Word of the Year 2016

Mashable recently reported that Merriam Webster had not yet announced its Word of the Year although, by the end of November, “fascism” had been the most frequently looked up word; unhappy about this, those in charge of the dictionary are encouraging users to look up other words in an apparent effort to change the results! On the other hand, dictionaries such as Collins, Oxford, Cambridge, and dictionary.com have already announced their words of the year.

 

The Collins Word of the Year is Brexit: “The withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union”. The word showed a high increase in usage, unsurprisingly, as the UK referendum results shook the world.

The Oxford Word of the Year is Post-Truth: “an adjective relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Apparently, interest in it spiked in relation to both the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States.

The Cambridge Dictionary saw a fourfold increase in searches for its Word of the Year, paranoid: “feeling extremely nervous and worried because you believe that other people do not like you or are trying to harm you”. While the editors say they cannot be certain why readers were looking up the word, they assume it must be the uncertain times we are living in, where people no longer have faith in the institutions they have traditionally trusted. Similar words have shown similar increases: anxiety, chaos, breaking down, prejudice, bigotry, bullying, and nostalgic. On a brighter note, adorable has seen a high increase in searches as well. The editors believe readers must be trying to comfort themselves by watching videos of cute animals!

Xenophobia is dictionary.com’s Word of the Year: “fear or hatred of foreigners, people from different cultures, or strangers”. Apparently, lookups spiked by 938% just after the Brexit referendum results, on June 24. In July, searches for hate crime multiplied as newspaper coverage of hate crimes rose post-Brexit.

A snapshot from the dictionaries – a snapshot of our world today.

Wishing my readers a happier new year!

 

Open Access Week

Academics worldwide will soon be celebrating International Open Access Week, from October 24 to 30. When I first blogged about Open Access in 2012, the movement had been likened to the Arab Spring, having been referred to as an “Academic Spring”. Since then, it has picked up momentum, as can be seen from the Web site of International Open Access Week.

Events are taking place globally in celebration of this movement opposing traditional, commercial publishing. Workshops, presentations, seminars, discussions and conferences are actively promoting Open Access, and a number of Arab countries have become involved over the years, including Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. Online groups have formed in celebration - from Egypt to Taiwan, and from Portugal to Tanzania. In Glasgow, Creative Commons UK will be launched as part of the celebratory week, another interesting development.

New terms are gradually being coined to refer to various aspects of the open access movement: gratis open access versus libre open access; gold open access; hybrid open access; delayed open access, etc. I will not bore you with the differences now as some readers may not care and others may find this unnecessarily complicated. For those interested, these concepts may be worth following up.

The Directory of Open Access Journals has a news section where you may read up on the various developments. Currently, for example, it shows an article on the open access strategy in Algeria: academic researchers are involved, and the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research is in favour. Interestingly, the Directory includes the Lebanese Science Journal, published by the National Council for Scientific Research, which was added in July 2016, including articles in English and French, and this journal is not the first. UNESCO notes that the DOAJ indexed a Lebanese journal in 2015, Journal of Numerical Mathematics and Stochastics published by Euclidean Press, and that a few other OA journals are published in Lebanon. Additionally, UNESCO states that the Lebanese Library Association supports the OA movement through a variety of activities that promote it among faculty, students and librarians (Global Open Access Portal). However, UNESCO identifies challenges for the Arab world, including lack of OA journals in Arabic, lack of staff qualified to manage OA databases, insufficient government regulation and donor mandates, and general lack of awareness.

 

 

The Challenge of Fairness in Student Assessment

It may seem easy for teachers to judge students; in fact, it is part of their job. How fair the teachers are in their assessment is another matter. This is where assessment of students needs assessment!

The reason why fairness in student assessment is important is obvious: every student should be given an equal opportunity to show what he or she has understood, knows, and can do. Both ethically and legally, tests (and other assessment instruments) should be culturally inclusive, unbiased, and accessible to students with special needs, such as second language learners and people with disabilities.

Culturally sensitive assessments are based on content and scenarios that cater to diverse populations. They attempt to give equal chances to students regardless of gender, place of origin, and socio-economic background. Biased tests, on the other hand, give unfair advantage to some. Unfair advantage privileges those with a certain background or experiences (rather than those with better aptitude or preparation for a test). The presence of bias invalidates scores because of irrelevant components that affect student performance across groups.

Accessibility of assessments is important based on an individual’s right to a quality education. This involves the use of tools, devices, and accommodations that allow students with special needs to take either the same tests as others or suitable equivalents. AUB is a good example of an institution that is showing greater sensitivity to students with special needs by providing special staff and accommodations to facilitate the academic experience of these students.

The type of assessment given is also important. For example, “performance assessment” in the form of projects may be considered fairer than traditional testing because it is more individualized; students may choose their own topics and may receive formative feedback as projects take time.

Of course, the teaching experience - before any evaluation – should also be fair. Fairness in assessment includes both what precedes assessment (such as resources and access) as well as the actual assessment design.

Grammar Police?

There seems to be a renaissance of language pedantry with the advance of technology and social networking. Not only does Google try to correct people's grammar by asking them what they mean, Facebook groups such as “I judge you when you use poor grammar”, are quite popular. English teachers, especially teachers of writing, are expected to behave as language police. If students make grammar errors in other courses or later, in their careers, their English teachers are often blamed. No one likes to be viewed as a scary police officer though, just as students resent being viewed as criminals for violating grammar rules. In fact, a recent study concluded that "People Obsessed With Grammar Aren't as Nice as Everybody Else". While language attitudes have been correlated with personality traits before, this study interestingly focused on attitudes towards typing errors and grammar variation through confused homonyms (words that sound the same but that should be spelled differently). Details of the study were published in the article “If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages”.

Split verbs are known to be particularly irritating to language purists, yet Steven Pinker defends them as follows:

Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, 'to say'. But in English, infinitives like 'to go' and future-tense forms like 'will go' are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.

Let us not be thick-witted and mean when it comes to grammar! Besides, effective communication is not merely about grammar: it is about content, logic, general clarity of expression, relevance, and overall fluency. If grammar is also “polished”, all the better; if not, it is not such a disaster – or is it?

Students or Consumers?

Many institutions of higher education all over the world now view students as customers. One only has to take a look at the terminology used on web sites and in student booklets to see this. Student handbooks have come to be called "student consumer handbooks". Last year the UK government issued a student guide on student consumer rights: Higher Education: Guide to Consumer Rights for Students. Prepared by the Competition and Markets Authority, it addresses students as customers of their institutions - customers with rights as follows:

Students have consumer rights. Universities and other higher education providers that don’t meet their obligations to undergraduate students may be in breach of consumer protection law.

This guide sets out what undergraduate students need to know about their rights when choosing or taking a higher education course, and what to do if things go wrong. It is also of use to those advising or assisting students.

While no one can deny the rights of students to a proper education, with adequate prior information on the courses they take, in terms of objectives, teaching methods and assessment, a new study has revealed that students who perceive themselves as consumers tend to earn lower grades than others: “The Student-as-Consumer Approach in Higher Education and its Effects on Academic Performance”. The study, noting that a “consumer identity appears to be increasingly recognised by students,” was based on a survey of hundreds of students from 35 English universities. The researchers found a negative correlation between the extent to which a student behaved like a consumer and the level of their academic performance. They noted that a lower learner identity correlated with a higher consumer orientation. As a teacher, one is not surprized by such findings. It only makes sense that those who view themselves as buying their degrees would learn less than those who are genuinely eager to learn, better themselves, and contribute to society.

Nate Kreuter, an English Professor in the US once rightly remarked in Inside Higher Ed that the growing “student as consumer” mentality was eroding key values in higher education. He explained that luring students with “slick advertising”, providing them with easy credit, turning universities into brands, promoting growth for the sake of growth, and “vocationalizing higher education” is not the way to run a university; the only advantage of viewing students as customers is reminding ourselves that our universities are accountable to our students (“Customer Mentality”).

When universities themselves encourage the consumer mentality amongst students, treating pupils more like customers than active learners, this could backfire. As Dr. Louise Bunce, one of the authors of the UK study, noted, “While it is positive that universities are expected to offer more value to students as a result of higher tuition fees, students also need to be aware that learning cannot be bought.”

Students beware.

Feeling Under the Weather?

Since the weather is occupying news headlines these days, it would be interesting to look at some weather idioms in English; the first that came to mind was “feeling under the weather”, meaning feeling unwell. Currently it is used mostly when someone is ill with a cold or flu. Its historical origin, however, appears to be nautical, not directly related to colds and such illnesses at all - it was used in sailing when some passengers were sent below deck, to protect them from the weather, for feeling seasick or generally unwell ("God Bless You! Idioms for Those With the Cold and Flu Idioms"). Sea sickness occurred mostly in bad weather, when waters were rough and ships rocked violently.

Another common weather metaphor is being “snowed under”, as in having too much work to do all at the same time. On the other hand, as I write, many parts of the world are literally getting “snowed under” in harsh winter climate. In the U.S., this could be one of the most terrible winters in history.

If you are a university student resting between semesters, this may be “the calm before the storm” for you. Hopefully, you will have no trouble “breaking the ice” with your new teachers and classmates, and if you are really lucky, and organize your time, your new courses will “be a breeze”. Besides, depending on how much effort you put into your course work, you might end up “on cloud nine”. Don’t go “chasing rainbows” (expecting too much) though if you do not invest time and effort in your work.

 To those who do work hard and do not succeed immediately, one can say , “ Every cloud has a silver lining”. Good luck!