Chomsky Versus: non-nativist link fest

We’ve scheduled a debate today in my intro to linguistics section. The topic is something like “Human beings have an innate, language-specific capacity.” My co-TA, a syntactician, is arguing the “pro” side, and I’m “con.”

Here are the sources I’m looking at so far:

• The recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece on Dan Everett and Pirahã
• Melody Dye’s take on Miller & Chomsky 1963
• Scholz & Pullum 2005 [PDF], in which they try to clarify exactly what “innate” means
• Textbook descriptions of connectionist and constructivist hypotheses

That should be enough for a 10-minute presentation to an undergrad class, but now that I’ve started reading, my interest is piqued. What sources would you recommend?

Tags: Chomsky, teaching

IRF and beyond

Reading: O’Connor & Michaels 1993. “Alighing academic task and participation status through revoicing: Analysis of a classroom discourse strategy.” Anthropology & education quarterly 24(4):318—335.

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One of the earliest findings in the classroom discourse literature is the interaction-response-feedback (IRF) pattern, where a teacher asks a question, a student responds, and their response is evaluated. For example (Mehan 1979):

Teacher: What time is it, Denise?
Student: 2:30
Teacher: Very good, Denise

O’Connor and Michaels write about a move that they call “revoicing,” which is kind of like the feedback move from an IRF sequence, and kind of not. Instead of saying that the student is right or wrong, the teacher:

1. begins by saying “So” to mark their turn as what Schiffrin 1987 calls a “warranted inference,”
2. restates the student’s utterance in more appropriately academic terms, but using a quotative to give the student credit for the content of the utterance,
3. and may optionally set that idea in contrast to what another student has previously said in the same discussion.

It looks like this (O’Connor & Michaels 1993:327):

Teacher: Did you just guess? Did you use any information to help you guess? Um if you did what information did you use to help you guess
[...]
Student: I picked Alewife too because like a lot of people like like to ride on the train for a long time, some people might just ride to Alewife just for the heck of it
Teacher: So you made your guess based on what you know about human behavior?

This leaves an opening for the student to contradict the teacher (“No, that isn’t what I meant”), but O’Connor and Michaels don’t present any examples of that happening. Instead they take it for granted that the lack of response from a student signals their assent.

The important difference between revoicing and other kinds of feedback/evaluation turns is its function in bringing students into the academic discourse community. In effect, the teacher is saying, “You all are having a discussion about academic topics; I’m just making all the interactional pieces fit together.”

O’Connor and Michaels take their data from a sixth grade class. In the transcript I’m working with for my own project (Sfard & McClain 2002), the revoicing moves look a bit different:

Teacher: What I want to do today is I want to take a look at some of the things that you did and let’s talk about them, I want to see if as a group I want us to look at them and decide if we think that they are an adequate way to represent this data and if we actually understand what these folks are doing. So, start with one? Jamie, one more time, big voice.
Student: I think it’s a pretty adequate way of showing information because you can see where the range is starting and ending and you can see where the majority of the numbers are.
Teacher: okay, comments about what Jamie said, or other comments about this.

Here, the teacher doesn’t revoice the student’s proposition at all. The only function of the revoicing move is interpersonal/interactional, to position the student as the establisher of a topic, and to solicit comments on that topic. Even her use of discourse markers is different: where O’Connor and Michaels show a teacher who uses so to signal that she’s making an inference, Sfard and McClain’s teacher uses okay to show that she’s moving on to a new proposition.

This difference could be explained in a number of different ways. Sfard and McClain are working with seventh graders, while O’Connor and Michaels are observing a sixth-grade class; perhaps the older students are more sophisticated and require less overt structure. Both transcripts come from math classes, but Sfard and McClain, as befits older students, are engaging with technical math content more specifically; maybe it’s a difference in disciplinary discourse style. O’Connor and Michaels are working with “excellent and experienced teachers,” while in Sfard and McClain, the teacher is McClain herself, a university professor and math teacher educator; perhaps the difference is related to the different teaching context that each teacher is most accustomed to. Or maybe it’s just idiosyncratic.

The important observation here is the similarity: teachers can use their third pair part following a student’s response to do more than just say what’s correct and incorrect. They can use students’ utterances as the bricks, and their own talk as the mortar, to create a structure of academic discourse.

