The title of this post comes from Postman and Weingartner's ​ influential book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969). This thinking can be applied to the study and teaching of any subject. In terms of language learning, it is safe to say tht once students are equipped with new linguistic concepts, they can formulate hypotheses and develop a new range of questions that can then be explored in texts.

They write:

Their statement, once you have learned how to ask questions, you have learned how to learn, could be a poster in every staffroom in the world.

Learning how to learn lies at the heart of the metacognitive dimension of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Producing one’s own knowledge accords with Vygotsky’s knowledge creation and it happens through the data-information-knowledge.

Postman and Weingartner’s fifty year-old revolutionary little book remains remarkably relevant. In their chapter, What's worth knowing, the authors bombard us with pages of questions that teachers could well discuss with their students. The first set of questions extracted below, prompts students to consider the nature of change, which they really should ponder if they are going to be subverted!

The second extract deals with relationships, another leitmotif of Learning Language from Language (the name of my unfinished book from which this blog post is extracted).

​The final extract contains questions about questions and questioning. They are for teachers to ask themselves.

​Processing such questions leads to ditching old modes of thinking and replacing them with new modes of thinking, the very definition of subversion.

Having been engaged in language study for over four decades, made attempts on four foreign languages and witnessed the growth of my first language, English, I can assure you that I have invested a great deal of time into learning vocabulary. Much of it was wasted. Much of it was spent learning useless words in ways that did not teach me how the words work in the target language. Vocabulary learning strategies were not taught. It was simply assumed that students would memorise context-free bilingual lists as if the L2 words worked in the same way as in L1. If I was lucky, my attempts to use the words in sentences and texts were returned bespattered with red ink highlighting collocation and colligation errors in particular. ​

You can probably think of some counter examples. And so can I. But what I see in contemporary course books does not negate most of the above. ​

We can task our students with identifying relationships between words and within words, and depict them meaningfully. 

These examples come from my Versatile Blank Book, which you can read about on this site.

Every layer of the hierarchy of language can be explored by students in a text. The exploration of Texts as Linguistic Objects (TALO) reveals how an author has used words and word forms, combined them as collocations and colligations, formed phrases and clauses that are linked with metadiscourse chunks to ultimately form texts. This is the bottom-up process that we employ both subconsciously and consciously when we speak and write. ​

As well as being linguistic objects, Texts are also Vehicles of Information (TAVI) which invoke top-down processes as we combine the content of the text with what we know about the world through schemata, general knowledge and our expectations of text types. In this way, readers and listeners are engaged in their own personal knowledge creation. 

Thirdly, Texts are Springboards for Production (TASP). We respond to texts by combining several texts on the same topic, by critiquing aspects of the text, and by discussing the potential impact of this new knowledge, for example.

To put texts under the microscope, VersaText is an open access, web-based resource that allows teachers and students to paste in a single text. The program provides several tools that foster discovery learning. The first tool is the word cloud, which depicts not only the relative frequencies of words in a text, but it colour-codes part of speech. The word cloud is highly customisable: the number of words, the choice of words vs. lemmas, which parts of speech to show. The relative sizes of words in the word cloud illustrate the extent of repetition in a text and repetition is the most commonly used resource to create lexical cohesion in text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976).​

The opportunity to put the language of a single text under such a microscope is invaluable to students of CLIL, EMI and ESP, as the texts are models of the language of subjects and fields that the students need to have a productive knowledge of, if they are to be acculturated into their subject disciplines. This is essential for TASP. 
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Halliday, M.A.K. & Hasan, R. (1976) Cohesion in English.  Longman
Hoey, M. (1991) Patterns of Lexis in Text. OUP.
Johns, T., Davies, F. (1983) Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1)
Partington, A. (1998) Patterns and Meanings: Using Corpora for English Language Research and Teaching.    John Benjamins.

In my last blog post, "…", I wrote:

• When we search a corpus for "does not a .* make", it is clear that this is a systematic linguistic exploitation, as the great British lexicographer, Patrick Hanks refers to such creative uses of language. 

