I just finished grading ten weeks worth of reading journal entries on a discussion board in Blackboard. To encourage extensive reading, the only requirements for the assignment were to read something they enjoyed or were interested in (NOT a TOEFL study guide!), write a short summary, and then post a question that is associated with the reading. For example, if they found an unfamiliar structure, they could post the example and ask questions. The questions, when they were sincere, were very illuminating for me as an instructor because I could see where my students' interlanguage was. For instance, a student may ask me something like this:

This student obviously doesn't know that "name" can also be a verb, or that this is fairly common in English for verbs to become nouns.

Anyway, as I was finishing commenting on the last entry, I ended with a question I ended many journal entries with: "Does that make sense?" Only one time in the whole semester did a single student respond with "yes, thank you" or some acknowledgement of receipt. It's possible they are busy (it's summer), and since I don't require it, students don't pipe in with more questions or followup. Or maybe my responses are just so magnificently clear that students have no further questions :). Whatever the cause may be, I have found it nearly impossible to create a kind of vibrant mini-community in a class where everyone is reading each other's posts and commenting or making followup questions or rating them. I'm sure I could force it and require them to participate like this, but I really wish it would just happen.

Back when I was teaching English 101, I was taking a course with former faculty member Dr. Maryann Crawford, and in a class discussion about what makes a discourse community, I remember her making a claim that it would be very difficult to make a class a discourse community since a class doesn't all the characteristics of one.

That week, I made an assignment to test this claim (I like a challenge). I had two freshmen English classes, and I had them use a class wiki to create a class paper by writing the different parts in groups during class. I then graded the class paper promptly with feedback about what it would need to be passing. I also communicated how each class was doing to the other class (One class had a D- and the other had an E). My vision was that each class would be inspired with some friendly competition and try to "one up" the other class, and it would all lead to this awesome communal knowledge of what it takes to make a good rhetorical analysis. After two days, a couple changes were made by one or two students, and both classes bumped their grade up to a D. I was excited. My plan was working!

Then it just sort of fizzled out and no one did anything more. Obviously, I was not pleased with this. 

I tried to encourage more participation, but a couple honest students commented that if it wasn't required, they just wouldn't do it; they were busy with their other coursework and just didn't have the time.

At the time, I remember reading an article about Old Spice's attempts to manufacture viral videos with its Old Spice Guy commercials. The initial one has been viewed, at the time of this blog entry, almost fifty million times. Interestingly, people at the time claimed that the amazing success of the ad campaign did not lead to increased sales. I remember reading those articles and thinking, "I'm just like Old Spice. I can't just manufacture a natural phenomenon and bend it to another purpose."

But then just now as I was looking for an article to link to stating that the campaign was a bust, I read that Old Spice critics even in Time Magazine had to eat their words since body wash sales actually increased 7%.

Maybe it can be done, but I need to require more things or give a few more incentives to get it rolling like extra credit or something like that.

Then again, maybe I just need to have Isaiah Mustafa sub for me.

-Bill

In my education classes, I remember every professor mentioning the importance of being a "lifelong learner." As a young, aspiring teacher, I thought this sounded kind of annoying and cheesy. "What? I'm supposed to teach--everyone else is going to learn from me!" Unfortunately, though, I realized I don't know everything (you can imagine this was quite a traumatic revelation for me).

The more I teach, the more I run into specific questions for which I don't quite know the answer. I also teach alongside some pretty veteran teachers who comment now and again about students asking difficult questions, which further cements the fact that I'll need to be a lifelong learner, too (I think "lifelong researcher" sounds more impressive).

The most important thing is not to know everything, but in most cases, to know where to look when you don't.

This applies to students, especially. I like to tell them, "I am like a set of training wheels [illustrated on the screen by the ever-handy Google Image Search]. Eventually you're going to go out into the big wide world and you'll be writing papers and doing presentations. You might want to use a word or structure, but you won't know how to use it, and I won't be there to help and guide you."

This is part of why I love using corpora in language teaching. It helps students be autonomous learners, and it gives me answers, and if you're like me, you miss that satisfying search for information you so often engaged in during college and graduate school (maybe you just found this laborious and annoying, so to each his own). The BYU Corpora have a search syntax page, and if you familiarize yourself with it enough, you can find some pretty specific information.  For example, you might want to see all derivations of a word (or in corpus linguistics, the lemma). You do this by enclosing a word in brackets to look for all forms of the word. Searching for:

[document]

will generate the following list:

Okay, so over a sixth of the forms are verbs (or participial adjectives). This makes me wonder, "How many of the instances of document and documents are actually verbs?" We can actually narrow this more by adding .[part of speech tag] to look for only those forms.

[document].[nn*] will look for all noun forms:

[document].[v*] will look for all verb forms:

If you run these searches yourself, you can click on each word to see more of the context. Most of my students are surprised when they find out a word they thought all along was a noun can actually be used as a verb, too. Well, that's all for now.

Have a good one, and good luck out there.

-Bill

What other words come to mind when you hear the word father?

I was listening to a guy on the radio the other day talking about fatherhood. The man told a story about taking his kids to the store without his wife and how an older woman saw him and said: "Oh, it's so sweet that you give your wife a break and babysit the kids for her." He said how it was a big pet peeve of his that people call him a babysitter, and he said something like, "I'm not babysitting my kids, I'm fathering my kids." 

I totally agree with this idea, but using the word father like that just doesn't feel right. If you do a COCA corpus search for mother as a verb, you will find many uses that mean to care for or to look after:

The word father, on the other hand, paints a very different picture:

Generally, when father is a verb, it means to impregnate, but it doesn't seem to carry an idea of raising or parenting. Weird, huh?

We can raise, parent, rear, look after, or care for our children, but none of these are specific to fathers.  Does this tell us something about Western culture? Maybe it will get better if we look at collocations. 

What is the #1 adjective to describe the word father? 

Biological. 

(On a side note, the #1 adjective to describe mother is the word single.)

Hmmm... well, this is going downhill fast. It has to get better! What about the top ten words to collocate with father?

Well, at least loving made the list!

Happy Father's Day!

-Bill


NOTES
[1] Caroline Kennedy discussing an Elizabeth Alexander poem on NPR titled "Ode," which is about motherhood. I got this from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. If you use their search syntax, you can find words as a specific part of speech by typing 

word.[part of speech code]

So for example:

• mother.[n] will search for all uses of mother as a noun
• mother.[j] will search for all uses of mother  as an adjective, and 
• mother.[v] to find all occurrences of mother as a verb (which is what I did for this entry).
  

[2] From NPR interview with Dennis Chaptman (2001)