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CONTENTS
SAAL Quarterly is under the editorship of Dr T. Ruanni F. Tupas. Please address your correspondence and contributions to: Dr T. Ruanni F. Tupas (elcttr@nus.edu.sg), Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260. 31 October 2003
Research Principles and Thesis Writing: Perceptions
Lakshmy A. Krishnan As indicated by the title, Lakshmy's talk dealt with students' and supervisors' perceptions with regard to the research principles behind thesis writing in the engineering discipline. This talk highlighted a small part of the findings from a larger survey done for a PhD on the composing of literature reviews in postgraduate theses in the engineering discipline. Lakshmy began her talk by stating that the basic premise of her study on thesis-writing in the engineering discipline was that all members within the institution of learning, i.e. the administrators, lecturers, tutors, and students, should be treated as shareholders in this process (Jones, Turner & Street, 1999: p. xvii). She added that quite often, however, a lot of the expectations of these concerned parties remained unexpressed and this, in turn, gave rise to a mismatch between students' perceptions and those of administrators and others. In her study, she also used Cronin's (1984) view on citations that there are basically four loosely defined groups that are involved in the citation process, namely, the quality controllers, the educators, the consumers and the producers. While the supervisors played the triple role of being the quality controllers, the educators and the consumers, the students were the producers. In order to investigate the basic understanding behind research and writing, a survey was conducted on 75 postgraduate students from civil, mechanical and electrical engineering sub-disciplines and 53 supervisors. Basically, the respondents were asked three crucial questions, namely,
The question on audience (1) was considered important as any piece of writing was created for an intended audience and not just for oneself. Even before students can start writing, they need to consider who they are writing for (Swales & Feak, 2000; Paltridge, 2001). The second question on the overall structure of a thesis (2) was asked to determine whether there was a shared understanding among students and supervisors as to the conventions of organizing the thesis. And the last (3) was to find out if both parties felt the need to read about prior research before embarking on one's own work. The findings for the first question echoed Yu's (1998), Thompson's (1999) and Paradis and Zimmerman's (1997), i.e. that the theses were usually written for none other than the supervisor, who is perceived to be the expert who would guide them towards getting the grade to pass. As to what they felt represented a well-structured thesis, civil and mechanical engineering students chose Pattern 1: Introduction → Literature review → Method → Data → Analysis → Conclusion/Recommendation. In this pattern, the literature review is treated as a chapter by itself. The electrical engineering students were almost equally divided between having a specific chapter devoted to the literature review and not having one at all, namely Pattern 2: Introduction together with Literature Review → Method → Data → Analysis → Conclusion/Recommendation. This suggests a slight difference in view within the engineering discipline itself. The last question yielded interesting results. While both supervisors and students acknowledged whole-heartedly that reading other researchers' work was necessary, both presented different sets of reasons for this. Supervisors in all three sub-disciplines seemed to feel that a review of literature in the field was important mainly to avoid duplication of work, to remain updated and to avoid reinventing the wheel whereas the students in the same divisions felt that it was important to review other works to learn how to do their own studies, to improve on existing technology and/or devise new ones, to enlighten one's mind. Students generally felt that this process was important to learn from other research in order to avoid problems and pitfalls, and to decide on best methods to employ in current work. Lakshmy pointed out that the students appeared to appreciate reading prior work as it was an important part of the 'learning process' while supervisors seemed to place importance on the issue of 'time constraint' and focused more on 'accountability'; therefore, they were more pragmatic. The talk was extremely relevant to the audience in that members could relate to the problems identified either from their own experience in supervising postgraduate students or from having had to make choices when writing their own theses. As the audience comprised largely of teachers of communication skills as well as applied and pure linguistics, an interesting question raised was whether or not the expectations of supervisors in humanities studies could be different from those in engineering or the sciences. One explanation offered by another member of the audience was that in engineering, research at PhD level was often done as a 'marketable commodity' and that because these projects were