Patrick Hubbuck
1996-2021: teaching EAP at universities in the UK, Japan & China
2006-2009: OU online MSc in Science (issues in STEM education)
2000: Cambridge/RSA DELTA
Location difficult to pinpoint given my momentum
Activity
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Kristin S
@YEJINJUNG Thanks - detailed resource interesting & useful to me as well as Graham :-)
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@KristinS - Yes, you're right: a good 'under the hood' manual can save us hours of trial-and-error discovery time!
As for why I went off on that mathematical tangent ... gosh, when someone replies (thank you!) and I come back and see what I wrote, I do wonder what kind of association measures I'm running ;-)!
But I do like the questions you were asking...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Kristin S
Thanks @YEJINJUNG, but I'm still confused!
Vaclav says it's a corpus of "Chinese spoken by people who are not native speakers of Chinese"; yet the tagged errors were of writing: "A particular Chinese character is missing from this original script."
And the error types shown don't include pronunciation.
Is it actually a corpus of Chinese written by...
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SOURCES
2) Guardian as Berliner (neither a broadsheet nor a tabloid be!): https://www.theguardian.com/gpc/story-of-the-berliner
1) Mirror as shaper of British journalism (in contrast with rival tabloid, the Daily Mail): https://review.gale.com/2020/04/02/the-role-of-the-mirror-in-shaping-british-journalism/
The same critically reflective exercises can...
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In his summing up video, Tony will tell us that dividing the UK media into just 2 categories - tabloids and broadsheets - is only 1 way of categorising them, and can be misleading.
Yet let's admit that, having made a binary distinction (which our brains are evolutionarily hardwired to do without conscious thought!), we then tend to filter all our discourse...
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PS I also find myself self-censoring when I refer in this MOOC to UK critiques of social policies in China.
In self-analysis of this:
I don't fear bad consequences in my life of engaging with such issues (e.g. Internet censorship, Xinjiang Uighurs) in these forums (though I might were they to come up in one of my classrooms in China) ...
... I do...
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Me too (without hashtag)!
You wrote: "If the UK tabloid and broadsheet accounts of RASIM are all narrated by omniscient narrator-reporters, then we only get their versions of the stories, unsupported by quotations, relevant and reliable quantitative information."
Is this 'if-then' a hypothesis you've yet to investigate, or a conclusion based on your...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
That Intro. to the 2nd reading sums up the idiotic ignorance of tabloid heads:
'BBC PUT MUSLIMS BEFORE YOU!'
The language we use in addressing our audiences speaks volumes about the stupid assumptions we're making about them. That's why civil rights movements are always linguistic reform movements too. Your straw man arguments against cancel culture...
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I do like this sort of thread!
@KristinS - I'd suggest keeping a screenshot journal of your experiments. Do things in one order first, keeping screenshots of every significant step. Then do the same things in a different order, after which you can play 'spot the difference'.
This is how I solve issues with filter sequencing in video editing. There's a...
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slowly ... slowly ... catching up ...
This course is making me realise I need to get back into my OU undergraduate maths degree, specifically to do the Statistics module!
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Yanan Zhao
I'm so glad I switched from Apple to PC in 1996 - it's so much easier to find the right click on a PC ;-)!
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Your tutorials are so clear, Vaclav! Thank you :-)
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Vaclav's co-authored paper fascinates an EAP teacher like me, at an EMI university in China, in the global context of a massive shift in English usage, towards majority use as an L2 or Lingua Franca, rather than as an L1.
As my selected quotes indicate [above], if corpus linguistics is to offer meaningful insight into systematic variations of English usage...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
FROM THE READING:
"One of the major variables affecting language use that has not yet received sufficient attention in corpus-based SLA studies is the level of L2 proficiency. [... Also,] many of these studies still appear to treat L1 speakers as a homogeneous group who all possess the full extent of linguistic knowledge." [p. 9]
"It is important to note...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
As developing software requires attention to detail, I hope you won't mind me making an aesthetic suggestion.
