The Problem of Evidence

“The problem of evidence consists of the tasks of making this fact intelligible” (Garfinkle, p. 103).
    While recently writing an autoethnography examining the semiotics of name in relation to experience, I consistently came across criticism of ethnographic research aimed at highlighting the problem of interpretation of evidence. Coffey (1999) explains that in ethnography the researcher, [...]

The Ring of the Text

What is a text and where is it located?
 
“The reading of any work of literature is, of necessity, an individual and unique occurrence involving the mind and emotions of a particular reader.”
 
For at least 20 years or so, I have waited to read such an assertion, having always believed that standardized tests of reading [...]

Letter to Achilles

Letter to Achilles
Hold fast,
breathe deeply,
tend to your armor, o warrior.
Your heart and I
will likely pummel you with waves of emotions,
soak you in stormy moods,
chill you with ice storms of thoughtless words,
and no doubt already have.

A Story Worth Preserving

“But you know your mother really wanted you,” said Connie, seemingly hurt by what I was saying. I was standing in her living room, emphatically yelling and complaining about my parents, listing a litany of hurts that to my 18 year old mind were cruel and harsh wrongdoings. “And another thing,” I would continue. So much [...]

but i AM a writer

“but i AM a writer” – Marlen attempts to define what a “writer” is and finds that perhaps he might just be one.
“A writer is a person who creates novels – a writer is a storyteller,” or so I’ve always thought. Of course I understood that there were other kinds of writers – [...]

Literacy Story – The Year of the Kite

 
I can vividly remember some of my earliest writing, from a poem about the Statue of Liberty, to greeting cards prepared especially for my mother. It was at the ripe old age of 12, however, that I had an idea that writing would come to be a meaningful part of my life. Age 12 was [...]

Language & Cognition (& Pragmatics & Interpretation &…)

Language – communication and expression – and cognition – thought and thinking – when put together equals what? Psycholinguistics, or to quote Altmann, “…the mental processes that underlie our use of language” (1997, xi). Having studied psychology and psychological counseling, the field of psycholinguistics has always held some fascination for me: “Why do we say/write [...]

O Pioneers, ye ESL Instructors

Scaffolding, Context, and Technology: O Pioneers!
 

Part 1: The Wild Land (click me to read an excerpt from Willa Cather’s novel)

“The Internet is not so much a tool as a new social space that restructures social relations.” – Warschauer (paraphrasing Poster, 1997)

Mark Warschauer, a writer whom I’ve been following for the past few years and [...]

The Question of Cargo

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (Yali’s question to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, p. 14)
In Diamond’s prologue to his Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999), he restates Yali’s question above as “Why [...]

Pragmatics and Email

Learning through online communication
The development of e-mail literacy