ChatGPT

I thought I’d give ChatGPT a go to try out it’s usefulness for the classroom. This short exchange, however, makes me seriously doubt that it can be relied upon. Here is the first part:

User
What is “taxis” in SFL?
ChatGPT
In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), “taxis” refers to the thematic organization of elements within a clause. It involves the systematic arrangement of participants (the entities involved in the action) and processes (the actions or states expressed in the clause) based on their thematic roles.

Taxis plays a crucial role in determining the structure and coherence of clauses in discourse. It provides a framework for identifying and analyzing the relationships between participants and processes, shedding light on how meaning is constructed and conveyed in language.

In SFL, taxis operates based on the principle of thematic progression, which involves the strategic arrangement of thematic roles within a clause to convey meaning effectively. The default thematic progression typically follows the order: Actor – Goal – Recipient. However, variations in thematic progression can occur based on contextual factors and communicative purposes.

By analyzing taxis in clauses, linguists can uncover patterns of meaning construction and discourse organization. Taxis offers insights into how language users structure their expressions to achieve clarity, coherence, and communicative effectiveness in discourse.

However, that is definitely not my understanding of taxis in SFL. So I then asked it:

User
Are you sure that is correct?
ChatGPT
I apologize for any confusion. It seems there may have been a misunderstanding. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), “taxis” actually refers to the grammatical organization of clauses within discourse. Taxis focuses on the relationship between clauses in terms of their grammatical structure, particularly their degree of coordination or subordination.

In SFL, taxis encompasses two main types of clause relations:

Parataxis: This involves the coordination of clauses, where clauses are linked together in a relatively equal and independent manner. Paratactic relations are typically marked by coordinating conjunctions such as “and,” “but,” or “or.”

Hypotaxis: This involves subordination of clauses, where one clause (the subordinate clause) is syntactically dependent on another clause (the main or matrix clause). Hypotactic relations are marked by subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns.

In summary, in Systemic Functional Linguistics, taxis refers to the grammatical arrangement of clauses in discourse, encompassing both paratactic and hypotactic relations. Thank you for allowing me to clarify.

This small exchange does cast doubt of its usefulness and practicality in any classroom context. If any information given out by the AI needs to be cross-checked or second-guessed it is hard to see how a student, who does not already have a sufficient level of competence or expertise in the subject to be able to do that, can usefully rely on the technology.

Ideal L2 Self

I was reading an article recently by Yashima (2009) about the concept of an ‘ideal L2 self’. The article described the difficulties that many Japanese students in particular have in imagining an L2 Self that is separate from their L1 identities and that “Japanese students’ ideal selves are typically formed without an L2 component” (p148). Often Japanese learners want the language tools to be able to interact with members of the target community without necessarily becoming a part of it. As Yashima says, Japanese “are not particularly interested in identifying with [native speakers]” (p145). They often want merely the experience of speaking the target language for a variety of reasons but are generally unwilling, or even unable, to let go of their L1 identities and imagine an L2 self. In a globalised world, even the target language community can be hard for Japanese to identify (p.145). Students may want to learn an idealized ‘Queen’s English’ that does not exist or some vague notions of ‘for travel’.

I’m interested though in how this affects classroom language and interaction. I’ve noticed that quite a few of my students, far from L1 interference, are in fact speaking the L1 – with L2 lexical items. Here is an example. Asked to describe which the ‘classroom’ was from a set of pictures, a student produced:

Classroom is right side toilet under picture.

At first glance this seems a valid attempt by a beginner student at producing the target language but actually this student has been studying English about once a week for two years. If we look more closely, compared with the Japanese we can see that it is in fact merely a transliteration of the L2 with ‘is’ functioning as topic marker:

教室は 右側、 トイレ のした. 絵
kyoushitsu-wa migigawa toire no-shita e
Classroom-topic rightside toilet under picture

The grammar in terms of its ideational and textual features is entirely L1. It also features a distinct lack of any interpersonal features, which is entirely the point – it is a way of maintaining maximum distance between their ideal self and the L2 self. It could even be said that this student has not, in any real meaningful sense, learnt any English at all in two years but instead enough English lexical items which then can be mapped onto the L1 lexicogrammar sufficient to satisfy classroom communication. In fact, nearly all of the language produced by this student revolves around ‘is’. Another example:

Teacher: What are you doing this weekend?
Student: Weekend is play tennis

Again, the ‘is’ here is not functioning as a relational Process but as a topic marker. Similarly, ‘play tennis’ is not a material Process + Participant but is a single lexical item.

The classroom then, in the absence of any sense of an outside ideal L2 self or sense of a participation in a wider target community, becomes a language community of two – teacher and student – and, being a commercial relationship, the Vygotskian idea of Zone of Proximal Development becomes inverted and it is the teacher who must come down to the student’s level for communication to take place rather than the other way around. As nothing changes in this context from week to week, the student makes no real progress. While this particular student here might be an extreme case it is by no means unusual in a Japanese commercial EFL context. The question is how, or if, this can be overcome and help students create an L2 identity.

Yashima, T, (2009) “International Posture and the Ideal L2 Self in Japanese EFL Context” in Dornyei, E.Z & Ushioda, E (Eds.) Motivation, Language Identity, and the L2 Self, Multilingual Matters

Genre of cooking classes

Further to my last post on recipes, I’d also highly recommend an interesting read on similar differences between American and Japanese cooking classes in:

Mayes, P., 2003, Language, Social Structure, and Culture: A Genre Analysis of Cooking Classes in Japan and America, John Benjamins

As she states: “…in the Japanese classes, the teacher was expert and the students were relative novices [and] would focus on task-oriented content and on giving precise procedural instructions. On the other hand, though the American teachers might be considered experts relative to the students, there was less focus on this professional relationship and more on creating a friendly relationship” (pp. 14-15). The Japanese classes were serious and focussed on ‘following the rules’ whereas the American classes were characterised by a relaxed individualism and creating original recipes.

I have noticed, however, a slight shift in Japanese cooking classes that I’ve noticed on TV. Traditionally, cooking in Japan was a female domain (ALL of the Japanese participants in the study above were women while the Americans were a roughly equal mix of men and women). Recently, more cooking shows featuring male celebrity non-professional hosts. These are decidedly more slap-dash affairs and often don’t even feature measurements at all (and lots of salt in one case). I do wonder if this in some way reflects on-going social changes occurring in Japan due to the ways in which economic pressures over the last twenty years have affected the traditional (conservative) boundaries between male and female domains and also those between older generations (full-time stable ‘job-for-life’) and younger ones (part-time non-stable careers).

 

Intensive Reading

There was an interesting article in the Independent about intensive reading in L1 children and its effects on vocabulary acquisition:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/neverending-story-how-repetition-helps-a-childs-vocabulary-2220647.html

The main conclusion of the study was that viewing vocabulary repetitively in the same context, as opposed to those same items in several different contexts (for example, reading the same story several times or several stories once), promotes greater acquisition of those vocabulary items. There hasn’t been much research, as far as I know, on Intensive vs Extensive reading for EFL but this study might suggest some benefit to learners of repetitive reading.