often heavily funded, there was more emphasis on innovation and completing within the time constraint. There was, as a result, less rigour and emphasis placed on analysis and interpretation of previous works. Instead reviewing prior literature was merely seen as a means to avoid repetition. An interesting discussion ensued resulting in a comment by a member of the audience that perhaps it is not only natural but also acceptable that supervisors, being established researchers in their own fields, would have different expectations for valid reasons compared to their students who are novices. Another important issue raised during the discussion was that of plagiarism and the various cultural perceptions with regard to this. It was brought to light that in some countries, accurate citations and proper referencing of sources were not regarded as important requirements in scholarly writing because of the perception that using someone else's work in your own was merely an indication of 'accumulation of knowledge'. Often students from these cultures brought these perceptions with them when they came to study in local universities. Finally, attention was turned to the actual skills involved in writing literature reviews and how best to teach them. It was brought to light that many students came to the universities equipped with summary-writing skills. However, it was noted that since writing a literature review involved interpreting and critical appraisal of what had previously been done in the field, the task of going over and above summarizing, was more difficult and sometimes totally alien to these students. Since students actually learned more about the area of study through this kind of critical writing, it was agreed that one way to train them might be to get students to do an annotated bibliography, i.e., to instruct students to write one or two comments on the summaries that they write. Laksmy's talk was not only informative but also thought-provoking both for researchers and teachers as the audience went away with greater awareness of perceptions, possible mismatches and the consequent urgent need to bridge these gaps. References
Reviewed by Radhika Jaidev ↑ Top | ← Publications BOOK REVIEWS
English in Singapore: Research on Grammar As stated in the book announcement in SAAL Quarterly 63:11, this book presents a collection of state-of the-art research addressing several aspects of the grammar of Singapore English (SgE). Chapters 1 to 9 offer descriptions of features of SgE such as null constituents, verbal tense and discoursal particles, from various theoretical perspectives that include discussion of cross-linguistic influences on SgE uses. Chapter 10 to 15 address issues in the teaching of grammar in Singapore schools, including topics as varied as the use of sentence connectors in written compositions, the pitfalls of prescriptive recommendations on language use, teachers' beliefs vs. teaching practice and students' evaluation of teachers' feedback on their work. Chapter 16 analyses uses of grammar in Singaporean creative literature, and chapter 17 gives a first collection of current and past studies on the grammar of SgE, in the form of a substantial bibliography of over 230 items. The set of collected papers favours breadth over depth, as expected of a first publication on the broad topic encompassed in the book's title and subtitle. Breadth concerns both the range of topics covered and the different varieties of SgE itself that are addressed, including Singapore Colloquial English, implicitly or explicitly attested in the titles or text of each chapter. The reader is able to form a relevant picture of current research on the grammar of the variety of English used locally, complete with interesting side-insight into which features catch the attention of researchers, who include native Singaporeans and non-native long-time residents in the country. The book consists of short chapters, averaging 10 pages each, and is entirely data-driven. Many chapters are based on the NIE Corpus of Singapore Spoken English (Deterding & Low 2001). The book is also data-friendly, in that its purpose is to describe how English is used in Singapore, not to use the data as examples of how SgE deviates from other Englishes. The focus is on what people say, on the language that is actually used, for the purposes that it actually serves. Most of the features discussed in the book concern native-to-native Singaporean uses, whether colloquial or school-bound, spoken or written. The book therefore provides a convincing set of findings on the grammar of SgE, whether the analyses treat Singaporean data according to approaches that became established in analyses of other varieties of English, for example, taking grammatical subjects as omitted and not as inserted (chapters 1 to 3), or propose new approaches for typically Singaporean features, for example, the findings that discourse particles function as topic markers and occur in high register varieties of SgE, refuting the urban myth that associates these particles with uneducated uses of language (chapter 7). Not all of the analyses are, however, equally compelling or equally well-argued. The taxonomy proposed in chapter 5 for verbal semantics