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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.

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.


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 fabrications in 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 made up 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?

I’d like to know more about how it is coming up with its ideas, then, to avoid triggering it unnecessarily. Any suggestions about where to find out more about this gratefully received. Overall, though, it’s probably better to think of it as a content generator rather than a search engine.

I find ChatGPT particularly prone to the more unhelpful version of this the more parameters like ‘give me ten examples’, or ‘write 150 words’ I have specified. Because it will definitely make up for any deficiencies on its own 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 articularting 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.

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.

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Is Duolingo audiolingualism reinvented?

I really like Duolingo.

For those who are not familiar (really?) with the app, you sign up, choose a language, and work your way through a series of lessons devoted to different language areas, supervised by an over-enthusiastic cartoon owl. Who then follows you around your phone reprovingly if you do not keep up with your daily exercises.

Photocredit Uschi Dugulin from the site Pixabay

There’s a lot of repeating what you hear, copying what you hear, translating in and out of your language but, and this is the interesting thing, quite a lot of it is not meant to be particularly challenging. In the sense that I’m not sure you are supposed to be cognitively working out the right answers, or logically applying your analytical skills.

My excitement about this is odd. Firstly, there is my imminent redundancy as an English teacher and teacher trainer if it works. But also, if we were sharing our teaching philosophy, I would say that mine runs very much to making people intellectually engage with what they are doing. Not just the topic, but in actually understanding the grammar, or certain patterns attached to phonology, or words, or the whys and wherefores of strategies to help them process texts.

When I was first formally learning Russian, I was also a newish language teacher, and it was genuinely interesting to sit in someone else’s classroom to see all the techniques I wanted to master applied. Or, in some cases, not applied. Bonus professional development. Wheee!

The problem with this is that eventually I began spending more and more of my professional life watching other people teach, and there does come a point, even if you really like your job, when you do not want to do any more of that in your free time.

So, I stopped attending Russian lessons and moved to the UK. Oddly, this worked out, language learning-wise, as I got to speak more Russian. Which is a story for another day.

I am now the proud possessor of an extremely spikey profile; while I can listen and communicate quite effectively, I also butcher grammar and rely on about five basic verbs to do the heavy lifting, vocabulary wise.

I still cannot bring myself to go back into the classroom though. Hence, turning to apps.

Plus I do still enjoy looking at others’ materials design and spotting the underlying theories of teaching and learning involved. Useful, when part of your work involves helping others to see the same things.

Which brings us back to Duolingo.

Because, yes, we can all see the gamification involved in the carefully structured levelling up, and the earning gems, and the being in different leagues competing against other Duolingo participants and so on. And so forth.

But what I think it owes a debt to is audiolingualism.

What is audiolingualism?

Audiolingualism is a methodology associated with the theories of B F Skinner, who once taught a two year old to be deathly afraid of his mother’s fur coat. 

Similarly, language is also considered to be learned behaviour.

Small children copy what they hear around them, get corrected, and eventually end up with the full range of utterances. There’s not much thought involved – it’s an automated process mostly to do with good habit formation.

Audiolingualism took this idea and ran with it – the method consists of students repeating a model and being immediately corrected to stop any bad habits getting embedded. It was particularly helpful in contexts like language learning in the US army in the 50s, where you didn’t necessarily need to say anything too sophisticated, but you did need to be able to deliver an appropriate phrase under  pressure without needing to sit there and think about how to conjugate it or whether this word or that might be more appropriate. 

So grammar was not explicitly taught.

Now there are all sorts of objections to both the underlying theory of language learning and the methodology which I am not going to go into. Generally they focus on the idea that if language is so automated, how do we account for new variations? Not everything is a copy of what has gone before.

Of course, one of the things that access to corpus data of what we actually say has shown is that while it’s not the only thing going on, there is indeed a certain fixed chunkiness to what comes out of our mouths. Not having to construct completely new utterances from the ground up each time is, indeed, a thing. Getting your mouth and brain lined up at speed is not just a problem when you have a gun in your hand.

Audiolingualism, however, never did go in purely for the rote-learning, tourist phrasebook approach to language. And neither does Duolingo.

