Monthly Archives: October 2015

It’s a fact that languages are in a constant state of change and there isn’t much we can do about it. Though it is common to hear people bemoan the current state of English, I agree with linguists who argue that English is in no danger of being ‘corrupted,’ and indeed never has been. Throughout history, self-proclaimed defenders of the English language have warned that the language was on the precipice of collapse. Here’s an interesting article on a list of things that at different points in history people of the time feared would destroy the language. Most are just too silly to consider now (Shakespeare and the printing press were threats to the language?), just as 200 years from now native speakers will probably have a good chuckle at the current breed of so-called language experts (Stephen Pinker in The Language Instinct labels them ‘language mavens’) who warn that the Internet is destroying the language. A language can never become better or worse. It just becomes different as it adapts to serve the needs of those who use it.

Changes in grammar tend to be slow. Whom as the object pronoun form of who has been slipping away over the past century or two, at least in America (though I suspect it will survive in expressions that require it to follow a preposition, such as ‘most of whom’ and ‘To whom it may concern’). Another apparently ongoing change is in the unreal conditional use of ‘be’¹: ‘I wish I were good at grammar’ vs. ‘I wish I was good at grammar.’ I don’t recall any of the ESL/EFL grammar textbooks I used back in the mid-nineties even acknowledging the existence of the latter, but these days it seems most of the major grammar texts in the ESL/EFL market point out that was occurs in informal speech. In a hundred years or so, perhaps we’ll see the form change completely.

But while changes in grammar typically take decades if not centuries, changes in vocabulary occur far more rapidly. Every year thousands of slang words are created while an equivalent number blink out of existence nearly as quickly as they were created. Every new printed edition of dictionaries officially accepts hundreds of new words into the lexicon, while quietly deleting hundreds of outdated words to make room (the 12th edition OED added 400 new words while removing 200). Online dictionaries are not burdened with such space issues, and thus can add hundreds of new words each year (the online OED adds about 1000 per year) without deleting any.

Some of these changes are generally welcomed by most people, as the words fill a new gap that existing words cannot fill.  As we are meeting and interacting with so many people online, people  now have the need to distinguish ‘online’ and ‘offline’ relationships, classes, and so on (I recently read someone referring to the offline world as ‘meatspace’ as opposed to ‘cyberspace’. I really hope that term takes hold.). ‘Nomophobia’ is, I am told, the term for cell phone separation anxiety: the fear of being without your cell phone for even a brief period of time. Will it take? As I type this, I realize that my cell phone battery has died, and I can’t stop worrying that someone might be trying to contact me. So yeah, it just might.

Those of us on the older side of 40 might bristle a bit every time society foists yet another new word onto our brains that are already at maximum memory capacity. However, most slang has the life span of a fruit fly (we’re looking at you, ‘chillax’) and for the slang words that stick, despite our initial grumbling, the transition as a whole is relatively painless. Before you know it, we’re using words like humblebrag and mansplaining in a sentence without a second thought, if you aren’t already.

 

Outdated words usually fade from the lexicon without much of a fuss at all. Few people lament that words like gumption are now only found in old texts and SAT vocabulary lists. Personally, I just can’t use the word gumption with a straight face. It takes gumption to use a word like gumption to anyone other than your grandparents and expect to be taken seriously.

So sure, language changes and it’s not a bad thing on the whole. All the rantings from the language mavens who warn that English is going to hell in a hand basket are just tales told by idiots,  full of sound and fury, signifying whatevs.

 

And yet…

 

Some apparent changes are just harder to accept lying² down. The following are changes in the English language that still bring out the language mini-maven in me.

Literally used to mean the opposite of what the word was specifically created to mean.

I don’t literally pull my hair out when I hear people misuse this word (genes passed down from my maternal grandfather are already taking care of that for me), but I do literally want to verify that these people did not purchase their most recent diploma online for $19.99. Yes, I know that there are many words in the English language that have completely reversed their meaning and the world somehow keeps turning. Yes, I know that from context we can usually tell if a person literally means literally or not. I don’t care. These people simply sound dumb.

