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Interview with PSU in Riyadh
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It's Scary!



Joined: 17 Apr 2011
Posts: 823

PostPosted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 3:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Point well taken. My men and women college students in the U.A.E. had nothing but the highest regard for Analytical Grammar. I can still remember the times walking by study groups out on the grounds there in Abu Dhabi at the Men's AND Women's colleges furiously arguing which approach to grammar that they thought was more cogent to their educational pursuits.

I have no idea what I was thinking about in my previous post!

It's the post I am responding to which rivals the one I first commented on in this thread! Rolling Eyes


Last edited by It's Scary! on Fri Feb 17, 2012 4:04 pm; edited 1 time in total
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veiledsentiments



Joined: 20 Feb 2003
Posts: 17644
Location: USA

PostPosted: Fri Feb 17, 2012 3:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

my sir wrote:
Quote:
How would you analyze this sentence "See John run"?
a correct but slightly artificial sentence.

Slightly artificial? Shocked And I would say that it is not a misquote... a change of the name from "Dick" or that we may remember it with the dog... "See Spot run." Now if it was "Make John study" the distracting artificiality disappears.

Nor do I see how playing at parsing it shows anything but how pedantic the teacher can be (or the interviewer is). Better for employers to use questions that show the applicant's ability to pass on grammatical forms to the low level students we teach. Active vs Passive, basic tenses/sv agreement, conditionals, tags...

Why should interviewing be a gotcha game?

What MA program teaches grammar stuff like this? Supposedly one learned this in school. Laughing

VS
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Linguist



Joined: 22 Feb 2006
Posts: 202

PostPosted: Tue Feb 21, 2012 5:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
What MA program teaches grammar stuff like this?


Some MA programmes teach systemic functional linguistics as core courses and there is no way students can opt not to take them.

Do students use what they learn afterwards, that's another question.
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Dominic-Pax



Joined: 20 Oct 2009
Posts: 77

PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 8:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Linguist wrote:
Quote:
What MA program teaches grammar stuff like this?


Some MA programmes teach systemic functional linguistics as core courses and there is no way students can opt not to take them.

Do students use what they learn afterwards, that's another question.


I think a good MA TESOL course will have some sort of pedagogical grammar course. It is important for language teaching.
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veiledsentiments



Joined: 20 Feb 2003
Posts: 17644
Location: USA

PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 4:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dominic-Pax wrote:
I think a good MA TESOL course will have some sort of pedagogical grammar course. It is important for language teaching.

When I got my MA at AUCairo many years ago, the only thing was Syntax as an elective (along with Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Contrastive Analysis, etc...) not the sort of 'grammar' course that transfers into your EFL classroom, but certainly an interesting part of Linguistics. I just went back and looked at their current program and they have added a required grammar course in their core. Shocked I suspect that this is a factor of the fact that applicants now don't have the strong grammar background that was taught in the schools up until the 70s.

A sad commentary on the current level of education K-12... certainly in the US and I have read the same complaint from the British side.

VS
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Badar Bin Bada Boom



Joined: 01 Jun 2011
Posts: 192
Location: Fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man

PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 7:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well...whatever... all I know is, our students get upset tummies if they don't get their milk and grammatical formulas. I think the interviewer looked it up and was curious to see if the job candidate could come up with some anti-matter from the black hole of grammatical minutia. such as...

In "See Spot run," Spot is the noun phrase and run is a verb phrase. Unfortunately your transformational grammarians do not trouble themselves with such details as what kind of verb phrase it is, leaving us pretty much back where we started.

Spot run is an "objective infinitive." Now we're getting somewhere. An infinitive is an uninflected verb form commonly beginning with to, as in to run. In an objective infinitive (and doesn't that sound like something you could get Unitarians to pray to?), the noun is modified by the infinitive, and the two parts together--in this case Spot run--are the direct object of the predicate, see. One may object: How can run be an infinitive? There's no to in front of it. My informant explained this by saying the to was "understood." "See Spot [to] run"? I don't think so.


--http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1275/how-do-you-diagram-the-sentence-see-spot-run
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johnslat



Joined: 21 Jan 2003
Posts: 13859
Location: Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

PostPosted: Wed Feb 22, 2012 7:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Dear B4,

Spot on (to borrow a Britishism Very Happy)

Regards,
John
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robinbanks



Joined: 28 Apr 2009
Posts: 77

PostPosted: Fri Feb 24, 2012 9:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"It's the way you tell 'em"! as Frank Carson would say (R.I.P. Frank)
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n.madyarova



Joined: 08 Jan 2012
Posts: 6

PostPosted: Sat Mar 17, 2012 10:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you Imdramayu for posting interview questions!
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Imdramayu



Joined: 09 Feb 2007
Posts: 394
Location: South Korea

PostPosted: Thu May 24, 2012 6:20 pm    Post subject: Prep program @ PSU Reply with quote

My chances @ PSU just went up a notch with a prep program interview. Sorry, didn't make a note of the questions but they were the usual ones.

My question: what's the housing like for PSU faculty? Can they get nice housing with the housing allowance? Also, are there enough mid-level schools whose tuition is covered by the child tuition allowance?

I'm wondering: why is PSU interviewing now and will get back to me in June? This does seem rather late.

Im


Last edited by Imdramayu on Fri Jul 13, 2012 8:17 am; edited 1 time in total
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citadel



Joined: 12 May 2012
Posts: 68
Location: Over the river and through the woods.....

PostPosted: Fri May 25, 2012 12:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"See John Run" Two of the three are high frequency dolce words.

Was this position seriously for university level teaching?
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Gulezar



Joined: 19 Jun 2007
Posts: 483

PostPosted: Fri May 25, 2012 5:15 am    Post subject: Re: ABP Reply with quote

Imdramayu wrote:
My chances @ Zayed just went up a notch with a ABP interview. Sorry, didn't make a note of the questions but they were the usual ones.

My question: what's the housing like for ABP faculty? Can they get nice housing with the housing allowance? Also, are there enough mid-level schools whose tuition is covered by the child tuition allowance?

I'm wondering: why is ADP interviewing now and will get back to me in June? This does seem rather late.

Im


One never knows how the numbers will shape up, who will jump ship or what student enrollment will look like. I got my offer in June, so don't worry. This year will be even more confusing since Ramadan starts in mid-July, but they probably do want to wrap everything up before July 19th (the last Thursday before what might be the start of Ramadan)

Zayed's housing offerings should be fine for the first year. I would recommend that you take it, as you won't want the stress of running around looking for a place in your first weeks. You can always stay with Zayed's housing, but once you take the housing allowance you have to stay with it, too; you can't shift back to Zayed University housing. After a year, you will have a better sense of traffic patterns and which schools your kids can attend.

Those who went through the housing bubble a few years back understand how volatile the market can be. There are lots of pretty places up for rent now and all for a song. It's temping to go for the waterfront view with a balcony, but I don't know if the market is stable quite yet.

You should have enough money for tuition for a good school. The problem is getting your kid on a waiting list for a good school.
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