appears to concern pragmatic uses of the verbs instead and, in chapter 9, the assumption of Malay English as the control in a study of Chinese vs. Malay influences in written school-English appears to defeat the title and purposes of the chapter. Not fully clear are also, for example, the reasons why yi-xie hua in (7) and (8) is "introduced in the first sentence as discourse topic" (chapter 1, pp. 7-8); whether the analysis of the pre-posed NP in the Don't Know construction takes it as definite or indefinite (chapter 3, pp. 25, 28); the arguments for the prescribed use of the past tense when dealing with permanence in recounting (chapter 4, p. 34), where the permanence itself is not being recounted, cf. an utterance like I went to Paris and saw the Eiffel Tower, which is (*?was) the major attraction there; or why (10) is an example of no "proper grammatical connection" (chapter 12, p. 113), although the author points out that opinions may differ on this matter. No model is given against which to gauge 'improper' uses, unless the model is the one referred to on p. 114, where the students, "[h]aving learnt" a table of connectives, are now able to "correct" each other's drafts (and their own too). The learning hinted at here can only be interpreted as rote learning, according to syllabus directives, and 'proper' use must then mean adequate use of syllabus directives, not of language. While the decision to include research on the teaching of grammar and on teachers' beliefs about its teaching in a book about grammar may, at first sight, appear questionable, the set of chapters on these topics in fact gives much-needed insight into the constraints that are imposed on the modes and the content of teaching school-sanctioned English. The teaching of English grammar must proceed in accordance with a schooling system where a set syllabus and the passing of set examinations are paramount movers (chapters 13 and 14). Assessment goals must therefore gear both the teaching and the content of what is being assessed towards emulating so-called standard linguistic targets whose rationale is often misguided, as the discussion in chapter 10 makes clear. A similar issue is raised in chapter 16, on the thorny issue of literary vs. grammatical use of language, namely, whether literary creation can be indistinguishable from poor command of the language where the latter masquerades, however unwittingly, as the former. The book provides insight into both grammatical canon, in the form of an ever elusive and therefore undefined (or perhaps the other way round?) "standard" English, and language in the making, in uses of SgE. In Singapore as elsewhere, the picture that emerges from the interface between canon and use is, expectedly, that of two different grammars, not necessarily competing for the same communicative space and clearly not coextensive either. For different reasons, literary and everyday uses of language are prime domains of poiesis, creation, and therefore test the limits of grammatical and other rules that may have been found to characterise the language in question. Just like any word in a language was once a neologism, the same is to be expected of grammatical rules. One major appeal of this book in fact lies in its earnest departure from approaches to SgE that attempt to encase it within grammatical limits that were found to describe other Englishes and were then adopted as canonical standards. It is noteworthy that the term 'standard English', mentioned several times in the book, has no entry in the book's index. Whether these standards are native or foreign also remains moot. Chapter 8 takes English as a native language in Singapore, whereas the analytical framework and the references in chapter 5, as well as the conclusion in chapter 10, take Singaporeans as non-native users of English. The fuzziness of the standard, of its adoption process and of the willingness of foster-users to adopt it stands out in several places along the book. Chapter 1 reviews discussion of the historic origins of SgE that takes "standard English" as an umbrella-norm, despite the qualification that it is used by "speakers of different nationalities" (p. 2). Not only the different nationalities, but principally the different levels of education of the first English speakers who came to Singapore and had linguistic contact with Singaporeans, would point instead to several standards, and many non-standard uses of the language, including foreigner-talk. Chapter 8 makes the point that the form of a language cannot be understood without understanding its use, and that different users of English will have different concerns about what standards to adopt: Australians are described as very unconcerned about standards, Singaporeans as very concerned. The issues here are therefore that the choice of a standard, backed up by language policies that shape language itself and opinions about it (chapter 11), is as arbitrary as the choice to follow it; and that the working assumption of a single standard is unproblematic in itself, but needs to be put into perspective, not least because Singaporeans may be striving towards "a standard" that is not accessible to them now, and never was. By addressing issues such as these, the