I find it very interesting that no matter where you go, there seems to be a standard for what you ought to do and what you ought not to do. I was discussing cleanliness in one of my classes last week, and it seems that it would be hard to find a people group on earth that says, "Yeah, we're filthy/disgusting/dirty, and we're fine with that." Most will have a standard or norm they go by. You'll find people peppered along a spectrum, some being the proverbial neat freaks, and others, total slobs, but most people will be somewhere in the relative middle of the particular group they grew up in. However, take that same middle and put them on another culture's spectrum and they will be unaware of the "inappropriateness" of their behavior. Back home, what they're doing might be completely fine, but in another environment, suddenly it's considered totally out there. 

I'm reminded of Thomas Balmès' documentary Babies. The film follows four babies, from four different parts of the world: two from urban environments and two from rural environments, but all four grow up to be healthy children despite different standards of living (the scene with the rooster walking around one of the babies' sleeping areas seriously freaked me out when I saw it in the trailer). I would recommend seeing it if you haven't.

Anyway, I shared some of my experiences living in South Korea that struck me when I first arrived. I remember walking into my first Korean bathroom and seeing a drain in the floor.

"Honey, look at this."

"What is it?"

"It's a... it looks like a drain?"

"Why is that there?"

"I don't know."

"Hmmm..."

We didn't know it right then (how could we have?), but keeping our bathroom floor dry was to become an intense daily battle. In the first month, we put on our thinking caps and did everything we could to reduce moisture--I think my wife and I even found some flexible rubber tubing that we stuck onto the edge of the tub because although our apartment happened to have a shower curtain (thank you, former waegukin resident!), the tub was not designed in such a way as to prevent water from running off the back of the shower wall and onto the floor. Looking back, I have no idea how my wife found this, but when your wife finds adhesive rubber tubing that might fix your ridiculous water problem, you don't ask questions! I can remember getting extremely frustrated every time I thought I had thwarted another invasion of the pernicious water droplets, only to step into a small pool with my socks later on.

As we visited other Koreans' apartments and subsequently used their bathrooms, I noticed they were extremely wet, but down on the floor at the entrance, there was a pair of bathroom slippers. I remember there were also these small raised platforms in front of the sink and toilet that provided some safety during high tides (right after a shower). I thought to myself, "Hmmm... they don't really seem bothered by all this excess moisture."

Looking back at this now, I realize Koreans probably don't consider this "excess moisture" to be excess moisture. They probably consider it the way a bathroom is, and now that I live in a two-bedroom apartment and clean two bathrooms each week (except when my wife grants me a reprieve), I think, "Man, this would be so much easier if I could just grab the shower head and just blast it all around here and wash everything down the drain!" (actually, I'll have to credit my wife with this revelation, since while talking to her about my discussion in class, she pointed out the practicality of hosing down the bathroom).

Then the Saudis chimed in and said how weird it was that Americans don't have drains in every room of a house.

Student: "I never see Americans really mop their floors."
Me: "What do you mean? In Saudi Arabia, you have a drain in every room?"
Student: "Yes. Most homes have them in every room."
Me: "Really?"
Student: "So that is why I say, I never see Americans really mop their floors."
Me: "Well, in America, we do mop our floors. We use some cleaning products, and then we usually let it dry."
Student: "Yeah, but to me, this is not enough."

They explained that having a drain in every floor makes it possible to really mop the daylights out of the floors and rinse it all down with fresh clean water. 

I started thinking, "Hmm, now that I think about it, it is kind of gross that in America, we just let the mop water sit there until it evaporates." This to me is the beauty of cross-cultural interaction--by interacting with people from other parts of the world, you see things in a new way, and you re-evaluate what you thought your whole life to be the best way to do something. I think living abroad really helps you think outside the box and see solutions where you might not have noticed them.

(I also think it's funny that a conversation about something as mundane as floor drains can get so heated. Every semester, I learn one more thing that makes America different from my students' home countries, and every time I think I've taken an inventory of everything that might surprise them, I find out something new!)

Is there anything you've noticed in your travels that really struck you? Have you implemented any of them back in your home country?

-Bill

My students had to identify the main verbs in a paragraph and mistakenly marked a few infinitives like the following:

Chop the carrots into small pieces to make them cook faster.

