by Michael Swan

Brief abstracts
(supplied by the droid abstract-abstracting service)

450-11 Aligote, Carlos and Colophon, Eulalia. Interlanguage in MA students. South Shields Journal of Prophylactic Linguistics, 22.3 (2004).

Utterances of Applied Linguistics students can be sited along a continuum running from pure L1 forms (e.g. We have to teach them to understand English) to pure TL forms (e.g. Our prime pedagogic task is to foster strategies which will enhance learners’ capacity to attend to the pragmatic communicative semiotic macro-content). The paper offers a choice of five models to account for non-systematic variability in the data, treating L1, IL and TL as hierarchically independent semipermeable systems in each case.

489.6 Smith, Mohammed K, Jones, Jeff and Bangalore-Torpedo, Lieut-Col Alison C. A taxonomy of bibliographies. Zeitschrift für Grundsatzfragen (Munich), 111.1 (2003).

Bibliographies can be classified into epistemic (designed to show what the writer has read) and deontic (aimed at telling the reader what to read). These categories correlate to some extent with defensive and aggressive approaches to bibliography. Special cases studies include the cannibal bibliography, which swallows up smaller bibliographies, the onanistic bibliography, which lists only works by the authors of the article to which it is appended, and the autonomous bibliography, whose accompanying paper has atrophied or completely disappeared. The paper is accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography.

502.3 Carruthers, Norbert St-C Foulkes. Phonetician’s palate. Colorado Review of Articulatory Phonetics, 12.2 (2005).

Phonetician’s palate has attracted some attention in medical circles recently, since the much-publicised case of Professor Solomon Andrex of Knokke, who suffered a spectacular breakdown while researching into nasal plosion. It is now becoming clear that PP is a widespread condition, analogous to the degeneration of the meniscus in “Runner’s Knee”. The palate, weakened by years of cushioning tiny but repeated percussive strikes, loses its resilience and begins to transmit shocks directly to the brain, with the unfortunate results that we see all around us.

550-14 Brisket, Gladys P. Coming clean on cohesion. Reading Research as a Cottage Industry (South Molton), 432.12 (2005).

If you refer more than once to a person, thing or event, the second mention can be made either by using the same words as before (iteration), other content words (synonymy), grammatical substitutes (anaphora) or no words at all (ellipsis). All of these are cohesive devices. This has led some critics of the theory to ask what would not count as a cohesive device. The answer is: nothing. Everything is cohesive. Life itself is a cohesive device.

579.8 Sackbottle, Caliban Q. Does instruction work? An in-depth study. Occasional Papers from the Seville Colloquium, 16 (2003).

A group of four Spanish-speaking nuns from Tierra del Fuego was exposed to comprehensible input containing numerous instances of English quantifiers over a period of six hours. At the same time, they were given explicit instruction in the semantics of English attitudinal disjuncts. A test to determine whether their command of quantifiers had improved more or less than their command of disjuncts was inconclusive: x 2 (1, N = 4) = .68, p > .25.

644.1 Dzhugashvili, J V. An ice-breaker for that first session. The Humane Practitioner (Jackson Hole) 1, 1 (1991).

Get all the students to write out name badges for themselves. Then collect up the name badges, shuffle them and redistribute. Tell students that they have to find and interview “themselves”; they must elicit three new pieces of information about “themselves” that they didn’t know before. Having done this, they must find someone in the class who doesn’t like repairing bicycles, and tell him/her how they feel about what they have just experienced. Identity-transfer of this kind helps students bridge the gap between autocentric and allocentric modes of communication, and prepares the ground for classroom parameter-setting activities.

Originally published in BAAL Newsletter No 39, Summer 1991.