Andrea Sterzuk

One of my Facebook friends posted this link in her status this morning:

http://www.youshouldhaveseenthis.com/

It’s a great hyperlinked list of popular internet memes, websites, and youtube videos.

I got back from Phoenix at 2 am last night; IRA went well.  Today, I’m giving a presentation to a class at First Nations University on standard language ideologies and schools.  I’m testing out some of my arguments from my book so I’m glad I get the chance to give this presentation before I mail the manuscript to my publishers on March 2.

8 days and counting!

I’m off to Phoenix tomorrow morning for the International Reading Association (IRA) convention.  I’ve never been before (IRA or Phoenix) so I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like -  and to the warmer weather.  It’s a quick trip though; I arrive Friday and leave Sunday.  I give my workshop Saturday morning.

I belong to a few academic listservs.  Much like “coffee row” in my home town, listservs seem to function as way to catch up on news and find out where everyone stands on issues.  Most recently, my email inbox has been filled by response to a literacy initiative called the “National Strategy for Early Literacy” being developed by the Canadian Language and Learning Research Network (CLLRNet).  Most of these emails have come from other members of Language and Literacies Researchers of Canada (LLRC) but I’ve received a few messages about this topic from other colleagues and students.  Personally, I’m somewhat leery of CLLRNet’s approach to literacy which seems, in my opinion, to be grounded in fairly traditional and positivistic views of literacy.  You can form your own opinion, though, because my academic coffee row has now expanded to invite discussion from the blogosphere.  Follow the conversation about CLLRNet’s literacy initiative at this blog.

I have a weakness for buying books online.  I recently received a 2008 book that I’m really pleased about called “Performing English with a Postcolonial Accent: Ethnographic Narratives from Mexico” by Angeles Clemente and Michael Higgins.  It reads really well alongside Suresh Canagarajah’s 1999 book: Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching.  Both of these books are a welcome relief from “native-speakerism” and deficit views of language variation.

Youpi!  There is not much that I like more than an opportunity to buy pens, post-its, binders, organizers, and labels.  I blame my childhood back-to-school trips to “the city” for the association I continue to make between office supplies and happiness.  In any case, I am currently picking out “data organizers” online (I like to pre-shop) and just as soon as I finish my morning coffee, I’m off to buy some fancy binders for my research data.  Fun!

I still haven’t taken this book back yet.  It’s now four six infinity? days overdue.

Phew, that’s a string of acronyms (click here to learn more about what each abbreviation implies for English language teaching). Thanks to a bunch of isms and a couple of ations (imperialism, capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, globalization, and migration), English language learning and teaching is big business world wide and on local levels as well. The Ministry of Education in Saskatchewan, the Canadian province where I live, has followed the lead of Manitoba, a neighbouring province, in using the term EAL (English as an additional language) in its discussions of students for whom English is not the first or primary language.  The argument for the move towards EAL is that it implies addition in ways that the second in ESL (English as a second language) does not. EAL also takes into consideration the fact that many students who are learning English as an additional language speak multiple languages (therefore second is not accurate). (more…)

I thought I knew what discourse means but after recently reading a number of books on the subject, the sense of this word seems increasingly slippery to me.   Tons of people in academic writing use this word (Bourdieu, Fairclough, Foucault, Gee…) and none of them use it in exactly the same way.  Now, I am no fan of language standardization schemes so I am not advocating some language academy-sanctioned definition of the word discourse. I do think it might be nice, however, if each new theorist or writer would be required to submit a paragraph explaining how their use of discourse differs from other theorists’ uses.

I’m only partially joking. (more…)

So this is a link to an academic lecture called Search Engine Society given by Alex Halavais, a professor at Quinnipiac University.  I came across his lecture in a listserv message from  the Association of Internet Researchers.   The video is around 45 minutes which might seem long but remember that it’s a lecture for a university class and not a vlog or video intended for youtube. It’s actually very entertaining and chock full of interesting information about search engines and society so it might be worth some of your time.