Audiolingualism and Duolingo

Famously, Duolingo has sentences like ‘Men are people too’, ‘Do you want to buy my giraffe?’ or, one of my favourites so far, ‘Take the cat and meet me by the bridge’, none of which you can really imagine being sentences that you need to actually say very often – they are not worth learning off by heart. 

Although I do think the last one has possibilities as an opening for a spy novel, and I was half way through plotting it by the time the sentence had recycled five times.

The idea, then, is that there is no need to explicitly wave the rules governing the structures around in front of our brains – they are perfectly able to sort out the underlying patterns for themselves if exposed to enough examples.

Take the lower levels of each lesson, where you get to select the words to make a translation of the sentences you are working on.

There’s very little need to think about it – they are not giving you distractors that give you much pause for thought. The idea, I think, is to do it at speed, allow your subconscious to recognise the pattern, without needing to get to the point of actually thinking about it carefully.

And then there is the repetition, over and over again, and by opening up a few more lessons at a time, Duolingo is signalling clearly you are not supposed to just stick to one set at a time. You do have to keep hopping around, circling back and though, giving your brain a bit of a rest from that pattern and then hitting yourself with it again. And again, And again. Until, tada! It has sunk in.

But there ARE grammar rules given, I hear some of you cry. Mmmmmmm. Not on the app version though*. And surely very few people are doing this anywhere other than their smartphones. I wonder if this is one of those grudging compromised most education professionals will be familiar with, the need to square what the teacher thinks is the way to go about it with the suspicion of said approach by the people you are trying to teach. 

Does it work?

Not for me. I saw a lovely tweet that said that after 365 days of using Duolingo, what they had got really good at is Duolingo. I rather agree.

The thing is, I find that unless I know what the rule is, I am either just learning specific, sometimes nonsensical sentences off by heart, or guessing, or applying a rule I have picked up from a grammar info dump app I downloaded after realising I had out precisely two rules from pure Duolingo. Everything else, not only did I get frustrated that I could not see the patterns, but I didn’t even realise there was a tendency I should be absorbing until I had come across it somewhere else.

I suspect the Duolingists might be coming around to this point of view as one of their new things for the paid version is to add little pop up messages explaining the rule you have just broken when you get a sentence wrong. Still not up front instruction, but fostering the noticing process, and fostering it in a nice interactive way. Because just reading about grammar (or having it explained to me), well, that doesn’t work either. Duolingo, in fact, now seems to me to be accelerating towards a much more cognitive approach. Good say I. It’s not that explicit instruction is wrong – it’s how you go about it.

Anyway, despite my reservations, I am (now) finding Duolingo beneficial. And even before I expanded my horizons it had got me back on the language learning horse. I was already able to decode Cyrillic reasonably comfortably, but all the typing involved in Duolingo got me much more up to speed on written production too. I also like the breadth of things being worked on at any one time. And the repetitive practice that other app is very short on, well, that is indeed a major bonus. AND just as you think it’s all over, they add another level to each lesson to squeeze that little bit more out of it and you. Whoohoo!

But I get a little toe curl of joy every time an idiotic sentence heaves into view because in my head I am having a little AUDIOLINGUAL KLAXON ALERT squee. It’s nice to see an old idea being reinvigorated, and this, just as much as the judgmental owl keeps me coming back.

Well, that and the fact that they are clearly on a roll right now and I’m interested to see what language learning/ teaching methodology will pop up next. I generally approve of not being so dogmatic in your approach to language teaching/ learning that you discount the idea that there might be other ways of doing it. That COMBINING other ways of doing it might indeed actually be the way forward.

And, of course, there’s the need to end up top of the leaderboard and out earn my teaching colleagues/ family/ friends. I’m stalking the top spot in the Diamond league this week. Wish me luck.

*It turns out that it depends which language you are learning – the big ticket languages do, in fact, have rules on the app version. You have to choose to click on them though – and we all know how difficult it is to get people to do extra clicking. And my other points still stand. She says, never one to give up on a theory too quickly.

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Grice’s Maxims, small talk and HEATHER!

It seems obvious that we need to give just enough info but not too much in any given circumstances, or at least so I tell my husband when he has been particularly cryptic and I need a bit more context to follow his train of thought. Enter philosopher Paul Grice’s Maxims of co-operative communication (again. See the beginning of this discussion).

