Brian Browser's book-filled trousers

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 12:31 am

You are the idea hamster, and this thread is like kicking a dead whale up the beach?

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 6:34 am

I suppose the first term would only be true if I genuinely were a hamster with ideas, or had even been tasked with coming up with a few between my many tea breaks; as for KDWUTB, that sounds like harder work than this thread!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Mar 24, 2008 8:59 pm

Bit of an "oldie" (i.e. not super-recent), this one.

I was dusting off my stored books the other day and came across this gem:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionary-Impo ... 0099415682 (the UK edition that I have)
http://www.amazon.com/World-Ideas-Dicti ... 0345437063 (A slightly different American edition. Amazon.com always has more reviews!)

I was struck once again whilst browsing through it anew at what a great little book it is. Obvously it can't go into great depth, and there isn't a whole load on linguistics in it, but the pivotal theories and thinkers that have influenced mankind really do all seem to be there in outline or at least mentioned.

I'm definitely going to either try to read it through (by following up and marking every cross-reference as I proceed from A-Z), or at least remember to take it with me in my next teaching job (assuming I get hired and continue in ELT LOL).

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Jul 07, 2008 4:11 pm

Dorling Kindersley have released (rereleased?) a range of affordable bilingual Visual dictionaries (I've just bought the Chinese-English one). The quality, quantity and general coverage of the pictures (that is, photographs) seems very good.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 7:30 pm

I mentioned the Oxford 3000 Profiler way back on the first page of this thread. Good to see that it's finally arrived on the OALD website:
http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/teache ... ?cc=global

Have fun!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 2:08 am

I've just become aware that Ronald Langacker has recently (this year) written Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction. Most of it appears to be previewable (i.e. readable) on Google Book Search:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UKVNKz0ZRqwC

alexcase · Post by **alexcase** » Wed Oct 08, 2008 7:37 am

This thread has got to be some kind of record breaker for the greatest percentage of contributions by one person!

TEFLtastic blog- http://tefltastic.wordpress.com

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Oct 10, 2008 8:49 pm

alexcase wrote:This thread has got to be some kind of record breaker for the greatest percentage of contributions by one person!

I just like browsing bookstores more than some (many?) teachers, and was lucky that the Shinjuku-beside-Takashima-ya branch of Kinokuniya in Tokyo had a quite good linguistics section. I'm not living in or near a major city now though, so I'm not as up on the latest releases and have become dependent on mainly chance discoveries of books and their reviews on Amazon. Maybe someone with access to a decent bookstore could take over from Brian Browser and do the more far-flung bibliophile teachers out there a small favour by reporting whatever interesting new releases?

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:04 am

If astonishing one man threads are your thing, check out "stonehenge" Gary Denke in adult education. There's no beating him.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Oct 14, 2008 1:03 pm

Hey, I just thought, I could from time to time also mention a few books that I WOULDN'T buy. How about this cracker:
http://www.amazon.com/Thinkers-Thesauru ... bb_product
(The Thinker's Thesaurus: Sophisticated Alternatives to Common Words, by Peter Meltzer)

I mean, just take a look at the excerpt (pages 9-14).

Jotham might really like it, though.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Oct 27, 2008 4:58 pm

Two reviews of a book, in chronological order:

PD Smith investigates the intricate process of reading as seen through Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid

PD Smith
The Guardian, Saturday April 12 2008
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
by Maryanne Wolf
308pp, Icon, £12.99

According to Herodotus, the Egyptian king Psamtik I (664-610 BCE) conducted an experiment to discover the first spoken language. Two babies were isolated in a shepherd's hut and no one was allowed to talk to them. Eventually, one baby spoke. The first word it uttered was bekos, "bread" in Phrygian, a language from northwest Anatolia. According to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, this was one of many such attempts to rediscover the Ursprache, the first language spoken on Earth. Indeed, it is a question archaeologists and linguists are still trying to answer today. But although the origins of spoken language may be lost in the mists of time, more tangible evidence exists for written language, and Psamtik would have been pleasantly surprised. Wolf cites recent evidence that suggests Egyptian hieroglyphs may be older (circa 3,400 BCE) than even Sumerian cuneiform writing.

Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading. In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual. As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves "our brains were never wired to read". Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes.

Wolf's story of the development of the reading brain encompasses many fields, from linguistics, archaeology and education to history, literature and neuroscience. The cultural centrality of reading has already been expertly explored, for example in Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. However, Wolf shows how evolutionary history and cognitive neuroscience are casting new light on "the complex beauty of the reading process". In particular, she highlights the brain's astonishing plasticity, its "protean capacity" to forge new links and reorganise itself to learn new skills: we are all born with the "capacity to change what is given to us by nature ... We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs". Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, "we are what we read". Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese.

