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Reviewing Peer Review Comments – Am I Reviewer 2?

So in this post I’ve decided to berate the academic community for doing it wrong in peer review. Which is a large statement for someone who is not an academic.

But the thing is, while contemplating politeness in the academic sphere because reasons, I came across a study of the discourse of peer review by the excellent Professor Brian Paltridge and was horrified.

The Mathematical Bridge in Cambridge (a wooden bridge with a geometrical design), a lawn, an old brick building and a punt proceeding down the river Cam

Photo by Chris Boland on Unsplash

My constructive criticism credentials

Some background about me is relevant at this point. I have been a CELTA (or CELTA-analogue) trainer for the last twenty years.* I’ve run well over 100 courses at this point**, and I worked out a while back that I have watched and – and this is the important bit – given feedback on over 500 online lessons (and climbing), and therefore far far far FAR more offline ones.

CELTA***, for the uninitiated, is a teaching boot camp originally designed to take people who have never taught before, let alone taught a language, and get them classroom ready as English teachers in four weeks.

Because teaching is a lot harder than that basic premise suggests, this is not necessarily a straightforward thing to do. Especially when many of the people on the course have an excellent practical grasp but an almost non-existent theoretical grasp of the subject they are teaching (aka, they are native speakers of English).

To complicate matters, I have also worked in a context where the people doing the course are generally not, in fact, newbies. To learning a language, to learning English to an excellent level, to understanding how language works, or to teaching.

Why do they do this course then? They are generally there for the opportunity to have the car of their teaching stripped down and put back together with the latest parts, cleaner, with no rust, and working even more efficiently than before.

And the internationally recognised certificate. Which is important because on CELTA there are grades. Guess which grades experienced teachers would prefer to get?

The importance of feedback

Add in the fact that this all costs a reasonable chunk of money, and that the main assessment is done not via marking essays or an exam but by watching and grading lessons, being a qualification that is designed to show you know how to teach not just about teaching, and hopefully you can see that my main role in course participants’ progress and ultimate success is trying to give clear but constructive feedback in a high stakes and often pressurized environment to somewhat stressed out people who need it so they can continue to advance and / or meet the necessary requirements of the course.****

Now, am I good at giving constructive feedback? Not for me to say. Ask the graduates of the courses I have run.

But I certainly have opinions about it, which brings me back to peer review for academic journals, where it seems to me, if Brian Paltridge’s research is to be believed, that some academics are very bad at it.

What is peer review?

Just in case, let’s review what we, or rather I, know about peer review to check that we, or rather I, have the basics down.

Academic journals, which is where academics publish a lot of their research findings, do not just take an academic’s word for it that everything they say in their paper is gold, and that their experiments and other studies have been exhaustively and properly conducted. No, they ask other academics from the same field to review and give feedback on what has been submitted before releasing said article on the world. I think the standard is to have at least two such reviewers, and that the reviews are usually anonymous, to better allow the peers to say what they really think.

Academia is a small world really.

Types of review

I daresay different journals might have different categories of grading, but let’s say that a typical overall response might be:

  • accept
  • accept with minor revisions
  • accept with major revisons
  • reject

Add to this the idea that there is a lot of pressure to publish in the academic world, and so a lot of submissions, and journals can afford to be picky and, to be fair, the whole of the academic world wants the publicly displayed research results to be correct and robust.

Peer review is, therefore, famously fierce. Negative comments far, far outweigh positive ones. Particularly, for some reason, if you are reviewer 2.

A number of memes where reviewer 2 in academic peer review is painted as being wrong and someone the meme maker hates

Now, I do not have a problem with this as such. Academia should be rigorous. It is about putting your ideas to the test, to the most stringent tests, and coming out the other side with something worth saying. And even if it is already pretty good, why not strive to make it as good as possible? Academic excellence rests on this.

What I do have a problem with is the wording of some of the comments.

The problem – too much hedging is unclear and / or rude

I appreciate that peer review is a different context to giving feedback to teachers about their lessons on a CELTA course, which is built around the idea of continuous professional development, with lessons and the lessons learned from delivering them building on one another. The teachers I work with and I are not trying to get one lesson to the highest standard possible, making people revise it, repeat it and polish it until it is.

