Job Discussion Forums

fluffyhamster · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 6:13 pm Post subject:

@Isla Guapa: (This may be old hat to many, but I thought I should still mention it anyway!) Jennifer Jenkins' The Phonology of English as an International Language details the research she conducted into how non-native speakers actually speak (to each other), despite whatever standards they may have been taught. (She seems to be one of the few researchers who has looked at how people really talk, as opposed to how they "should" talk - compare Ogden's Basic English, Quirk's Nuclear English, many an SLA study, etc etc. So hers are not "baseless" or limited top-down dictats but bottom-up genuine findings). On the basis of such research, she has proposed that teachers of English teach a more limited 'Lingua Franca Core' of phonemes (i.e. those phonemes that are actually needed for accomodating speakers from different backgrounds, with all their particular sociolinguistic identities, and effecting communication between them etc), rather than necessarily the full inventories of any particular native national standard.
http://www.soton.ac.uk/ml/profiles/jenkins.html
http://www.eltnews.com/features/elt_book_reviews/2007/10/the_phonology_of_english_as_an.html

An analogy could be made with the situation regarding the promulgation of Putonghua (essentially Mandarin) as the standard in the PRC: speakers of other 'dialects' of Chinese (who are usually regarded as native speakers of [Standard] Chinese, when they speak it, by the outside world at least), or of minority non-Chinese languages, do not always use the full range of phonemic distinctions made and possible in Standard Chinese, but in TCFL the student is expected to master every such distinction regardless of whether it really matters/affects mutual intelligibility or not.

Regarding ELT/TEFL/TESL/TESOL, I've never really heard/seen/read much about any North American institutions other than SIT (esp. Larsen-Freeman & Celce-Murcia) and Michigan. The net would widen a fair bit though if you included SLA "research proper", and Corpus Linguistics (I sometimes forget that this hasn't been confined just to e.g. Birmingham in the UK) etc. As for the New School, is that anything like A.C. Grayling's New College of the Humanities LOL.

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

I promise never to inflict 'global English' on you, Sahan. Cool

johnslat · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 9:08 pm Post subject:

Dear spiral78,

"You reached that advanced level where you can talk pretty much anything."

He/She might have been inflicting it on you. Very Happy

Regards,
John

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

Dear John:

Clearly, my ear/eye for correct forms is getting duller over the years Laughing

.
Wonder when they'll pull my license to teach due to slow reflexes?

Best,
spiral

Isla Guapa · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 11:15 pm Post subject:

Don't fret about your slip, spiral. After living several years in Mexico, I sometimes find my English slipping into Spanglish territory, much to my dismay Embarassed

.

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

Maybe you can pass it off as Global English, Isla Cool

Isla Guapa · Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2011 11:48 pm Post subject:

fluffyhamster · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 7:01 pm Post subject:

@Spiral: You mentioned Surrey on page 1, but did you mean Sussex? I couldn't find anything remotely ELT-related when I had a look just now at Surrey's range of Master's courses.

Birmingham and Edinburgh I'd agree have good reputations. To this list I think you could add Lancaster (Leech etc), probably Nottingham (Carter, McCarthy, Schmitt etc), and possibly Liverpool (Hoey, Thompson).

I'm not sure though why people go with Leicester - none of the staff are of much if any renown, and there seem to be few or no course options of any real interest (IMHO).

J.M.A. · Joined: 20 Jan 2009 Posts: 69

fluffyhamster · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:25 pm Post subject:

I'm sure that Halliday influenced the Birmingham school (of Discourse Analysis, right? Sinclair & Coulthard etc), but his name IIRC is more associated with the 'London school' (of linguistics generally) stemming from the work of Firth etc. Which prompts me to ask what the MAs offered by institutes in London are like (one doesn't hear that much about them). But yeah, it would be good to hear more info (up-to-the-minute) about Aussie MAs too, JMA!

J.M.A. · Joined: 20 Jan 2009 Posts: 69

@Fluffyhamster

Ditto about the London school but Australia is the land of SFL which is why I wonder what they are up to. I haven't got around to Halliday and Hasan etc yet but to be honest topics like textual cohesion and genre studies (combined with descriptive grammar, corpus studies and discourse analysis in general) really intrigues me and would be a particularly useful education for a language teacher imo.

fluffyhamster · Posted: Fri Jul 15, 2011 2:54 pm Post subject:

To be honest I find Halliday's writing a bit stodgy, and prefer to have it filtered by other writers (e.g. Geoff Thompson, or Graham Lock, or Downing & Locke, or Eggins & Slade), but Cohesion in English certainly seems like it would be worth a proper wade through LOL. (It's still sitting gathering dust on my shelf Embarassed

).

There were a few threads about Aussie MAs here or on the Teacher Discussion forums, but they were all a few years ago or more so could be quite out of date by now.

One thing that's always good for a laugh is that ETAQ debacle first mentioned on Language Log, and picked up on by moi on the forums. (That's not to denigrate SFL and SFG as faddish or anything, but rather just to show that the actual implementation of potentially valuable, quite new ideas, can sometimes be pretty flaky!).

JimJam · Joined: 06 Mar 2010 Posts: 69 Location: UK

fluffyhamster · Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:06 pm Post subject:

Hiya JimJam. Most MAs have a core range of modules and differ mainly in the optional courses offered, so there probably isn't that great a difference between an MA TESOL versus and MA in Applied Linguistics or whatever else from the same institute, plus they are likely all taught by pretty much the same staff anyway. Note however that I didn't say that Leicester had a bad rep, just that its courses seemed very bland compared to say Birmingham's range of MA courses and options.