But seeing as some of my BLSCI colleagues might be awaiting something from one who could talk some smack but still state facts, get down to brass tacks, not exactly attack but risk a lack of tact, and maybe attract fellow hacks to take a crack at McCracken. Wise-cracks and shellackings, maybe followed by retractions and being sent home packing.

Or maybe a pact. But not exactly to shack up intellectually with this jack of all trades and his tract on value-extraction.

Alack, what to make of McCracken?

I started calling myself an anthropologist not too long ago, and since Dr. McCracken does as well, I suppose we have something in common. I suppose our differences are an invitation for me to police the boundaries of our discipline. The stakes seem to be broader than just defining what a proper understanding of anthropology or ‘culture’ can or should be. In any case, for all their propensity to deploy opaque jargon, anthropologists don’t maintain a monopoly on the concepts and methodologies of their field. Ethnography is increasingly popular in business, law, design, as well as other academic disciplines. The right to talk about culture belongs to everyone. I don’t think many anthropologists would object to that sentiment.

That said, McCracken’s take-away message was that successful companies need to be hip to culture and its vagaries, especially of a certain category of people he referred to repeatedly as the ‘Qydz.’

The Qydz are, as I understood McCracken, a rather large and underexamined tribe. They actually live among us, rather than in some faraway rainforest or mountainous highland. (At least, we aren’t so interested in the Qydz residing in such remote lands.)

These Qydz are the lifeblood of contemporary capitalism. Any business worth its salt should devote its energies toward studying the values and aesthetic tastes of this people. For the Qydz are nothing else if not consumers. And oh, the stuff they consume! Baggy jeans! Flip-out keyboard texting gizmos! Snapple!

Apparently, the Qydz are not born or raised. They have no provenance, no parentage, no institutions that foster their development. They simply appear in their present form (or ‘respawn’ as they might say in their own video-game parlance), as autonomous beings arranged into ‘generations’ we can only designate as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ (no word yet on any Generation Z sightings). Qydz culture prizes individualism, but their collective will is mighty and a thing to be feared only if business does not have the products to appease them.

Three female Qydz foraging for sustenance (not such a rare sighting, actually)

For McCracken, the wants of the Qydz are limited only to their own imaginations, which, he contends, are limitless. Business can only hope to track the Qydz desires by means of increasingly sophisticated trend-tracking technology and–gasp!–ethnographic methods. Yes, really getting to ‘hang’ with some Qydz is a thrilling and potentially dangerous experience.

Academics spend oodles of time with Qydz, but McCracken may lament the time professors waste speaking to them, teaching them of our ways of life, rather than listening to and observing them. Pity.

It is increasingly clear that the Qydz are a natural resource we must safeguard carefully, lest they begin to imagine and wish for things business cannot manufacture and sell to them.

Great former tribesman Qydz referred to as Qurt Qobayn (center). He is still revered on t-shirts and other sacred memorabilia as an unsatisfied customer.

While it’s true that this is a respected and reliable one-stop reference place to find (and preserve) such materials, given the contemporary focus of the class, YouTube offered hours of browsing enjoyment. The two resources serve very difficult functions—and have very different levels of functionality. (Especially since the Hemispheric Insititute’s archive is frequently restricted to performances that they themselves have had filmed at their own events.)

I don’t know if it counts as procrastination or further research, but I whittled away many evenings that semester watching clips of the dynamic performers we had been studying.

First, here’s a link to a performance by Mexican cabaret performer, Astrid Hadad, from the HIDVL. Her performance, ‘Amores Pelos,’ was filmed in Monterrey, Mexico, in July 2001, as part of the Second Annual Hemispheric Institute Seminar. It’s a long clip, but worth the time to see the costumes changes involved in the “wearable art” of her hair. The site provides a bit of context for those first meeting this artist’s work: “Hadad blends popular songs and ranchero, son and bolero music and political satire with highly theatrical precision to create a genre of music she calls ‘Heavy Nopal’.”

And then, below, is another unique Hadad performance, this time from YouTube (and featuring some well-placed self-flagellation). It brings us into the actual performance space, and is part of a larger documentary about Hadad.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutdQW_jz0g[/youtube]

Make Your Own Academic Sentence

After playing around a bit, I came up with “The (re)formation of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the systemization of the nation-state.” Excellent! I can’t wait to put that into my dissertation!