So I explained that the infinitive bolded above is working more like an adverb. Compare the above sentence to the following:

Chop the carrots in small pieces quickly/efficiently/whimsically.

Infinitive verb phrases like these provide a reason for the main verb (chop), and thus, it is not the main verb of the sentence. 

Person A: "Why did you chop the carrots into small pieces?"
Person B: "To make them cook faster."

I then wrote the following sentence on the board as an example:

She ate the soup to make him happy. 

This example looks a bit contrived, but it really happened. I made some soup last weekend that turned out pretty bad, so I couldn't help but tell my class this story about my wife's polite endurance and my two-year-old son's brutal honesty: 

Anyway, so then I went on to explain the grammar: 

Me: "See, this part, 'to make him happy,' is the reason. You could ask, 'Why did she eat the soup?' and the answer would be, 'to make him happy.'"

Student: "Eat it?"

Other Student: "No, drink it."

Student: "Drink the soup!"

Me: "I'm sorry, what?"

Other student: "It should be drink!"

Me: "Oh, okay, I see. Yes, in many languages you drink soup. I know that in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Arabic, you drink soup,  but in English, you eat it."

Students: "Whaaaat?! Why?!"

Luckily, I found out from a German-speaking colleague that Germans eat their soup as well, so I knew there was some safety in numbers and I was able to cite that as another example:

Me: "I don't know, but in English and in German, most of our soups have pieces in it that you have to chew. Anyway, you can say 'drink soup,' and people will get what you mean, but it will just sound weird."

Student: "I think you should change your way." (if more languages say drink, then English should do that, too).

I'm not so familiar with Middle-Eastern soups, but I know the soups I encountered in Korea and Japan were mostly liquid, and they were quite drinkable. Most American soups, on the other hand, are not. Of course this is all anecdotal and based on my own limited culinary knowledge, but I think the soups of European descent (if there were such a thing--we'll need genetic testing to be sure) seem to be chunkier in nature. Even drinkable soups like tomato soup are often accompanied with a grilled cheese sandwich, an instantiation of the Soup and Sandwich Phenomenon (on a side note, while I was conducting grilled cheese research, I discovered "the cheese dream." Thank you, Wikipedia for documenting this gem of an Americanism). 

I don't know why, but these kinds of interactions intrigue me every time. The shock and surprise in my students' voices when they hear something strange about English--their reaction, it's always new, always sudden, that I feel like I get to learn it all again along with them. It never gets old.

How about you? Are there any things you teach that always seem to surprise your students? Do you get a kick out of seeing them discovering the weirdness of English?

-Bill

I'm teaching a group of intermediate student writers as opposed to the advanced class I usually cover, and truth be told, I'm a little nervous. I'm okay with the focus on sentences and paragraphs as opposed to essays and longer works, but I know I won't be able to focus so much on critical thinking skills like questioning one's own assumptions and claims. Those, to me, are some of the most rewarding things to teach: I'm not just teaching them how to be better writers, but also better thinkers! I love seeing the "ah-ha!" moment in their eyes as they realize the complexity of an issue.

As I thought about this, I started getting reminiscent about a course I created for graduate students who needed familiarity with graduate school writing genres, so I did a needs analysis and found an incredibly useful textbook for them: John Swales and Christine Feak's Academic Writing for Graduate Students. The book has chapters on writing summaries, data commentaries, critiques, problem-process-solution texts, and general-specific texts, as well as an introduction to writing IMRAD articles. Most of all though, I appreciate the first unit, which is "an approach to academic writing" (after we got through the introduction, I would revisit the unit's title and point out how even the title displays the cautious tone of academic writing since it is not "Academic Writing" but "An Approach to Academic Writing" (emphasis added)).

There is an invaluable activity in the first unit called "Gene's Conclusion" (which is renamed "Sam's Conclusion" in the third edition for some reason). The activity describes a student who writes up an effective conclusion, but then realizes that there are limitations and weaknesses in his data set that he has not described anywhere else in his paper. Should he acknowledge these in the conclusion or should he sweep them under the rug? I love this activity because in the four semesters I taught this class, it never failed to generate a lot of discussion. After a short time, students usually broke into three schools of thought:

These students appreciate this point and make a mental note to write cautiously and quickly see the value in hedging their statements.