Why not position the slides in the video such that the subtitles/captions don't obscure important details, such as x-axis keys or data table rows. I assume that caption files are uploaded separately, so you might not have anticipated how...
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For everyone's edutainment in this context, here's a very funny diachronic review of anti-RASIM English rhetoric by clever British comedian, Stewart Lee.
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTgxNzI5MTYwOA==.html
Alas, YouTube blocks my edit on copyright grounds, so I've put it up for you all on China's Youku platform. Youku works worldwide, but if you're...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
For everyone's edutainment in this context, here's a very funny diachronic review of anti-RASIM English rhetoric by clever British comedian, Stewart Lee.
https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTgxNzI5MTYwOA==.html
Alas, YouTube blocks my edit on copyright grounds, so I've put it up for you all on China's Youku platform. Youku works worldwide, but if you're...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
"I have made a distinction between tabloid and broadsheet and then pursued it. You could do this study again just looking at tabloids and see how different tabloids relate to this issue."
I'm happy to see Tony say this in his sum up video, as it's a point I raised in some methodological discussions in threads in the earlier forums. Lumping the Daily Mirror...
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I read this exchange with much interest, and wished I could show you the most brilliant and hilarious diachronic review of anti-immigrant English rhetoric by British comedian, Stewart Lee. Unfortunately, YouTube blocks it on copyright grounds, so I've put it on China's equivalent, Youku. If you watch it outside China, be patient - there'll be a bit of...
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Interestingly, I had a similarly negative initial reaction to the term, but mine was rooted in automatic associations with:
1) a similar English abstract noun, RACISM; and
2) a similar Arabic proper noun, the male name RASIM.
I feared that these automatic associations might give the acronym RASIM an unintended negative connotation. This fear at the...
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If I understand what you're both saying here, it fits my reply to an earlier post about the significance of 'pose as' in anti-RASIM discourse; i.e. that 'pose as' is a verb with negative connotation in all its typical uses, so any usage of it with RASIM as subject will 'prime' the listener/reader with a negative bias towards that subject. Implied in that...
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Yes, once a frequency threshold for significance is set, and all the clusters which exceed it identified, the researcher must not only select those clusters most worthy of investigation given the questions being operationalised; but also (as Tony pointed out) exclude clusters which - while meeting or exceeding that threshold for statistical significance - are...
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I suspect that a RASIM-positive discourse would not use the verb 'pose as' with RASIM as its subject because (to my mind at least) that verb has intrinsically negative connotations.
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Robert Williams
@RobertWilliams - yes, so many angles can be explored, once the corpuses are set up! Your thought about wire services triggered another in me: to investigate differences in usages of global English news services which (unlike FOX & CNN) are headquartered where English isn't L1 (RT, Al Jazeera, CGTN, etc.)
Thinking about CGTN reminds me of a teaching story....
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Patrick Hubbuck
I do my best to add to them all the time ;-)
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I look forward to that - even though it'll be Week 7 before I get to it!
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So many interesting MOOCs, so little time!
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I'd challenge it by pointing out that British tabloids were historically split between labour-left ones (e.g. Daily Mirror) and tory-right ones (e.g. Daily Mail). The former ran notable campaigns at odds with the tabloid majority, notably against the Iraq war c. 2002-3, and the Cambodian genocide c. 1979. Both these campaigns were massively important in my...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
TANGENTIAL THOUGHTS:
1) Shall I add 'topoi' to the plurals I refuse to use? What instead: corpuses, forums and lemma(s) work nicely, but 'toposes' isn't nice!
2) When was Tony's lecture recorded? The Independent stopped publishing its broadsheet c. 2003, and its last tabloid was c. 2016 (it's now online only); the Grauniad switched to Berliner format c....