Since I wrote this, this great British lexicographer has passed away.
 
Patrick's theory was articulated in his unputdownable book Lexical Analysis: Norms and Exploitations (2013). It is an empirical investigation into how words go together in collocation patterns and constructions to make meanings. In the book he writes extensively about patterns of normal usage and then demonstrates how a great deal of creative language use is also patterned, albeit differently. By the time Lexical Analysis was published, I had known Patrick for quite a while during our overlapping years at the Faculty of Computer Science (FI MU Brno). Our offices were on opposite sides of a corridor across which we'd often call to each other.

​Patrick had not been fully apprised of the doctoral defence procedure. Czech doctoral defences are preceded by an oral exam and he more or less delivered his inspired defence during the exam. We had to wait outside the exam room while the committee determined his exam result before allowing him to give his defence, which turned into a grand round table discussion. I remember James Pustejovsky, who'd been flown from the USA for the defence, ramping up Patrick's interrogation by claiming that he was getting off a little bit lightly. He passed.

Before the New Oxford, there was the COBUILD project at Birmingham University in the 1980s. Patrick was the managing editor of the COBUILD Dictionary. I distinctly remember the day he strode the metre and a half from his office to mine to tell me that he'd just learnt of the death of his dear friend and colleague, John Sinclair. Sinclair had run the highly innovative COBUILD project for a decade. Patrick would often relate the day Sinclair announced to his team of lexicographers that all of the dictionary's definitions would be written in full sentences unlike the standard practice of providing synonyms and snippets to express a word's meaning. These sentence definitions are built up of chunks of information that explain what and why and how something means what it means. This aspect of the COBUILD dictionary is why I recommend it to students and teachers in all my training and writing. I shall wax lyrical on this in another post.
 
One Friday afternoon, Patrick drove around the corner from the faculty to the bank, unnecessarily and lamentably. He came back from the bank on foot, his car having been stolen. Unfortunately, he hadn't finished unloading boxes of rare and specialist books from his car into the flat that a friend of mine let to him. The police came and drove Patrick and me around the neighbourhood for quite some time before they took us to the police station where we spent hours answering questions for the policeman to fill in forms. I was interpreting for him and I had to keep asking if cars really have all of these features he was being asked to say yea or nay to. It had been well over 20 years since I had owned a car and half of the features sounded indulgent and verging on sci-fi. He never got his car back let alone the books. But we did spend that Friday evening washing down a hefty steak with a fine Czech brew or two.
 
While still in Brno Patrick started a project that he pursued to the end of his working life. It is the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), publicly available as an online database. He and his team studied concordances of verbs, tagging their grammatical and lexical features. They used Sketch Engine of course, since it was born and thrives to this day in the faculty where we were working. Sketch Engine achieved an international reach when the philosopher-linguist, Adam Kilgarriff, bought into it through a university–enterprise agreement. Adam died of cancer at the age of 55. In fact, the last time I saw Patrick was at Adam's funeral in Brighton.
 
Here is the entry for adapt in PDEV.

Every meaning/use of a verb has a unique pattern, which is why we know which meaning of a verb is meant when we read or hear it. And we use this information when we write and speak. Native speakers do this subconsciously while non-native speakers learn this, although to the best of my knowledge, there are no vocabulary teaching resources that employ this user-friendly description of meaning. I'm working on it! Watch this space. While an entry does not employ terminology such as valency, complementation or transitivity, it does use semantic types which are indicated in square brackets. The PDEV entry for answer has 14 entries, two of which are tagged phrasal: answer back and answer for and two are tagged idiom: have a lot to answer for and answer call of nature.
 
I participated in the PDEV corpus work for a short time. I was convinced that the searches could be partially automated as I had developed database scripts for automating Sketch Engine CQL searches for verbs in their known grammar patterns as part of my MA dissertation research. But Patrick preferred to work from raw data without skewing observations towards predetermined patterns. He also rejected intuition. There were times when I pointed out that the data did not show something about a verb that should be part of its description.
 