book goes beyond grammar itself, bringing cohesiveness to our understanding of English, English varieties and language in general. Features of grammar are placed in their inseparable social context, on the commonsense assumption that languages, their grammars included, are shaped by history, by geography and by the people who use them and who have power over them. By addressing SgE in action, from its own context and on its own terms, the book puts together an overview of the highly systematic nature of this variety of English, including constraints, licensing and grammatical markers, and certainly helps dispel the myth, in Singapore and elsewhere, that associates 'good English' (again with indefinable and undefined qualifier) with someone else's uses of the language. As with its twin volume on SgE pronunciation (Brown et al., eds., 2000), the book raises more issues than it settles. The overall impression is one of bustling academic activity, as effervescent and as probing, not least through the repeated invitations to the reader to access the data and improve on suggested analyses or propose alternative ones. This open-ended stance must, I believe, steer the purpose of publishing descriptive linguistic literature. References
Reviewed by Madalena Cruz-Ferreira ↑ Top | ← Publications
Effects of the Second Language on the First In considering the influence of one language on another, it has been most usual in the past to discuss the interference of the first language on the learning of a foreign language, and the reverse pattern, the influence of L2 on L1, has received rather less attention. Previous research which does consider influences on L1 has tended to focus on language attrition, and there has been less work on other ways that L1 may be affected. This book attempts to redress the balance, with thirteen papers by various researchers on the ways that L1 may be affected by L2. Many of the chapters refer to the model of multi-competence proposed by the editor, Vivian Cook, a model which claims that the learning of additional languages usually offers positive results, effectively enhancing a person's total language skills. Cook also suggests that so much negative comment about interference between languages has arisen because the usage of bilinguals is so often compared with that of monolinguals, and given that there are probably more bilinguals than monolinguals in the world, it is inappropriate to be constantly judging the more common pattern against something that is the exception rather than the norm. On the whole, therefore, the papers in this book take a positive view of inter-language influence, some of them explicitly reporting that exposure to a second language can enhance the range and sophistication of L1 usage. One paper that contrasts sharply with the others in this respect is Chapter 6, where Graeme Porte considers the language of native speakers of English who have resided in Spain for many years. The data consist of conversations between three college lecturers who originated from England but had become fully bilingual in Spanish, and the environment was deliberately designed to encourage code switching, but the researcher then condemns the occasional lapses into Spanish, regarding them as the first step in language attrition. It seems quite bizarre to set up a situation where the speakers are aware that the others are all bilingual and where it is natural for them to switch to Spanish, and then when such entirely expected and appropriate behaviour occurs, to condemn the fact that "conspicuously deviant output" went unchallenged by the other participants and to warn about the "danger of such tacit acceptance of deviance" (p. 114). However, this is the only chapter that adopts such a negative tone. Much of the work reported in this book is pioneering, and it seems likely that some of the methodology may benefit from modifications in the future. For example, in Chapter 7 Dewaele and Pavlenko attempt to compare lexical diversity for monolingual and bilingual users of English and Russian, and it is reported that a substantially wider range of words is used in all the Russian data than the English (p. 133). But is it really possible to compare occurrence of lexical items in two separate languages in this way? And in Chapter 8, Murphy and Pine investigate the effect of learning a second language on judgements of the appropriate past tense form of the invented verb spling, and the "correct" answer is given as splung rather than splinged. But is this really the correct answer? If we consider unusual verbs like wing and ping, for which the past tense forms are winged and pinged, it seems that splinged might actually be regarded as the most appropriate choice. Finally, in Chapter 10, where Cook, Iarossi, Stellakis and Tokumaru study the influence of learning English on judgements of the subject in various sentences for Spanish, Greek and Japanese speakers, there is some doubt about what different people might understand by the notion of subject. The participants were asked "to say which of the two nouns in each sentence is the subject, that is to say which one does the action" (p. 204). But this instruction seems to incorporate two separate issues, the grammatical