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Robert Williams
Yes. I'd be looking for systematic differences in language used by mainstream news sources on so-called 'left' and 'right' of the political spectrum: CNN v. FOX, for example.
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@RaffaellaBottini - no, I switched from Apple to PC back in 1997 when I realised all the computers in all my office working environments were going to be bought in bulk and maintained on limited budgets. Macs had many advantages but price and ease of DIY troubleshooting were never among them ;-)!
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@HannaSchmueck - yes: and you've brought to mind by analogy the primary and secondary complications of cousinhood in the genealogy of human relations!
"You must remember Auntie Eileen - she's yer dad's second cousin twice removed on his mum's brother's side!"
"Isn't she the one what used to collocate in all the pubs in London and Dublin?"
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These are great questions! Any question that goes straight for the fundamentals of a clever theory, demanding definition then asking 'Why?', has been great in my book since first I woke!
[What do you mean by 'a clever theory', 'woke' and Why? - Ed.]
I'm fascinated by the inner dialogues which characterise my every use of language, even when I'm alone....
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
"And certainly speaking on the fly, and listening on the fly, and responding on they fly, is very demanding."
I enjoyed this part of the conversation; and that which followed, regarding the self-dissonances of language learning.
I'll never forget arriving in Paris aged 18, proud of my Advanced Level ability to read existential novels by Camus and...
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[... ctd]
I'm not arguing against all the irrefutable evidence for reductionist mechanisms located in mappable areas in the average human brain. I'm simply arguing for a sensible simultaneity in our envisaging of natural languages, akin to the wave-particle dualities that quantum theory tells us are our best hope of momentarily grasping our paradoxical...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
On 'a theory of language in the mind':
Yes! I think these are glimpses Richard Dennehy and I have been intuiting elsewhere in these fora, triggered by multidimensional GraphColl mappings, for example!
I'm very wary however of reductionist accounts which posit physical memory locations in the brain; so while I recognise and am fascinated by the...
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I hear Proxima Centauri is nice this time of year :-)
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
I assumed this was a very recent video till I looked up Geoffrey's Wikipedia article while watching it. RIP Professor Leech: I remember reading your work on pragmatics as part of my undergraduate Philosophy studies in Bristol, 1985-7. I'm sure if I went back and re-read it, I'd find the origin of fundamental views of language I now take as my very...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
It's changed my limited prior view of what collocations are. As an EAP teacher, I'd always conceptualised collocations as occurring in the short-range linear sequences of phrase and sentence construction. Not that I didn't have a broader awareness of other 'association measures' - such as the common recurrence of specialised key words and phrases in academic...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Great selection of readings in Weeks 1 & 2 :-)
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@RichardDennehy - yes, I keep having mathematical intuitions about network theory, wondering what would happen if we had the computing power to run these tools on all human language ever: what insights would we gain into the unfathomably profound relationship between language, thought and brain?
The most worrying intuition that struck me was that the...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Alisa E
I'm fascinated by the TIME is SPACE metaphor, in which I think (like ARGUMENT is WAR) Lakoff & Johnson got the dominant directionality the wrong way round. I wonder how GraphColl could help us visualise metaphor mappings in everyday usage.
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This is one of those exchanges where it would be so good if FutureLearn forums let us insert inline images (screenshots) in posts ;-(
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@SepthiaIrnanda - do you mean you can't use it for Indonesian and that's what's disappointing?
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Watching the video, I ached to abbreviate the display tags for _noun, _verb, etc. ... so imagine my delight when I read the Note: under the video :-)
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The 2017 paper now starts reconstructing my prior knowledge, integrating it into what's new here without consigning its past usefulness to a box labelled 'you were wrong'.
