Spring Break at WHISC
Next week is spring break, so we at WHISC will take the week off. Publication will resume on March 30.
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Other Ling Newsletters
04:08 (2006-03-16)
March 16, 2006
Maria Gouskova: Tenure-Track at NYU
Maria Gouskova has accepted the offer of a tenure-track position in Linguistics at NYU.
Marcin Morzycki: Tenure-Track at Michigan State University
Marcin Morzycki has accepted the offer of a tenure-track position in Linguistics at Michigan State University.
Anne-Michelle Tessier: Tenure-Track at the University of Alberta
Anne-Michelle Tessier has accepted the offer of a tenure-track position in Linguistics at University of Alberta, in Edmonton.
Undergrad Linguistics Group
The Undergrad DARLings meet today: 6:30 pm, in South College 301.
Lisa Schiozaki will present her currrent experimental research. In her words:
My presentation will be about accentuation patterns observed in Japanese loanword phonology. I will give general descriptions of what is being/has been proposed in the literature and present results I obtained in a nonce word experiment I conducted this year. I'll be dealing with the data in the context of OT (Optimality Theory). I (and hopefully the phonologists too) will do our best explaining all the necessary info, so no a priori knowledge is expected.
Last week, Patrick Houghton presented on incremental processing of backwards anaphora in Japanese.
Reminder: Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium
From Paula Aden:
Undergraduates! Interested in leading a roundtable discussion or presenting a talk at the 4th Annual Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium? The final deadline for abstracts is tomorrow (March 17)! Send submissions to the address that begins with "bdsamuel", continues with the usual "at" sign, then "fas.", follows that with "harvard.", and finishes with the usual "edu".
Students at all levels of expertise are encouraged to submit an abstract on any topic in linguistics! Linguistic disciplines represented at the colloquium include, but are not limited to, syntax, phonology, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics.
The Undergraduate Linguistics Colloquium will be taking place at the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts from April 22-23. The keynote speaker is Professor Marc Hauser of Harvard University.
Semantics Reading Group
The semantics reading group meets today (March 26) at 8:00 pm at Jan Anderssen's house.
First, Florian Schwarz is going to run through the latest version of his SALT 16 talk. That will start right at 8:00 pm, so be sure to be on time if you want to catch that.
Second, at 8:45 pm or so, the group will begin exploring generalized quantifiers. The reading for that:
Keenan, Edward L. 2002. Some properties of generalized quantifiers. Linguistics and Philosophy 25:627-654.
UMass Amherst Linguists at SALT
SALT 16 takes place at the University of Tokyo, March 22-24. The program is full of South College-goers:
Angelika Kratzer is an invited speaker. Her talk is called Building a pronoun.
Maribel Romero (1998 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called On concealed questions.
Ilaria Frana is giving a talk called Wondering about concealed questions.
Florian Schwarz is giving a talk called On NEEDING propositions and LOOKING FOR properties.
Irene Heim (1982 UMass Amherst PhD) is an invited speaker. Her talk is called 'Little'.
Joe Pater: Invited Speaker at Galana 2
Joe Pater is an invited speaker at Galana 2006, in Montreal, August 17-19. The deadline for abstracts is March 27.
HUMDRUM on April 29-30, at JHU
HUMDRUM is now scheduled to talk place at Johns Hopkins University, April 29-30. (HUMDRUM is the Hopkins, University of MarylanD, Rutgers University of Massachusetts workshop on Optimality Theory. It took place here at UMass Amherst last year.)
MUMM 1 on May 6
MUMM 1 is now scheduled for May 6. MUMM is the joint meeting of the phonology groups at UMass Amherst and MIT. The first one happened on February 11, 2006, but it was then called UMMM 1, because it took place here.
Report from Heather
Heather wrote with more news from Pakistan. Visit her blog for more detailed descriptions.
Education or Eligibility?
I'm nearing the end of my first module at the women's college, and about 50% of my students are in danger of failing. It's an MA program for TESOL, yes that is to become teachers of English, and unfortunately about half of them (or more likely their families) didn't realize that learning English was a step that should be taken prior to enrolling in the program. I'd already been advised not to give them reading assignments, to keep quizzes to true/false, multiple choice, and fill in the blank, and to not be too hard on the shy girls. The first quiz was so ridiculously easy it almost made me sick, but nevertheless several students failed. About four girls even mysteriously had the same exact (mind you completely incorrect) wording on the essay section. I stuck in the short essays at the end because I just couldn't give them a test which didn't require anything more than memorization.