While his interest was in verbs, mine lay in nouns as the primary carriers of meaning in message clauses. I posited applying the PDEV approach to nouns, but Patrick had a completely different methodology for this part of speech. The cognitive profile, as he called it, consists of a set of short, objective sentences each sentence revolving around a collocation of the noun. For example, his spider profile includes these sentences:

• Some species of spiders hunt prey.
• Spiders lurk in the centres of their webs.
• Spiders have eight legs.
• Many people have a dread of or are frightened of spiders.

 
I have adapted this for teaching purposes, preferring the more student-friendly term, word profile. In pedagogical circles, a cognitive profile is more likely to pertain to a student than a word. I'll elaborate in another post.
 
I took him a couple of times to visit the old folks in Mikulov, a beautiful Moravian town on the Austrian border. The old folks were my dear friends, a Czech man and his South African wife, who had lived in my town, Sydney, for 15 years before moving to Czechia after the fall of the wall. We used to chat at the bar in their house, drink carafes of Moravian wine, play Noel and Cole on June's Steinway and stumble home the following day.
 
Patrick did invite me to stay with him for a few days in Bristol during which time he was frantically busy, but we did manage to talk about pattern descriptions of nouns, about his loneliness, his depressive moods, his ex-wife and his beloved daughter.
 
I can't imagine where my thinking about language would be had I not spent this time with Patrick. They were pivotal years for me, and it is a great honour to have been in his presence. You are very well-remembered, dear friend.

The title of this post is a sentence in a book I don’t seem to be able to finish: Grammar, Vocabulary and Everything in Between (GVEB). It’s a book full of language learning tasks on whose cover I would like to plaster “More fun than Murphy". Better not :-).

But what is holding me up at the moment is the writing of another task book called After IELTS (and e-course), which is for students who have passed the Academic IELTS and will soon start their university studies in English, perhaps in the belief that IELTS prepared them for university level work. This belief was at least partly engendered by the low IELTS score that the university declared adequate for this level of study. I witnessed many hundreds of students in exactly this situation being seriously ill-prepared. So, when I finish writing After IELTS, I will finally finalise the final version of GVEB. Watch this space!
 
In the context of GVEB, "casual encounters rarely lead to life-long relationships” refers to the lack of long-term impact that a meeting with a word whilst reading, listening and watching has. It’s like being in your local shopping mall or at a reception with hundreds of people milling about. They all share the properties of [HUMAN] – walking upright, head, body, four limbs, clothed, a sense of purpose. There will be some outliers – very tall, blue hair, in a wheelchair, atypically dressed, looking lost and confused. Some people look very familiar, some less familiar, and others not at all.  It will be clear that some people are there with another person, and others are functioning in small groups. Some people will be helping others and some people will be performing their roles in their milieu independently.
 
If we don’t stop and get to know someone in a crowd or a word in a text, they are not going to enter into our consciousness or become a part of our understanding of the world. They are just going to be a part of “the general mush of goings on”, to quote J. R. Firth, whom some regard as the founding father of British linguistics. People do stop, even crouch, to pat someone’s dog or goo-gah someone’s child as a coy excuse to talk to the accompanying adult. At a reception, people have the shared context of the event itself to thaw the ice. When I was teacher training for the BC in Tashkent, the British Ambassador held occasional garden parties. At one such event, I walked up to two women nursing wines and announced that I didn’t know anyone there. They said they didn’t either. We got chatting and ended up Sunday lunching together for the next few months till COVID put paid to that. And a few other social niceties and professional MOs. We three have a Telegram group and stay in touch. I’ve met them both once since. They have most definitely become a part of my worldview.
 