Just as Newton's equations of motion and gravity (good enough to get man to the moon, but not for GPS mapping of Earth) turn out to be low-velocity approximations to Einstein's; I can...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
"In [Fig. 13], swearing is symmetrically connected with collocates such as vain, common, cursing and propane [and] through cursing (its strongest collocate) to drunkenness and (yet again) prophanation and through these in turn to a host of other associations including the people who would be referred to as 'prophaners'." (2015, p.163)
Collocation networks...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
"The tool box is greatly impoverished without the presence of corpus linguistics. And it’s greatly enriched with the presence of it. But you mustn’t throw away the other tools."
Excellent advocacy of an adaptable and eclectic approach: always use all ways!
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Good to see Tony using locuses as an English plural (not loci :-)
Once all our corpuses are full of lemmas and locuses, the elitist grip of Latin grammar schooling will be banished from all forums!
Did Tony refer to a change in which children are 'constructed' or 'constricted'? The latter, according to the transcript: "There is also a significant shift...
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Got it, thanks! Interesting debate on whether literal use of swear words counts as swearing :-)
And through reading it, I got a new Latinate plural - lemmata - to add to fora and corpora as forms I'll seek through frequent usage to marginalise ...
So in these forums, I'll be discussing lemmas found in corpuses ...
At first, I thought I was surprised...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
That copyright issue!
The copyrighteousness of IP owners in this era of Turnitinnery is running diabolically at odds with everything we're learning properly about language acquisition and its negotiations through communities of knowledge.
Thank God the British not the Americans got the copyright on the Human Genome first and put it copyleftlovingly where...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Love the outdoor scenes! I've been taking my sound recorders out in Japan to liven up my lectures for students in China too! ;-)
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On the subject of Hamlet's author (cf. posts elsewhere in W1 fora where we argued who really wrote that play!), I have a theory about diachronic shifts in the usage of 'worry'.
In its earliest uses in the Oxford English Dictionary (which we might treat as a pre-computer corpus-based usage study!), 'worry' was a transitive verb which required an object: The...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
My arrogant inner critic, which thinks it's a pure science intelligence (though it's more likely a white male Anglo-Celtic mixed-class monologuerrilla!), runs down every aspect of every human argument it hears or reads.
Yet listening to Elena talk about the importance of human engagement in online negotiations of terms of illness, an empathic part of me is...
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Reply to Self (bad form I know, but nobody else knows I'm still catching up on Week 1!).
In W1.23, Elena Semino framed my 'area of change B' in much better language:
"communication in areas where there are sensitivities or potential challenges, which is why I am interested in communication about health and illness, communication in different kinds of...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
British English for Academic Purposes (British EAP) has changed during my 25+ years of teaching it. Of significance here:
1) the emergence of corpus-based learner dictionaries (from the original Collins Cobuild with its monitor Bank of English corpus through to the online dictionaries of Cambridge, Macmillan, Longman & Oxford today);
2) the massive...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
A quote from Reading 1:
" ... there is little doubt that the many texts on the web contain errors of all sorts. For example, while writing this book we typed receive and receive into Google – receive scored 300,000,000 hits, recieve scored 8,670,000 hits."
This reminded me of an occasion in the early days of the WWW (the 1990s) when I Googled for...
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Thanks Hanna, will try to make time to enjoy that!
As a cognitive rule of thumb, whenever there's a bifurcating dichotomy [Are you serious? Ed!], I replace it with a graded continuum - and then look for other neglected dimensions that might be obscured by our simplifications!
Borderline examples can always usefully be contrived to challenge anyone who...
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Thanks Saira - alas, at the Institutional Login, 'Xi'an Jiatong-Liverpool University is not supported'. Sage is sage - how did it even know I work there, as I'm sitting on a laptop using public wifi from a cafe in Japan!
I've just been sidetracked from your fascinating course (again!) by my Annual Performance Management review. A lot of catching up to do...
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Another interesting linguistic phenomenon is the traditional grammarly distinction between so-called open and closed classes of words. Open classes (e.g. nouns, verbs) admit new words; closed classes (prepositions, pronouns) don't. Yet we could argue that the politics of pronouns is opening up that class of words. And isn't there even a case for considering @...
