The value of carrots

In recent weeks my students have been learning about the concept of linguistic value (from Ferdinand de Saussure). The differences in value between terms in different languages can have very humorous effects, as I have found on numerous occasions.

I’m currently in the Netherlands on a family visit. Last night we had dinner with my husband’s old school friends, and one of them was telling me (in English) about some dental treatment he had had recently, including some ‘carrot treatment’.

Carrot treatment?

Image from here.

The English word ‘carrot’ is translated by the Dutch word ‘wortel'. But ‘wortel' also means ‘root’ more generally. I found that out a while ago when I was reading a news report or something that mentioned trees being ‘ontworteld’ in a storm. Recognising ‘wortel’ from ‘carrot’ (the first of its meanings that I learnt), I thought ‘upcarroted’? But my husband explained that ‘wortel’ means both ‘root’ generally and ‘carrot’ specifically. The trees were actually ‘uprooted’, then.

So it turned out my husband’s friend had had root canal therapy. In Dutch, as in English, the word for ‘root’ also refers to the roots of teeth, not just plants. It is also used in mathematics (square root, etc) and to refer to the background of something ('my roots are in Scotland'), as in English .

I drew a diagram representing the difference in ‘value’ between the terms in the two languages.

The large rectangle represents semantic space. In Dutch, ‘wortel’ takes up the same semantic space that in English is occupied by two terms, ‘root’ and ‘carrot’. Thus the term ‘wortel’ doesn’t have the same value in Dutch as either ‘root’ or ‘carrot’ in English, although we can say they occupy some of the same semantic space.

Postcard from Uganda: language

Greetings from Kampala, Uganda! We arrived about 10 days ago to work as visiting scholars at Makerere University, and there have been many interesting things to observe in this initial time, including some language points.

I have noticed the following systematic uses in Ugandan English that are different from Australian English, which may well be a feature of other Englishes elsewhere:

• 'pick' - instead of 'pick up', e.g. 'I called the number you gave, but no one picked, so can you call me back on Monday?' and 'I'll come and pick you around 2.30pm'.
• 'thank you too' - in response to a 'thank you', as an adjacency pair, e.g. in the supermarket when I thank the checkout person they often say this, as opposed to just 'thank you'.
• 'born-agains' - used to differentiate Christians who have been spiritually born again from 'nominal' Christians. For example, our apartment attendant asked 'are you people born-agains?' and another friend introduced us to someone else saying 'these people are born again, too'. In Australia asking 'are you people Christians' would probably get the answer she was looking for because people are less likely to identify as Christians unless they are actually believers. But a larger proportion of Ugandans would identify as Christians (statistically about 84%!), at least nominally, so the word 'Christian' doesn't have quite the same value here. It's almost the default. Hence 'born-again' is a useful alternative.
• 'done' - meaning finished, e.g. waiters/waitresses might ask 'are you done', rather than 'have you finished?' This usage also occurs in American English I think. But there is another usage, when a waiter/waitress might say 'the chicken is done', meaning there is no more. I think this meaning is less common in American English, as the expression would normally mean 'it is cooked and ready'.
• 'You are welcome' - as an elaborated form of the simple 'welcome', which is more common in Australian English. I have heard this from a wide range of people: new colleagues at the university, students, supermarket attendants (especially the friendly guys at the meat counter at the nearby supermarket), waiters/waitresses,  and people at the church we visited. I find it rather endearing and somehow more sincere than just 'welcome'.
• 'dear' - seems to be used as a generic term to address someone who might be a peer (rather than specifically as a term of endearment), e.g. the young woman who sat next to me in church on Sunday wrote me a note on her bulletin that said 'My dear, I would liked to speak to you after the service', and a colleague replied to a line in an email I sent with 'thank you dear'.
• 'what': in a number of teaching contexts (church sermon, Bible study group, introductory linguistics lecture), I have heard the teachers/leaders using a construction in which they use 'what' in a sentence to prompt the hearers to supply the word they are about to say (at least internally). An example (loosely based on a lecture I attended this morning) would be something like 'Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. We say that words have one or more morphemes, which are the smallest meaningful units of words. For example the word 'students' has two meaningful units: 'student' and 's'. So we say it has two - what? - morphemes.' The construction has a particular prosodic and intonational pattern - there is a slight pause before the 'what' and and a slight rising intonation on 'what' followed by falling intonation on the rest of the clause (which is usually just one key word or phrase that the teacher wants to emphasise).
• etc: On a number of occasions I've heard teachers (and some others not in a teaching role) use 'etc' to indicate that they are providing an incomplete list. But instead of saying 'etcetera', they say 'e. t. c', i.e. spelling out the abbreviation.