For example, I would prefer a better balance of criticism to positive comments than the statistics provided by Professor Paltridge suggest, but I do appreciate that that is perhaps driven by this difference*****. So I am going to take what I would normally see as a demotivating and overwhelming imbalance and allow it.

Or I would if clearly peer reviewers didn’t seem to be at least as aware as I am of the likely effect of 700 negative comments and one vague positive. Sadly, what seems to happen more often than it should is that they retreat into polite obsteusification in order to try to put their suggestions in the least offensive way possible.

Except for the ones who are just using politeness as to be breathtakingly rude. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, because the point about politeness in an English speaking world is that it needs to match the context. Overdoing the politeness levels is generally a sign that you are really very cross, and using politeness as a weapon.

Examples of infelicitous wording

Here are some of the things peer reviewers said, as quoted in Brian Partridge’s book. I have slightly edited them because I wanted them to stand alone for one of the exercises for academics Paltridge suggests in his book, which is to ask potentially bemused paper writers if they can identify what the reviewer wants, which items are urgent, and which can be ignored.

See what you think. Also, can you spot the politeness strategies being used (or possibly abused)?

  1. If one claims to present an overview of the main approaches to genre analysis, one should not reduce existing approaches to genre analysis to justify these approaches. 
  2. Is it really necessary to present the methodology section in such detail? 
  3. The author may wish to pay heed to some of the suggestions found in Lewis (1999) concerning the content of certain courses. 
  4. Some proofreading to remove infelicitous wording is probably needed. 
  5. I wondered if the author could expand a little on the benefits of students engaging in simulations.
  6.  It would be worth citing a more recent volume.
  7. Research question 1 has not been dealt with in the paper.
  8. Below are some references to intercultural communication I suggest the author familiarizes themselves with.
  9. Consider making a brief reference somewhere in the paper to David Russell’s Activity theory.
  10. I would recommend that the authors revise this to focus on using a slightly more formal register.

Rudeness

That first one was received by Professor Brian Paltridge himself. I can see two possible explanations for it.

Either the reviewer was actively being as nasty as they possibly could and using the anonymity of peer review to really let fly, or they were so intimidated by feeling they needed to criticise such an illustrious figure as Brian Paltridge, Professor of TESOL, University of Sydney, who has (I quote his Sydney Uni bio) “published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, and written books and book chapters for leading academic publishers” and is ” included in Stanford University list of the world’s top 2% most influential researchers”****** that they freaked out and overdid it. It’s just too hedged.

Some of the others are iffy too. Looking at you ‘infelicitous wording’ and ‘slightly more formal’.

Honestly. </eyeroll>

I would suggest that what is actually rude in academia to assume that your reader is such a bad academic that they cannot take a bit of robust dialogue. Sugar coating it implies that have something to be embarrassed about, which in my non academic opinion anyone who has spent all that time putting together something they offer for publication, decidedly does not.

Knowledge is queen.

Lack of clarity

However, regardless of whether or not these are examples of academics trying to start a fight with each other, when I gave this list to some non-native but very competent speakers of English they did not realise that in fact all the suggestions were not suggestions, but something the writer expected to be fixed.

Now, I will admit that giving people a list and asking them to say which are important does rather push people into assuming some of them are not. Welcome to my training seminars. Look, it gets people’s attention.

But this is mirrored in Paltridge’s book by what I assume is a statistically significant sample of reviewers expressing surprise when they got the revised versions of the paper where an insufficient number of the comments they made had been addressed.

Mmmmmmmmm. How did that come about, I wonder?

Even more than the potential rudeness in the more hedged comments, I am offended by the lack of clarity.

Improving peer review comments

So I came up with a set of suggestions, because you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you absolutely cannot stop her from trying to fix bad communication strategies.

I am open to being told why this is not appropriate, but I will absolutely be mentally firing into the sun anyone using the impersonal ‘one’ to make their criticism, saying what is wrong without telling me how to fix it, asking a pointed question instead of anything more helpful, or presenting something as a choice when it is not. Or using the word infelicitous.

Bearing in mind there might be online forms to fill in, of course. I can’t control the forms.*******

Strengths

Start with some positives: 

  • An overall summarising comment (This was overall an interesting read) 
  • Include specific praise (The idea about …. was genuinely original, and the whole paper was well written and easy to follow).

