Via the Dish, I read this hype-ridden piece on the “astonishing” progress of Google Translate, and this far more sober piece by Lance Ulanoff. Ulanoff writes, “Initially… the translation was perfect, but when I started to speak in longer sentences, it basically fell apart and got a lot of it wrong. As I tested with others […]

Here in Lafayette, we have really hard water which leaves a layer of white film on dishes and fixtures, so there’s a water softener in my building. Periodically they have to add more salt to it, which results in super-salty water for a short time. I usually have to let the faucet run for 10-15 […]

I’m excited and grateful to share with you the news that my article “Evaluating the Comparability of Two Measures of Lexical Diversity” has been accepted for publication in the applied linguistics journal System. The article should appear in the journal in the next several months. I would like to take a minute and explain it in language […]

It’s a real pleasure to see a thorough and effective definition of a term that is frequently contested or confusing. Here’s Batia Laufer and Tina Waldman’s definition of collocation from their article “Verb-Noun Collocations in L2 Writing” from the June 2011 issue of Language Learning.  “We regard collocations as habitually occurring lexical combinations that are characterized […]

I’ve mentioned in the past that I currently work for Purdue’s Oral English Proficiency Program, where we train international teaching assistants for the classroom. International grad students who have TA funding and whose TOEFL scores are below a certain cut score take a test that was developed internally here at the university, and which grad […]

This past November, a video of a beating delivered by one Houston area teen on another went viral. In the video, a black teenager named Sharkeisha attacked another, sucker punching her and continuing to assault her despite friends and onlookers attempting to separate the two. It’s unclear what precipitated the attack. Part of the immensely […]

I try not to write about politics as politics here, but I do want to write about language, and language and politics are deeply bound together. Here’s a good example. I have recently been struck by the near-total demise of the word “sexist” in online political interaction, at least from my own anecdotal vantage point. […]