal of his time collecting spoken data in a number of research projects and, in addition to looking at data in English, he has also concentrated on looking at exchange structures and exchange strategies across languages, and this was the focus of his SAAL talk. In particular, he talked about the similarities and differences between Japanese and North American English in the dominant exchange strategies employed in both languages. The methodology used involved 'wiring up' participants with a portable cassette recorder for an extended period (up to 4 hours) which recorded all the dyadic conversations undertaken in that period, which were then transcribed and analyzed according to general functions to establish the dominant exchange structures in the different languages. What emerges from the research is an overall exchange structure strategy in dyadic encounters common to all languages. Such structures involve goals such as exchanging information, exchanging feelings and suasion. His research has examined the relative frequencies of these goals across languages, and comes up with fascinating observations such as the fact that Japanese has a higher frequency of the exchange of feelings than North American English; an outcome which I certainly would not have expected. An equally interesting finding was that of relationship bonding patterns. I have long worried about my inability to remember the names of Asian students in my classes, both for the fifteen years I worked with Malaysian students in the UK and my time here in Singapore. Among other things, I put it down to the depressing thought that memory deteriorates with age -- the "Senior Moment" syndrome writ large -- but I also had a feeling that it was partly due to the lack of reinforcement from classes where it seemed that, unlike British students, who commonly used each other's names in discussions, e.g. "I thought what John said was interesting" or "Hang on a moment, John, but ...", this was not so with Asian students. This intuition was thankfully borne out by research findings. There is a huge difference between languages/cultures. Names and name substitutes were used 68% of the times in English, but only 4% of the time in Japanese. Social role terms are used 18% of the time in English, yet 27% of the time in Japanese. Thus, although memory deterioration is playing a part, it may not be the only factor making it difficult to remember the names of my Asian students. This type of enquiry offers a fruitful cross-over between culture and language. The above preference for role relation terms has an obvious correlate with the importance of hierarchical relationships in Asian societies. Similarly, research showed a large difference between clarification typologies between Japanese on the one hand and English and Spanish on the other. The latter languages commonly offer clarification as supportive information to the primary function of the turn, whereas it is significantly less common in Japanese. It is tempting to draw a parallel between a society which places a high value on cohesion, as is the case in Japan, and the lack of necessity to give support to an argument as exemplified by the lower unprompted provision of clarification as exemplified in the discourse patterns. The talk given by Prof Berendt raised a whole set of issues involved in oral discourse, and it was extremely thought-provoking both in its implications for teaching spoken English (What does real spoken English look like?) and on cross-cultural pragmatics in general. Reference
Reported by Mick Randall
Phonetic Data Analysis: This book provides a highly practical guide to two crucial areas of research into phonetics: how to collect data, and how to analyse the data that has been collected. Peter Ladefoged has spent a lifetime travelling the world in an impressive attempt to obtain a detailed articulatory and acoustic description of the sounds of as many of the world's languages as possible, and in this book he seeks to share some of the extraordinarily wide-ranging knowledge he has gained over the years. An infectious enthusiasm emerges from these pages, not least from the delightful anecdotes about his experiences with informants in India, Nigeria, Namibia, Papua New Guinea, the Aleutian Islands, the Amazonian rain forest, Scotland and many, many other places, and this constitutes a timely reminder to all of us about the huge range of sounds out there waiting to be investigated. Some of the advice proffered in this book will seem rather exotic and even maybe impractical to many readers. However admirable it may be to trek off into remote jungles and deserts loaded up with various tape recorders, computers, devices for performing palatography, and tubes and facial masks for measuring nasal airflow (sometimes accompanied by a wife ruefully commenting on her role as a packhorse), it is hard to imagine very many of us actually following his example. And even though there is also fascinating practical advice on how to use a mirror, ground charcoal obtained from burnt toast, and olive oil in order to perform quick and easy palatography using ordinary household equipment and thereby investigate the contrasting articulations of [s] for a speaker of Basque (p. 38), one suspects that this is probably not a party trick that many of us will actually try to emulate. However, some of the material is extraordinarily valuable even for those of us who do not plan to travel to remote locations or perform charcoal-and-olive-oil-based investigations on unsuspecting party guests, as there is in addition a wealth of detailed advice on how to use a computer most effectively for the acoustic analysis of speech, including