To work on

Introduce the constructive criticism section clearly:

  • Here are my suggestions for improvement
  • The following areas will all need to be addressed

Tell the author directly what to do using imperatives.

Explaining why in addition to this is useful. Even if you think it is obvious, it is one of those interesting psychological quirks that giving a reason (any reason really) is helpful in getting people to do what you want.

It also still allows you to say what the problem was in a way that does not distract from the main point (how to fix it) or annoy and / or upset people (because it is negatively commenting on their darling). Avoid just telling people what was wrong.

  • Expand the section on the benefits of simulations by… in order to strengthen the argument in this section
  • Include citations to more recent research such as… so as to avoid the appearance of having missed something
  • Cut down on the amount of detail in the methodology section by removing… because it’s a standard procedure and the reader can then get to the meat of the paper more quickly

Suggestions

Only be more indirect in the suggestion if it is truly a suggestion not an expectation. It’s still a good idea to say why, and bury any direct criticism in the explanation. Putting this in a whole different section would help too.

  • Consider reworking the title to the methodology section to remove the allusion to Pterry in case it confuses rather than amuses 

End on a positive note

Finish with encouragement if you cannot really add more praise (or have both):

  • I hope the author is not daunted by the amount of work needed here, and I look forward to reading the revised paper
  • I wish to reiterate my opinion that this is very much a worthwhile topic and that the paper is along the right lines, and I look forward to reading the revised version

I await feedback.

Further reading

Paltridge, B. (2017). The discourse of peer review: Reviewing submissions to academic journals. Springer.

Footnotes. Yes I do know there is a proper footnote function on WordPress. This is funnier. We all still miss Terry Pratchett, right? Look, I’m not giving feedback in peer review here. I can have my little joke.

*Good grief.

**Probably. I’ve lost count. Close to that though. Might be more!

*** Or analogues to CELTA, as othercoursesdoexist, but only if they include at least 6 hours of assessed teaching, and preferably at least three times that of peer observation plus a significant amount of collaborative planning.

**** Depending on whether you see the course as useful or a hoop jumping exercise. Both. Can’t it be both?

***** To be honest, I do not believe this at all. Positive feedback is necessary to balance out any kind of constructive criticism. See this post about politeness for why. Plus, pointing out what people do well, as well as being psychologically helpful, is actually part of the usefulness of feedback – it’s not always obvious to the recipient what they have done well or why, and if you want the good things to keep happening, or in the context of peer review, for this to stay when something is revised, this is important flag up. However, baby steps, baby steps.

****** Although this may be a comment he received earlier in his career. It stuck with him enough for him to highlight it in his book though.

******* Do these need revising? I do enjoy fiddling with forms to try to make them produce better results. This is not a joke. I really do.

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On (not) smiling politely, positively and negatively

It’s probably not surprising that a lot of people’s complaints when they are going through the ‘aaaaaarrrrrrrgggggghhhh’ phase of culture shock are to do with the perceived lack of politeness. Or that a lot of the plaudits they give to the other culture when they are in the honeymoon stage are about how it is more cultured and refined. Which means, of course, also more polite.

But what is politeness?

Is it just remembering to use the right fork, saying please and thank you, knowing when to open the door and when not to, and when to tip and when not to?

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson, back in 1987, divided politeness into two types: positive politeness and negative politeness.

When I ask people to guess what each of these involve, it’s interesting that most often I get the suggestion that positive politeness is when you mean it, and negative politeness is a sort of fake, ritualised version of politeness. White lies are the most benign (‘does my bum look big in this?’) but it also covers things like sending a thank you note regardless of how much you like the present or the person who sent it, because that’s what you have to do, or, worse, because it is politic to do so.

In fact, this is a wrong guess.

Positive politeness is about showing someone they are valued. As an individual, with individual needs and wants, and as part of society, your community of friends and family, as a colleague and so on.

Negative politeness is about helping people save face so they do not look stupid, about not lowering their self worth or their worth in the eyes of others. It also covers not impinging on their freedom nay, their right, to do whatever the heck they want.

There’s some overlap, of course. Recognising someone’s individual worth also covers not trying to limit that to an extent.

I tend to think of positive politeness as proactive and about boosting the other person.