subject and the doer of the action, and for example in English a passive sentence might elicit two completely different but equally valid answers, so it seems possible that some of the participants will have been confused by these instructions. However, these are rather minor quibbles about the wide-ranging and refreshingly original research reported in this book. Most of the text is presented with admirable clarity, and even in the one chapter that is markedly tougher than the others -- Chapter 11, where Teresa Satterfield outlines issues involving bilingual processing of null subjects within the framework of Chomsky's Minimalist Program -- many interesting and important research questions are proposed. Occasionally, the conclusions of the research seem blindingly obvious, such as the finding by Batia Laufer in Chapter 2 that the longer Russian L1 speakers have spent in Israel, the greater the influence on their Russian (p. 24). But maybe this is actually not as obvious as it seems, as in Chapter 3 Aneta Pavlenko investigates native speakers of Russian living in the United States, and she reports that differences in their length of exposure to English do not significantly affect the degree of transfer between the two languages. It is not clear why the influence on the language of Russian speakers exposed to Hebrew should depend on the length of the exposure, but the same is not true for those living in an English environment. Even if the findings of some chapters appear to conflict in this way, this is to be expected for a relatively new domain of research. Overall, the book offers a stimulating set of new perspectives on the ways that L1 may be influenced and even enhanced by the learning of a second language, and there is plenty of fascinating data that is clearly presented. One hopes that some of these ideas might encourage similar avenues of research in Singapore, which after all is uniquely well-suited to the investigation of bilingualism. Much early work on English in Singapore concentrated on errors (Tongue, 1979), and some of it focused on the influences of other languages such as Chinese that result in deviations from the norm (Ho & Platt, 1993). While this research has provided many valuable insights into the varieties of English found in Singapore, it may now be time to devote more effort to studying influences on language usage that do not necessarily result in errors. One study along this line is that by Yeo and Deterding (2003), which considers the way that Chinese and Malay affects adverb placement and the frequency of use of passives in the written English of secondary students in Singapore with no suggestion that the patterns reported are in any way wrong. It is hoped that this book might stimulate more research of this nature, so that we can study influences between languages without always detecting errors. References
Reviewed by David Deterding ↑ Top | ← Publications
↑ Top | ← Publications PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MINORITY LANGUAGES & COMMUNITIES Worldwide migration and unprecedented economic, political and social integration in Europe present serious challenges to the nature and position of language minorities. Some communities receive protective legislation and active support from states through policies that promote and sustain cultural and linguistic diversity; others succumb to global homogenisation and assimilation. At the same time, discourses on diversity and emancipation have produced greater demands for the management of difference. This series will publish new research based on single or comparative case studies on minority languages worldwide. We will focus on their use, status and prospects, and on linguistic pluralism in areas with immigrant or traditional minority communities or with shifting borders. Each volume will be written in an accessible style for researchers and students in linguistics, anthropology, politics and other disciplines, and for practitioners interested in language minorities and diversity.
Series editor: ↑ Top | ← Publications
PRAGMATIC PARTICLES IN COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION:
Peter K. W. Tan, Vincent B. Y. Ooi & Andy K. L. Chiang This paper reports on a research project investigating the characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC, also known as Netspeak) in English in South-East Asia. Web gurus have been apt to emphasise the colloquial and spoken style of CMC, whereas Crystal (2001) suggests that it has more features of written language than spoken language. An earlier study suggests that the picture is far from clear and that there might be selective appropriation of features of spoken language, including the use of 'discourse markers' or 'pragmatic particles' (Tan et al., forthcoming). Discourse markers are also increasingly being seen as deserving further attention (e.g. Jucker & Ziv 1998). This paper will focus on the pragmatic particle lah, said to be distinctive of Singaporean and Malaysian English. The paper will examine the extent of its use and also the way it is employed in the Singaporean Internet Relay Chat (IRC) portion of the corpus. The paper will also offer a discussion of the significance of the use of discourse markers in CMC.
