One important step closer to being Dr. FL Doctor (hee hee)…

Today I presented my dissertation proposal to my committee.  It went pretty well.  I will have to make some substantiative changes to one of the experiment paradigms, but that being the only real revision to the written proposal, I got off relatively light.  I’m officially dissertating now!  The project itself will involve testing Chinese literacy acquisition by native English-speaking students, which will probably require some travel around the country in order to get enough subjects at the higher ends of Chinese literacy that my tests require.  Still, one more big hurdle out of the way on the road to the Ph.D.  This was pretty much the final administrative pit-stop until I defend my dissertation, which, in principle, I’m expecting (if the subject testing proceeds without any major delays) to do in early 2010!

Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all actions, and states that have transpired at an earlier point in time—from their standard English and language arts programs.

In the most dramatic display of the new trend yet, the Tennessee Department of Education decided Monday to remove “-ed” endings from all of the state’s English classrooms, saving struggling schools an estimated $3 million each year. Officials say they plan to slowly phase out the tense by first eliminating the past perfect; once students have adjusted to the change, the past progressive, the past continuous, the past perfect progressive, and the simple past will be cut. Hundreds of school districts across the country are expected to follow suit.

Language in humans has evolved culturally rather than genetically, according to a study by UCL (University College London) and US researchers. By modelling the ways in which genes for language might have evolved alongside language itself, the study showed that genetic adaptation to language would be highly unlikely, as cultural conventions change much more rapidly than genes. Thus, the biological machinery upon which human language is built appears to predate the emergence of language.

I must confess that I was rather shocked that the Baldwin effect was even considered a possibility for explaining divergent language features.  The speed with which language changes seems to preclude this, and that is exactly what the investigators discovered.  If we think about it, we see pretty profound shifts in language use even over a human lifespan (hence the sometimes communication gap between grandparents and grandchildren, or the fact that we can often guess approximate age based upon what expressions one uses).  Thus cultural forces seem to be the “smoking gun” behind language change.  The basic neural and physical mechanisms of human language production do not seem to have changed since prehistoric man.

Also, as the authors of the study correctly point out, if there were a genetic basis to language shift, this would indicate that certain, isolated people groups would have considerable difficulty learning other languages.  American/Chinese/etc. jokes aside, there is no basis for such suspicions, as all humans learn all human languages just fine — given the proper learning environment.  In the simplest possible terms, if you put a baby of any race/ethnicity with say…  an British couple to be raised, that baby is going to end up speaking like a Brit, accent and all…

Sorry…  This has nothing whatsoever to do with language learning, but it’s easily the funniest thing I’ve seen today.  Enjoy!

In the hectic bustle called “my life,” I managed to completely forget to wish everyone a happy (Chinese) new year yesterday.  My bad…

Exposure to the sound patterns of another language, even if it is initially meaningless, could hold the key to quickly picking up a foreign tongue, says a researcher…

Listening to a language’s sound patterns was critical as it set up structures in the brain required to learn the words, he found.“Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words,” he said. “Neural tissue required to learn and understand a new language will develop automatically from simple exposure to the language - which is how babies learn their first language.”

This works on two different levels.  First, familiarity of sound patterns plays a huge role in recall.  Being able to distinguish and categorize a sound pattern allows for easier storage.  Annecdotally, I have noticed that students tend to recall words with familiar sound patterns (especially words that sound like words in their native language) much more easily than words with unfamiliar sound patterns.  Chinese tones, the French “r” sound, and the like all discourage memorizing and data retrieval.  The second level is that of affect.  The more familiar the language’s sounds are, the less intimidating it will be.  Even if one speaks next to nothing, the more “familiar” a language sounds, the more willing most people will be to give it a shot.  For instance, even though most Americans know nothing about either, if you listened to two conversations, one in Indonesian and the other in Vietnamese, and then asked the listener which language sounds “harder” (or some variant on “which would you rather learn”), the less familiar sounds of Vietnamese would make it the near universal choice as both the harder language and the more unlikely choice to be studied (unless the listener was looking for a challenge).

The interesting part of these findings: they may well give some justification for some fun language exposure before beginning actual language study — just to accustom the ears to the sounds of the language (i.e., not listening for comprehension).  “Listening to songs, movies and even foreign news reports on the internet were all easy ways to expose the brain to foreign language sounds, Dr Sulzberger said.”  Sounds like a fun activity, and may well be worth devoting some initial class time to…

This has been the hot topic of my department today.  From the Language Log….

I stumbled across this tonight, and just had to post…

I’ve been offered a marketing position with a foreign company in shanghai, but was shocked to hear that the salary is only 10,000RMB before tax, plus a 1000RMB monthly accommodation allowance.

To me this seems ridiculous, and something not worth even considering, as it’s less than I earn working part-time, just 10hours per week, here in London.

note: The entry is over 3 years old, so the numbers are likely to have shifted, but they’re still illustrative of a point.

I’ve oft come across these incredulous reactions to foreign salaries.  Simply put, if you’re moving to a developing nation, your salary is likely to take a nose-dive.  While there are certain exceptions to the rule (international schools, certain foreign companies and NGOs, and most people who are transferred within their company to a foreign post), typically if you’re recruited from abroad or hired locally, you’ll be dealing with a local(ish) salary.  Oftentimes, the salary is still much better than that of local hires, but compared to salaries in the developed world, they seem outragiously small.  University instructors in some parts of China, for instance, will earn $500 or less per month.  In Thailand, the starting EFL salary is usually in the neighborhood of $800/month.  How can one justify giving up a salary that’s probably 4-8x bigger to move abroad?