recommendations on selecting the best settings for spectrograms, determining the most suitable order for linear-prediction-based spectra, and choosing an optimal frame length for pitch analysis in order to avoid pitch doubling and halving. This invaluable advice is accompanied by a healthy dose of humility, with Ladefoged constantly reminding the reader that there are no easy answers (p. 99), that he himself often gets things wrong initially (p. 90), and that acoustic analysis of speech still remains something of a black art. All students of phonetics should read this, to help them realise that even the world's most accomplished and experienced phoneticians cannot provide straightforward solutions and so there is always a need to fine-tune the settings, and that even then there are times when things simply do not work out as expected in the acoustic analysis of speech. Of course, there are many highly accomplished linguists who probably could not tell a spectrogram from a sack of potatoes, and they may feel that recommendations on how to customise the settings for linear-prediction-based spectra are about as useful for their work as advice on how to record the natives when travelling through the Amazonian rain forest. But, in reality, nowadays the increasing availability of extremely effective speech analysis software, some of it free (such as PRAAT), means that measurement of the acoustic features of speech increasingly does not just belong inside the arcane world of the phonetics laboratory but is actually fast becoming something we can all get involved in using an ordinary laptop PC. In this respect, it is interesting to note that a recent introductory book also by Ladefoged (2001) starts out with computer speech analysis and then builds on that to explain phonetics, rather than proceeding in the more traditional way with articulatory phonetics leading to a brief coverage of acoustics. So it seems likely that the ability to perform successful instrumental analysis of speech is increasingly becoming a central aspect of phonetics, and maybe this is a field that more people need to become familiar with. Ladefoged has devoted much of his professional life to researching the precise articulation of sounds in the languages of the world, but most of the analysis concerns extraordinarily detailed investigation of individual consonants and vowels, and rather less of it involves studying longer stretches of discourse. It is, therefore, perhaps a bit unfortunate that he provides very little advice on how to make recordings of conversations and thereby investigate aspects of discourse, as it is still the case that high-quality recordings of the conversational interactions of a group of speakers are not easy to obtain, and the book does not help in this respect. However, this is a minor quibble about an impressive and richly entertaining book on the collection and analysis of speech data. Reference
Reviewed by David Deterding ↑ Top | ← Publications The following is the first set of paper abstracts to appear in SAAL's The English Language in Singapore Series: Changing Perspectives on Grammar in the Classroom. The papers grew out of workshops presented at the SAAL-Singapore Teachers' Union Colloquium on the same topic on 27-28 November 2003, at the Regional Language Centre (RELC), Singapore.
Where the Grammar Syllabus Ends and the Teacher Begins This paper argues that no amount of top-down guidance can take the place of self-reliance on the part of the teacher. This is particularly so in language teaching, partly because language is such a richly varied and constantly changing phenomenon. Every teacher needs to constantly keep abreast of the current state of the language through first-hand observations of how English is used in various contexts, and with regular access to up-to-date language corpora to check on the latest developments in lexical and grammatical form and usage. And all this needs to be informed by a genuine understanding of the nature of language and an open mind. In essaying such arguments, Hung explores four main related topics: the nature of language, the linguistic structure of English as it is used today, the learners' interlanguage grammar and attitudes towards applied linguistics research.
Use of would in Standard Singapore English In this paper, Deterding and Low outline the use of would in Standard Singapore English. The use of would from the local newspaper The Straits Times is compared with its use in British English. The analysis for the British English usage is based on Greenbaum and Quirk (1990). The result was that the fixed grammatical category of hypothetical conditional is not generally found in Singapore English, which often leads to a different usage of would than that found in British English. Would in Standard Singapore English often indicates a degree of tentativeness, though it is also possible that it is simply used as a stylistic variant of will while in British English might is used instead of would as might is rather less frequently used in Standard Singapore English than British English.
Teaching Grammar with a Learner's Corpus This paper outlines an approach to the teaching of grammar using "data driven learning (DDL)" (Johns, 1991, 1994). This approach typically uses software tools such as the concordancer to explore grammatical patterns and their frequencies of occurrence in a learner's corpus (Willis, 1990). It is argued that when learners are able to use the software themselves, they are not only more effective at noticing patterns in their own language use, but they are also motivated to so. In this paper, there are also several tasks and some evidence to support the above claims.
