Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"They speak of revenge, justice, buried women and sacrificed babies..." - ok, the weird stuff begins, can't say whether I'm disappointed or relieved.

"biological networks do achieve maximal space filling and consequently scale like three-dimensional volumes rather than two dimensional Euclidean surfaces..." - aren't biological networks three dimensional anyway? - "...This extra dimension, leads to organisms functioning as if they are operating in four dimensions" - there is obviously something I don' t understand about 'dimension' here.

"Whole lessons or more can be spent on LAM and RAM (Reading-as-modelling) before free production is attempted. When time is limited it can be tempting to go from presentation straight to production without enough time for students to process large amounts of comprehensible input" - smash the tyranny of the stand alone lesson based plan!

"Another factor which affects comprehension is the pace of delivery." - intuitively, I agree with this, though I think the gaps in the delivery are more signifigant that the speed of delivery. With a gap I find can catch up with what has been said. But is there any evidence for this?

"With high-attaining students this figure may fall to around 90%" - i.e. clever sausages can cope with 1 unfamiliar word in 10.

Listening-as-modelling = Explicit modelling (by teacher) + implicit modelling (by student) + micro-skills + cognative strategies

"...any input which contains fewer than 95-98% comprehensible words poses serious obstacles to understanding, and consequently learning." - i.e more than 1 in 20 - 1 in 50 incomprehendible words, the second figure seems low.

"Egorova et al, 2013" - there are again gaps in the Bibliography.

"...of all the language skills, we believe listening to be most important for the development of second language proficiency. Our brains are wired to pick up language through listening." - critical period hypothesis? At 55 I process subtitles much more quickly than speech, and suspect that the same is true for the teenagers I teach.

Oh wow! Bakti has quotation marks all over the shop.

"at which point the interpreter in the back seat dissolved in tears and José Miguel continued, piling sentence on top of another, one Spanish sentence running into the next" - so much for the man of short sentences. Hungarian doesn't distinquish between sentence and clause: Szirtes misses a trick here.

""the love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed"" - which, apart from making me tear up over my poor, dear departed cat, are the only quotation marks in the story. Amid the all the other idiosyncratic punctuation, it's worth pointing out that Hungarian doesn't use quotation marks. Something that greatly impressed James Joyce.

"...to check whether the warden did actually use that word in Spanish" - so I'm reading the English translation of a Hungarian novella narrated as a conversation in German about a conversation in Spanish that was interpreted into English: plenty of scope for error then.

"José Miguel, a man who...once he started speaking, clearly preferred short sentences..." - this must be the dark irony reviewers attribute to Krasznahorkai.

"Rather than strictly following the rules, speakers are writers make choices. It is those choices that L2 learners should explore - Certainly, but there is no contrast between following rules and making choices, language users follow the rule to realise the choice they have made.

"The key is too create a culture of enquiry..[when the students] get things wrong or struggle to work something out...the teacher can simply tell them.' - Obviously never taught Hungarian teenagers, who will wait patiently until the teacher does.

"However, it is important to ensure that the language in the text is natural, as graded reading texts or scripted dialogues written specifically for the level can often be unnatural or artificial" - yep, and natural texts are usually too lexically rich to easily understood by students, unless you want to spend the whole lesson discussing vocabulary. Teacher trainers shoud admit how difficult finding natural texts is.

...ones, all of which leave me hoping I can put their distracting nature behind me and work out whether they add anything to the narrative, or if there is a story of any value beneath the obstructive prose, while bearing in mind that it may have been much more successfully executed in its native Hungarian

...translator of Hungarian, being both bilingual and a poet, but or perhaps because this has not stopped from uncapitalising the word that follows a question mark, writing run-on sentences with unnecessary conjunctions, presenting separate clauses as apposite phrases, replacing demonstrative pronouns with relative ones, equivocating between direct and reported speech, and preferring infinite constructions to finite..

...though a keen reader of Hungarian fiction, I have avoided Krasnahorkai, marketed as he has been as a writer with a gimmick, which has been misdescribed as writing very long sentences, but in fact his gimmick is writing without full stops, a gimmick which is realised in Szirtes's English translation through a number of abuses of English grammar, upsettingly because Szirtes is such an natural and elegant...

Bloom's taxonomy - good to see him reaching out of the ELT bubble.

"An authentic task, also called a real world task (Thomlinson, 2011) should enable the learners to read or listen to the text for the same purpose as it would be read or listened to outside the classroom" - easily said, than done

"It helps if statements or discussion questions are open-ended and pictures or headlines arouse curiosity, rather than merely depict the content of the lesson"

"A prediction task can be used to sensitize learners to difficult aspects of the text, such as organisation, accents, features of connected speech or typical genre features".

"Because many commercially produced coursebooks have been designed to appeal to as broad a range of learners as possible, it is naturally difficult for writers to include culturally specific texts or topics." - and vice versa

"Find some unusual photographs online and bring them into class. The students have to guess what has happened." - a visual version of "Yes, No, Nope"?

Conditionals and reported speech are not used standardly among native speakers. It's not clear if mixed forms represent the speakers' meaning or they are slips.

"For teachers without access to much material or for those who rely on coursebooks, learner-generated texts can provide a rich source of relevant and engaging material that is appropriate to the level of the class" - the level of passive ability will be well above the level of active ability.

"will signifies less signifies less certainty. However, Parrot (2010) suggests that in its contracted form, will expresses logical deduction." - you would have thought grammarians would have got this down by now. His example, however, isn't logical deduction.

"With all my extended family responsibilities, it's simply too much to live on. How am I going to find time to do all the shopping to afford my job?" - the point at which 'reversalism' began to make sense.