The key is to think in terms of 1) quality of life; and 2) the cost of living on the local economy.  The first issue is intensely personal, as the quality and enjoyability of any foreign location depends mostly upon the individual, and may not be something that one can be too sure of before packing one’s bags and going.  However, the cost of living is a factor that is quite researchable.  Friends working in China have often told me that, while their salaries are a mere $750/month, it can feel like a king’s ransom because the cost of living where they are is so low.  As my friend put it, his quality of life there on $750/month was considerably higher than it was in the US making circa $36K/yr. as a high school teacher.  Mind you, this will be goal dependent too.  If you have high savings goals, such work in China would probably not work out, as even if you saved, say, half your paycheck, that still wouldn’t be all that much…  If quality of living is your highest goal, however, often moving to a low cost area will win out.  It’s fairly incredible living in areas where you can eat out for less than $1.

The appeal of this sort of low-cost and low-pay overseas work is largely dependent upon salary potential, and thus age becomes a factor for most.  For instance, when I first worked in Taiwan (many moons ago!), I was only making around $20K/year, which may seem low, but the low taxes (6%!) and low cost of living meant that for years I was both taking home more and saving more of my salary than would have been possible teaching in the U.S.  I calculated at one point, based upon the median teaching salary in the U.S., that it wasn’t until my 3rd year in Taiwan (and 6th year of teaching) that my savings from lower tax rate and absence of insurance premiums made my potential take-home salary in the U.S. actually higher than my take-home in Taiwan…  And even then, with the lower cost of living it was no contest.  At that point in time, I was putting my wife through university, living quite well, and still saving about 1/3 of my paycheck — something that would have been quite impossible for a comparable teacher in the U.S.  Of course, now, given my advanced degrees and many more years of teaching experience, work in Taiwan, sadly, would be a financial loss.  As one ages, and salary potential rises, such positions start to lose their luster….

Thus, if you find yourself, like the writer of the message linked above, wondering whether or not to even consider a job in another country  where the salary seems like peanuts, you need to:

1) Ask yourself what your financial goals are at this stage in life — maintenance or growth?

2) Investigate the local cost of living.  $800/month may not seem like much when you’re in California, but if you’re in a small town in Thailand where renting a two storey town house might put you back as little as $125, and a good meal can cost as little as a quarter, it may actually afford a nice quality of life.

Ultimately, the value of both salary and location are determined by whether or not you are enjoying yourself.  If the place (and job?) truly make you happy, you’ll be content no matter how low the salary; but if you don’t like the area, people, culture, etc., a 6-digit salary is not going to change that…

Ohio schools need more specially trained teachers to educate a growing number of students whose primary language is not English, a new study says. From 1995 to 2005, the number of so-called English-language learners in Ohio jumped more than 60 percent, to 27,616, according to a study released today by Education Week magazine. The study said the increase was part of a nationwide surge that saw totals triple in some states, primarily in the Southeast.

About 1,200 Ohio teachers certified to teach English as a second language were in classrooms during the 2006-07 school year, the study says. Researchers called for increasing that number by about a third over the next five years.

When Elizabeth Hurd was trapped in a Hamburg train station in 2006 during a riot of soccer fans after a game, people around her were pushing and yelling, but she could not hear a sound. Hurd, a student at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., is deaf, as were her fellow travelers. As the crowd grew more violent, Hurd’s group ran into complications. “A policeman came to me and commanded me to go to the train, and I tried to say no in German, but he didn’t understand me and I couldn’t communicate with him,” she said in an e-mail interview. Hurd and her friends ended up safe that night, but Hurd realized it would be difficult to prevent such situations in the future. “That encounter made me realize that we should have had an interpreter to inform us of what was going on, but there was a lack of availability of international interpreters.”   

Even if the policeman Hurd encountered had been able to sign, the two may have not been able to communicate. Each nation usually has its own distinct sign language, and American Sign Language and German Sign Language may not be mutually comprehensible. Sign language is often overlooked in the today’s debates over the loss of language diversity around the world, yet it is an area in which there is a concerted effort to eliminate the type of linguistic differences others are scrambling to maintain in spoken languages. In 1973, the World Federation of the Deaf created Gestuno, a collection of 1,500 standardized international gestures. But while Gestuno is used at the World Games for the Deaf, it is only signed by a few, making it an impractical tool for Hurd abroad.

Not only is there no effective international sign language, but also, sign language interpreters are few and far between—the bigger problem, in Hurd’s opinion. “[Sign] languages are based on cultures and their customs,” Hurd explained. “I would like to have international interpreters rather than have a new international sign language, because every different culture is unique and should keep its own sign language.”

An interesting conundrum…  Essentially, it’s the same problem as anyone traveling abroad (i.e., facing a foreign language), but it’s complicated by the fact that you’re only dealing with a small subset of the larger population.  Basically, an ASL signer would arrive in a foreign country, have to first seek out fellow deaf (or otherwise sign-capable people), and then negotiate the fact that they sign a different language…  Whew…  The fact that foreign sign languages are not typically taught here, and that ASL-fluent people in the country you’re visiting would be few and far between makes learning to communicate all the more bothersome.  It would be great to simply propose that deaf schools teach foreign sign languages, but I don’t know if the need is even sufficiently wide-spread to merit the cost.  I would imagine that the basis of initial communication with foreign nationals must be a mutually known written language (such as English — which most Germans, at least, would be familiar with).  Without some sort of mutual basis for communication, any study would be slow, indeed.  When I studied Taiwanese sign (informally, and sadly, it’s gone now), fortunately, my instructor could read lips (in Mandarin) and, of course, could write Chinese fluently, so communication was not so much an issue, but if I couldn’t speak Chinese, I’d have to imagine that we wouldn’t have even tried to communicate (which would have been a pity, as he’s a great guy!).