Tags: classroom discourse, IRF, teacher talk

Why law school is like prison

In his writing on total institutions — that is, anywhere the inmates work, eat, sleep, and spend their leisure time within the institution — Goffman makes a distinction between some total institutions where the inmates are meant to become more like their keepers, and others where the relationship is different. For example, you go to boot camp to become more like the higher ranking soldiers and officers who are running the boot camp, and you go to a monastery to become more like the monks. On the other hand, you don’t go to prison to learn how to be a prison guard.

I was reminded of this at Thanksgiving dinner, where I was talking to people who came from a number of different professions. We had a doctor, a lawyer, an actor, and maybe others, and we were talking about what your relationship is in each of these different professional training programs to the professors who are teaching you. For example, I know from presentations I’ve seen about ethnography in business schools that the situation is a little weird in B-school: you’re a businessperson learning to be a business executive, but the people you’re learning from are researchers. I imagine law school and med school are similar: your professors aren’t lawyers and doctors, or at least not practicing ones; instead, they’re academic researchers who are in charge of training the next generation of practitioners. Fine arts programs, I learned, are different: the instructors there tend to be working artists in the field. So you don’t learn how to be an actor from researchers; you learn to be an actor from actors, and maybe you’ll take a theory class from a theoretician to supplement it. And then in my case, I’m working with researchers to learn to be a researcher. PhD school, when it works well, is much more of an apprenticeship model.

So that puts art school and PhD school in the same category as monasteries and military bases. Business school and law school are in the same category as prisons and psychiatric hospitals. I feel like there’s a joke to be made here about “vocation” vs. “incarceration.”

Tags: disciplinarity, Goffman

Fitting positioning theory into SFL

Reading: van Langenhove & Harré (1999). “Introducing positioning theory.”

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I’ve been thinking about positioning theory lately in the context of an analysis I’m doing of casual conversation. Van Langenhove and Harré define it this way: in a social interaction, there are discrete speech acts taking place (e.g., asking a question to test your knowledge), which are meant to fit within an overarching storyline of that interaction or that relationship (e.g., math class). To fit the speech acts within the storyline, people put themselves and others into positions (e.g., teacher / student). Within an institutional context, storylines and positions tend to be pretty clear, but in casual conversation it all gets a bit murkier.

The idea hit me as I was riding my bike to class this evening: since positioning theory includes speech acts within its framework, positioning isn’t operating on the level of language functions — it’s operating on a meta level. So can we map these three elements of Harré’s triad onto Halliday’s three metafunctions?

Storyline is textual; that’s pretty clear. It’s an organizing metafunction that provides context for everything else.

Positioning seems quintessentially interpersonal. As I wrote in my notes once, positioning is Newtonian: every positioning of someone else causes an equal and opposite reaction in which I myself am positioned. If I act as a teacher, it positions you as a student, and vice versa.

So can we say that speech acts are in some sense ideational?

Updated 11/25, 4:48 PM: On further consideration, this is pretty much BS, but it was an interesting thought experiment.

Tags: insights, readings

Cross-disciplinary adventures

I’m just back from four days in Pennsylvania showing new speaking and writing test items to students. I got to talk to kids from grades 3–12, have them try out draft test items, and ask them about their opinions of the prompt and their process of finding an answer. For me, this kind of study is one of the most exciting things about test development, because it’s the closest look we get at the interaction between students and test items. Among the many things I’ve learned about as a test developer is the importance of qualitative research; numbers are great, but they never tell you “why.”

Tomorrow, I’m leaving the house at 4 AM to catch a flight to Chicago, where I will present at the NCTE Annual Convention. NCTE is the trade association of English language arts teachers, which is a new audience for me; I’m used to working in the ESOL world. I’m presenting as part of a panel sponsored by an LSA committee that I’m on, so in planning my talk, the question that I had to answer is this: As a linguist, what do I have to say to a group of English teachers?

The talk that I have planned is basically a sales pitch about the existence of academic oral language as a register distinct from academic written language and social oral language, and the importance of paying specific attention to it in class. On the first point, talking to people outside the fields of linguistics and education, I tend to get one of two responses: either “Of course it exists,” or “What are you talking about?” So this suggests that it will be a fruitful topic for discussion.

