(on your own quote, has Marshall McLuhan’s idea of the “media being the message” come to mind? Also, Neil Postman and Amusing Ourselves to Death on degeneration of public discourse?…25 years after publication I attended a workshop, today 08.2010, on using cell phones in the classroom to engage student interest. Topic to be addressed: poetry!)

tk

I guess he makes a living as most of us–producing value for society. Hoey’s work, if we ever get to pay attention to it, might revolutionize ELT.
Discourse analysis and especially corpus linguistics, which informed Lexial Priming 100%, is almost pure empirical science.

Thornbury’s reference to Lewis (Natural Grammar) who has included Hoey (Teaching Collocation) should caution us to think that teaching practice can be happily ignorant of theory. And as unplugged as Thornbury comes across, he is certainly not un-theoried (Conversation: From Description to Pedagogy).

In fact, I have been arguing the point in my work environment that we have a lot of pseudo-teaching going on in classrooms precisely because we are not fully aware of Hoey’s findings. Students are kept busy with nice activities (edutainment: a word that makes my fingernails curl), but they are not learning (acquiring, remembering, storing, recalling, automatizing> priming)language.

best,

tk

It does make sense.

And of course, aging brings lots of learning.

tk

While Phillipson [the author] raises many interesting points (the fallacies of ELT among them) his overall thesis has to be rejected on the following grounds (toname but a few):* on its in-built power asymmetry, that is that the devloping countries are seen as being incapable of independent decisions. * the fact that linguistic imperialism is not falsifiable: there is no scenario where Phillipson would admit that English DOES fulfill a useful role in a third world country.* Phillipson’s left-wing terminology and tone: imperialism itself is a left-wing term.* a country’s linguistic ecology is too complex to fit into Phillipson’s neat “black and white” scenario. Phillipon’s book can thus be only a start for a discussion on global English. For further reading I recommend Kachru’s “The Alchemy of English”, Crystals “English as an International Language” (critical reading necessary) and Pennycook’s “The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language.”