Hopefully I will discover more as we go along!

Students are people, not numbers

Last week the Macquarie University Vice Chancellor’s blog published a post by Arts Faculty Executive Dean Prof John Simons about the current debate about universities being allowed to widen participation through an abolishment of government caps on student numbers.

There are so many variables and issues involved that it is really hard to work out what’s a reasonable position. But there were a few things that he said in his post that I want to respond to as a teacher of first-year students who wants see students properly cared for.

"What this debate is about, of course, is widening access. It’s about giving people from diverse backgrounds the opportunity to benefit from higher education. It’s about being fair. It’s about making sure we use all the talent available not just some of it. This appears to be scary."
The only scary thing here is the suspicion that it’s not actually about universities wanting to give more people the opportunity to receive a higher education. If universities were serious about wanting more people to benefit from higher education, rather than just be entered into the system, I would expect to be able to see them putting infrastructure in place in anticipation of increased student numbers in order to be able to care for them properly. This would include in particular employing adequate numbers of full-time/permanent teaching staff so that class sizes could be kept at reasonable levels (15, rather than 25 or more!) and so that there could be sufficient staff consultation hours to go around to support students who need extra help (particularly in first year).

"Aptitude for success in higher education is not necessarily the same as aptitude for success at school."
I completely agree with this, having seen a number of my school friends who had not been brilliant at school absolutely flourishing when they got to university. They had increased motivation from being able to choose their own study paths and be accountable to themselves for what they did or didn’t do. However, lowering entrance scores is not necessarily the best way to give increase participation from lower socio-economic backgrounds. There are many other underlying variables that are involved, such as the quality of high schools in such areas, students’  and parents' attitudes to and support for education, and the simple fact of the need to survive financially through university.

Many students who come into university on a lower entrance score are simply not ready for university. It can be a very difficult transition culturally (although recent efforts to implement ’transition programs’ at various universities have helped alleviate this somewhat), let alone intellectually. The problem of maturity can certainly also be true of students who gain entry with higher scores, but would perhaps not mean the difference between passing and failing - just passing instead of getting a credit or higher.

It may be too much to expect students who have not so far achieved well academically to be able to keep up with a full-time student load AND maintain a part-time job (or multiple) AND carry out other life responsibilities, and be able to pass. And so I wonder if granting entry to students who have not so far shown the aptitude at school is giving them a false notion that they will be able to pass their university subjects and gain a degree. So if such students continue to be enrolled, there need to be greater support mechanisms - including financial support - to allow them to spend the required time and intellectual effort to keep on top of the new ideas they are learning and be able to flourish at uni so that they gain the social and intellectual capital to effect positive social change. Otherwise we will just see increased enrolments followed by large numbers of withdrawals, and I don’t think that’s the desired outcome.

Real Dialogue

This evening there’s a public debate on the question of ‘Can God become a man?’ between a Christian professor, Dr James White, and a Muslim scholar, Abdullah Kunde. I was asked to moderate the debate, and this is a new experience for me – a new kind of register to negotiate.

I did some research about the speakers and their past debates to find out how similar events have been run (see e.g. this debate two years ago with the same speakers) and in one of the videos I saw online, the MC/moderator noted that, while public debates used to be a permanent and regular feature of university life, these days they only occur every so often. Academics themselves tend to have more opportunities to engage in debate and dialogue through their disciplinary conferences (although this is becoming increasingly more difficult because of lack of funding and time to attend them), but students in most disciplines would probably miss out. In the opinion of that MC, the lack of real public dialogue and debate about the big ideas meant that, instead of being taught how to think, students these days are being taught what to think. I think I can actually see this attitude in many of my students, who are often not interested in engaging with ideas themselves and coming to their own view, but want to be given the 'right' answer. When asked for their opinion in class they are often reluctant to say anything in case it's not 'right' (this is also partly a result of cultural differences in pedagogical values and practices).