This is why it involves things like paying compliments and giving praise, as well as making that praise slightly (or very) exaggerated (that was very good/ excellent instead of adequate or even plain good, for example). It also helps to be specific in your praise to prevent it seeming ritualised and meaningness – that negative perception of politeness I mentioned earlier. And, of course, it’s about agreeing as much as possible.

Negative politeness is reactive.

There is a situation, or something you want to say, that may upset the other person, so you want to soften it. This is where hedging comes in. You are going to be indirect, phrase something hypothetically rather than directly, make it seem like it’s just your opinion rather than a fact and, or rather, or make it seem like a request rather than an order.

Now, these categories are intended to apply not just to the English speaking culture the authors belonged to but all cultures, everywhere, all the time.

But while the categories and broad tendencies remain the same, the actual way of achieving it across cultures does not.

And neither is it just about words, what you say, and how you say it.

Take smiling for example. In the UK, which is where I am from, having a permanently pleasant half smile in public is a thing. This is because, regardless of how well you know them, smiling at people when you are greeting them, saying goodbye, giving instructions, giving feedback, asking for or giving directions on the street, selling them something, etc, etc, etc, etc is a way of showing that you consider the other person worthy.

In Russia, which is another culture I am very familiar with, smiling is not a thing. Not unless you mean it, not for strangers or acquaintances, or for trivialities.

Now this is often presented as evidence of people wanting to hide their private true selves from anyone who has not passed a certain friendship test, but another way of looking at it* is that while smiling at people represents positive politeness in the sense of showing your smilee that you are inviting them into your circle, that you are showing them they belong and are valued, not smiling at them is respecting them as individuals. You are not imposing on their freedom or limiting their ability to act by making them them join your gang.

Interestingly, you can also see this in the way Brits sometimes react to being exposed to the high wattage aggressive friendliness of American shop assistants or random strangers in lifts or long distance aeroplanes. There is indeed a level up from gently curving your lips up and starting every conversation with five minutes of small talk about the weather as a way of signalling a bond, and we UKians don’t like it, much as I imagine Russians are disconcerted by my insistence on grinning at them (with TEETH!!!) as a teacher almost before we have been introduced.

Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash

Of course, it doesn’t stop me doing it. Forcing that intimacy is another way of saying ‘building rapport’. Bask in this example of hacking politeness norms to achieve a particular effect, brought about by the existence of politeness norms in the first place.

But there are also limits to how far you can violate people’s sense of what is acceptable. Which is why I have a chatbot for talking about the weather with. Must be trained on non-British data though because it keeps going off topic.

Anyway.

Most people in most places are probably trying to be polite. They might not be trying to be polite in the way you expect though. Before you take offence or start making overgeneralised statements about a whole group of people, it might be a good idea to look at it from a different perspective.

That said, I think people often focus more on negative politeness strategies aka trying to avoid being rude, including an obsession with the wording of criticism.

Let us spread more positivity instead!

Can I just say, dear reader, that it is a pleasure to not really know you, you are almost certainly an excellent human being, and deserve all and more of the hopefully wonderful things that are coming your way. You are also correct in whatever criticisms you have of this piece of writing, and please feel very free not to leave any comment whatsoever here or on social media. It’s your choice!

*This particular example was actually supplied by Lingthusiasm’s recent podcast on this very topic of politeness in case you think I am reaching a bit here. Well worth listening to as always, but I have thoughts about their dissection of the word ‘please’ which really needs a whole other post. Watch this space. Politeness is interesting.

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Searching search engines for AI

Robert A Heinlein’s book Friday* ruined the internet for me many years before we were even able to conceive of logging on.

Scifi writers are a bit prone to this sort of thing . Look how drawn out and tedious just getting a working self driving car is, let alone flying cars. And that’s despite the frisson of danger attached to them because they might choose to kill their driver rather than the erratic but pregnant lady who has just stepped out into the road. It’s just not as cool as it should be right now.

In much the same way, in Friday there is a description of the main character (named ‘Friday’ for character development significant reasons) throwing herself into a research project with the help of her computer assistant and its connection to academic libraries.

Lots and lots of books, stacked in a geometric format.

Photo by Rainhard Wiesinger on Unsplash

Look, it was published in 1982, ok? It’s not actually about the internet as such. Bear with me.

