The Pit Corder Project (1148 words)
The Pit Corder Project is a multi-faceted project that aims to raise awareness of Pit Corder, an applied linguist that is seen as the “godfather” of the discipline in the U.K. The class of the MEL061 module have collaborated to achieve a few objectives as a part of this project. The first objective is to facilitate the creation of a York Civic Trust plaque to be affixed on Pit Corder’s childhood home, and the second objective is to expand on his Wikipedia page, making it accessible for users of more languages.
I had a direct impact on both of these objectives. Alongside another classmate, I wrote a letter to the current proprietors of his childhood home. It is now owned, alongside its neighbouring terraced houses, into a bed & breakfast, so we delivered our letter to the owners of the hotel. The letter was carefully written to fit to a few parameters, that me and my classmate discussed:
- The letter must provide context, explaining who Pit Corder is, who we are, and what our objective is.
- The letter must provide incentive for the owners of the hotel to cooperate with us.
- The letter must carefully describe exactly what we wish the owners of the hotel to do for us.
I believe we were able to successfully meet each of these criteria. We made sure to describe Pit Corder’s achievements powerfully, using words to the tone of “legacy”, “achievements”, and “founder” whilst describing him, and then going on to explain how his discipline has grown – discussing the BAAL conference that recently occurred at the University as a direct result of his work.
We discussed our class, explaining our personal investment in the objective, and described our discipline in the modern day, making sure to indicate to the owners that we have a direct influence on their day-to-day life. We also mentioned the possibility that the plaque would attract potential customers to the establishment, to provide incentive for the owners to cooperate. A copy of the letter can be found below.
We received a reply from the property, who expressed their interest in accepting the plaque, successfully completing our part in the first objective of the project. We still await the Civic Trust’s word that the plaque has been accepted before getting in contact with the owners again.
My second contribution to the project is to do with the Wikipedia pages. I have a background in computer science and am able to understand and extrapolate code. Some of the translated Wikipedia pages needed to be given structure and referencing through coding, specifically the French, Arabic and Japanese pages. I was able to use my knowledge of coding to locate the existing code in the English page and use that to create subheadings and references on those other pages.
This was a challenge, particularly on the French and Arabic pages due to my inexperience with each of the languages. Each reference had to be meticulously placed just after the phrase referenced, so I asked friends who were able to read each of the languages in order to insert the code, confirming the references were accurately placed. A further explanation of the actual code used on the pages can be found below.
Letter to Owners of 4 Bootham Terrace
Dear Owners of Hedley House & Bootham Terrace 3-6.
We represent a group of post-graduate applied linguistics students at York St. John University, and during our research, we found that Pit Corder, the universally considered founder of modern applied linguistics spent his childhood in 4 Bootham Terrace, which is a part of your establishment. We are in the process of running a campaign to commemorate his achievements and contributing greatly to our field of research.
We would very much appreciate if you, the current proprietors of his previous home, would consider having a York Civic Trust plaque, commemorating his life and times, affixed to the front of 4 Bootham Terrace. We are currently in talks with the York Civic Trust, and we have a representative supporting our case for the plaque with the civic trust board.
Due to Pit Corder’s legacy, York is seen as one of the homes of applied linguistics. Just this September, York St. John University held the BAAL (British Association for Applied Linguistics) conference, one of the largest applied linguistic conferences in recent history, inviting upwards of 250 speakers and 4 plenary speakers to share their research in the field.
Applied linguistics is a sister discipline of theoretical linguistics that is concerned with the practical applications of language studies, for example, language teaching, translation, and speech therapy, and it has a strong influence on society, ranging from classrooms, to clinical treatment, and to social justice.
We believe that in seeing York as the home of Applied Linguistics, celebrating Pit Corder’s legacy would attract applied linguists from all over to see where the father of our discipline spent his most formative years. This, in combination with the potential of future BAAL conferences being held in the city, would bring many potential academics as customers to your establishment, if you were to accept the plaque.
We thank you greatly for your time, and we look forward to your response.