You can spend some good time procrastinating on your actual writing by making sentences containing random phrases like “history as such” and “poetics.” The site also has some excellent writing sources for students and academics alike, such as The Sentence of the Week, where a published sentence is thoroughly critiqued for its positives and negatives, giving us a great sense of what makes a well-written sentence. There’s also this guide to college writing that I’ll surely point out to my students.

But, if procrastinating with random word generators is more your thing, you can always play with the classic Wu-Tang Clan name generator.

Yours,

Tha Eurythmic King of Nowhere

As I continued reading the article, I realized, despite my initial reservations, how promising this project really is. For instance, the authors are asked to select a line from their work to be animated and posted on YouTube. This is a new and very creative form of literary expression that allows for imaginative possibilities and, as Michael Cunningham pointed out, “maintain[s] the integrity of the written word and extend[s] its range.”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPqOy2rvfqM[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdJieivqFQs[/youtube] [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSf_4vxWmxg[/youtube]

I was reminded of a few students in our in-class workshops in the past few weeks whose eyes were constantly on their iPhones. The same happens on the subway, in gym classes, and everywhere we go. As much as I’m reluctant to accept the pervasiveness of the electronic world, I must admit that it can effectively create what Rick Moody has called “new envelopes for [literature’s] message.”

Oral communication instruction is traditionally somewhat neglected in the ESL curricula and services of colleges. Many programs focus on reading/writing proficiency and give only nominal, if any attention to listening/speaking skills. The imbalance is due to a great extent to college entrance requirements and grading practices in college classes: Students are often only tested for reading and writing proficiency but not for speaking skills. With the correlation between spoken and written proficiency in nonnative speakers being only moderate, it is no surprise then that some students graduate with low proficiency in spoken English.

This status quo is in stark contrast to the skills needed for integration into the college community and success in the workplace. In fact, oral communication skills are consistently ranked most important by employers of business as well as liberal arts graduates. Yet, every semester, nonnative students report that they are being asked by teammates not to speak during group presentations so that team grades are jeopardized. They also report being dismissed from job interviews due to comprehension-inhibiting accents.

It is paramount, therefore, that we address oral-communication competence. Two services are available for students at Baruch College: (1) Students can go to the Student Academic Consulting Center (SACC, VC 2-116) and make an appointment for free one-on-one tutorials with a professional speech tutor. (2) Students can visit the new ESL Lab (VC6-121, enter through VC6-120) and practice with the excellent software, audio, and video materials there. See http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for hours, instructions, and materials.

To give an example: It’s the beginning of a semester. An (ideal) instructor collects writing samples and engages his/her students in speaking activities to determine whether a student may need assistance. The student is then encouraged (required?) to make an appointment with one of the speech tutors at SACC (the tutors, by the way, are all professionally trained speech pathologists and ESL specialists). During the first meeting, a diagnostic conversation/reading takes place, and the tutor determines which speech patterns are the cause of he students comprehensibility problems.

While the student may already have an idea about some patterns (e.g., differentiating between /r/ and /l/), some problems are more difficult to determine. For example, many languages have a syllable-timed rhythm (i.e., syllables have the same length); English, however, is a stressed-timed language (i.e., the rhythm of a sentence is determined by the regular beat of the stressed syllables only). Try to say the following sentences out loud as you clap your hands on the stressed syllables. You will notice that the sentences take the same amount of time, although the first one is much shorter than the last one. This is because of the stress-timed nature of English.

The lion came.
The lioness came.
The lionesses came.
The lionesses arrived.
The lionesses have arrived.

Comprehensibility problems often arise from stress problems; e.g., when a speaker from a syllable-timed language used his/her native rhythm to speak English. A staccato delivery ensues that makes it difficult for English listeners–who are used to listening for word and sentence stress–to follow the speaker.

In any case, once the student is diagnosed, the tutor will help the student produce the speech pattern correctly in one-on-one tutorials. When the student can produce the speech pattern, he/she needs to practice to commit the new pattern to muscle memory. It is said that our body has to practice a new movement (including speech organ movement) 1,000 times before the movement becomes muscle memory. Please see the Accent Reduction FAQs at http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/esllab for more information.

Ideally, a student should see a speech tutor once a week and practice individually in the lab several times a week. With regular practice, significant progress can be made, even in the course of one semester. Please alert your students to these services. and remind them that, to change speech patterns, regular practice is necessary

Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.

MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSCS_KxYAk[/youtube]

To my credit I came up with an in-class exercise based on a segment of a chapter that allowed students to enter the content imaginatively, and I think it was rather successful.

However, I still have this major misgiving about how to use these books to foster critical thinking and I was wondering if anyone had thoughts or ideas about this. For instance, what are the benefits of using them? How can you liven them up? Where does argumentative and critical thinking come in?

They look something like this:

These things are a minor nuisance, the price we pay to protect the sites we need from bombardment by unwanted traffic or use as a launching pad for spam attacks.  According to researchers at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, “about 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.”

What if the time spent solving CAPTCHAs could be harnessed for productive purposes?  Thanks to reCAPTCHA, it can.

Carnegie Mellon is currently working with two organizations (the Internet Archive and the New York Times) to employ humans to decipher scans of text that are unreadable by OCR software (Optical Character Recognition).  If your site uses reCAPTCHA, your users can contribute to a major digitization project.  For details on how the technology works, click here.

This is the latest innovative effort to maximize productivity in a focused way by taking advantage of the reach of the web to congeal a distributed knowledge network.  reCAPTCHA has tapped into existing knowledge and processes to build yet more knowledge through another process.  All of us together are smarter than we are added up.

Brilliant work.

(Nod to Mikhail for the heads up about this technology.)

Now that’s American ingenuity.

Perhaps it is a common or at least recommended practice among professors to integrate CPE-like assignments into their courses if many of their students either have not yet taken or failed the exam.  Until recently I have not encountered in regular classes any assignments that came close to the CPE prompts.  I was in fact very surprised when the professor teaching the section of Great Works for ESL students shared with me her two-fold writing assignment that articulates the same goals and criteria as the CPE.  The subjects of this compare/contrast essay are of course literary texts.   I have not yet discussed the assignment with the students, but I am sure they’ll appreciate their professor’s effort to bridge the cold and scary CUNY testing world with the comfort of classroom learning.

Why bother when surely the tasks involved in the CPE exam require the level of critical thinking and writing abilities that develop gradually in different classes and through different activities in the course of their first few years in college?  But many students still dread the exam and postpone it for as long as possible.  Many do not always realize that attending a CPE workshop plays just one part, and probably not the largest one, in their exam preparation.  It is the work they do in their classes that truly prepares them for this test.  And perhaps reminding them about this through course materials that share the exam’s rhetoric would create a more positive and serious attitude not only toward the exam, but  toward college work in general. 

Working with the Draft: Techniques for Helping Students Revise

A few weeks ago, the democrats debated each other in front of a live audience, as usual, but also on millions of computer screens via You Tube. The format of this event, co-sponsored by CNN, was a bit different than usual. The internet users were invited to submit their questions on video as well, and those were played on a large screen and then the responses of each candidate were also posted online.

Is this format really a revolutionary new approach? I am sure it was meant to attract young voters, and offer a “fresh” approach to an old, tired way of doing things. But was this a successful attempt or simply a rehash of “same old” with a new technology attached to it? Jon Stuart’s Daily Show had a rather harsh critique of the idea and its execution.

More recently, the LOGO, LGBT channel, hosted a democratic presidential debate as well.

This was a live debate, where a couple of moderators asked the candidates questions about issues that the LGBT community cares about. It is also an innovative way of doing things, and certainly this type of event would probably not be possible 10 years ago. But there were no technological gimmicks here, and yet I think I learned more about the candidates’ opinions about a few specific things. In this particular case the technology of the You Tube/CNN debate did not contribute to providing information or clarifying the issues.

High-Stakes Writing
High-stakes writing assignments are expected to be completed according to formal academic and disciplinary conventions and usually count for a significant part of a student’s grade; examples include essay exams, research papers, lab reports, and critical response papers. This term is generally paired with the term “low-stakes writing” (see below), and distinguished from informal writing that is often exploratory and non-graded. In Britton’s framework, the function of high-stakes writing would be “transactional,” that is, to get the business of college done.

Journal
Generally informal, journals can be a productive place for students to record their thoughts, experiences, questions, and informal writings throughout college, in all disciplines, as well as in their daily lives. A variation on the journal is a “double-entry journal.” Students write in two columns: the first column contains quotations from a reading; the second column contains their reactions or responses to those quotations. Many variations are possible. Students might be asked, for example, to use paraphrases or summaries in the first column instead of quotations. Triple-entry journals, in which the third column might be used for peer responses, research questions, etc., are also commonly used.