As a side note despite the existence of the real internet now, access to academic libraries are very much worth signing up to any random uni course for.**

It’s definitely pretty much the first thing I’d do if I won the lottery. You can look up any and all research your heart desires! You don’t have to stay in your designated academic lane at all! No more second-hand accounts filtered through layers of journalese or something snappy designed to fit into a 20 minute conference presentation! Sigh. I should probably do a Master’s.

Anyway, with this unfettered access to the sum of human knowledge and what Heinlein would probably have described as an AI assisted search engine were Google or ChatGPT already in existence, Friday correctly predicted the location (the moon colony) and date (a few years into the future) of the next outbreak of bubonic plague while ostensibly trying to establish a connection between the length of women’s skirts and the length of men’s beards (because plot significant reasons***).

This seemed to me at the time to be the most wonderful use of technology EVAH. Much much MUCH cooler than flying cars.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when in real life you could finally access this new resource, the World Wide Web, and, get this, search it for anything and everything you wanted…

…but all you could find was someone’s laboriously built site containing five pages of information about the lesser spotted screaming catbird, newspaper articles and a fan forum devoted to Jane Austen.

Which were often written in lime green on a dark blue background with something strobing at you in the corner.

I mean it was fun (apart from the migraine inducing design), and not actually a bad way to meet interesting people or find out things you weren’t looking for but which had a certain fascination of their own.

It was not, however, likely to be able to help me find how facial hair and fashion influenced the next pandemic.

And when more content did appear, it took a long time before search engines were refined enough that you didn’t have to have advanced google fu or luck to get it to point you to the right content.

Eventually, both of these situations improved, and I’m not just talking about the appearance of Wikipedia.

But now everyone is suddenly turning to ChatGPT for all their random queries.

I can see why.

It’s not just because it’s quicker and less effort to type a question and get a neatly packaged reply. It’s because when I google something less concrete than a particular product or a particular event lately there seems to be too much content, most of it saying the same thing, all copied from one site to another, an increasing amount of it generated by AI anyway, and none of it quite what I want. Or wrong.

We are back to there being a few relatively reliable sources that you might as well go straight to, and our chances of stumbling across that one really unique and interesting resource have once again decreased significantly.

By Chaz Hutton aka instachaaaz


Of course, AI is not there yet either, and I’m not just saying that because one of the first things I did when ChatGPT launched was ask it to predict the next pandemic by making a connection between men’s beards and the length of women’s skirts.

Which it flatly refused to do. I mean.

It tends towards bland summaries which are often shorter than Wikipedia but very much not more insightful.

And then there is the potential for complete fabrications, although admittedly I’m not sure we should believe everything we read on the rest of the internet either. Even the bits that are not already written by AI.

I think it’s the refusal to admit ignorance that is the most frustrating thing about using ChatGPT as a search engine. If it just said ‘I don’t know’ or ‘out if cheese error’ it would be a lot less irritating than ‘I’m sorry, but predicting the next pandemic based on unrelated social trends like women’s skirts and men’s beards is not scientifically valid’.

I do not need that kind of gaslighting.

I also do not need, when contemplating words that go with certain suffixes: ‘joyworthy: deserving of joy or happiness, bringing delight; healthy worthy: deserving of attention for promoting health or wellbeing; literary-worthy: deserving of recognition in literature, or significant in literary merit’.

I do reluctantly admire the verisimilitude of having the actually non-existent words given as one word, two words and with a hyphen though. Nice. Also, doubling down on the misleading nature of how accurate it is.

Mind you, my top favourite example of ChatGPT being a tad off the mark is: ‘The connection between Heather Belgorodtseva, Lewis Hamilton, and E.M. Forster is the term “Room.” Heather is known for her work in the field of architecture and design, particularly related to “Room” concepts in spaces. Hamilton is a Formula 1 driver who has a well-known connection to “Room” through his involvement in various charitable initiatives, including those focused on creating safe spaces or rooms for youth. E.M. Forster: He is an author famous for his novel “A Room with a View,” which explores themes of personal freedom and societal constraints.’

There’s probably something to be learned from understanding exactly how it is coming up with its answers which will help with prompt engineering.

It certainly helped me to understand that the correct term for the wrong bits is hallucinations, and this is a positive term.

AI’s ability to go beyond narrowly pre-programmed answers and busk its way to an original response is the point. It’s what makes it intelligent, or rather to pass for intelligent. This wild creativity is a feature, not a bug.

