Teacher Discussion Forums

Brian Browser is a Viz-like character, a sad ESL teacher with aspirations of one day becoming a serious linguist, but who doesn't have the money (he's an ESL teacher, remember) to buy all the lovely books he's been pawing, sniffing and licking in the bookstore - hence the "book-filled" trousers.

Here are some of the recent (or not-so-recent-but-noticed-it-recently) publications he's now lusting after:

http://www.grsampson.net/BLID.html
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books.p ... 1841500801
http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_book ... L%26LT%208
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-925067-7

The last book has a URL so long that it affected the right margin. Go to the link below and search for 'Grammar and Context' (by Hewing). Click on the first search result, then on the red 'Paperback Book' link to see the full details.
http://www.routledge.com/

Brian's also noticed that CUP is releasing a second edition of their Advanced Learner's Dictionary, packed with all the kinds of features that their main competitors (most notably, Longman and Macmillan) had included in their dictionaries before the first edition of the CALD was published just a year or so ago.
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/elt_projec ... id=2500819

Maybe somebody on the CALD2 team could take a look at e.g. Scholfield's comments in his chapter on learner dictionaries in Schmitt and McCarthy's 1997 book Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition and Pedagogy (CUP):

Sense organization in...the very latest batch of EFL dictionaries shows that lexicographers have been paying some attention to it. The solutions they have come up with are remarkably different...

.....

Finding the sense

.....

I incline to the Longman solution, on the grounds that examination of guessing protocols (such as in Hosenfeld, op. cit.) shows that learners very often can guess the part of speech of an unknown word, if nothing else, and so substitute an appropriate semantically empty dummy as an interim measure (e.g. 'something' for an unknown noun). ... It therefore seems likely that learners will often arrive at the dictionary look-up stage already knowing the part of speech, and it is unhelpful to waste this as the first quick way of reducing the amount of material the user has to focus on as COBUILD and Cambridge do.

Based on Scholfield above, fluffyhamster (when he was a human) wrote:As for COBUILD, whilst I respect the innovations they made (particularly the use of stylistically-consistent, full-sentence definitions), I really do not understand why they insist on not separating differing parts of speech into separate entries - it must make finding the correct entry very slow for learners who have already intuited that they are dealing with e.g. a noun rather than a verb! (The Cambridge dictionary referred to above takes a similar approach, but its use of signposts helps alleviate the problems involved in access somewhat).

Anyway, Brian hopes that CALD2 will indeed be an improvement on CALD1 (which in some respects wasn't actually an improvement upon the original CIDE), and that this will be the last Cambridge dictionary he "has to" buy for quite a while to come.

Please feel free to tell us if you know anyone like Brian, who might have mentioned and/or is planning to shoplift a recent book or two.

Seventh edition of Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary is coming!
http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/isbn/oald7?cc=gb

The 'Oxford 3000 Profiler' sounds like it will be particularly useful (for those of us who don't make much/enough use of concordancers etc):

Coming soon: The brand new OALD 7 website!
We’ll be launching a new site soon, providing you with information, support, resources, and so much more.

-Access OALD 7 online – for free! You’ll be able to look up any word in OALD 7 and find its meaning at the click of a mouse.
-Read all the information you need about Oxford 3000 (the words students need to know) and how to make the best use of the list.
-Play games and crosswords, and download dictionary activities.
-Check your own texts for free with the Oxford 3000 Profiler. This useful teaching aid lets you know which words in the text your students should know, and which ones they may need help with.

(Details are from the OALDCE6 website:
http://www.oup.com/elt/global/products/oald/ )

I thought the Oxford 3000 Profiler was going to be an automated copy and paste-in word cruncher of sorts, and provide an easy indication of which words were basic vs. more advanced in short texts, but it's actually just the defining vocabulary list for the OALDCE7.

I had a quick glance at the Second Edition of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, and it is very similar to the earlier edition. The extra information on collocations didn't leap out as with Macmillan's dictionary, or the LDOCE4, but who knows, there may be almost as many in there for those who want to take an accurate count. The new frequency information takes the form of three bands, kind of like "essential", "need to know soon" and "work on these to sound more impressive" (I can't remember what three letters are used, or what they stand for exactly, but it's along these sort of lines). Longman is still the most informative when it comes to frequency information and ordering of entries, followed by COBUILD3.