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One of my favourite illustrations of language change is to quote what Queen Anne reputedly said to her architect, Christopher Wren when he gave her a first tour of his new St. Paul's Cathedral (the old one had burnt down in the Great Fire of London).
"What an amusing, awful and artificial building!" she exclaimed.
The architect Wren was overjoyed to...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
6'37" TONY: "So why is that the case? We’ll look at it in a moment."
At this point, I pause his lecture to check what questions it's already raised for me:
1) How reliable are linear extrapolations from only 4 sampling points? Mightn't we miss significant fluctuations (eg dramatic wartime shifts in keyword frequencies, 1939-45)?
2) Are we accounting...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Susan Goldberg
The questions that book asks are: "What elevates a mere word to the status of keyword? What sort of resonance and reverberations do we expect a keyword to have? How much does the semantic range of a keyword explain its significance? What kinds of arguments does it generate? What are the stories told to illustrate its meanings? What are political and...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Richard Dennehy
Yes, it's what Yejin, William and I are musing about in our thread elsewhere in the 2.5 comments. It's fascinating especially how mathematical keywords like 'normal' and 'argument' can cause normal people (i.e. not mathematicians!) to argue ;-)
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Hamisu Hamisu Haruna
[Oops! Posted in wrong place!]
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Patrick Hubbuck
@WilsonDouce - I imagine the further apart the two fields are (e.g. a natural science v. a social science), the greater the variation in their meanings for the same keywords (e.g. 'normal' or 'argument' in mathematical physics v. in philosophical ethics), but the less likely this variation is to cause confusion. Whereas if the fields are closer together, but...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Patrick Hubbuck
Thanks Yejin - this clarifies for me that the meaning of 'keyword' in the context of Tony's lecture is specifically different from its meaning in other areas of education. Such subtle differences of key terminology across different but related academic disciplines is just one area that corpus linguistics can illuminate through carefully designed...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Robert Williams
This is a really interesting thread! I'd just done my 'first take' post after watching the lecture; then I switched 'View comments' to 'most liked' as a (perhaps dubiously Googlish) way of optimising the time I can afford to spend here) - and @RobertWilliams yours was the second.
How we conceive of and therefore operationally define 'keywords' (e.g. in...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
I started by assuming the 'keywords' Tony refers to must be what I call 'meaning words' - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Why? Because 'little grammar words' - articles, prepositions, etc. - should cancel out in comparative analysis of any 2 English corpuses.
Is a refutation available to my conscious mind? Yes! Comparing 2 imaginary newspaper corpuses -...
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@TraceDreyer - much food for thought here! Any corpus designed to improve translation would need annotating to reveal possible ambiguities, which can arise as a result of any of the overlapping phenomena we're considering here: collocation, colligation, semantic preference. Given such corpora [Don't you mean 'corpuses' - Ed?], a technical manual might be...
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'Colligation' was the 1st new term I learned from this course (W1). For decades, I've been distinguishing 'grammatical collocations' from 'vocabulary collocations', advising students "If you use a preposition with a verb that doesn't 'go with' that verb, it 'feels' more like a grammar issue than a vocabulary one."
But now I have a new word to make this...
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@ElifSayar - I Googled "Online Oxford Collocation of English" and found an old 2013 website not related to the real Oxford dictionaries. Did I get the wrong one?
All the corpus-based learner's dictionaries in print (Cambridge, Collins, Longman, Macmillan, Oxford) have great collocation information; their online versions have a lot of it too - try them all...
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@TeresaHolmes - well if we can finish weeks 1 & 2 in week 3, we'll be on week 4 by week 5 ;-)!
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Being poor, the great unwashed couldn't afford to spend a penny in one of the public water closets that the Victorians added as they reconstructed and extended the lost sewers of their Roman heroes.
Try spending a penny at your public convenience nowadays and you'll see that not a little has, eh, changed since then.