Language
To talk about writing is to talk about the uses and functions of language, as well as to talk about politics, history, and culture. All converge at CUNY, which is an extraordinary crossroads of languages: our students speak (and may write in) 131 first languages other than English.

Literacy
The term literacy refers to the ability to use language—to read, write, listen and speak. In recent years, educators and administrators have added “numeracy,” “multimedia literacy,” “information literacy,” and “quantitative literacy” to the literacies expected of college students. Of course, what it means to “use language” successfully is a cultural and political question.

Low-Stakes Writing
Low-stakes writing activities provide students with an opportunity to experiment with ideas, form, and style without the pressure associated with correctness. The term “low-stakes” represents the level of expectation that a student and instructor bring to a particular assignment, meaning that low-stakes writing should count very little (if at all) toward the student’s final grade, while high-stakes writing is presumably graded. Examples of low-stakes writing include: journals, reflective responses, and freewriting. Some argue that the more frequently students engage in low-stakes writing, the more confidence and expertise they will apply to formal, high-stakes assignments. In Britton’s framework, low-stakes writing would be “expressive.”

Minimal Marking
The principle behind minimal marking is that correcting each technical mistake is not the most useful way to respond to students’ work; minimal marking encourages a focus on the larger ideas the student is trying to communicate, and emphasizes responding to those. Faculty may choose to point out one or two recurring technical errors, but should focus their responses on the work as a whole. Many faculty are concerned that they spend a great deal of time marking and correcting grammatical and other technical errors, and proponents of minimal marking argue that this practice reduces the amount of time spent correcting, and therefore allows for a greater number of writing assignments. Moreover, some research has shown that students can be overwhelmed by too many comments, and have difficulty prioritizing and addressing them in effective ways.

Paper
Common college short-hand for a formal, graded assignment of a specific length. “Paper” covers a lot of ground, from “essay” to “report,” and is also often modified by adjectives like “research,” or “compare/contrast.” Some argue that WAC/WID provides a space for educators to reflect on the many assumptions that cohere around vague terms such as “paper” or “write” or “composition.”

Peer Review
Practice of having students read and provide comments and suggestions for each other’s writing. This is generally done in class in pairs or small groups. Also referred to as peer editing, peer review is often guided through the use of handouts or worksheets that assist students in reading others’ writing through various critical lenses.

Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively, using the principles and rules of composition drawn from classical traditions, typically tied to the art of persuasion. Classical rhetoricians were interested in dividing rhetoric into its component parts. For example, Roman rhetorician Cicero identified five rhetorical components: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciato. Early scholars and teachers of composition tended to discuss and teach rhetorical modes: persuasion, description, argument, compare-contrast, etc. More recently, WAC practitioners have focused on the rhetorical nature of all language, emphasizing the rhetorical dimensions and methods of the various disciplines. (For a set of definitions of rhetoric offered by rhetoricians both ancient and contemporary, visit this site.) All these approaches share the fundamental belief that a speaker or writer will use any given language more effectively if s/he is consciously aware of its rhetorical dimensions.

Scaffolding
Scaffolding is a term drawn, primarily, from the work of Russian cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to represent the centrality of social interaction in the development of cognition. The term has come to be used within education to refer to the ways in which complex projects can be broken down into manageable pieces, with the instructor/expert guiding the students/novices through the entire process, and encouraging students to move to higher levels of expertise. Faculty can monitor how students are developing their ideas throughout, and provide assistance if students encounter obstacles.

SWE (Standard Written English)
There exist many language communities within the larger rubric of the English language. SWE refers to that form of written English that is agreed upon by most publishers, colleges, and standardized tests to be the most “correct” and thus most understandable by all speakers and users of English regardless of differences in dialect or usage. This variant is sometimes called “Standard American English” (SAE), as well. The debate about how to teach what students need to know to gain fluency in Standard Written English (see below) is an important, current cultural, political, and historical debate throughout the English-speaking world.

Common WAC/WID Terminology (Part I)

Audience
This term is used to define those for whom a piece of writing is intended. The identity of the audience shapes the writing, as writers adapt their tone and content to the situation. It is especially important to keep in mind the difference in audiences implied by discipline (the audience for a lab report, for example, is different than that for a performance review).