Now I daresay the intention is not for creativity to be quite as random as it seems – although who among us has not been confidently wrong about something when put on the spot by a random question?

Overall, though, it’s probably better to think of it as a content generator, a sort of extremely sophisticated text prediction machine, rather than a search engine.

Nevertheless, it’s useful to consider how not to trigger it into inexactitude unnecessarily.

I find ChatGPT (etc) particularly prone to the more unhelpful version of making stuff up the more parameters like ‘give me ten examples’, or ‘write 150 words’ I have specified. Because it will definitely compensate for any deficiencies rather than stop at 7 or 135.

But I also resent the way prompt engineering of any kind is sometimes presented as though if you can just find the right words you will definitely get what you want. Or if you haven’t got what you want, it’s because you are simply not very good at articulating yourself.

You do need to pay attention to the wording, be specific and precise, and be willing to adjust and refine but sometimes you just hit a wall you are not going to get past no matter how many times you ask the thing to pretend it is an expert EFL teacher, or limit (or otherwise) the expected response.

You are also going to have to look very hard and suspiciously at what it gives you and engage your brain about whether it might, in fact, just be wrong as well as rather bland.

Not that this has prevented me from coming back to a role play I have long since done with students to try to get it to spit out precisely the cards I wanted. Haven’t succeeded yet, but you never know.

Still, it’s never not thrilling to press the magic button on an app like Twee and have 10 reasonably sane, if basic, comprehension questions roll effortlessly out in front of me. And, my goodness, this sort of thing is as close to me feeling like I am living in the future as we have got so far, probably emphasised by the way it seemed to work straight out of the box when it was launched. Having a super computer in my pocket in the form of a smartphone somehow crept up on me by comparison.

So perhaps, just perhaps, those flying cars really will be with us any day now. I’m looking forward to it.

*I am aware of the problematic nature of Friday and Robert A Heinlein in general. Don’t @ me. But for what it’s worth, if you have actually read the book, my opinion is that while The Incident is definitely calculated to give the reader the ick, arguably it, or more properly, Friday’s reaction to it, underlines, after a series of more subtle hints, just how damaged an individual Friday is, and when viewed through this lens is actually quite well done.

The problem I have with The Incident is the book’s ending. Again, if you’ve read it, you will know what I mean.

My personal theory is that this should have been a trilogy as I always felt we were barely getting going having chugged through some wonderfully detailed scene setting, and that Friday was destined to save that fatally flawed version of Earth from itself. But Heinlein didn’t really do multi book epics and he just decided to stop the plot by grabbing and firing as many of the Chekov’s phaser blasters on the walls as he could in fifty pages or so.

Still a bad call on The Incident resolution though, and as a result this is not actually a recommendation to read what is otherwise a great slightly dystopian futuristic spy novel.

Heinlein all over really. Stick to his YA books. Podkayne of Mars is outstanding.

**Much as a character in another of Heinlein’s books does, in fact. Although that’s mainly so that Robert A can be sarky about education as a field of knowledge. I told you he’s problematic.

***And Friday’s boss being a very effective manipulative pragmatist. And one of the good guys, obviously. See what I mean about Heinlein?

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Tag questions and persuasive language – when negatives are positive

The thing about grammar is that in and of itself there’s really no point to it.

Students do not come to class to learn about the present perfect, they come to class to learn how to speak English.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think learning about grammar can be part of that. And I personally find dissecting grammar systems quite interesting as a pure logic chopping exercise. Which is helpful when wading through your kids’ Spanish homework when you don’t speak the language at all.

But if you are going to teach grammar it’s important to keep sight of what a particular grammar structure might actually be useful for, in the real world.

And why it works like that.

There’s a sales technique called ‘foot in the door’ which is about trying to get your customer to agree to something, possibly even quite a small something, because once people have said yes once, they are more likely to say yes again, to potentially much bigger requests. Or sales pitches.

It’s based on studies such as the one where researchers who got homeowners to put a small sign about safe driving in their homes had good success rates in getting them to put a much bigger, more in your face sign up than when they started with the big request first. Nothing had changed about the arguments used, the rightousness of the message or the background of the people being asked, except that initial small step being easier to convert*.

If you know this is true (it is true), it’s not just useful for explaining advertorial hussle.