The Maxim of Quantity and the Maxim of Relevance deal with just this issue. To be honest, these are the ones I originally meant to write about, but I got sidetracked by politics and social media infighting.

Well, haven’t we all lately?

Grice’s Maxims: the Maxim of Quantity

I find the Maxim of Quantity neatly encapsulated by part 1 of the Cambridge English language speaking exams.

Let’s say the examiner asks ‘Do you like Moscow?’ Which of the following answers is best?

A) It’s alright.

B) Living in Moscow has its advantages and its disadvantages. On the one hand, there are certainly more opportunities in a big city than in more rural areas. I refer to both career advancement and also the many cultural and sporting events and facilities that such a place boasts. On the other hand, big cities tend to have many cars, a lot of traffic, and as a result of this and other factors, also a lot of pollution. There is also a higher incidence of crime in such an urban environment.

C) I like it in spring, especially this year – all the rain has really encouraged some colourful flowers to bloom. I’m less keen when it gets down to minus ten for weeks on end though – that’s too cold for me!

The point is, it depends on the context, but let’s assume that part 1 of this exam simulates (because it does) making small talk with an acquaintance at the school gates, at a work conference coffee break, or even while you wait for everyone else to turn up to a Zoom meeting.

The first answer is too short. It does not give enough for your conversation partner to hook onto and continue the conversation without having to strain their own communicative resources. There is a time for a laconic reply. This is not one.

The second, of course, is too long. The interlocutor’s eyes will have crossed about half way through and the conversation will have failed again, because the next time the listener sees ‘X is connecting to audio’ looming on the monitor they will turn their camera off and pretend to be unavailable until someone more entertaining turns up or the meeting actually starts.

The third answer is just right, both for the test and small talk more generally. Nice couple of vocab items for the examiner there, look at that, and something non-taxing for the other fathers dropping their kids off at kindergarten to build on for the few minutes it takes to build rapport using small talk.

The examples I found myself mulling over, though, were given by Professor Elizabeth Stokoe, in her video* about what she has leaned from many years of doing conversation analysis (discourse analysis, but exclusively applied to, wait for it, conversation) on service related telephone calls. Especially, in this first example, receptionists at places like doctor’s or vet’s surgeries.

Now this was just a throwaway comment to one of her main points, but she mentioned that in the sort of telephone call where one of the people has to do some clicking around on a computer, this often necessitates a bit of a pause. So it can be helpful for that person to actually say that’s what they are doing. The danger is, otherwise the other person thinks that they are being ignored or have been cut off.

Which was a bit of a revelation to me as I have spent a lot of time over the years suggesting that teachers do NOT provide a running commentary about what they are doing in the classroom.

(‘OK, so I’m going to write these questions on the board now, where’s that pen gone, ooops, it’s over there, ok, so I’ve got the pen and I’m writing up the questions, look I’m remembering to use the blue pen just like Heather told me to, nearly done now, on the last one, yes there it is, and now you can discuss them’).

I still maintain this is a problem face to face. It’s wildly distracting, and threatens to overload the often quite low level students. They can, in this environment, see very well what is going on and are not very interested in some random woman’s opinions about the colour of pens.

However, online the teacher sometimes gets this intent look in their eyes while they fiddle around with some back end buttons preparing to open breakout rooms and such, and sometimes the students are definitely bemused about what is happening. A small amount of ‘I’m going to open the breakout rooms now’ or ‘I’m just uploading the handout to chat’ or ‘I’ll share my screen’ might be actively helpful, especially of the students have something else to be getting g on with while you make faces at your computer (‘…so think about what you will say about Marmite to your partner’).

So what is too much talking in one context, is not quite enough in another. We need to take the situation, the mode of delivery and the purpose of what we are doing into account. Not very groundbreaking, seemingly, but then good philosophy, like good education, is about making sure everyone can see the wood and not just the trees.

But what was Stokoe’s main point, I hear you cry? For this we need to think about another of Grice’s Maxims.

Grice’s Maxims: Maxim of Relation

This Gricean Maxim means you should make your contributions relevant.

Now this can be subtler than you might think. Take this (made up) exchange:

Chilly, isn’t it?

Go ahead.

