The Teaching-Learning Cycle

I spoke today at Penn-TESOL-East’s fall conference on the beautiful campus of Penn State-Abington. My presentation was titled “Discovering Writing with the Teaching-Learning Cycle” and it followed on from my earlier campaigns “beyond the five-paragraph essay.”

>> Here are my materials:  PowerPoint slides and handout

I was running against the clock, so I wasn’t able to do justice to this powerful technique for teaching writing.

Pushing a 10K

Welcome to my 10,000th visitor! (even if about half of those hits seem to be from people looking to plagiarize a five-paragraph essay)

Conferences coming up…

I’ll be presenting at these conferences in the coming months. Stop by and say hallo!

• Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), March 2012, St. Louis: “Preparing and Supporting Graduate Student Writers Across the University” (my paper is called “Teaching the Genres of Academic Writing”)
• TESOL, Philadelphia, March 2012: “Preparing for Excellence: Practical Strategies for Improving Graduate Writing.” Workshop with Christine Feak, Grace Canseco, and Jennifer Greer.
• TESOL, Philadelphia, March 2012: “Making Grammar Choices in Advanced Academic Writing” (publisher session for my new grammar textbook from the University of Michigan Press, forthcoming)
• Genre 2012 – Rethinking Genre Twenty Years Later: An International  Conference on Genre Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, June 26-29, 2012: “Genre and Cognition in an MBA Program.” (results from a needs analysis of language skills required for international students in UD’s MBA program)

Q: Skills for Success 5 Reading/Writing is out now!

I just received my sparkling new copy of Q: Skills for Success, Reading Writing 5 (Advanced), the textbook I wrote with Scott Douglas for Oxford University Press. You can read a sample unit on OUP’s global website (Unit 2: What is lost when a language disappears? — one of the units I wrote!). You need to register for Oxford’s Teachers Club first (free).

Our book is written for advanced-level students to help develop critical reading and writing skills along with grammar and vocabulary. We used authentic texts from a wide range of sources and academic disciplines — from linguistics to business to communications to recycling to a whole short story by the great Nick Hornby (“Small Country”). Students also get access to Q Online Practice, which has at least one practice activity for every skill in every unit in the book (about 100 extra exercises). We’ve also written the teacher’s book, and that has answers, tips, alternative assignments (in case you don’t like ours!), and rubrics. Update 11/20/11: The Teacher’s Handbook with Test Generator is now available from your OUP rep (I haven’t seen it yet in print!).

A great deal of planning, writing, and re-writing has gone into the book (Scott and I have been working on this project for over 3 years!), and we hope you like using it! Every reading, every exercise, and every skill box has been looked at by many pairs of eyes (not all of which saw the same thing!) in an exhaustive — and at times, exhausting — process. In the writing assignments, we encourage students to write three drafts of their essays. In our case, we wrote far more than that! Leafing through my copy, I’m very pleased with the product and grateful to the editors who finally got our manuscript into a printable state.

Contact your friendly local Oxford rep for an exam copy! Feedback is most welcome.

Nigel Caplan & Scott Roy Douglas, Q: Skills for Success Reading and Writing 5 Student Book Pack (includes Q Online Practice). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-19-475642-6. (Available at amazon.com)

Fun facts about modal verbs!

… because there can be nothing more fun than a modal verb, right?

In doing research for my forthcoming grammar textbook for graduate student writers, I came across these interesting nuggets about the frequency of modal verbs, which I thought I’d share:

• The most common modal verb overall in academic writing is can (I suspect because it has so many meanings!)
• The most common modal verb for hedging (showing uncertainty or deference) is may
• Both can and could are frequently used with passive infinitive verbs
• Fewer than 5% of modal verbs in academic writing are followed by a perfect infinitive (might have done)
• Just over 0.5% of modal verbs in academic writing are followed by a progressive infinitive (may be growing)
• Help isn’t technically a modal, but it’s an awfully interesting verb because it can sometimes be followed by a to-infinitive (help to make) and sometimes by a bare infinitive (help make). I suspected that the shorter form (help make) should be more common in academic writing because academic writers tend to reduce the number of function words (little “grammar” words like prepositions) to increase the lexical density (number of content words per sentence). And my data supports that: only 16% of clauses with help are followed by the to-infinitive. Unfortunately, that turns out to be the highest proportion of all the registers in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so actually academic writing is more likely to use to than spoken or other written registers, but still far more likely not to bother. Oh well, the advice still stands: the shortest form is usually the best. On which note …

Stay tuned for more tips on writing and more information about my new grammar textbook for graduate and research writers.

(All statistics are based on my searches of the Corpus of Contemporary American English.)

The Father’s/Fathers’ Day Apostrophe Debate Continues

In honor of yesterday’s celebration of fellow fathers, I am reposting a link to the post I wrote last year about the puzzling apostrophe in Father’s Day. Or is it Fathers’ day? This page is the most visited on my blog with over 200 hits this week alone (a record for me!), and has sparked a lively set of comments. Do add yours!

For the record, I spent a wonderful Father’s Day (my preference) playing with my son at the shore (not the “beach” or the “coast,” by the way in these parts) and I am now busy revising my new grammar textbook, due out some time next year. More blog posts coming soon, I hope.