It is quite a useful thing to think about when you have to structure an argument. Start with strong statements first, the ones you feel that no-one in their right mind could disagree with. Nothing is too obvious, too banal an idea! You want to get your foot in the door. Then you might find that your more controversial points are more easily accepted.

It also explains a particular grammar feature that I find tends to get taught as a quirk, a rule, an oddity, without, perhaps, a proper focus on how powerful a linguistic trick it is.

It’s tag questions.

You know about tag questions, don’t you?

No? 

Well, you can ask a fairly direct question: Where do you live? Or, Do you live in Moscow?

Or you can make a statement, and add a tag. A questioning tag in fact.

You live in Moscow, don’t you? Or, You live in Moscow, don’t you?

There’s a lot of grammar involved in tag questions. If the statement is positive, the tag is negative. And also you have to match the form of it to the verb form used in the statement.

So, It isn’t going to rain, it it? You can dance the tango, can’t you? You saw this man on the night of the robbery, didn’t you? He won’t bite, will he? And so on and so forth.

Unless you live in London, where famously all the tags have been replaced by innit. And not just as a short version of isn’t it.

Image from the site pixabay.com

Before I declare that the grammar is the least interesting thing about tags, earning me a glare from every English student forced to try to manipulate the tags at speed, firstly, can I just point out Spanish conjugations and Russian cases? 

And secondly, a similar process has happened for short back channeling questions, the sort of ones we use to express an interest in what our interlocutor says.

So I went to him, right, I went, you muppet.

Did you? 

Yeah, and, like, he said I ain’t no muppet.

Did he?

Yeah, and then, right, I would of popped him one.

Would you?

Yeah, but his mum came out and was all, get in here and do your piano practice, Rupert.

Was she?

Yeah.

Anyway, I would be having conversations like this with the proper born and bred Londoners of my acquaintance, and finding them faintly off in some way, until I realised that what was actually happening was:

So I went to him, right, I went, you muppet.

Is it?

Yeah, and, like, he said I ain’t no muppet.

Is it?

Yeah, and then, right I would of popped him one.

Is it?

Yeah, but his mum came out and was all, get in here and do your piano practice, Rupert.

Is it?

Yeah.

I  apologize if the slang is a bit Gen X. I’m a bit Gen X. I also can’t do this at all, because Gen X, not a Londoner and probably way too middle class. I LOVE it though. Let’s hope for all our learners’ sakes it catches on. I’d put money on it having something to do with London as a melting pot for people who are not here for this amount of auxiliary verb manipulation in a second or third language, so it could well be the future in a proper English as a Lingua Franca world. Let’s wait and see.

Getting back to tag questions though, the grammar, apart from the butchering of it by Londoners, is the least interesting part of this structure.

The most interesting part is the intonation.

There are two variants. Which is why there were two versions of the same question about Moscow above. No, it wasn’t a typo.

If you ask about my residence in Moscow with a rising intonation, it’s a genuine question. You have an inkling that this might be true, which is why it’s not a straight out question, but still, you are not quite sure. So you are checking.

But if you use a falling tone, it’s not a question. You know I live in Moscow.

Now at this point people I am talking to about this are nodding politely and resigning themselves to having to spend a lot of time doing gap fill exercises to try to automatise the verb manipulation process.

But what they should be asking is, if it’s a statement of something you already know, why ask a (sort of) question about it? Why bring it up at all, in fact?

It’s because tag questions with a falling intonation, force agreement. Because you are making a true statement. That’s what the intonation means. The tag is there to drag the agreeing response.

In its most benign form it’s a lovely small talk generator. You are standing next to a stranger at the bus stop and say, Lovely day, isn’t it? And your interlocutor pretty much has to answer and five minutes later you can get the pictures of your budgie out and invite them to the next book club meeting.

But if you are trying to pitch something, it’s also a nice trick. Have you ever found yourself saying, You understand, don’t you? Especially while nodding your head? Well, then you might be a teacher. You also aren’t actually checking comprehension very effectively, but it does tend to allow you to power on with whatever you want to get to next.

Works with any negative question, actually. In English, they are designed to get the answer yes.

Isn’t it time you went home? Didn’t you say you would do the washing up today? Aren’t those shoes a bit expensive? Wouldn’t you like to go on holiday to Paris this year? Etc.