Talking to people from a different disciplinary background is always a little tricky, and it’s important to think of it almost as an exercise in intercultural communication. Here’s what I’m thinking on this score:

• Teachers don’t know linguistics. If I start by telling them I’m a linguist, it won’t give me any credibility, and it’s likely to make some eyes glaze over. So I’ll be sure to mention my teaching experience first, to establish myself as someone worth listening to.
• Still, I have to talk about linguistics at some point, because in a sense, that is what I have to offer. I’m planning to talk about the SFL concept of textual meaning, including mode and Theme, but without ever using those words. Instead it’s going to be “If you look at how sentences begin, it gives you an idea of how the author was thinking about organization. The way this looks in teacher talk is different from how it looks in textbooks or in casual conversation.”
• When I went to conferences as a teacher, I usually felt that the best presentations were the ones that gave me something I could do in class the next day. I’m planning to mention techniques like sentence frames (e.g., “In my opinion, ___”) and the idea that you can teach students how to have a productive discussion about academic content.
• After that, I’ll ask for more ideas in the Q&A. As a practitioner, I always wanted researchers to show respect for my knowledge of my own work context, so I’d better show that respect now that I’m the researcher.

If anything interesting happens tomorrow, I’ll be sure to let you know about it.

Tags: classroom discourse, teacher talk, travel

Feeling stupid

Related to my last post, this has been going around among my twitter people:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid … the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

Click and read the whole thing — it’s short, and it’s worth it.

There are times when you say “I don’t know,” and you find it frustrating or discouraging. And then there are times when you say “I don’t know,” and it’s exciting because it means you get to try to find out. I wouldn’t say “there are two kinds of people;” rather, the way this breaks down varies from person to person, and from situation to situation.

Independent to this, there are times when you say “I don’t know,” and you look into it, and it turns out that the reason you don’t know is that nobody knows, so if you’re really curious then you have to figure it out on your own. And if this is the case, and you’re excited to find out, and you think it’s an interesting or important question, then that’s when everything is clicking.

The importance of the incredible growing reading list, which I blogged last night, isn’t so much that it helps me find out whether the questions have already been answered. There are so many more questions than answers that once you get into it, you’re bound to hit on something. The importance of the reading is that it helps me to ask more questions.

Tags: research process, science

Maybe I should learn about

Once I was staying in a youth hostel in Florence, Italy, and I met a group of tourists from Brittany. They told me all about the Celtic music festival that they had in their hometown, and invited me to come stay with them and experience it myself — the kind of well-intentioned invitation that you make to someone you meet in a youth hostel, and you mean it when you say it. I told them how excited I would be to see this festival, and I remarked, “You know, the more places I go, the more places I want to go.”

One way I’ve confirmed that I’m meant to be a researcher is that I have the same feeling in the library.

99% of all archaeology is done in the library.

Each article I read points me to a book, each book points me to five more books, names start coming up repeatedly. This is problematic. Part of it is the idea — I think Socrates or Donald Rumsfeld said it first — that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. And there’s also always the chance that any one of these things you come across tangentially could lead you to new breakthroughs down the road.

Here are a few things that have been on and off my mental to-read list:

• Mohan, Language and Content. I’ve written previously about the difficulties I’ve had teasing apart the concepts of learning academic language and learning academic content. Mohan, I’ve heard, makes the case that it’s not possible. I actually borrowed this from the library, but never took the time to pick it up.
• Becker, Beyond Translation. Another different take on the intersection of language and culture.
• Some of Bernstein’s work on education. He’s wildly influential in other countries but I believe he hasn’t caught on as much in the US. I think I’ve read that he was controversial because his idea that education cannot compensate for society — that social class makes a difference in educational outcomes — has been taken by some people to mean poor kids are deficient, which is not the same thing.
• Finish the NLTK book.
• Somehow I’ve never read anything by John Gumperz. I know, right?
• If I want to look at genre, I should know more about narrative, and at least take a look at Labov and Waletzky 1967.
• Currently in a pile in my house, this, this, and I just picked up this. Lots of SFL, and I probably won’t get through it all (though I’m about 70% of the way into Eggins & Slade).

I bring all of this up because tonight I decided that I need to learn more about rhetorical structure theory. It’s another model of textual cohesion to go with the ones I’m already using, just in case they weren’t enough. But I think it could be useful if I ever get to codifying exactly how classroom discussions and lectures unfold, move by move. I just need to find time to do the reading.

Tags: research process