Additionally, Nick C. Ellis consistently presents his research in contrast to skill-building theories of language development.

He's also very much in the Construction Grammar camp (cognitive linguistics), which is incompatible with structural models of language.

The Declarative/Procedural Model of Lexicon and Grammar - Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predi...

Skill-building through rules-based grammar? I recommend reading Michael T. Ullman, who shows how that view contradicts a convergence of empirical evidence from different disciplines, e.g...

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

www.nature.com/articles/350...

"The Incantation" 1797–1798, by Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes

Like Francis Bacon, Goya was a deeply disturbing artist.

Disentangling hierarchical and sequential computations during sentence processing Sentences in natural language have a hierarchical structure that can be described in terms of nested trees. To compose sentence meaning, the human bra…

A new paper from the lab!
We use MEG and a "local/global" design in the language domain to ask whether the transitions between words in a sentence are encoded by a shallow transition-probability mechanism, in parallel to a tree-based syntactic mechanism.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

By building influential institutions, a vibrant press, and a modern literary tradition (with figures like Kahlil Gibran), they shaped how ideas circulated in Arabic, established intellectual pluralism, and promoted a more secular, critical, and inclusive vision of Arab society.

Why is Lebanon so important to the middle east? Its legacy:

Lebanese thinkers and writers—centred in Beirut—helped redefine Arab identity as a shared linguistic and cultural project rather than a purely religious one, particularly through the legacy of the Nahda.

Tyre, Lebanon, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world & a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In the 1960s, the Cinema Rivoli of Tyre attracted a who's who of celebrities including Jean Marais, Brigitte Bardot, Rushdi Abaza, and Omar Hariri.

Yasmine Hamdan - Beirut | Beirut Jam Sessions YouTube video by Beirut Jam Sessions

Yasmine Hamdan, Lebanese singer, performs Beirut at Cafe Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. Beirut is widely recognised as "the Paris of the middle east": www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B1J...

Education is supposed to be transformative. Students need to understand the value of epistemic responsibility, i.e. that some things are true & others are false & some are unresolved or uncertain, & to validate knowledge; basically, to learn good judgement.

I have written a free guide on responsive teaching for UNESCO available here: t.co/puvgOyGgi3

When we systematically break down a task into its constituent knowledge, skills, & attitudes, the cognitive processes that make up competent, fluent performance, only then can we appreciate the difficulty that novices experience in learning to perform it.

To clarify, "the younger the better" is based on immigrant children immersed in the host language culture, where they get many thousands of hours of intensive, meaning-focused language use.

In contrast, in foreign language classes studying a few hours per week, it's a very different story.

Up-to-date, evidence-informed guide to responsive teaching by Carl Hendrick. Excellent for developing lesson observation criteria & CPD programme objectives that move learning forward: unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/p...

An interesting assumption but I recommend reading the "age of onset" research; kids who start English at 3-5 years old typically perform worse at 15 years old than those who started at 10-12 years old.

Carmen Muñoz's work is a good place to start.

The word "you" is a grammatical error. So is "bird," "goodbye," and "apron." Every English speaker alive is speaking a language built on mistakes:

China’s Rise in Global Research

"Between 1980 and 2022, China’s share of global research publications in top journals rose from a negligible level to 32 percent, while the US share declined from 60 to about 24 percent."

Is it time to start learning Chinese?

www.nber.org/digest/20260...

Perhaps the best argument as to why educational resources shouldn't be "more like Netflix"?

Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that edutainment/infotainment genres seek to merely appeal to emotion, drive engagement, & make viewers feel good, whereas lectures require us to think hard & process dense information meaningfully.

There are other edutainment/infotainment genres commonly used, e.g. 3-minute theses www.my-thesis.org

Again, these are closer to "empathy" writing/speaking & bear little resemblance to the purpose, rhetorical moves, & register features of lectures.

Additionally, if we want to get into greater detail as to how & why EAP coursebooks are poor preparation for lectures, this paper's good: Deroey, K. L. B. (2018). The representativeness of lecture listening coursebooks doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

If you're using TED Talks to train EAP students in listening to lectures, there's some bad news for you. You may be setting them up for failure: doi.org/10.4000/apli...

I've been wondering... Do you think Hades let Cerberus sleep on the bed?

For anyone involved in #EAP #SFL genre pedagogy & would like a handy guide on what constitutes a "good" problem statement in practical terms & more importantly why, here's a very succinct (3 pages) but useful paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.li...

Or converging on the 5% of functions that 95% of people actually use.

Here's a hill I'll die on:

All academic conferences should be online, video recorded, & made openly publicly accessible.

On language learning apps in general & how they're evaluated & marketed.

Ref: MacWhinney, B. (1995). Evaluating Foreign Language Learning Tutoring Systems. In Intelligent Language Tutors: Theory Shaping Technology (1st edn, pp. 317–326). Routledge. www.learnlab.org/uploads/myps...

@profbrucehood.bsky.social Yes, by now 3-minute theses have become a worldwide phenomenon & a wonderful, more factual alternative to TED Talks.

They're also fantastic examples of persuasive yet (epistemologically) responsible language use. Well worth studying their rhetorical moves & phrasing.

Just to put it into perspective, about 50% of all written, & 80% of all spoken language is "formulaic" or idiomatic, as it's also sometimes called.

There's a concern that too much recycling GPT LLM text back into corpora may degrade future models.