These students cannot accept failure. And they're also big fans of time travel:

"If you find problems, you must go back and fix it."
"But you don't have any money. You used up all your funding to get the data you have."
"Um... well, you need to get more money."
"You can't do that. The publishing deadline is coming up soon. You're under the gun."
"..."

The silence becomes too uncomfortable and usually leads students to defect to...

For these students, transparency of this kind is a tough sell:

"Don't do it. You should never talk about your weaknesses or problems."
"Never?"
"Yes. It will be bad. It's better not to mention it."
"But don't you think it will look more thoughtful and meticulous to note the limitations of your data?"
"No. It's better not to mention it. Maybe no one will notice."
"But suppose someone does notice, what then?"
"So I should point out my own mistakes? Then what will I look like? People will see me and think, 'He is stupid!'"
"No, no, they won't think you're stupid. It will be the opposite effect, actually."
"What? How?"

Then I tell them a story about a AAAL conference I attended back in 2011 in Chicago. There was a man who presented an experimental treatment that his data seemed to support as effective. He finished his presentation and began fielding questions.

"Could you go back to the slide with the results on it?" an astute woman in the back asked. He flipped back in the PowerPoint to a slide that looked like this:

Can you see the problem?

TL;DR: This post started as a Labor Day post, but then I decided to make it about a very funny experience with my former Turkish students.

For Labor Day weekend, I thought I'd look up some idioms and expressions about work and whatnot. The first expression that comes to mind when I hear the word labor is the expression slave labor. I remember when I was working as a graduate assistant on a yearly stipend, I overheard someone say the GAs were paid "slave labor." My stipend was quite low, but I certainly wasn't working for free! Anyway, as I thought about this expression, my gut told me it was more popular in American English, but I can't make a claim based solely on my gut, can I?

This might sound weird, but I love to double-check my intuition using a corpus. Sure, I'm a native speaker and my intuition can tell me a lot of things, but it's always good to make sure. So what do you do when you have questions about the Americanness of an expression versus the Britishness or the Canadianness, for that matter? Luckily, Mark Davies at BYU has developed and released a new corpus called the GloWbE (Corpus of Global Web-Based English). The coolest thing about it is that you can search for an expression or word and see its popularity based on national websites, so I was able to type in slave labor and see what countries use that expression the most online:

It looks like we have a winner (well, it's at least prima facie evidence that slave labor is more popular in American English).

Sometimes I do these kinds of tests in class (okay, actually, I might do them more than sometimes). I had a group of really high-performing Turks one year that would challenge me on many grammar points--not all Turks are as feisty, but this group certainly gave me a run for my money (interestingly, a run for [possessive pronoun] money is 58% more likely on British websites than American ones). Anyway, each time they would contend that a particular form did exist in English, and I told them it did not, they would say, "Check the corpus!" I would type the words into the search box, request a drum roll, and hit enter. Most of the time I won (as in the case of I forgot VERB-ING, as in, I forgot locking my car, which they swore up and down was correct), but on some occasions I lost (as in the infamous case of the breakfast).

One day a student said, "He called while I was eating the breakfast."
"No, we actually never say 'the breakfast.'"
"What do you say then?"
"We would just say breakfast. I have never heard someone say 'the breakfast.'"
Soon the room erupted in Turkish murmuring.
"Can you check the corpus?"
"Sure, but I'm telling you, we don't ever say this."

Then there it was. Over 1000 instances. I looked at many of the results and saw that breakfast was actually acting as an adjective in them (we sat at the breakfast table), but still there were instances where the breakfast was a grammatical construction. I tried to backpedal and acknowledge that in some cases one could say the breakfast when referring to a specific breakfast on a special occasion, but that in most cases, when referring to the run of the mill meal we eat every morning, the breakfast is inappropriate. Nevertheless, this did not stop "Remember the breakfast!" from becoming the rallying cry among those Turks whenever the grammaticality of a statement was called into question.

I learned that a teacher must be very careful to avoid generalizations and that a corpus is a double-edged sword.

Have a good Labor Day, and good luck out there!

-Bill