Essay
In the classical sense, an essay is a text in which the first-person singular comments upon—questioning, debating, arguing about—a subject. Although “essay” is often used interchangeably with “paper,” the term properly refers to a type of writing that blended the personal with the academic. As a verb, “essay” means an initial, and sometimes tentative, attempt—a “try.”

Expressive, Transactional, Poetic Uses of Language
Britton and his team developed a framework for classifying school writing, based on sociolinguistic theories of the functions of language (drawn primarily from the work of linguist Roman Jacobson). They were concerned that most school writing was written to the “teacher-as-examiner” and that students were not encouraged to try out the whole linguistic keyboard. The three categories of language function, according to Britton in Development of Writing Abilities, are:

1) expressive—writing that is “close to the self,” representing the “ebb and flow” of a writer’s thoughts and feelings.
2) transactional—“language to ‘get things done’ or participate in the world’s affairs . . . to inform, persuade, or instruct.”
3) poetic—“writing as a verbal construct, a patterned verbalization [poem, story, song, etc.] of the writer’s feelings and ideas.”

Error
Error is closely connected to the study of grammar, basic writing, and ESL. Error analysis is a technique for identifying possible underlying causes of mistakes in sentence structure, verb form, etc. The identification of recurring “patterns of error” in a writer’s text is a widely used pedagogical tool to reduce a seemingly large number of errors to a handful of teachable categories of error (subject-verb agreement, possessives, etc.).

Freewriting
Freewriting is an informal writing activity in which students write “freely” without concern for grammar, punctuation, and other constraints. Freewriting is often considered a staple in composition pedagogy: typically, students are directed to write in class without stopping for a set period of time (usually just a few minutes). An instructor may specify a topic or leave it entirely up to the students. What is done with the writing varies widely: the texts may be read out in class to prompt discussion, or used as a source of ideas for another writing assignment, or not used directly by the instructor at all.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics
Grammar is the study of how words and their component parts combine to form sentences; the system of rules inherent in any language (from the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed). Grammar is structure, form, syntax; by the time children are four or five, they’ve “got” the structure of the language they hear all around them. Grammar needs to be distinguished from usage and mechanics. Usage refers to the way in which language is conventionally applied within the culture and reflects an awareness of one’s audience. Voice and word choice, for instance, will depend upon the formality/ informality of the writing situation and may derive from disciplinary standards as prescribed by particular style guides as MLA, APA, or the Chicago Manual of Style. Mechanics include the technical aspects of writing, such as spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

Summary of Key WAC/WID Concepts

The original groundbreaking idea for writing across the curriculum came out of England in the late 1960s, and was focused on the relationships between writing and learning in the schools. In 1975 James Britton and his colleagues published a report of their foundational research in The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). In the United States a number of composition scholars, building in part on their British predecessors, provided an institutional shape to writing across the curriculum initiatives.

What follows is a quick overview of issues and debates that mark the development of this movement.

WAC, WID, WIP:

Some academics and administrators use the following terms and acronyms interchangeably: Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), Writing in the Disciplines (WID), and Writing in the Professions (WIP). For others, the terms are pedagogically, historically, and politically loaded.

Broadly speaking, the central premise behind WAC is that students need to write, informally and formally, in all of their courses (not just in English and composition classes), in order to develop expertise as academic writers. WAC is often considered a pedagogical movement, working to change modes of learning and teaching, particularly the reliance on multiple choice and short answer modes of assessment. Participants argue that WAC not only makes students stronger writers, but also provides more opportunities for students to integrate their learning across the disciplines. They also claim that there are writing experiences and exercises that cut across the disciplines.

Proponents of WID, on the other hand, have argued that the WAC programs that developed in the United States should be more focused on writing within disciplinary frameworks rather than writing as a “process” that is often decontextualized, too focused on expressive writing, and overly personal. WID, therefore, privileges disciplinary contexts and representational forms and styles, recognizing the particular modes and conventions within specific academic discourses. As an extension of WID, Writing in the Professions (WIP) focuses on writing within specific professions, rather than disciplinary bodies of knowledge.

WAC/WID at CUNY encourages the colleges to develop programs that situate writing across and within all academic departments and programs, spanning the disciplines and professions.