Why would more public debating contribute to a general pedagogy of how to think rather than what to think? I suppose it's because participating in a debate involves fairly high-level skills of reasoning and rhetoric, and even watching a debate usually means that you are exposed to two opposing ideological positions on the issue so it’s up to the individual listener to sort through the ideas, weigh up the validity of the arguments, and make up his or her own mind.

It reminds me of an article I came across a little while ago about a father who, in the interests of family harmony, taught his children how to argue from a very young age. I don’t like argument for argument’s sake, but inevitably life involves negotiation – of ideas, positions, propositions, decisions – so being able to argue well and constructively must surely be a good thing.

How does this sound?

Tomorrow I’m giving a guest lecture as part of a subject I’m teaching in a Masters of Interpreting and Translation program. Normally I just teach tutorials but this week I get to do part of a lecture. I’ll be teaching a bit of phonetics and phonology in the hope that it will give the students a tool for improving their pronunciation in their B language. For most of the students, English is their B language, but there is a small handful of native English speakers whose B language is Spanish or Japanese. The idea of the subject as a whole is for students to learn how to keep developing their proficiency in both working languages, beyond the period they spend studying.

 (image from http://introling.ynada.com/category/phonetics-phonology)

I like the following quote from Daniel Jones, who was a British Phonetician who became Professor of phonetics at the Sorbonne University in Paris. He is thought to be the person upon whom George Bernard Shaw based the character of Professor Henry Higgins in his play ‘Pygmalion’ (see also My Fair Lady). Obviously we want our students to master grammar and vocabulary as well, as most of them are looking to be professional translators or interpreters, but since pronunciation can be such a barrier, not just to understanding but to interpersonal relations, I think equipping them with some phonetic training is important too.

“I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on human relations – that when people of different nations pronounce each other’s languages really well (even if grammar and vocabulary are not perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together, it puts people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them immediately springs up.”

Daniel Jones (1881-1967, phonetician)

I quite like teaching phonetics. It’s not my main area of expertise in that it wasn’t the field of my doctoral research, but I remember how much I enjoyed as a student learning how to classify sounds and produce strange sounds and gaining a more technical knowledge of the sounds of speech and how they are used (or not used) in different languages. I have a reasonably good ear for differentiating sounds so I enjoyed being able to put that to use.

One reason I like teaching phonetics is that it requires you to get rid of your inhibitions and be willing to be laughed at. My past phonetics lecturers have involved me singing and making all kinds of strange sounds in order to illustrate a point, e.g. to illustrate the point that vowels are sonorant (i.e. singable), I demonstrate that you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ (apart from the rhythm) on the consonant [k]. I also love it when the students can’t help themselves and start trying out the sounds as you explain them. You get some very interesting facial expressions and sounds coming from the lecture theatre – somehow the students seem to forget that they are in a lecture and don’t even realise they are making the sounds!

There are also lots of interesting videos about how the human vocal tract works, which liven up the lecture quite well. If you’re interested (and not too squeamish), here’s a video of a laryngeoscopy showing the vocal chords (larynx) of a female singer while she makes sounds with varying loudness and pitch. A slightly less graphic one is this x-ray video (no sound) showing how the shape of the vocal tract changes for producing different vowel sounds.

Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- Changes (again)

The new semester has begun, and the shape of my week has changed yet again. Instead of being spread across 4 courses at 3 different campuses in two different cities, I'm very thankful to be based at just one campus this time. Unfortunately it's not very close to home, so I'm going to have to start making the most of train and bus travel time for reading and thinking.

My teaching this time is entirely in a postgraduate translation studies program. I'm teaching two subjects I haven't taught before (although one is very similar to one of the ones I taught last semester) but many of the students are the same as last semester so I'm glad to be able to continue with them, get to know them a bit better, and keep trying to equip them with linguistic skills to be good translators/interpreters.

As well as teaching, I have also started a ministry apprenticeship with the Simeon Network but based at the campus I'm teaching at. Teaching part time (and deliberately less than last semester!) gives me the opportunity to spend the rest of my week doing other things, and I was glad to be offered the chance to get some training in ministry. At first, it will mainly involve participating in training sessions in theology and ministry skills like one-to-one bible reading, leading small groups, etc. I'll also help with planning and organizing Simeon Network events and eventually help run training sessions for others. My apprenticeship includes time for thinking about the nexus between my discipline and my faith, so I hope to be able to update my blog more frequently with the fruits of those thinking times.

