Last semester I wrote a total of 5 essays for my masters program. Today I got the first three of them back. The earliest was submitted September 10! Good turn around time there, this is the longest return time I have had yet. Anyhow I am happy to say I got good grades on the essays especially the essay comparing qualitative and quantitative methods for which I recieved a HD (High Distinction). I am now waiting for the final two essays in order to figure out my final grade for both courses.

I have additionally decided to not do the dissertation option. There were a number of reasons both personal and beaurocratic that brought me to this decision. I will now be taking two classes this next semester and completing my degree in June. I must say that I am definately looking forward to the end - I haven’t yet decided exactly which classes I will be taking but I will of course write about it here.

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Well I have finished essay two of three for Research Methods, two weeks early. Now I really need to catch up on my pragmatics reading and start focusing on the research proposal fcr the third essay. Fortuneatly there is a five day weekend right now and I have ample time to get reading done. I’ll be heading off to Starbucks yet again to read and drink coffee.

On a pragmatics note I was watching CNN this morning and they had a story about MIT"s Open Course Ware which I had written about earlier but had forgotten. Anyhow I spent some time looking around and found several bibliographys and links to pdf documents. The pdf’s are often not active links but if you paste them into the address bar they work. Hope someone finds this useful.

This semester it looks like pragmatics is a popular subject among the linguistics graduate students who are also EFL/ESL instructors. I’m taking pragmatics and currently puzzling over what to write about for the second essay, Dana talks about Framing and Semantics and Pragmatics while Jason spends time discussing Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis.  Looks to be an interesting semester for all of us.

Today, I’ve been doing a lot of reading for my pragmatics course and have found one journal article to be particularly useful. Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure by Jenny Thomas in Applied Linguistics 4, 2 (1983). This article has helped me to see the relevence of pragmatics to ESL/EFL instruction.  I am in particular interested in one of the references within the article.

However the article I want is not available at my schools library nor can I find it available in the databases available to me via Macquarie due to it’s age. So if someone who has access to this article would like to help out a graduate student could you scan and email it to me. I am looking for:

Harder, p. 1975 ‘Discourse as self-expression-- on the reduced personality of the second language learner’. Applied Linguistics I/3:262-70.

I can get it via post from the library, but this usually takes two weeks or longer and by the time I get it, it would be too late.  If you leave a comment I will provide you with my email address - I don’t want spam bots to find my address so will not display it publically.

Thank you for your help

I’m re-reading the course notes for pragmatics and again I came to this section with a joke that I do not get. I understand the point being made (at least I think I do) but the joke doesn’t make any sense. If someone would care to explain this to me, I would appreciate it.

Successful communication, for Green¹, depends on the reflexivity of belief and intention (what Labov refers to as AB knowledge - ie A knows what B knows and vice-versa). Note, however, that it is not just knowledge, it’s crucially also belief. It’s also, incidentally, belief about belief: (as in the joke: if you believe what A believes and A believes what B believes , then is George Bush George Washington in disguise?)

¹Green, G. 1989. Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum.

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The first assignment for pragmatics is short and only worth 30%, but that does not mean it will be easy.

Approximately 1500-2000 words, on the following topic: ‘Consider an issue/problem relating to communication in your workplace or in everyday life. How do you think this issue/problem might be addressed, illuminated, or dealt with, by one (or more) of the pragmatics concepts which have been considered so far in the course?’ This paper is intended to encourage you to take a very initial first look at what you can see pragmatics as possibly having to offer, as applicable to communication-related issues or problems or situations with which you are personally familiar or concerned. For this reason, the paper is deliberately set to be submitted quite early in the course. This paper counts for about 30% of the final mark.

At this point I am not sure exactly what I will write about, but I am ready to write as I have finished reading the material that this essay is based on. I will probably spend some time re-reading it as well as looking through some supplemental material. I am not exactly the easiest person to communicate with so my life is rife with examples to choose from - which one is best that is the important question.

Essay due September 10 but must be sent in via post rather than e-mail so real due date is September 3. Time to get cracking. Hopefully I can get it finished by the end of the weekend, though I, Robot will interfere with that plan tomorrow.

During my studies so far in this masters program I have been able to see relevance and usefulness of all of my courses to teaching. But while reading about pragmatics I fail to see any relevance to the classroom. Admittedly I haven’t read much on the subject, but what I have read does not seem applicable to teaching. The cooperative principle, while interesting and most likely useful when analyizing conversations is, at least to me, not readily transferable to a teaching context.

The other classes I took on SLA, Testing, Context Use & Analysis of English, TESOL in context, and Innovation in the classroom (Links here) all had relevance to teaching though some of it I did not consider relevant to my teaching context. Perhaps one of the reasons this class is an elective is the lack of relevance to teaching. Hopefully as I continue to read it will become clearer and I can see the usefulness in a classroom situation.

This is a followup to yesterdays entry about Conversational Maxims & Cooperative Principles (CP). Today I read the third article by Green and found that it helped the Grice article gel in my mind. The writing style was a lot easier to read and the article is essentially a review of Grices theory so reading about the same topic twice obviously helped.

It is interesting to note that Green states that these maxim’s “tend to strike the naive reader variously as common sense” (pg 88)¹ which is pretty much what I said in yesterdays posting.  I guess I am one of the naive, but not anymore! An additional point that Green makes in a footnot is exactly the same that I was complaining about in the previous entry as well.

Insofar as perspicuous and prolixity are unnecessarily obscure expressions (compared to clear and verbosity or too many words), the statement of the maxim and its third submaxim violate the first submaxim; submaxim (3) violates itself as well with the obscure and repetitious paraphrase; and submaxim (4) is not ordered well with the others… (pg 89)¹

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Today I moved on to section II of XII in the pragmatics course; this section is titled Variability of Interpretation in pragmatics (I). Before moving on to the materials in the course notes I started on the pre-reading of three articles by Grice¹, Coulthard², and Green³ but found the reading to be rather difficult.  In particular Grice writes incredibly long sentences using obscure vocabulary which did not encourage me to continue writing. As an example of a long sentence try this one (73 words):

For the presence of these elements has the result that the concepts within which they appear cannot be precisely/clearly defined, and that at least some statements involving them cannot, in some circumstanances, be assigned a definite truth value; and the indefiniteness of these concepts is not only objectionable in itself but leaves open the way to metaphysics - we cannot be certain that none of these natural language expressions is metaphysically ‘loaded’.

I’m pretty sure that this is a run on sentence, but am not sure as the semi-colon and the hyphen leave it open to interpretation - at least that’s what I think.  Further, the obscure vocabulary required the frequent use of a dictionary: excrescences, perspicuous (perhaps I should have known this one), prolixity, and meiosis. All of this made the article difficult to get through as well as an overly long introduction that was itself convoluted and seemingly led nowhere, at least to me, for the first three pages. Why are some academic articles so incredibly difficult to read and others less so? Obviously I’m not referring to the use of Jargon, but rather to overly long sentences that require re-reading two or three times and obscure vocabulary.

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On Friday I recieved the material for the next two course that I am taking, LING 904 Pragmatics and LING 905 Research Methods. The essay questions look to be difficult but interesting.

Fortunately for me, I recieved the material two weeks before the semester officially starts so I can get a headstart and hopefully do well. Research methods is using Introduction to Research Methods 4^th by Robert B. Burns as the set text plus a large selection of articles and books sections. Pragmatics, however, does not have a set text but relies entirely on a broad selection of articles and book sections. I will probably purchase a text sometime next week.  Recommendations from readers will be greatly appreciated.