If we want new words to become part of our "wordview", a fleeting meeting ain’t gonna cut it. We can read and listen and watch till the cows come home, but if we don’t devote some attention to the desirably unfamiliar, they will remain unfamiliar and the desire will remain unquenched. If you have never seen the word unquenched before, be not surprised. In the 52 billion (sic) word corpus, EnTenTen (Sketch Engine), it occurs a paltry 1,292 times. By comparison, desire occurs 5 million times in said corpus. Even the lemma of quench only occurs 112,342 times. The lemma includes quench, quenched, quenching. Does quench typically keep company with desire? Yes, 821 times. It more typically keeps company with thirst, hunger, craving and curiosity. The words that typically come between quench and one of these objects are my, your, etc., In the chunk, quench the thirst of (3,105 times), thirst is mainly used metaphorically, e.g. the thirst of millions. Quench also collocates with fire, flame, furnace.

Following on from my previous post about constellations, in this post I'm looking at the asterisk, which some of my students refer to as a star. I admit that that's a pretty tenuous connection and I apologise whole-heartedly. But the universe does get a mention here, so bear with me.

I'm drafting a vocabulary workbook at the moment, or should I say yet another vocabulary workbook. In this one, the students are often tasked with discovering how words work in grammar patterns. They mainly use CorpusMate. This is quite a new, free, open-access and superfast corpus tool that was designed by Peter Croswaithe and programmed by Vit Baisa, who also programmed my VersaText and was instrumental in the development of SkELL.

The CorpusMate corpus does not have part of speech tagging, which means that you can't search for a pattern such as Verb + noun + v-ing and there are hundreds of verbs in English that function in this pattern, e.g. remember, picture, catch, tolerate, leave. There are not only hundreds of words, but there are also hundreds of patterns that nouns, verbs and adjectives function in. My current vocabulary book revolves around the COBUILD grammar pattern reference books from the late 1990s. In fact, I wrote my masters dissertation on the grammar patterns of the verbs in the then new Academic Wordlist (2000) that Averil Coxhead had created for her masters dissertation.

It is always interesting to see how much can be gleaned about the grammar pattern of a word without part of speech tags. The asterisk is mighty. In fact, it holds the secret to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Read on!

A supercomputer called Deep Thought was asked what the meaning of life, the universe and everything was. It calculated that it was 42. See the announcement in this extract from the film. Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the cult 1979 novel from which this comes, always claimed that he chose the number 42 randomly. But 42 is the ASCII code for the asterisk, which in computer searches means anything and everything. Did Deep Thought calculate that the meaning of life, the universe and everything is anything and everything?
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This search uses two asterisks. The first has spaces before and after it, which makes the program search the corpus for all of the words in between the items to the left and the right of it. The second asterisk is used with a dot and is attached to ing. Dot-star, as my students call it. This makes the program search for words ending with ing. While this might include words such as thing and during, the fact is that the -ing word that follows remember followed by another word tends to be an -ing verb. This is the reality of pattern grammar.

As mentioned, Verb + noun + -ing is one of hundreds of grammar patterns of words that the COBUILD team uncovered. They were not the first to identify this or many other patterns, but they were able to demonstrate with large corpora the semantic relationships between words that function in the same pattern. This means that the words in a grammar pattern are related in meaning. Important and interesting.

Chunks
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Now back to our mighty asterisk! With queries such as these, you can find the frequent chunks that a target word is used in. The concordance extract below shows some things that people are "in search of a". ​

I'm hoping that a vocabulary workbook that has students learning about the patterns that words function in and the words that go in these patterns through tasking them with discovering these properties of words for themselves using CorpusMate and other tools will be a stimulating voyage of discovery which will add a layer of systematicity to their vocabulary study which will in turn lead to them using words with more confidence and fewer hesitations. Think fluency. They might become stars themselves! ​

We can identify a key word and highlight all of its occurrences in the text, then highlight the words that are used with it. I prefer to do this with VersaText because it is easy to see the left and right cotexts of keywords in a concordance. You can do this with at least several key words in the text. ​

References
Ijaz, I. H. (1986). Linguistic and cognitive determinants of lexical acquisition in a second language. Language Learning, 36(4): 401-451
Ringbom, H. (2007). Cross-linguistic similarity in foreign language learning (Vol. 21). Multilingual Matters.
Veselá, Z. (2003) Czech Republic’s unrivalled system of marked walking trails. Radio Prague International, 5.12.2003.