Also new from CUP:
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/c ... 0521612888
(Huddleston & Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar)

I'm hoping this book will be the one that helps transform me from a mere fluffyhamster into a Stephen Jones...but perhaps not, we'll need to see! In terms of the demands it makes on the reader, it is appreciably easier than e.g. Huddleston's Introduction to the Grammar of English (it appears to make similar points, but in a fraction of the space and time), and obviously a lot more digestible than the full-size CGEL.

Finally, the following book looks like it will be a "good" (at least a reaction-provoking, if not a thought-provoking) read:
http://www.unfoldingoflanguage.com/

The bibliography includes works by Aitchison, Bickerton, Bybee, Croft, Deacon, Jackendoff, Kovesces, Labov, Lakoff & Johnson, Pinker, Sampson, Savage-Rumbaugh, Smith & Tsimpli, and Tomasello. (Only one of Chomsky's: Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, 1971).

I do, I confess, read dictionaries. I haven't reached the stage of being excited about new ones coming out though. Is it only a matter of time?

It's only a matter of the time it takes to read all the small print on, say, about 1500 densely packed pages. If you can get excited about that, you might also start getting excited about prescription glasses.

http://www.eupjournals.com/book/9780748617586
(Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, edited by Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge)

List of entries: Aristotle, Arnauld, Austin, Ayer, Bakhtin, Barthes, Benveniste, Berkeley, Bernstein, Bloomfield, Boas, Bopp, Bourdieu, Brugmann, Cameron, Carnap, Chomsky, Davidson, Derrida, Descartes, Dummett, Firth, Fodor, Frege, Geach, Goodman, Greenberg, Greimas, Grice, Grimm, Halliday, Hegel, Hjemslev, Hockett, Humboldt, Hume, Husserl, Jakobson, Jones, Kant, Katz, Kripke, Kristeva, Labov, Lacan, Leibniz, Lewis (not Michael LOL!), Locke, Malinowski, Martinet, Marx, Mill, Milroy, Montague, Moore, Morris, Peirce, Piaget, Pike, Plato, Popper, Putnam, Quine, Ramsey, Rask, Russell, Ryle, Sacks, Sapir, Saussure, Searle, Sinclair, Skinner, Strawson, Tannen, Tarski, Todorov, Trubetzkoy, Whorf, Wittgenstein.

Some of the entries seem a little "token" (e.g. Sinclair gets about two and a half columns - just over a page - compared to eleven and a half columns for Firth, and just over thirteen for Chomsky).

http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/c ... 0521663768
(Argument Realization, by Beth Levin & Malka Rappaport Hovav)

http://www.palgrave.com/products/Catalo ... 140391642X
(English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction. Second edition. By Geoffrey Leech et al)
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book ... 377&site=1
(Language, Frogs and Savants: More Linguistic Problems, Puzzles and Polemics, by Neil Smith)

What seems to be a recent new book (Grammar, in the Oxford Introductions to Language Study series) from Michael Swan, that is engagingly written and looks very interesting (could be just the sort of linguistic i.e. satisfyingly sophisticated introduction to grammar that e.g. teacher trainees might really appreciate - would thus make a great companion to his PEU 3rd Edition); the best book now in the OILS range?
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-437241-3

Routledge have recently published Introducing Metaphor by Murray Knowles (who he?) and Rosamund Moon.

A while ago (see above) I mentioned what a letdown the 'Oxford 3000 Profiler' was. It's nice therefore to see something like (indeed, better than) what I was expecting from Oxford offered FOR FREE online (the download link is in the 'Price' box at the top of the following TESL-EJ review):
http://tesl-ej.org/ej33/m3.html

I've just downloaded the zip file...will start tinkering with the program soon...

This looks like it could be very useful!

http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/dacapo ... 0738206806
(The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, And Intelligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors To Modern Humans, by Stuart Shanker & Stanley Greenspan)