And once you’ve got that yes, that foot in the door, well. 

Might be worth putting the effort into learning all those conjugated tags after all. 

Or moving to London.

* Freedman, J. L.; Fraser, S. C. (1966). “Compliance without pressure: The foot-in-the-door technique”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 4 (2): 195–202

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Lexical chunks vs Latin

When people think about language teaching or learning, they sometimes assume that it consists of breaking sentences down into grammatical formulas. Words are there to be dropped into specific slots, and aside from changing their form a bit sometimes, Bob’s your uncle as far as sentence construction goes. 

Of course, there are amusing phrases such as ‘Bob’s your uncle’, which are not governed by any pattern. And multi word verbs, like ‘break down’ as well as less idiomatic combinations such as ‘drop into’ or ‘aside from’. 

These are all, by and large, fixed, in the same way that if you want to talk about a British parking lot you need to use two words. ‘Car park’ (or ‘parking lot’ for that matter) – is it one word or two? It’s certainly one unit of meaning, just as ‘by and large’ cannot even be ‘large and by’, let alone use a different word altogether. ‘By and huge’, anyone? 

These fixed phrases certainly don’t have to be particularly colourful. They can be rather mundane linkers, like ‘of course’. Or ‘as well as’. Or ‘such as’.

And then you get things that look a lot like they might be grammar structures, but which can really be very static. If I were you, I’d just accept that there’s more to life than grammar right now. 

See what I did there? ‘If I were you I’d…’ Another fixed phrase, this time a frame for a full sentence. And you thought that was just second conditional, a formula of if-plus-subject-plus-past simple-comma-subject-plus-would-plus-base form to slot the words into. 

You can tell I’m having fun with this.

It also turns out, thank you the computational power of computers which have been fed large numbers of different texts, that even if they are not fixed, a lot of word combinations are highly predictable. Like ‘highly predictable’. Rather than ‘strongly predictable’. 

Anyway… ooooh, wanna bet whether that started as more than one word back in the day?

ANYWAY. This is the difference between vocabulary and lexis.

You can get quite lost in categorising the different types of lexical phrases. Want to tell me which of the examples above is a binomial? Go on, answers below, etc etc etc.

Which is why it’s much easier to not worry about it too much and label them all prefabricated lexical chunks, or chunks of you are on familiar dropping round for tea without prior warning terms. No need to blunder about butchering your categorisation like a bull in a China shop. One size fits all (not ‘one size fits everyone’. Or at least, not with the same punch).

Image via pixabay.com

It has taken probably thirty years to integrate lexical chunks into mainstream language teaching, beyond the low frequency but fun phrases such as ‘like a bull in a China shop’. 

You can tell it’s not niche anymore by the way that even the most mainstream coursebooks are clearly influenced by the desire to draw students’ attention to all of the above and more, and that others even market themselves as being lexically driven.

What I wonder is, where does the recent drive to introduce Latin to the masses in the UK fit in with this? Latin, it seems to me, exists to teach logic, not a language. Well, it’s not a language any more, is it? It is something you can use to mess about with pattern recognition, and pattern application though. The ultimate grammar crunching course. The ultimate logic chopping game.

I think I prefer ELT’s current obsession with imposing critical thinking skills on teenagers. In addition to grammar. Not via.

Not quite sure in any case why you can’t do that to UK school kids with, say, Italian instead, which might at least also give you a passing chance of ordering your cappuccino and pizza in Rome more successfully. As well as a fighting chance (but not a boxing chance) of understanding Latin too if that is deemed absolutely necessary. Or is that too pre Brexit, pre pandemic a suggestion? No need for actually useful languages any more.

I also want to know what they are leaving off the current, already quite packed curriculum to fit it in.

Although I suppose there has always been a rich tradition (but not a wealthy tradition) of learning Latin tags off by heart, the better to stun your audience with your erudition. So perhaps lexical chunks will be more part of dead language learning than I think. 

Or perhaps the headlines I saw floating round on social media are designed to present the suggestion as more done and dusted (but not…) and more compulsory than it actually is. I’ll grant you the topic seems to have been quietly dropped, so perhaps it was more of a dead cat diversion tactic than a serious suggestion. Still, got a blog post out of my mild irritation. Eventually. Look, I’ve been busy.