​Some years ago, I was part of an EU funded “experiment” in which a group of scientists worked with a group of English teachers to co-create a semester-long “science in English” course for non-native speaking university students. Non-native speakers of English, that is! Unfortunately, I was the only native speaker of English in the group and unfortunately, my expertise as an applied linguist, teacher trainer and materials writer were not in high demand. I was just the native speaking English teacher who could offer alternative wordings and arbitrate quandaries about the pronunciation of a word. Negotiations among the dozen people were mostly awkward as the approaches of science teachers were largely incompatible with mindset of the English teachers. The English level of the science teachers was quite low and therefore most of the planning meetings were not held in English.

One of the most important things I learnt during this “science experiment” was that the fun-and-games communicative mindset of the English teachers did not challenge the science students “sciencly”. Science students learn about their world through identifying patterns and relationships in the data they explore, structuring their observations and combining their findings with the information they get from books, articles and lectures. They develop their cognitive, procedural and metacognitve knowledge in concert with their factual knowledge (a.k.a. information). Surely they could learn English in this way too. As just-the-native-speaker in the room, there was no opportunity to offer such a radical departure from the attempt to “funify” the high stakes, serious business of language learning. The alternative would have involved teaching the students how to learn language from the language they read, listen to and watch. They would use this input as data from which they would be guided to discover patterns and relationships in the language that they could ultimately use in their own speaking and writing.

CorpusMate is the latest free, open-access corpus tool available on the web. It hails from the University of Queensland, which was recently recognised as the leading university in Australia. It was designed by Dr. Peter Crosthwaite and programmed by Dr. Vít Baisa. I should say here and now that Vít is also the programmer of SkELL and my VersaText, and I had lunch with Pete on his campus in June as we had only met online up to that point.
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Its clear and simple interface allows you to search for a word or phrase in its 50 million word corpus. You can focus your search in one of 20 topics such as biology, law, education and journalism. And you can also limit your search to spoken or written language. While it does not have a collocation tool, it does have a patterns tool: the search result is sorted according to the frequencies of patterns. The numbers on the right indicate how many instances there are. 

The single page About page provides some background to the corpus, the sources of data, and most importantly, help on performing queries.
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Last year I wrote a workbook, Discovering Academic English, that was used by about 500 students in an MA TESOL program. They learnt a lot of academic language and a lot about learning language through COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), but COCA was a steep learning curve for them and no matter how detailed the instructions were or how focussed the tasks were, many of the students found COCA difficult. They were frustrated by the limited number of daily searches and by frequently being taken to an invitation to pay.  This was not the experience I wanted them to have. 

In the workbook I am writing now, the students will work with CorpusMate instead of COCA. CorpusMate has a much smaller corpus and fewer tools, which make it easier to use and easier to find results. I am hoping that students will warm to corpus use through the new guided discovery tasks. The searches are easy to perform and the results are clearly displayed. The aim is to promote their learning of academic English and their academic English!

It is obvious when you put it like that. To ask if there are more meanings than words begs several more questions. We could start with: what is a word and what is meaning? Then we could ask how the numbers of these things are counted. We might even wonder who wants to know. Or as my grandmother used to provoke: how will knowing this change my life?

Let’s start by appeasing my long-passed grandmother. To be honest, I am not sure that being aware of the fact that there are more meanings than words in a language (spoiler alert) would have changed her life as she was not a linguist in any sense of the word: she didn’t study languages and she didn’t study language. Bingo! Right there in that very statement the question manifests. Are the countable and uncountable forms of language one word or two?