Abstracted by Chris Nur
Learning Grammar in Flexible Mode: In this article, Pathak explores the teaching of grammar online. The author discusses the functions of online platforms that can be used for online courses, highlights five problems that many online courses have that make such sites user-unfriendly, and suggests ways to make online websites interactive. Finally, the author examines ways to promote online grammar discussions based on the implementation of a weblog platform at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and concludes that if familiar strategies are used appropriately, grammar teaching websites can greatly enhance e-learning.
Inductive or Deductive Approaches to Grammar Teaching The paper discusses the inductive and deductive approaches to grammar teaching. They explain the differences of the two approaches and how they work in the classroom, review studies that test the effectiveness of the two methods, and conclude that each approach has its advantages and drawbacks. Such being the case, they propose a balanced use of the two methods in the teaching of grammar so that students can benefit maximally from the two approaches and obtain the optimal results in their learning. Abstracted by Yuan Yi ↑ Top | ← Publications
BESIG, the Business English Special Interest Group of IATEFL, or International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, is a professional body representing the interests and serving the needs of the international business English teaching community. BESIG's members are mainly teachers of Business English and include both native and non-native speakers of English. The largest proportion of our members comes from Europe but we also have members in over 50 countries including South America, Africa and Asia. BESIG offers you ways to improve your expertise in teaching Business English and a link with other people in the profession. We do this through our annual international BESIG conferences, regional workshops, regular newsletters and reports describing conference papers/workshops in detail. For more information about BESIG, go to www.besig.org. ↑ Top | ← Publications
EDUCATING FOR ADVANCED FOREIGN LANGUAGE CAPACITIES: GURT 2005 will focus on all aspects of instructed foreign language learning to advanced levels. Recently this topic has been the focus of considerable concern in society at large. It is also beginning to attract the interest of scholars exploring use-oriented theories of language, of researchers who want to expand the horizons of the field of second/foreign language acquisition research, particularly by adult learners, and of professionals and practitioners who are concerned with effective instructional approaches toward advanced levels of use in diverse educational settings. Central strands for the conference are: Theories of language for learning and teaching a foreign language to advanced levels; Curriculum construction in support of advanced foreign language acquisition; Instructional approaches that foster advanced-level foreign language capacities, from the standpoint of the learner and the teacher; Assessment of advanced foreign language abilities, both within a programmatic environment and outside of it. Website: www.georgetown.edu/events/gurt/2005/callforpapers.html.
9TH INTERNATIONAL PRAGMATICS CONFERENCE As always, the conference will be open to all themes relevant to the pragmatics of language in its widest sense as an interdisciplinary cognitive, social, and cultural perspective. SPECIAL THEME: Pragmatics and Philosophy. It is both interesting and scientifically productive for pragmatics to revisit and discuss its philosophical starting points and enduring presuppositions, as well as its philosophical implications. Various philosophical problems may benefit from being discussed in a pragmatic perspective, and philosophy itself as a discourse genre is liable to be analyzed by a pragmatic approach. The range of themes meant to be covered by the special topic "Pragmatics and Philosophy" therefore includes at least:
Website: ipra-www.uia.ac.be/ipra/9th&10th_conference.html.
CURRENT PERSPECTIVES AND NEW DIRECTIONS The conference, organized by the Centre for Language Studies (CLS) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), aims to bring together academics, researchers and professionals from Asia and beyond for a productive and rewarding exchange of insights, experiences, views and perspectives on current and future developments in foreign language teaching and learning. The conference serves a platform for participants to report on current research and practices in foreign language education and related disciplines. It will also provide an avenue for the discussion and critical examination of new and innovative concepts and approaches expected to have an impact on future practices. CLaSIC 2004 is also proud to play host to the inaugural conference of the vibrant new Pacific CALL Association. PacCALL@CLaSIC 2004 will form a special section on the sub-theme "CALL/ICT, Multimedia and Foreign Language Learning". Both CLaSIC and PacCALL participants will have free access to presentations of both conferences. Website: www.fas.nus.edu.sg/cls/clasic2004.
16th WINTER CONFERENCE ON DISCOURSE, TEXT & COGNITION The Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Winter Conference on Discourse, Text & Cognition will be held in the usual location: The Inn at Teton Village, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The meeting typically attracts cognitive scientists interested in various aspects of language and text and the roles they play in various types of cognitive activities, e.g., reading, conversation, and learning. Website: litd.psch.uic.edu/assoc/wintertext/index.html. ↑ Top | ← Publications
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