But as well as celebrating the transformative act of reading, Wolf admits to being troubled about the future of reading. For thousands of years, the process of engaging with texts has enriched us, both existentially and - as Wolf's fascinating book shows - biologically. In particular, reading has given us "the gift of time"- time when our thoughts can move beyond the words on the page to new levels of understanding, time to think the unthinkable. Reading is not just about absorbing information and finding ready-made answers; it is thought-in-action. There are no pre-packaged answers in life. "We can receive the truth from nobody," said Proust; "we must create it ourselves." But in the "Google universe", with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read "inferentially, analytically and critically"; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the "associative dimension" to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons. Although not opposed to the internet, Wolf concludes on a cautionary note: we need to be "vigilant" in order to preserve "the profound generativity of the reading brain".

Wolf's insights are fascinating, although the book is at times quite a dense read. However, the title, Proust and the Squid (which refers to the different but complementary ways of understanding the reading process), sets up expectations that are not wholly satisfied. Proust personifies the intellectually transformative aspect of writing and reading; whereas the squid - mysteriously morphed into a stylised octopus on the cover - stands for the biological part of the reading equation: in the 1950s the squid's long central axon showed scientists how neurons fire and transmit information to each other. Memorable though the title is, Wolf fails to explore fully this intriguing juxtaposition of literature and science. Nevertheless, Proust and the Squid has much to offer on this important - perhaps the most important - subject. For, as Hermann Hesse has written: "Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there would be no concept of humanity."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/ap ... anreview21

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NICOLAS LEZARD'S CHOICE

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
by Maryanne Wolf
Icon, £8.99

A brainy book about reading skills
Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian, Saturday October 25 2008

If you're reading this section of the paper, then there's a good chance you like reading. But did you know that because you can read, your brain is differently wired from that of an illiterate person? Or that Chinese and Japanese speakers use different parts of the brain to read than we do? (Which should help you forgive the mangled English that occasionally comes out of those countries, like the sign in a Taiwan hotel apologising for the closure of the swimming pool: "Because of rainy day. The swimming pool pause opens! The inconvenient forgives please HouseKeeping department".) Or that, because of the language's eccentricities, children take a year longer to read English than they do when they learn Italian, German, or Finnish?

We take our reading skills for granted, but we shouldn't; and this book tells us what's going on in our brains when we read. (When I say it is a very brainy book, I am being literal as well as figurative: the book is crammed with drawings of brains, with areas given such imposing names as supramarginal gyrus or occipital-temporal area. Do not let these put you off.) It begins with the arresting proclamation: "We were never born to read." That is, there is nothing in our genetic makeup that determines literacy, in the way that there is something which determines how we digest, or see, or move. Reading involves getting two halves of the brain to work together: to get the part that sees and the part that talks to cooperate.

Sometimes they don't - and if you don't learn to read, your mind works differently. Portuguese scientists examined two different groups of rural dwellers: those who had been educated to read as children, and those who had managed to bypass that stage. They could both speak the language, of course, but when the non-readers were asked to repeat nonsense words like "benth" they would find it hard, and try to substitute similar-sounding words that actually meant something, like "birth". You or I might question the utility of getting a Portuguese peasant to say the word "benth", or its equivalent in Portuguese, but that is the kind of thing scientists get up to - and the research can have surprising implications.

This book is so thought-provoking that at times it feels as if one is being overloaded. Yet it is - except for some of the stuff about the supramarginal gyrus - quite easy to read. That, probably, is why it is so stimulating. Wolf covers a lot of ground very quickly. (As for the title: "Proust" stands for the reading brain, "the squid" for the anatomical study of nerve reflexes.) We zip from cuneiform (the initial great literate achievement) to Socrates, who was deeply suspicious of reading, which he said stifled independent thought: he attacked people who think "like papyrus rolls, being able neither to answer your questions nor to ask themselves". Well, thanks to Plato's writing down Socrates's words, we still have his objections to hand; but, as Wolf points out, Socrates's fears for the future of thought are very similar to our own fears for our children in the face of the instant-retrieval revolution of the internet.

If there is a continuous underlying theme in the book, it is, indeed, about the education of children. At what age should they start being taught to read? What's the best way to help them? (Read them poetry. It helps them distinguish phonemes.) Is the internet stunting their intellectual growth? (Probably not, but let us be vigilant.) And - she really goes into this in depth - what's the best way to deal with dyslexia? (I will not summarise her arguments and insights here, but the gist is that dyslexia is not necessarily bad news.) And the great thing we learn about reading is that, as we age, it just gets better and better. Describing her experience of reading Middlemarch half a dozen times - which itself bespeaks a high level of commitment to the written word - she winningly admits that she now sees things she didn't before: "I never thought I would see the day when I empathised with Mr Casaubon but now, with no small humility, I see that I do."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/25/lezard

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Nov 03, 2008 4:09 am

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QHrq ... frontcover
(Linguistics in Britain: Personal Histories)

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Nov 20, 2008 2:22 am

Dinky new Oxford Learner's Pocket Grammar, by John Eastwood:
http://www.oup.com/elt/catalogue/isbn/0 ... ?cc=global

Replaces the pocket version of the Thomson & Martinet.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Dec 05, 2008 10:50 am

http://professorjackrichards.com/work.h ... tm~content

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 3:45 pm

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