Person two has correctly interpreted that the first statement is not just a comment on the weather but a request to close the window, which may have been aided, of course, by person A standing next to the window and making little gestures at it.

So utterances to not have to be ponderously overt to be successful in relation to relevance. And therin lies the rub. How obvious do you have to be then?

Now Professor Stokoe was not talking about Grice’s Maxims, but one of the conversations she gave as an example goes something like:

I’d like to know if I am eligible for the flu vaccine.

Yes, you are.

* crickets *

The caller feels that what should happen next is that they should be offered an appointment. The receptionist thinks they have answered the question and the call is over and is waiting for their thank you. In the next couple of moves you can hear the caller then having to fight to make sure the phone is not put down on them before they can get to the point.

Now you can blame the caller if you want for not being clearer up front about why they are ringing – see the post about the Maxim of Manner and the importance of not being ambiguous, yes these Gricean Maxims do tend to start overlapping after a while – but it IS after all a call to a doctor’s surgery. Offering to make appointments is surely something receptionists ought to be expecting to do every time they pick up the phone. Missing the relevance of that opening to the purpose of having a telephone line into a doctor’s surgery is weird.

In fact, I gather Elizabeth Stokoe has a bit of a career in being called in when this failure to understand the rules of communication results in terrible ratings on customer satisfaction surveys in these kinds of interactions. And suggesting that the way to improve is not to try to get the receptionist to engage in rapport-building exercises such as asking about the customer’s breed of dog and making a happy little noise about the answer. It is enough to just get the transaction out of the way in as efficient a manner as possible, with the caller having to do as little work a possible to get their desired outcome.

For the dangers of doing small talk to build rapport really wrong, take Professor Stokoe’s example of cold calling sales pitches, which sometimes start with ‘… and how are you today?’

‘How are you?’ is an integral part of the ritual of greetings, but only in certain circumstances, and it sounds odd in a cold call. It’s the wrong context.

My personal little bugbear in in this category is being called by my name when people are trying to sell me things, including themselves in an interview. I assume, as with many of Stokoe’s examples of truly bad communication, that this has come about because it started life in a training manual somewhere. But it. Drives. Me. Up. The. Wall. Because it comes across as a bit of a power move to me. Yet I was never quite able to put my finger on why it was so wrong until I realised that it is just out of place.

Generally, people only really use my name to greet me (‘Hi Heather’), to nominate me for a turn when, and this is important, there are multiple people in a conversation (‘Are you coming too, Heather?’ Or ‘The doctor will see you now, Mrs Be… Belg… Heather’. Or ‘Would you like some coffee, Heather?’), or occasionally to tell me off (‘HEATHER!!!’).

The use of the name Heather in the wrong context is an example of violating Grice's Maxims, so here are some heather plants
Image by JackieLou DL from Pixabay

They don’t go round inserting it into random utterances in a one to one conversation, or as a direct reply to something I’ve asked them, especially in the middle of a sentence. (‘Well, now, Heather, I’m glad you asked me that’. ‘Is that something you might be interested in, Heather?’ ‘So, Heather, the place I see myself in five years’ time is doing your job’. ‘This one time offer, Heather, will only be valid for a couple of weeks’).

It’s not following the natural rules of conversation, and as a result I cannot be doing with it and it’s like fingers down the chalkboard of my soul every time.

I suppose the counter argument is that it is so embedded in this kind of discourse nowadays that perhaps I should just relax into the new normal. But the point Professor Stokoe makes is that quite a lot of things which are given out as good advice about making conversation really isn’t when you look at the actual data. I expect in this case, for example, overusing people’s names came about because someone at some point noted that people like it when you remember what they are called. Yes, but there’s no need to be OTT in demonstrating that. Good grief.

Really it depends if I am alone in finding it annoying, in whether this is my personal quirk or if actually, like the ‘…and how are you today?’ it is counter productive in establishing rapport for other people too. Answers much appreciated. Is it just me, or is it them?

And in the meantime, here is a video covering all of Grice’s Maxims, except I think one of them has been labeled wrongly. See if you agree with me about that too – which one?

* It’s a Royal Institution lecture. Before there were TED talks, there were Royal Institution lectures, and they share much in common, except the Royal Institution has a kick ass desk.