PROMOTING LEARNER INDEPENDENCE THROUGH THE USE OF IT:
Norhayati Ismail Information technology (IT) presents educators with fresh and exciting ways of designing our courses, opening frontiers to teaching and learning never before thought possible. However, in our eagerness to embrace IT, there might be a tendency to focus too much on using it for our teaching, losing sight of the learning that it actually brings about. How can our courses be redesigned to effectively integrate the use of IT to promote learner independence? What do educators need to do to motivate learners to take greater responsibility for their own learning? The paper identifies some challenges that we as educators face and discusses a number of key considerations and ideas that might prove useful in fostering learner autonomy when redesigning courses to incorporate the use of the available new technology. In particular, examples are drawn from a business communication course taught at the National University of Singapore in which IT has been modestly but effectively used to supplement classroom teaching, with one main aim being the promotion of learner independence. IT does not necessarily make our job as educators easier but its creative use can bring about desirable learning outcomes in our students, making the effort all worthwhile.
SUBJECT OMISSION IN COLLOQUIAL SINGAPOREAN ENGLISH
Leong Ping, Alvin Many writers have observed that Colloquial Singaporean English (CSE) is a null-subject language, where the grammatical subject of a finite clause can be omitted so long as it is retrievable from context (eg. Gupta 1994: 10-11). The conditions which permit the omission of the grammatical subject, however, need to be worded more precisely since the notion of "context" is a slippery one. This paper explores the pro-drop feature of CSE using the theme-rheme framework of the Prague school, one that gives prominence to the contextual (in)dependence of each clausal element and the role it plays in contributing to the further development of the discourse. It hopes to shed light on which thematic element is favoured for omission, and so clarify the role context plays in facilitating such omission. (Reference: Gupta, Anthea Fraser. 1994. The Step-Tongue: Children's English in Singapore. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.) ↑ Top | ← Publications SAAL EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 2002-2004 Know more about our SAAL ExCo officers ... Mrs Christianty Nur (Member, MA: Singapore): Chris has taught for 8 years in a Catholic university before she came to Singapore in 1999. Since then, she has been teaching both at the RELC and CELC as a part-time lecturer/tutor. Her interest is in English Language Teaching in Southeast Asia, with special focus on Indonesia, her country of origin. Chris is a new SAAL ExCo member and is the SAAL representative for members sited in the local polytechnics. Chris can be contacted at christiantynur@yahoo.com.sg. Dr T. Ruanni F. Tupas (Member, PhD: Singapore): Ruanni is from the Philippines. His research interest is in the politics of language. He joined SAAL as a new ExCo member for 2002-2004 and he hopes to see SAAL reach out to regional scholars through creating more awareness of Southeast Asian applied linguists and their work. He wants to promote both formal and informal links between Singapore and regional scholars, and he believes SAAL is positioned to facilitate this link. Ruanni teaches at the Centre for English Language Communication (CELC) in NUS and he took over from Yuan Yi the portfolio of SAAL representative for members sited in CELC. He is currently Editor of the SAAL Quarterly. Ruanni can be contacted at elcttr@nus.edu.sg. Dr Yuan Yi (Member, PhD: Indiana): Yuan Yi teaches at the Centre for Language Communication (CELC) in NUS. Her academic interests are in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. She believes that given our AILA2002 organizational feat, SAAL is well capable of organising smaller conferences that focus more on the region. She also likes to see the SAAL website properly established so that information about SAAL can be made available online. Yuan Yi can be contacted at elcyuany@nus.edu.sg. ↑ Top | ← Publications Check out our new SAAL website! Information about the Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics will be available in this website, including forthcoming SAAL Quarterly issues, SAAL publications, the members of the Executive Committee for 2002-2004, past and upcoming events, membership instructions, and more! We encourage suggestions from all of you to make the website more informative and useful to everyone. ↑ Top | ← Publications |
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