My next attempt was a five paragraph essay assignment comparing two different teaching methodologies regarding listening, speaking and in particular pronunciation. In order to help them with their essay structure (I thought I had learned from the quizzes), I broke the essay up into four questions and directed them to write one paragraph each for numbers 1-3 and two paragraphs for number 4. Intro, body and conclusion all set up for them. Well 14 out of 28 students failed based on the American system (60% and below...here in Lahore 70 is an A and 40 is passing...I can't bring myself to think along those lines). The registrar can give them an A, I will insist that they've only earned a C- as far as the rest of the world is concerned. The marks were so poor because Lahore's future English teacher's just need more time to learn English before trying to teach it to others.
This system just becomes an endless cycle with the English in Pakistan becoming less and less like English and more and more its own mutually unintelligible language. I work with second language learners all day long and my ear is trained for comprehension, but four or five of the presentations given in my class today were completely incomprehensible to me. Their task was to create and run a listening activity. For some of them, I had no idea what was going on! I just felt so bad for these girls, because here in Pakistan they don't necessarily choose their own path for education or career training.
Education here is also still based on rote memorization. Even while prepping students for IELTS, a few have asked me if I could write an essay for them to memorize. One woman who doing quite well in the MA TESOL program was chatting with me yesterday about the current state of education in Pakistan. She said, "They have been spoon fed all their lives. Usually they are given the questions and the answers to memorize. When you ask them to think and make an opinion, they don't know what to do." We spent an hour of one of my classes this week going back over the essay questions and talking about the key words in the questions and how to answer them. If I asked for "goals" I was given "pronunciation features." If I asked for the features, I was given an opinion. If I asked for an opinion comparing two different methodologies, I was given a four page essay about how important it was to learn English. Seriously, I ended up correcting them while drinking sipping vodka on my friend's terrace, because it was just too much to bear the thought that this was the future of Pakistani education. It's not that the girls aren't bright or don't have potential, but the fact that they've been in the program for about a year and nobody has noticed that they need some time to learn English and study skills prior to going for their MA.
I talked to the advisors about this problem today, and basically it comes down to the fact that it's MY responsibility to make students pass. Even if I think they shouldn't pass. Even if I think they shouldn't be in the program at all. In order to be admitted there was only an entrance interview, not even a written test or any essays. The program head gave me a whole list of excuses why the girls' English isn't good. They've come from the village. They've come from a backward area of the country. They only know how to memorize things. They can't really read academic texts in English. They can't understand my accent. They can't write essays. They are too shy to speak. And most of all, they won't become English teachers anyway, they are just "biding their time before getting married."
You see, an MA degree makes you eligible to boys with MA degrees and may be the road to a better life. If your daughter has an MA, she should marry a boy with at least an MA or one PhD. In Pakistan almost everyone seems to have one or two PhDs, and they all insist on being called doctor. They seem to forget the fact that NOT ONE university in Pakistan in internationally recognized. Outside of Pakistan their degrees don't mean anything. The President was saying the other day that "even India has internationally recognized universities" and some deals have been made to bring in foreign partners to create a recognized university here in Lahore.
But for now, I'm still in the Pakistani college with a class of variable abilities and stuck in an ethical quandry. I've been asked to give my students "another chance," but the problem is that even if they had 100 more chances they need more training in English language, writing skills, and how to think critically. Even if I gave private tutoring to each student it would take more than a year for a few of them to catch up, and so I'm not quite sure what to do. I don't want to lower my standards, and I can't bring myself to pass students who lack the general ability to answer a question or follow directions. I also don't want to let my bright students down by failing to challenge them and teach them what they need to know to be able to be better teachers. I have several girls who will make great teachers, but the rest of the class is holding them back from rigorous academic studies. Ahhh! This weekend I need to make their final exam up...if you see me online, please just say hi and let me know I don't have to let this drive me insane...at least not yet.
Acquisition Lab Sessions
Lately, we've missed announcements for the acquisition lab, due to the timing of publication. We're working to get you the news before it happens. For now, just a brief report on the two most recent meetings, both lively and interesting:
On March 13, Helen Stickney reported on her ongoing work on partitives. And Tanja Heizmann talked about exhaustivity and clefts.
On March 6, Leontine Kremers reported on her work on collectivity and distributivity.
Intricate Grammar Yields Precise Understanding
Linguistics in the Washington Post: