Getting or buying permissions to reuse a figure in a new publication?

Currently working on a project that aims at listing not all but quite a few well and less known models and hypotheses encountered in the domain of language learning, I decided that illustrating my writing with the original figures would be a plus for my enterprise. The first model I started my “permission to reuse” enquiry with was the one from Mike Levy and Philip Hubbard published in 2005 in the Computer Assisted Language Learning journal, Taylor & Francis Group.

To be able to reuse copyright material from a published work in my own work, I need to ask for permission. I don’t think that the adage “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” would work here. Let’s be prudent!

Finding the permission information page on the website was easy enough. The “Request permissions” link is listed at the bottom of the article. Some publishers grant their permissions through a centralised Copyright Clearance Center. For instance, “Taylor & Francis has partnered with Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service to offer a variety of options for reusing Taylor & Francis content”.

They offer, they say, a variety of options for reusing their content, so far so good.

After completing their online form, I discovered that the price to reuse one single figure in my new publication would cost me 110.26 EURO. COME ON! I intended to use about 500 different ones. Even the authors of this graph must ask permission to reuse their own work; it is not their’s anymore.

My final thought is that, we writers have the power to select our publisher. Let’s make a good choice and publish our work under Creative Commons.

Reference

Levy, M., & Hubbard, P. (2005). Why call CALL ‘‘CALL’’? Computer Assisted Language Learning, 18(3), 143–149.

What does language aptitude mean?

Carroll and Sapon (1959) delimited language aptitude as “basic abilities that are essential to facilitate foreign language learning” (p. 14). More recently, Dörnyei (2005) reports that “the tacit understanding in the L2 research community has been that language aptitude is what language aptitude tests measure” (p. 35). The purpose of this discussion is to shed some light on the notion of language aptitude which is somehow a shadowy and complicated concept.

Early language aptitude

Identifying those with major difficulties and those with natural abilities at easily learning a foreign language motivated the first attempts of language aptitude testing. The so-called prognosis tests, occurring in the late 1920s, were developed in the U.S. schools to screen learners’ aptitude so as to reduce the high percentage of unsuccessfullness with regard to language learning (Dörnyei, 2005). The results, judged “too unreliable for use as a basis for denying any child the right to undertake foreign language work”, promoted at the time the creation of orientation classes to distinguish in between different learner’s levels (Kaulfers, 1939, p. 82). Years later, in the 1950s and 1960s, the goal had not changed and research on language aptitude became more active than before (Dörnyei, 2005).

The MLAT

The Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) designed by Carroll and Sapon (1959) aimed at predicting each candidate’s level of success in terms of rate of learning in second language acquisition, where candidates with more aptitude were likely to learn faster. In other words, it anticipated learners’ potential at rapidly speaking and understanding a foreign language. Carroll (1973) refined the concept of foreign language aptitude to the “rate at which persons at the secondary school, university and adult level successfully master a foreign language” (Carroll, 1973, p. 5 cited in Johnson, 2008, p. 118).

Language aptitude reconsidered

On the one hand, Dörnyei and Skehan (2003) claim that post-Carroll research on language aptitude has been poorly investigated, mostly because “aptitude is perceived as anti-egalitarian, in that if a fixed, immutable interpretation of aptitude is taken, it is seen as potentially disadvantaging many learners, with no hope offered of overcoming the handicap of low aptitude” (p. 593). One the other hand, Stansfield and Reed (2004) point out that the “MLAT has been used for selection, placement and guidance by schools and U.S. government agencies for more than 40 years” (p. 43). Because MLAT was developed when language teaching was mostly audiolingual, a now outdated technique, some researchers on foreign language instruction, in 1990, came to the conclusion that “…the time has come to rethink the whole notion of what constitutes ‘aptitude’ to learn FL’s” (reported by Parry & Stansfield, 1990, p. 2), to which Carroll (1990) retorted:

… it has been my assumption, for some years, that the degree of success has been acceptable or more than acceptable. In view of this, I return my query: What’s wrong with present methods? Do they require just ‘fine tuning’, or is some more radical change called for? (p. 12).

Regardless, Carroll (1990) still suggested a new approach of language aptitude prediction by investigating memory performances and cognitive factors, which were emerging, at the time, as highly active domains of research. He also proposed to take language learning tasks into consideration for further research in foreign language aptitude.

New contributors to language aptitude

New cognitive factors started influencing how researchers could measure language aptitude. Sawyer and Ranta (2001) believe that working memory capacity, which is the new label for short-term memory system, may be the answer to enhance the concept of language aptitude. The outdated term portrayed the short-term memory space as a limited space for information that will be remembered for just a few moments (Skehan, 1998). Working memory, however, is defined as “a system for temporarily holding and manipulating information as part of a wide range of essential cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehending“ (Baddeley, 1997, p. 49). Ellis (2001) further points out that in opposition to short-term memory, working memory has an active storage function for managing information.

The working memory, proposed by Baddeley (1997), is a controlling attentional system or central executive that supervises two subsystems specialised in short-term memory and information processing, respectively named the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketch pad. While the central executive, limited in capacity, is responsible for the allocation of attention, the phonological loop deals with verbal information, and the visuo-spatial sketch pad is concerned with image representation and spatial information. According to Ellis (2001), individual differences in the phonological loop account for individual differences in language learning aptitude. He adds that the ability to repeat uttered phonological sequences predicts the learner’s facility at learning vocabulary and syntax.

Conclusion

The perception of what language aptitude is has considerably evolved during the last decades. It seems to be now acknowledged as being several different individual cognitive aptitudes that differ from person to person, rather than one individual difference per se. The aptitude at learning a language will be balanced between learners’ more or less developed cognitive aptitudes, which may be, for instance, classified into basic cognitive abilities, such as processing speed, pattern recognition, phonological working memory capacity, phonological working memory speed, semantic priming, lexical inferencing, text working memory capacity, text working memory speed, grammatical sensitivity, and rote memory (Robinson, 2005).

References

Baddeley, A. (1997). Human memory: theory and practice (Revised ed.). Sussex: Psychology Press Ltd Publishers.

Carroll, J. B. (1990). Cognitive abilities in foreign language aptitude: then and now. In T. Parry & C. Stansfield (Eds.), Language aptitude reconsidered. NJ: Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs.

Carroll, J. B. (1973). Implications of aptitude test research and psycholinguistic theory for foreign language teaching. International Journal of Psycholinguistics, 2(1), 5-14.

Carroll, J. B., & Sapon, S. M. (1959). Modern language aptitude test: MLAT; manual. New York: Psychological Corporation.

Dörnyei, Z. (2005). The psychology of the language learner: individual differences in second language acquisition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dörnyei, Z., & Skehan, P. (2003). Individual differences in second language learning. In C. J. Doughty & M. H. Long (Eds.), The handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 589-630). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Ellis, C. N. (2001). Memory for language. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, K. (2008). An introduction to foreign language learning and teaching (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Pearson Education Limited.

Kaulfers, W. V. (1939). Prognosis and its alternatives in relation to the guidance of students. The German Quarterly, 12(2), 81-84. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/400453

Parry, T., & Stansfield, C. (Eds.). (1990). Language aptitude reconsidered. NJ: Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs.

Robinson, P. (2005). Aptitude and second language acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 25(1), 46-73. doi:10.1017/S0267190505000036

Sawyer, M., & Ranta, L. (2001). Aptitude, individual differences, and instructional design. In P. Robinson (Ed.), Cognition and Second Language Instruction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Skehan, P. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford Univiersity Press.

Stansfield, C. W., & Reed, D. J. (2004). The story behind the modern language aptitude test: an interview with John B. Carroll (1916-2003). Language Assessment Quarterly, 1(1), 43-56. doi:10.1207/s15434311laq0101_4

Installing TrEd on Mac OS X Lion

Tree Editor TrEd is a customisable and programmable graphical editor and viewer for tree-like structures. I installed it on Linux, but then I realised that it could also be handy to have it on my Mac.