Ode to the Ladies and Gents - 14s3d...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
I would like to find out if it is possible to mathematically model language as a waveform of which persons are the particles, analogous to such wave/particle dualities in physics.
Then (like Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation' trilogy), we might contrive an ecospherical psychohistory, wherein partially differentiated sums of all future probabilities...
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Good question, and an important issue, Susan.
Yes, most learner dictionaries do signal verb-noun collocations of significant general frequency (e.g. in shaded 'Collocation' text boxes under dictionary headwords).
Your point (that of their importance in formulating the key terms of specialised disciplines) is a crucial one in the growing area of EMI...
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Yes!
And the study of this might relate to my earlier observation that proofreading tools such as Grammarly now purport to 'correct' inappropriately archaic or offensive language 'as-you-type'. So how are they tracking the rapidly shifting usage trends, which since we first spoke woke have in awoken speech awakened bigly spoken changes?!
["Correct...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Both words have multiple uses: cause as noun and verb, and in collocating phrases such as 'just cause'.
Diamond as a noun has idiomatic uses, also in collocating phrases ("He's a bit of a rough diamond" etc.).
So I'd have to write dictionary entries covering the most frequent of these in most useful order, which of course begs the question of what corpus...
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I can't help positing* a quantum theory clarification. Were speakers truly particles in a waveform dubbed language (or LANgauge), they couldn't speak over each other without violating Pauli's exclusion principle.
*Grammarly tells me I have misspelt the word 'posting'. But it can't tell me whether the cat in Schrodinger's box is alive or dead. Does that mean...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Week 2 is nearly over and I'm still way back in Week 1. I guess those warnings about how much there is to explore here and how we'll have to learn to dip selectively in and out were right!
For now, I'll just share this, my favourite distractor from the Week 1 Quiz (1.12)
What a collocation is NOT:
"The tendency of speakers to talk over each...
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Amazing, I must read that article, thanks - and query the hierarchical relationship between 'genre' and 'style' framing its 'new textual genres'.
I read some writings of China's Nobel Laureate Mo Yan a few years back, and they blew me away with their sentence-by-sentence capacity to blend contradictory moods and moments into astonishing human insights. But...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Patrick Hubbuck
@BenLarkin - yes, I was being cheeky, pointing out spelling mistakes or typos in the professional profile of our top linguistics expert! But doing it in a playful way, in keeping with the issues on this course. Did you notice the one deliberate spelling mistake or typo I put in my post? [That's not to say there aren't any accidental ones - I checked very...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Eduardo Mórlan
@EduardoMórlan I'm good! Finding it hard to keep up with this course. Hope all's well in Mexico :-)
I was told the bowdlerisers of Shakepsepeare and Chaucer also put cloth coverings on piano, table and chair legs in case they evoked offensive fantasies of female ankles!
But more and more these days, when I look up what I thought I knew, I discover that...
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When I edit these posts, I take great care to make them use exactly 1200/1200 characters.
Yet after I've posted them, if I re-open one for re-editing, the character count underneath it no longer says 1200/1200. Instead, it'll say something like 1208/1200.
Hypothesis: while in editing mode, FutureLearn's forum post editor doesn't count paragraph returns...
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In my Post under 1.8, I raised the issue of markups for multiple potential meanings of one word in one context in a corpus. There, I was considering the implications of ambiguities (grammatical and semantic) for that most difficult written form of language to translate: poetry. I wondered how effectively computers can be programmed to rapidly and reliably...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
I did it my way ...
After watching each part (1.7-1.11) of Tony's introductory lecture, I wrote a Post here under it, before going on to watch the next part.
What made this enjoyable was the way in which questions raised for me in one part (and therefore explored in my Post below it) went on to be clarified by Tony in his next part (as here, regarding...