Yours Faithfully,
Ocean Martinez (Ocean.martinez@yorksj.ac.uk)
Harvey Helmer (Harvey.helmer@yorksj.ac.uk)
In any email correspondence, we would appreciate it if you would CC our project coordinator and lecturer, head of the School of Languages and Linguistics at York St. John University, Rachel Wicaksono (Rachel.wicaksono@yorksj.ac.uk).
Sample Coding for Wikipedia Page
For Subtitling:
In order to create a subtitle on Wikipedia, you can either use the format tool to change text to a subtitle, or you can use the source code. To change the French pages' headings to subtitles, the source code was edited. Below is the source code required to create a subtitle heading on Wikipedia.
== Subtitle ==
The italic text is replaced with the subtitle heading to create a subtitle. One example from the French page can be found below.
== Jeunesse ==
For Referencing:
The general structure of referencing in Wikipedia follows the below structure:
<ref name="name of reference">{{cite type of source|title=source title|(more information, including access date for websites, page numbers for books, etcetera)}}</ref>
Italics represent areas that should be replaced. Below is an example of a reference in the Pit Corder project:
<ref name="BAAL-History">{{cite web|title=Notes on the History of the British Association for Applied Linguistics|publisher=British Association for Applied Linguistics|url=http://www.baal.org.uk/dox/history_of_baal.pdf|accessdate=30 December 2012|deadurl=yes|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20121029100702/http://www.baal.org.uk/dox/history_of_baal.pdf|archivedate=29 October 2012|df=dmy-all}}</ref>
There were in total 6 unique references used on the Pit Corder Wikipedia page, each with their own unique parameters. 6 different code strings were present, and were located, copied, and inserted into the French, Arabic, and Japanese pages, in the appropriate places.
For Creating the Reference List:
Most of the hard work creating a reference list in Wikipedia is actually done by the in-text references. Each reference you create using the above process is added to a database of references used throughout that particular page. In order to get the list to display, you simply add the following code to the references section:
{{ Reflist }}
Transcription of Interview: "Written Language is Superior to Spoken Language" (1051 Words)
INTERVIEWER: First question is: What’s your impression of people who are highly literate?
PARTICIPANT: As in?
INTERVIEWER: Just in general in society.
PARTICIPANT: Highly literate? As in like read a lot? Or, are very well spoken or…
INTERVIEWER: Yeah, who are able to read difficult texts, and write difficult texts.
PARTICIPANT: I certainly have a lot of respect for people who can write highly literate texts, like having read a lot, extensively for kind of, two dissertations on separate subjects, yeah, you kind of develop a real respect for people that can write at such a high level, ‘cause it’s really hard. Um, yeah. As for, yeah, I guess the same for people who can read it. ‘Cause I spent a lot of time with like a thesaurus open, reading that kind of text, ‘cause the language is kind of, different, I guess.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, and what about people who are illiterate?
PARTICIPANT: Um, I feel like being able to read and write, is a human right, so for people who are illiterate, something has gone wrong and, you know, they’ve not been allowed that right. In this country? I mean I don’t know how rare it is to not be literate, but I feel like, especially in this country, if there is someone who is illiterate, there’s some sort of governmental system that’s failed, or they’ve slipped through a net or something.
INTERVIEWER: In England, I think, it’s 97%, 98% literacy
PARTICIPANT: Wow, so it’s like 1 or 2 %, like, a whole percentage, that’s quite surprising.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, and, do you feel like, on a regular basis, you are judged, based on your level of literacy?
PARTICIPANT: I don’t think so. But I think that’s probably because, as of late, I have been in quite a highly literate circle, being at university.
INTERVIEWER: So you don’t think that your university experience included being judged on your literacy level?
PARTICIPANT: In, I guess in, kind of, in some cases. Obviously, you submit work, to be graded, and therefore it’s judged in that way, but… I mean, I guess, the people doing the judging are also highly literate, so they kind of know what they’re talking about? And when you’re in that kind of environment you’re expected to write at a certain level, I guess.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that outside of your life, there are people in the world that are judged for their level of literacy?