First thing’s first, I checked that I had the Mac developer Tools (Xcode) installed as they are required to build TrEd dependencies. More specifically, I would need amongst other things a C compiler (gcc – GNU Compiler Collection). Xcode can be downloaded for free from either the AppStore or the Apple website. Note that you will be asked to enter your Apple ID and password. The latest version of Xcode you can download seems to be running only with the latest version to date of Lion.

I got Xcode 4.3 which runs with Lion 10.7.3, and copied it to the Applications folder.

Installing TrEd!

install_tred.bash (save link as) was downloaded and ran from Terminal:

>bash install_tred.bash --tred-dir /Applications/tred

 It didn’t work! The “llvm-gcc4.2″ and “make” were apparently missing on my system .

How to access gcc (symlink for llvm-gcc4.2) from Xcode 4.3?

Xcode does not provide an installer anymore, which means that the compilers and other command lines toolsets are not visible in Terminal. This may be temporarily fixed by updating the PATH env (see The Rubyist Journal).

I entered the following command line in Terminal:

>PATH=/Applications/ Xcode.app/ Contents/ Developer/ Toolchains/ XcodeDefault.xctoolchain/ usr/ bin:/ Applications/ Xcode.app/ Contents/ Developer/ usr/ bin:$PATH

The issue seemed to be fixed as the compiler was now accessible.

But fixing the path did not help much in installing TrEd. The C compiler could not create executables and the installation of TrEd dependencies failed.

 Another way to fix the PATH env issue is to install the additional tools directly in Xcode: Preferences > Downloads > Command Line Tools > Install. Note that another 170MB are downloaded.

Installing TrEd: another try!

Success! Hurray! Installation is now complete. Here is what TrEd looks like: 

Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Lyster & Ranta (1997)

Lyster and Ranta (1997) investigate corrective feedback and learners’ oral responses to feedback, i.e., learner uptake, at primary levels. After recording 100 hours of classroom activities, they classify the various teachers’ responses to learners’ incorrect turns into six categories: explicit correction, recast, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, and repetition.

Explicit correction differs from recast in the sense that, even if both types provide learners with the correct form, the former clearly indicates that the production was erroneous, whereas the latter is more subjective. In this case, learners might not notice that their spoken language, compared to the teacher’s reformulation, is indeed incorrect. Clarification request, as its name indicates, points to the fact that a clarification is necessary to understand the learner’s utterance. Metalinguistic feedback is mainly defined as detailed information about the error, yet without providing the correct answer. Elicitation techniques, such as pausing, are used to elicit the correct answer from the learner. Finally, a teacher’s repetition is generally provided to the learner with an emphasis on the error, as to make it salient.

The authors demonstrate that recasts, which are the most widely used in classroom context, are the least likely to lead to any modified output and, a fortiori, self-repairs. The most likely types of feedback that trigger self-corrections would be elicitation, clarification request, and metalinguistic feedback.

References

Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19(1), 37-66. doi:10.1017/S0272263197001034

Starting “Internet in the humanities: an insight from Ireland”

Last year, I co-edited a book and published it. The particularity of this book was that it targeted young researchers, having just completed, or nearly completed their Ph.D., with a research focus on language learning by means of Internet technology and web-based computer applications. The task was rather challenging, given the fact that it was my first editing involvement. But the experience gained in doing it was just invaluable. Furthermore, the book was well received by the community, which was a great reward for so much effort made with regard to quality.

Empowered with this new skill, I am now ready to make another one .

I am co-editing a second book provisionally entitled “Internet in the humanities: an insight from Ireland” with Cathy Fowley and Claire English, two researchers who have recently completed their PhDs in Dublin City University, just like me, in areas related to digital humanities. The aim of this new project is to publish selected papers, whose focus will be on the Internet in the humanities in Ireland, just like the title says.

The Call for Papers has been announced. If you are researching in the domain of Internet in the humanities in Ireland, we would like to invite you to contribute to this book. Deadline for submission is on the 15th of March 2002. Please visit the publisher’s website for more information.