Welcome to the Grey world of Applied
Linguistics
Feel the Greyness
5 multiplied by 5 is 25. Now try and say the opposite. Try to prove that in Europe numbers work in a different way than in Asia or that cultural differences, individual variables, the peculiarities of setting or participants involved may have an influence on a mathematical equation. Your chances, to say the least, are non-existent. Now step out of the black and white universe of natural sciences and go through the threshold of Applied Linguistics.There you are, embrace the Greyness.
Here's the world where phrases like "take it with a grain of salt", "tentative claims", "non-conclusive data", etc come into play. In fact, they are much more common than words as "proven", "enough evidence", "generalizable", etc. Fortunately, linguistic research tries to shed some light on the overwhelming greyness.
One issue, for example, that every teacher asks himself/herself at least once in life is how to give feedback. In what form? How often? Recently I have read a 2009 article on Written Corrective Feedback by Bitchener and Noch. The article, based on a thorough longitudinal experimental study, shows that some Corrective Feedback (CF) is a must in language teaching but does not distinguish any difference of efficiency between different types of CF (written/oral, direct/indirect). The study, focusing on a 10-month teaching experiment targeting on a single grammatical form (a/the in English), provokes obvious questions on its validity and practicality in day-to-day teaching. Here are a few questions that were raised during our class discussion of the article:
1) Both forms of corrections direct or indirect may lead students to improve their work (correct revision), but do they allow them to retain the information long-term?
2) Was the written corrective feedback the only means of imroving the students' skills for using ''a/the'' during the research period (remember that they had long intervals between the tests)?
3) Is it and if yes, how practical is it to apply WCF on a single-error category throughout a long period of teaching-learning process?
These are all valid questions and come to show once again that research in Applied linguistics often times fails to bring any clearness and distinction in our understanding of teaching and language learning. Shades of grey, that's all we can hope for.
Linguistics
Feel the Greyness
5 multiplied by 5 is 25. Now try and say the opposite. Try to prove that in Europe numbers work in a different way than in Asia or that cultural differences, individual variables, the peculiarities of setting or participants involved may have an influence on a mathematical equation. Your chances, to say the least, are non-existent. Now step out of the black and white universe of natural sciences and go through the threshold of Applied Linguistics.There you are, embrace the Greyness.Here's the world where phrases like "take it with a grain of salt", "tentative claims", "non-conclusive data", etc come into play. In fact, they are much more common than words as "proven", "enough evidence", "generalizable", etc. Fortunately, linguistic research tries to shed some light on the overwhelming greyness.
One issue, for example, that every teacher asks himself/herself at least once in life is how to give feedback. In what form? How often? Recently I have read a 2009 article on Written Corrective Feedback by Bitchener and Noch. The article, based on a thorough longitudinal experimental study, shows that some Corrective Feedback (CF) is a must in language teaching but does not distinguish any difference of efficiency between different types of CF (written/oral, direct/indirect). The study, focusing on a 10-month teaching experiment targeting on a single grammatical form (a/the in English), provokes obvious questions on its validity and practicality in day-to-day teaching. Here are a few questions that were raised during our class discussion of the article:
1) Both forms of corrections direct or indirect may lead students to improve their work (correct revision), but do they allow them to retain the information long-term?
2) Was the written corrective feedback the only means of imroving the students' skills for using ''a/the'' during the research period (remember that they had long intervals between the tests)?
3) Is it and if yes, how practical is it to apply WCF on a single-error category throughout a long period of teaching-learning process?
These are all valid questions and come to show once again that research in Applied linguistics often times fails to bring any clearness and distinction in our understanding of teaching and language learning. Shades of grey, that's all we can hope for.
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