Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

'Real world constraints make some sequences impossible or at least very highly unlikely...the Narrative Principle provides a powerful organisational tool."

"It is a surprise that so many non-native teachers have been persuaded so easily to undervalue their own abilities, and discard a classroom technique of great potential value." - Experience of using Duolingo casts doubt on this standard critique of English only ELT material: it becomes a question of whether individual markets are big enough to support the production of high quality non-native materials.

""Can you say...?" shows learners have an intuitive grasp of lexis ... an awareness that speech communities do not simply make up new ways of saying things all the time; on the contrary, there are often expressions which the non-native needs to acquire as wholes ... There is nothing to understand, just items to be remembered so they are available for subsequent use in exactly the same form."

"The central role of chunking - the ability to discern clearly the component units of any text - becomes clearer and clearer. Unless you chunk a text correctly, it is almost impossible to read with understanding, and unless you speak in appropriate chunks, you place a serious barrier to understanding between yourself and your listeners." - How is 'chunking' different to phrase analysis?

"...for while grammar can generate many original and useful utterances, it can also over-generalise and appear to sanction language which is not accepted by the speech community."

"In addition, there are ... a minute number of words from the grammatical closed classes, determiners, pronouns, prepositions etc.' - does inflection make Hungarian more difficult to learn, it certainly makes more closed class words."

"We can break language into sounds, morphemes, words, sentences; but words are no more the basic units out which English is 'built' than sounds, letters, or morphemes."

"An important consequence of viewing language from a lexical point of view is that the traditional distinction between 'fixed' vocabulary and generative grammar is recognised as an invalid over-simplification."

"The best known of these countercultural communities had been the little groups of like minded souls that gathered around philosophers in classical Greece..." - Socrates again

" North did [Huxley] acknowledge that for more than fifty years the principal object of the national park movement in England was, in reality, Africa."

Thanks to Yellowstone (1872) Yosemite (1890) the National Park Service Act (1916)... the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Alaska National Interest Landshipping Conservation Act (1980) the US has maintained a reputation as the world's foremost protector of wildlife and wilderness."

"The procession of English tourists to the Alps was the first major instance of nature importing as a social and intellectual movement. "

"...and adult male lion in Ambroseli National park in Kenya generates $515,000 in tourist revenue over the course of its lifetime."

"In the half century between Gore's safari and Roosevelt's the United States changed from being an exporter to an importer of wild nature."

"Wilderness entrance examinations, comparable to those used to select college students, may not be far around the corner."

"If a visitor was on occasion killed and eaten, that was the way of the wilderness that was being preserved. Eliminate the risk and you eliminate the wilderness"

"He did not like the constructed trails, elaborate shelters, latrines and corrals"

four revolutions contributed to the overrunning of the woods; the intellectual, the equipment, the transportation, and the information

"innumerable people cannot enjoy solitude together"

"Alaska emerged with almost exactly the same pattern of land ownership as a typical Western state."

"[Alaskans] differ from other Americans in their understanding of what activities are appropriate in wild country"

"Dig it up - Chop it down - Fish it out - and shoot it"

"...the use of snowmobiles, motorboats, and complex rifles by modernisation hunters and gatherers occasioned considerable misgivings"

"[the passage of the Alaska lands act] was the most expansive action ever taken for wilderness and associated values at any one time in world history.'

Is this science fiction, 'coz it reads like Thomas Pynchon?

the Wilderness Society, the Sierra club, the National Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the National Parks and Conservation Association.

"scenery "is more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted."

"Essentially, they did not want Alaska to become like the rest of the United States. Almost the opposite sentiment motivated pioneers on earlier American frontiers."

"The whole concept of wilderness in Alaska is "ethnocentric to the point of being insulting"."