PARTICIPANT: Yeah, for sure.
INTERVIEWER: In what ways?
PARTICIPANT: Um, I think, the first one that springs to mind is the whole stigma of people with learning disabilities or with dyslexia, who, naturally struggle with a certain level of literacy. I think especially for people who go through school without any kind of diagnosis. Like, I have a friend who went all the way through high school and only got a diagnosis for dyslexia and actually autism, at the end of her school life and her entire experience had been, why are you behaving so badly, why can’t you do this why can’t you do that. So, I guess, people kind of assumed, she, um, she was doing it on purpose? So, I guess, in that case, she was judged on her level of literacy without people understanding what was going on? Um, I think, um, in other countries as well, particularly in Third World countries, where you do have that huge disparity between people who can read and write, people who are educated and people who aren’t. There’s kind of, a big, big gap there where a lot of judgement could be cast.
INTERVIEWER: And now you’re talking about whether you can or can’t read and write. That’s either, you can use both written and spoken language, or you can only use spoken language.
PARTICIPANT: I guess, yeah
INTERVIEWER: So, to you, what are the differences between written and spoken language? I.e. their purposes, advantages, disadvantages?
PARTICIPANT: I guess, with, I guess with written language, it tends to be a slower process, in communication, I guess. So, if you write something, you can go back and change it. Whereas with spoken language, it’s immediate, so, if you say something, you can’t really, go back and change what you’ve said, so I guess, I guess as well with the way people naturally speak, um, I don’t really know how to phrase this but, I guess, some people would speak at a high literate level, and some people would speak at a low literate level.
INTERVIEWER: And do you think that that is directly related to their literacy?
PARTICIPANT: Potentially, yeah. Like I feel like, tell me if I’m giving too many examples, but, for example, take somebody who is born in a mining community in Durham, versus someone who grew up in Cambridge. I feel like, the environment, kind of impacts, the level of literacy, and how you speak, and therefore how you are perceived, as well. like people with regional accents, particularly northern ones, I feel, are occasionally, it’s assumed that they won’t read at a higher level, or it’s assumed that they won’t speak at a higher level of literacy. Because of their environment, and because of the way they sound, I guess.
INTERVIEWER: Cool, this is all leading up to this final question, I want to know what you think of the phrase, written language is superior to spoken language.
PARTICIPANT: [long pause]
INTERVIEWER: Kind of thinking about what we just spoke about.
PARTICIPANT: Yeah, I think in certain senses of the word, err, of the phrase, yeah? It is, because, as we discussed, not everyone can write, therefore people who can write have a distinct advantage I guess, over some people.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, so do you think it’s not necessarily the form of the language, it’s because only a certain subset of people can use it?
PARTICIPANT: I think it is also the form as well, because as we mentioned, you can go back and change stuff, or you can choose to use certain words in a certain way, because of that slower process. I think you can take time to craft something that’s written. Whereas if you’re talking, just like as a natural conversation, things come out and you can’t go back and change them, so if you’re thinking on the fly, it might not come out as “highly literate” as you want it.
INTERVIEWER: Okay, do you have any further thoughts?
PARTICIPANT: No, it’s just a very intriguing question!
"Written Language is Superior To Spoken Language" (653 words)
Hall, Smith, and Wicaksono (2017) outline 10 Dead End methods of thinking about language. Each of these Dead Ends details a specific aspect of many non-linguists' viewpoints. One of these Dead Ends was selected, and a non-linguist was interviewed to investigate whether they agreed with the Dead End, or otherwise disagreed with it.
The Dead End selected was the third, "Written Language is Superior to Spoken Language". The reasoning for this selection is that it is a lot more pragmatic than some of the other options, and is relatable to any participant, regardless of their linguistic resources, because everyone is in contact with both spoken and written language almost every day.
The participant just graduated from a Masters' Degree in American History, with a bachelors in History too. I specifically avoided disclosing to the participant that the interview was about a "Dead End" way of thinking to avoid any polluting of opinion; if a person heard that it was considered wrong by linguists, they would automatically avoid agreeing with it.
The participant produced some utterances of particular salience that I believe affirm the Dead End, but also made some statements that question the Dead End in the same way as linguists also. When asked whether they thought Written Language was superior to Spoken Language or not, they hesitated but ended up saying yes, they thought it was.
Hall, Smith, and Wicaksono (2017) explain that "written language is a way of making language physical... rather than constituting language itself", and that as a mode it has advantages of durability and wider scope of audience. The participant agrees with this statement, saying that "you can take time to craft something that's written", but uses the word "craft". "Crafting" is often used with delicate and/or difficult matters of construction or art, whereas they say "if you're talking... you can't go back and change [what you said], so ...it might not come out as "highly literate" as you want it". In comparing spoken and written language in this way, it is as if the more refined is written, and the more spontaneous is spoken, reinforcing the Dead End way of thinking.
Another example could be found when asked about the differences between written and spoken language. The participant stated that "some people would speak at a high literate level, and some people would speak at a low literate level", moving on to mention that "the environment, kind of impacts the level of literacy, and how you speak, and therefore how you are perceived", making specific reference to mining communities in Durham, and "Northern" accents. Arguably, you could consider that literacy does not directly affect a person's speaking ability, but it makes sense that one would believe it to do so. This is just one other way that written language is seen as superior to spoken; it's seen to directly influence ones' ability wielding the spoken word.
Interestingly, when the participant was asked whether people are judged by their level of literacy, they distinctly notice one facet of Hall, Smith and Wicaksono's argument, in that written language was owned by the privileged elites for over 97% of its existence and had become a powerful tool of coercion and control (Hall, Smith and Wicaksono, 2017). The participant notes that literacy is a human right, so if people are illiterate, something has gone wrong; they haven't been allowed their basic rights. They continue to say that if that happens, the governmental system has failed. They also mention that in impoverished countries, there is a huge disparity between literate and illiterate people, and in that large gap, a lot of judgment could be cast.
In conclusion, it seems that the dead-end is definitely represented in the non-linguist community. Even from the opinions of the highly educated, it still remains relatively set in human interaction, but there are signs of awareness; it seems the participant was explaining how it is, not believing it to be that way.
Changing Englishes: Creating Diagrams (686 words)
The website "Changing Englishes" is a course intended for teachers of English. After a review of the entire site, I found that overall, the content was a satisfactory introduction into the sophisticated ideas that university-level linguists hold about languages and language teaching. However, I felt that the websites' formatting and its methods of presenting its points were particularly lacking. Due to the page being a free-access course found on a university website, it must be easy to navigate.
Take, for example, this website: http://japanese-lesson.com/conversation/basic_japanese/index.html. This website has an array of Japanese lessons on it, provided for free. Its layout is elegant; using a contents table on the front page to use as a navigatory nexus around the website. In comparison, the Changing Englishes site has a rather confusing method for its navigation. The contents table is on the left, and when you enter a certain unit, it changes completely to that units' modules. The main contents page menu completely vanishes from the left, so if you wish to return to the main contents page, a user has to take one extra unnecessary step.
Most of the pages feel somewhat incomplete; they are short and few contain any diagrams or pictures. If the website had more informatory diagrams, I think it would be easier for a potential learner to stay focused as they make their way through the units. One great example of this is the first half of Unit 1: Defining English. Overall, the content is engaging and if given time easy to understand, but as the first unit in the course, it must be able to grab its users' attention almost immediately. The Planet/Galaxy analogy does a good job of this, but a diagram using this analogy would be a great fit. I have designed a relatively simple, but effective, diagram as an example of what could be made for this purpose, as can be seen in Fig. 3.1. The two different viewpoints are distinguished by colour; green, and blue, and one is a perfect circle with a thick boundary, while the other is a cloud-like formation with dotted lines for edges and multiple parts that seem to be "coalescing". The archetypal features of each surround the diagram. I believe that this will allow the reader to have a second perspective from which to comprehend the information presented.
I have also created in Figs 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 potential options for the Monolithic and Pluralithic viewpoints presented in the next two modules. This is all about comparing, and I found myself quite commonly switching between the two pages to see the difference between the monolithic viewpoint of "language boundaries" and the pluralithic one. There is an argument for restructuring these modules so that each belief is discussed from both standpoints in turn, rather than covering all of the monolithic, and then all of the pluralithic viewpoints in bulk. The diagrams I created would assist in this goal, as they could be presented side-by-side on the page to further emphasise the difference between the two.
Figure 3.2 describes the "Single Object vs Multiple Objects" idea. The pluralithic diagram has multiple arrows pointing to each arbitrary piece of the diagram in an attempt to illustrate that a language is pieced together by countless objects, while the other diagram is a singular circle with a singular arrow.
Figure 3.3 discusses the boundaries between languages. The monolithic viewpoint includes three circles, each with a different language name within them. They are touching, but distinctly separate. This is to emulate two things: Firstly, how languages can be distinctly given borders and marked on a map, and also to show that bilinguals separate their languages in their head. Meanwhile, the pluralithic viewpoint shows the blurred line between the two languages, as if they are flowing into each other at the seams.
Finally, Figure 3.4 shows the difference between an ambiguous and unambiguous shape. I decided to use a rectangle in this case as it has the most "immutable" image, while the other diagram has a secondary line around the outside of it, that fills the small gaps between the ellipses, in an attempt to show how it's always changing.
Reflective Piece: The 5 ingredients of AL (555 words)
As a part of this reflective piece, an Applied Linguist was interviewed for 10 minutes. They were asked if they minded being filmed, but said they would much prefer only being recorded, so the interview is presented as an audio file. The participant is Chisato Danjo, a lecturer of Japanese & Linguistics. She has a research focus in bilingualism and holds a PhD in International Language Families’ Language Use. She was a primary school teacher in Japan before moving on to further academic study.
Hall, Smith and Wicaksono (2017) propose that there are five ingredients of Applied Linguistics in their book Mapping Applied Linguistics. They are the centrality of user needs, pragmatic orientation, social and cognitive embeddedness, role-shifting & collaboration, and mode of enquiry.
The participant describes most of these ingredients throughout her work during the interview. Firstly, at timestamp 1:20, she describes a language philosophy where a learner focuses on learning another language, continuing to describe how this leads to using a single language in the classroom. She contradicts this idea, describing it as a “monolingual mindset” and advocates for the use of both languages in the classroom—as the end goal of a second language learner is multilingualism, explaining that you end up using all of your resources to communicate. This an ideal that is generally avoided in traditional language classrooms (as from my own personal experience in Japan, we were asked specifically not to speak in English during class). This ideal puts the users’ needs to communicate and become multilingual at the centre of her work.
She holds a pragmatic orientation because she maintains her ideals and opinions but will alter her methods based on the needs of the students (for example, she mentions that she has different teaching styles for 1st and 3rd year students at 5:15) and she collaborates with her third-year students, refining her teaching methods to their requirements based on the feedback and goals of the students. She mentions that many of her students are at a level where they “can say what they are thinking” (8:15-10:00), but aren’t as equipped to discuss social issues, an example of how the participants’ mode of enquiry makes the use of non-textbook language teaching to explore how students express their identities at a greater, social scale in their second language.
She also focuses heavily on preparing her students for the future, putting their future needs into account while preparing her lectures. She handles this differently for both classes; for her 1st-year students, she uses her pragmatic orientation to move away from her own ideals: lessons without language tests, and puts her students’ needs first—she prepares them for their experience in Japan in the traditional language classroom by also examining them in a similar way (13:22). Then, once they return to the UK, in third year, she removes those tests, and instead examines them through reports and through conversation, and puts a specific focus on future skills needed, like how to handle yourself in a Japanese-style job interview (6:20). Most of her work as a language teacher is centred on the social aspects of being a language learner. I believe there was a malfunction in the interview structure, as no mention of cognitive effects on language use were mentioned, but I think it was due to a lack of effective questions, rather than a lack of consideration on the participant's part.