An itinerant linguist

It's now week 5 of teaching and I have more or less got used to the routine of being at a different university teaching a different subject virtually every day. Sometimes I actually find myself teaching very similar lessons but for different subjects - not because I'm recycling the same tutorial for 11 different classes, but because it happens to be relevant!

Image © Images.com/Corbis

Thankfully, I am enjoying this period of being an itinerant teacher. In that sense, it's a bit like what Jesus was doing when he was bodily on earth - travelling around primarily to teach. Of course I can't claim divine powers of healing or exorcism (that would look interesting in my tutorials...), and Jesus' teaching priority was about the kingdom of God rather than grammar, academic writing, or semiotics (although he did talk about signs a lot...). But it reminds me that moving from place to place for work is ok - if it was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me! At least I have the same place to go home to each night.

There is a lot of temptation for me to be discontent in this role. Tenure is, of course, the holy grail of academia, and it would be nice to be 'secure' in a job that does not rely on students numbers and universities being in teaching session. Note I said 'nice', not 'essential'.

In my home group last week we worked through 1 Corinthians 4:1-13 together, and were reminded of the stark and often uncomfortable contrast between Jesus' leadership (and Paul's, following him) and the kind of leadership the world values. The world looks up to wealth, physical strength and attractiveness (or at least good grooming), nobility, worldly wisdom, reputation, stability, and distance from the 'dirty work' of manual labour. Jesus and his apostles were weak, held in disrepute, seemingly foolish, poorly dressed, homeless, and involved in manual labour.

I can see this period of unstable and almost mercenary work as an opportunity for humility and sacrificial service. It's not 'beneath me' to work as a casual tutor, especially if Jesus didn't consider it 'beneath him' to wash his disciples' feet. I can think of the exposure it gives me to students from a range of backgrounds whom I can love and encourage and point to Jesus, my Saviour and King, when the opportunities arise. And I can see it as an opportunity to be light and salt, encouraging colleagues who are walking the same uncertain path as casuals but who don't have a great heavenly King as their hope and strength.

Work is a verb (and a noun)

Teaching started in earnest at the three universities where I am teaching this semester. When my temporary full time contract finished last year I didn’t really know what work I would have this year, and I just hoped I could pick up enough tutoring to pay the bills. But in fact I have an abundance of classes to teach and in the end I had to turn some down. It’s just as Jesus said when he was speaking to the crowds and disciples on the mountain one day (Matthew 6:25-34; ESV):

²⁵ "Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? ²⁸And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' ³²For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. ³³But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

³⁴ "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

And he was right about each day having enough trouble for itself! First year students and new casual tutors will know how difficult it can be to negotiate admin, IT access and online learning systems at your new institution, and in my case I'm trying to negotiate them at 3 unis all with different systems! But I think I've got it all sorted now.

Yesterday I witnessed one of the greatest student epiphanies I've ever seen in one of my classes. This being the first lesson in a first year grammar course, I was trying to lay the foundations by introducing nouns, verbs and the like. I asked them to give me some examples from the text we were looking at, and then asked them to tell me how they were able to identify that is was a verb just from looking at the text. Was it a wild guess, or a feeling about the word, purely intuition, or some other way?

One student, who had earlier indicated that she was at a loss to understand the subject so far, said 'I think it was just that the rest of the sentence seemed to be about that word and so I thought it might be the verb'. Wow! I got really excited at that point and gave lots of encouragement.

And then I tried to build on her observation by make a transition to a more technical version of it, i.e. that each clause needs a verb and the verb is like a nucleus that all the other elements in the clause revolve around. But the other students wanted her to repeat her version because that was a bit more accessible! So I think I misjudged their readiness for technicality at that point.

Anyway, the thing that thrilled me was that I had an opportunity to show this student, who had said she was anxious about grammar and ‘couldn’t do it’, that actually she was able to ‘do it’. She seems to have even been able to ‘feel it’, and not only that but to articulate how she came to her conclusion. Exactly the kind of outcome I’m hoping for in my grammar classes!