Mockery is the only way to reverse this tide. Each time someone says something like they ‘literally peed their pants’ out of fear, ask directly (and loudly) how they specifically dealt with their urine-soaked jeans. “What? You literally peed your pants? Did you go directly home to change said pants? Do you have a history of bladder problems? Do you wet your bed every time you have a nightmare? Have you considered therapy?”  Keep asking annoying and embarrassing questions like these until the sinner finally breaks down and says, “OK, I didn’t ‘literally’ pee my pants! Will you shut up now?” They’ll think twice before misusing the word again. This is how we fight, people.

 

Ironic to mean anything weird, funny, or kind of screwed up

Isn’t it ironic that the Alanis Morissette song titled ‘Ironic” is completely lacking in examples of irony? Or is that the irony that Alanis intended all along?

 

Fun Quiz! Which picture actually shows irony?Turn to the back of the Internet to see the answer.

 

Irregardless

I don’t mind double negatives in slang and music (Ain’t no thing if you can’t get no satisfaction), but use of irregardless always gives a bad impression. ‘Regardless’ is just a bit too far removed from informal speech to allow misuse without the raising of eyebrows and hackles.  I have no problem with ‘unirregardless,’ though. The math checks out.

 

Beg the question vs. Raise the question

It seems that even many educated people do not know the meaning of  begging the question. Begging the question is using circular reasoning. That’s a bad thing. Raising a question means bringing up a question. It’s usually a good thing.³

 

Could care less (?)

There are some misused expressions that are probably too late to save and we need to learn to be unbothered about. I  was initially going to add could care less to the list, but after reading up on the controversy, I’ve been swayed. In the Language Instinct, Stephen Pinker defends this expression by saying the ‘I could care less’ form is used sarcastically. I doubt this. Every time I’ve heard someone use this, the speaker did not give off any vibe of sarcasm. It’s just an expression that was used carelessly by enough people for a long enough time until it stuck. It’s probably passed into the realm of the idiomatic, which is no longer ruled by logic (shouldn’t it be forth and back rather than back and forth? HOW CAN YOU COME BACK BEFORE YOU GO FORTH?!). What I guess I’m saying is that I could care more about people who say they could care less, but I don’t.

 

 

Footnotes

1. Also known as the past subjunctive to teachers and scholars who enjoy using language in public no one else understands nor cares about.

2.  Please note that I didn’t write laying down. Here’s a sentence that can help you distinguish between lay down and lie down: “When too many people lay down word turds all over my Internet, I need to turn off my computer and lie down for a while.”

3. Of course, there are times when a question is not a good thing. I’ve broken it down here:

1. The question is seriously stupid. We can’t define this for you; we just know a dumb question when we hear it.
2. A student is asking questions in class solely for the purpose of getting the teacher off track (and damn it if it doesn’t work on me every time).
3. The teacher asks you a question in class even though it’s clear to everyone in the room that you couldn’t possibly know the answer because you weren’t even pretending to pay any attention in the first place.
4. You ask a perfectly reasonable question to a police officer who feels profoundly threatened by anyone he fears might be questioning his authority. Regardless of the question, the answer is usually, ‘Because taser.’
5. Your spouse asks why you didn’t do something that you totally forgot to do, again, and you’re really tired of hearing that question because she already knows the answer anyway and of course eventually you’ll remember to do it, but you’ve just been busy with a lot of stuff lately and besides it’s not like she always does everything she’s supposed to do so why does she always have to nag about it? [edited for length]

Come to think of it, perhaps the good vs. bad question ratio is basically a 50/50 split.

When studying vocabulary, many language learners set about memorizing lists of the foreign language words alongside the first corresponding language translations. This is not necessarily a bad approach to quickly memorizing words (if considerations for proper reviews are taken), but it is just a first step towards mastering a new word. There is much more to learning a vocabulary word than simply being able to match a new word with the translation in your native tongue.

‘Depth of vocabulary’ refers to how much a learner knows about a word. Here’s an example. Take the word spend. Initially, a student may just look up the word in a bilingual dictionary to see a single word translation. In Spanish, for example, the translation is pasar. In Korean, spend can be translated into  jichulhada (지출하다).

Once the language student memorizes the word pair (pasar = spend/jichulhada = spend), she can now use the word as needed without a problem, right?

Well, not quite. It can be one thing to pass a simple translation vocabulary quiz, and quite another to recognize and produce the word in actual language use. Each word has a different amount of knowledge that learners must attend to, something Paul Nation(2001) refers to as the ‘learning burden’ of a word. Some words pose a very light learning burden. Imageable and concrete nouns such as apple, dog, scissors, etc. tend to have a light learning burden. For example, just knowing that apple in Spanish is  manzana  is usually enough to plop the word relatively error free into a sentence the next time you want to say ‘apple’ in Mexico.

 ¿Cómo te gustan los manzanas?

For many other words, verbs and more abstract nouns in particular, there is a lot more the student needs know in order to use them correctly. Going back to the word spend,  you need to know that the past tense and past participle is spent, and not spended. It’s helpful to know that the word can be used as a noun in the gerund form (spending). You also need to realize that spend means different things in different contexts. In English we can spend money as well as spend time. In Spanish and Korean, however,  different verbs are used for those expressions (gastar dinero vs. pasar tiempo, and doneul jichulhada vs. siganeul bonaeda) and you’ll sound a bit silly mixing them up when speaking in those languages. It would probably be the equivalent of saying ‘I passed $30 on gas this month’ in English).

 

Fill her up!  

There are also restrictions about how to use the word spend. We can spend cash, but we don’t spend credit or spend coupons. A person who regularly spends a lot of money can be referred to as a big spender, but we don’t call a person who avoids spending money a little spender.

Here are some of issues related to depth of vocabulary knowledge(see Nation, 2001 for a complete list), many of which are usually not addressed with rote memorization of vocabulary lists.

1. Word recognition

Can the learner readily recognize the word when seen in print and when heard?

As learners of English well know, the way an English word is spelled often fails to correspond to how it is pronounced.  There may be a large number of words that students know when they see it in print, but do not recognize when they hear them and vice versa.

2. Production

Can the learner say the word with comprehensible pronunciation and spell the word correctly?

3. Grammar forms

Does the learner know the different grammatical forms (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) of the word?

4. Collocations

What other words commonly occur with the new word, and what combinations of words are not accepted?

Collocations are words that are commonly used together. For example, medicine is used with the word take (Did you take your medicine?). In the Korean language, the direct translation of ‘take medicine’ is ‘eat medicine.’

There are countless others. We go to a hairdresser or barber to get our hair cut, not chopped or severed. We ride a motorcycle, but don’t drive a motorcycle. We go bowling, but do not play bowling.  Learning the words ‘cut’, ‘motorcycle’ and ‘bowling’ also involves knowing what words usually go with them and what words do not.

5. Colligations

These are like collocations, but refer to grammatical issues. For example, we are interested in skydiving, not interested at skydiving. We avoid watching movies starring Rob Schneider, not avoid to watch.

 

Ugh. 

 A word can be paired with a wrong collocation and still be grammatically correct (yet sound awkward), but a word paired with the wrong colligation is considered a grammar error.

6. Usage constraints

Is the word more appropriate for formal occasions rather than informal? Is it common in spoken English, but sounds out of place in academic writing? Is it a word only used (and known) to a specific group of people? Is the word out-dated or otherwise used only in specific social contexts?

 

How to develop depth of vocabulary?

To master a word, there is no way around the fact that you simply have to encounter it hundreds if not thousands of times in a variety of contexts until you develop a strong sense of how the word is and is not used by native speakers. Often the amount of information to know about the word is simply too vast for explicit memorization. This is why most vocabulary scholars acknowledge a strong role for extensive reading and listening.

However, there are some things we can add to explicit study which will give the learner a good start with vocabulary depth. Raising awareness about the most common collocations and relevant colligations is generally helpful. The information given earlier about the word spend, for example, could be enough.

When we first started talking about making what is now the Praxis vocabulary program, there were already a large number of flash-card programs in existence using the spacing effect. What we were interested in doing was going one step further and designing a program in which not only did students increase the amount of vocabulary they knew (quantity), but also develop some depth of vocabulary knowledge(quality). I’m not opposed to simple L1-L2 flashcards. This is an effective way to begin learning vocabulary. It is just a beginning, however, and we believe more can be done.

For each word in the system, Praxis Ed provides  10-14 different exercises and in any given learning session the learner will typically encounter 2-3 of these exercises. The idea is that every time the learner is due to review the words, not only is she getting the needed repetition to keep the word in memory, but she is also learning more about the word as well. In the first learning session, she’ll see the definition, a model sentence, a list of common collocations and colligations, and opportunities to recognize the word in reading and in listening. The following day she’ll be challenged to produce the word and work on spelling. A week later, she’ll encounter it in a new context-rich listening exercise. Later, exercises which develop specific collocations or colligations are added, as well exercises showing the word in new contexts.

 

Has this worked?

Yes it has. Thanks for asking.
The two published studies on Praxis have both investigated receptive as well as productive skills, and the results are encouraging. Our first study(Miles & Kwon, 2008) measured how well students could recall the word from memory, use it in the correct grammatical form, and spell it correctly. While students using Praxis Ed increased and maintained their knowledge of how to use the words, students working off of bilingual lists lost most of their gains on recalling the words, and made nearly no progress at all on measures of vocabulary depth. This was supported by independent researchers in Japan (Hirschel & Fritz, 2013) who found students using Praxis Ed retained their ability to produce and use the word with more accuracy in comparison to students using vocabulary notebook study methods.

We don’t make any strong claims that a student will ‘master’ a word that is studied on Praxis. There are limitations to what any one product, book, or class can do for a student in the marathon that is learning a second language.However, we do feel students on Praxis Ed get far more bang for their buck by having the opportunity to learn a bit more about the word with each review.

 

Quality or Quantity? 

With the Praxis program, we have the flexibility to allow teachers to decide which way they wish to go in regards to quantity and quality. If they feel it is better for their students to quickly broaden the quantity of their students’ vocabulary, then we have a program for 10 words a day. It still provides a range of activities which gives a fair amount of depth, so quality learning is still happening, but to account for the additional words (while keeping study sessions around 20 minutes) we had to make some reductions in the number of exercises seen per word. I think this option is good for students who need to expand their receptive vocabulary quickly in order to read and listen to a wider range of materials. It can also be a good choice for students preparing for a largely receptive test like the original version of the TOEIC (listening and reading only).

For teachers who lean towards quality over quantity, the number of words per day drops to five. Students get the full variety of exercises to help them develop better usage of the vocabulary. This option is useful for students who need to use the words, as well as understand them when encountered in speech or text.

The default is seven words per day, striking a better balance between quantity and quality. It is the system that has given us the overall best results. We believe that our program along with extensive reading and listening is a powerful combination for vocabulary learning.

 

 

Hirschel, R. and Fritz, E. (2013). Learning vocabulary: CALL program versus vocabulary notebook. System, 41(3), 639-653.

Miles, S., & Kwon, C. J. (2008). Benefits of using CALL vocabulary programs to provide systematic word recycling. English Teaching, 63(1). 199-216.

Nation, I.S.P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (see page 27 for an extensive list of word depth aspects)