An orthographic word is a string of letters that has a space before and after it. This applies to the written word, obviously. Spaces in the spoken language do not separate words. When software counts words, this is the definition of word that it uses. But no one would argue that a text that contained a thousand words expressed a thousand units of meaning. No one is two othographic words but one lexeme. Lexeme is the term for a unit of meaning and while most meanings are expressed by orthographic words, very many are expressed by compound nouns, compound adjectives, compound prepositions, phrasal verbs, idioms, fixed phrases and chunks of various kinds. The day before yesterday is one lexeme made up of four orthogrpahic words. Made up of is a phrasal verb consisting of three words expressing one meaning in this context. The words that compose these multi-word lexemes are used in many others.
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Is there a difference in meaning between participate and take part in? In many languages, the day before yesterday is one word. A linguist in the old-fashioned sense meaning polyglot and the modern sense of language researcher have their own words in other languages. German has Sprachkundige for polyglot and Sprachforscher for the academician. Even without any knowledge of German, the interested reader will notice that the first syllable of these two words is the same and will therefore conclude that these are compound nouns without a space between the orthographic words that they consist of. Spaces and hyphens also confound the definition of word: in English, we write hobby horse, hobby-horse and hobbyhorse. This word also has very different literal and figurative meanings.

Every dictionary has a different number of meanings for make. Some dictionaries lump together similar meanings and uses, while others split them into separate sub-entries. Lexicographers thus accuse each other of being lumpers and splitters. In fact, they are not alone. Lumping and splitting occurs in many fields wherever things are being categorised. But I digress. In delexical verbs, make doesn’t mean much at all: make a decision, make a comment, make a plan, make a promise, make a suggestion. In fact, in these cases, there are single word verbs that have the same meaning even though they are syntactically different. Compare: someone makes a plan and someone plans something. Delexical verbs are quite different from phrasal verbs as the latter contains only a verb + particle (prepositions and adverbs) and the meaning of many phrasal verbs results from the interaction of the verb with the functions of the particles. For example, one of the functions of up in phrasal verbs expresses completion e.g., clean up, wrap up. Another function expresses change, e.g. grow up, break up.
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Make up is two orthographic words and one lexeme. But the Collins COBUILD lists eight meanings of make up. These meanings result from the different functions of up. The Collins lists three meanings of the hyphenated noun form make-up.

In the iconic expression of the 1960s peace movement, Make love not war, the denotation of make love is have sex. But the connotation carries more intimacy than the physical act. The 1960s protest movement was advocating warmth, harmony and love between people, not a biblical “go forth and multiply”. I often wonder why the hippies didn’t perform more music by Bach, after all he had 20 children with his two wives. Making war is something that politicians ultimately do. The military doesn’t make war. The military goes to war, wages war, fights battles. Anyone chanting Make love not war must have been directing the slogan at politicians. They wanted them to promote harmony between people instead of sending them to war.
On a lighter note, in an old pun on the word make, one guy says, My mother made me a homosexual (make = cause) and his friend replies, Would she make me one too (make = create)? Many words form phrases and idioms, and express jokes, puns and cultural references. Some words have shades of meanings that cause lumpers and splitters sleepless nights.

Not every word is as polysemous as make, but many of the high frequency words in the language do have multiple meanings. Many of them also undergo conversion, that is, they function in more than one part of speech. How many parts of the body are both nouns and verbs, for example? And don't think that parts of the body and body parts are synonymous. Speaking of verbs that parts of the body do, consider the similarities and differences between these troponyms of 'go on foot': amble, stroll, wander, meander, saunter. And these troponyms of 'eat': nibble, devour, swallow, feed, consume. These words are not synonyms either.

To borrow an analogy from database design, words and meanings have a "many-to-many" relationship. This is the  type of relationship between two entities where each element of one entity can be associated with many elements of another entity, and vice versa. Many words, though not all, have many meanings, and many meanings are expressed by orthographic words and by multi-word lexemes.

​This knowledge about language (KAL) would not have been of much use to my grandmother but for the billions of people who are both Sprachkundige and Sprachforscher in the modern world, being equipped with concepts about vocabulary enables them to systematise their study. It makes learning visible. It is not necessary to second-guess things. Knowledge is power. ​