I’ll be posting a few choice items from the handbook in the next few days. Next up: Part 1 of the WAC/WID Glossary. Many thanks to CUNY’s 2007-2008 WAC/WID Planning Committee for putting the handbook together. Very useful stuff for us WAC/WID types.

I have just found Sounds Familiar?, a fantastic website and have spent much time playing with it. It reminds me of the George Mason University Speech Accent Archive.

The site contains numerous recordings from the British Library of regional accents and dialects from every corner of the UK–some recorded as far back as the 1950s and many recent recordings up until 1999. There is a section on phonological, grammatical, social, and lexical variation: this means you can pick a region on the map and hear and learn about how a given pattern of speech developed, or how it fits with the language spoken in the rest of the UK. You can submit to the database and analyze your own accent, if you are British. You can spend hours clicking on the map of the UK to hear how words are pronounced across the region and how dialects change over time and space. Apparently, there are more than 150 audio clips of Geordie – the dialect of Newcastle-upon-Tyne – arguably one of the most recognizable dialects in Britain. You may want to hear how ethic minorities pronounce British English (check out the sound files for Asian English Phonology), or practice your Received Pronunciation, if you are feeling proper.

It is an interactive site allowing you to investigate how the language changes and progresses over time, using learning modules suited to college or high school students. In fact, the entire site is nested in the website of the British Library, and if you venture into the rest of the site, you’ll find all kinds of treasures.

The Sounds Familiar site is fairly new, hence this Guardian story about it.

The article ends with this passage:

Language evolves for many reasons – even something as superficial as the hegemony of supermarkets, as any Midlander trying to buy a pikelet will tell you. In Sainsbury’s it’s a crumpet or nothing. But change is not something to be judged or mourned; it’s something to be observed and understood. The purpose of the website is to document the history of language – with schools and universities invited to become part of the process by sending in their own regional recordings. As Upton says, “We’re not in the business of preservation. The only language that doesn’t change at all is a dead one.”

I know that there are some for whom this is not a self evident truth and in fact this statement invites controversy. But for those of us who accept it, I think it has implications for how we teach, communicate, and think about pedagogy, especially in a universe as diverse as CUNY and Gotham. Doesn’t it?

And for dessert, and since we are talking about accents, check out this truly bizarre, yet funny, (?) clip:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Here are some examples from native speakers of Georgian, Urdu, Norwegian, and Tamil.

There are currently 661 samples and more are added regularly. Many of them include phonetic transcriptions of the recording and are annotated with phonological generalizations, general rules that help to describe a given speaker’s accent. Samples also include biographical data on the speakers, including age, sex, place of birth, age when they started learning English, the learning method, and a number of other interesting facts.

The interface is very easy to use and there are a number of ways to browse through the archive including by language and region. The search function is quite powerful as well. Seasoned linguists and dabblers alike can spend lots and lots of time on this site. Take a look. (Thanks to Jim of bavatuesdays for the tip.)

As some of you may have heard, Google now lets us search patents issued in the US over the last 100 or so years. Fun stuff. Here are a few relevant to the sorts of conversations that go on around here:

System and method of providing evaluation feedback to a speaker while giving a real-time oral presentation (2002)

Grammar Game (1947)

Game for teaching grammar (1994)

System and method for teaching writing using microanalysis of text (2000)

Device for teaching writing (1912)

Teaching method and apparatus (for expository writing, 1981)

Enjoy.

While reviewing a number of student drafts, I noticed that there are quite a few common errors, like subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, their vs. there, punctuation, etc. I think it might be useful to give out some such reference to students in the beginning of the semester (put it on the CIC’s Blackboard site or just hand it out). A whole chapter from that handbook would probably be daunting (and bulky) for students, so we could develop something more laconic that would include references to additional resources for those who want them. We could even distribute this among teachers, so that they could give it to students selectively. I think especially the professors who are teaching something other than composition or literature would appreciate that. There surely are similar resources online and in different handbooks, but somehow students often don’t get to them.

Do you all think this is worth doing?

And this is not all. There is more to that site than just a thesaurus. It also has interviews with writers and bloggers, and links to useful linguistic resources, as well as links to blogs related to teaching, corporate communications, writing, grammar, kids books, lexicography. I haven’t looked through every corner of that site, but I think that every one of us can find something interesting there.