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One way in which the Collins Cobuild English Learner Dictionaries revolutionised TEFL was in their introduction of concordance samplers into classrooms. One good example of an applicable insight "almost impossible to recover from the subconscious by introspection" (Tony, 1.10) was that 'of' - in its normal British English usage - is not really a...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
"By the way," says Tony, "‘corpora’ is the plural of corpus. It’s a very unfortunate plural, but that’s the plural we’re stuck with. So, different types of corpora, we have to say."
For the sake of argument, I'll challenge this. Language is fluid, and usages change over time, as diachronic corpuses can help us discover. So if in online forums like these,...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Riveting!
It all goes to show how important it is, in initially setting up a corpus, to markup those attributes of its content you are aiming to investigate: from header and paragraph level; down through grammatical word-type; to the prefixes, roots and suffixes one might want to analyse as lemma or for etymological purposes; even all the way down to the...
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
Excellent clarification of the basic approach. I particularly like the emphasis on the counterintuitive results we can expect: "[Corpora] show us things that we’re doing routinely on a daily basis, which we find it very hard to imagine, if you like, that we’re doing."
Over 25 years of EFL teaching, I've noticed how 'native speakers' - while struggling to...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Eduardo Mórlan
@EduardoMórlan - 2 or 3 years on from the Soton EMI MOOC, we meet again! I'm also fascinated by diachronic shifts in so-called 'politically correct' language. In a post elsewhere, I noted that Grammarly can supposedly help you 'correct' archaic or offensive terms. And yet using the Firefox Grammarly Add-on to 'correct' my posts in this forum, even the ordinary...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Andreas Werle
@ZhengkunZhang - I think your 2 'how's are exactly the 'how's @AndreasWerle has joined this course to find answers to!
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Andreas Werle
@RichardDennehy - at the root of the Oxfordian theory, isn't there a snobbish refusal to accept that an ordinary bloke with no university education could've written such insightful and influential literature? Or maybe Oxfordians - like flat earthers - merely profess to hold their alternative belief as an attention-seeking pose, to elicit the awe and ire of the...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Sondos Odeh
@SondosOdeh: Nice to meet you. Did you notice that our course leader Tony has done corpus linguistics projects on Arabic (amongst many other languages)? May I ask you a question: How is the current demand for English educators at Turkish universities, and how is the pandemic currently impacting on-campus activities in Turkey?
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to William Hawkridge
@WilliamHawkridge: I like your observation about 'comforts' in Austen's novels. I remember as an early teenager avidly reading the novels of prolific UK science-fantasy writer, Michael Moorcock; and noticing therein the frequency of 'sardonic' - a word I'd never read anywhere else before!
Before we set out to analyse and interpret, I suppose we'll have to...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Patrick Hubbuck
I'm also the sort of person who 1) thinks he has to use EXACTLY 1,200 characters, and 2) replies to himself so as not to feel lonely online ;-)
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Patrick Hubbuck made a comment
I'm a Senior Language Lecturer in EAP at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, PRC - although thanks to Covid-19, I've done my last 3 semesters' work for XJTLU remotely, from Shiojiri-shi, Nagano-ken, Japan. I'm currently on unpaid leave pending a return to my Chinese campus complicated by return logistics straight out of the...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Jing HUANG
Yes, I'm fascinated by some of CASS's research angles, such as 'hate speech'.
Recently, Chinese students at my EMI university in Suzhou (Jiangsu Prov.) complained that Grammarly (which they use) keeps 'correcting' their use of passives. So I investigated, and found that 'Passive voice' is one of the 'Writing style' suggestion types you can switch on or off...
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to William Hawkridge
I learned a new word for the first time in ages. Never again will I refer to 'grammatical collocations' now I know how to 'colligate'. :-)
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Patrick Hubbuck replied to Sun Xiaoyu
@SunXiaoyu & @ZhangYu - one good thing about FutureLearn MOOCs is that, when live streaming doesn't work well, you can download the video in SD and play it freely afterwards :-)
