I was one of the judges at a graduate research showcase today. All research projects were great. There was a police officer from Indiana who studies the use of drones in policing and a doctor from Tanzania who does research on antibiotic resistance.
And then there was a guy who does linguistics. It’s not what is called linguistics anywhere else on the planet but in North America linguistics is a whole other thing.
“14,29% of subjects in my study said they prefer this method of language learning,” said the graduate researcher meaningfully.
“And how many people total did you have in the study?” I asked.
“Seven!” reported the researcher happily.
I had to pinch my thigh so hard to avoid laughing that I now have a bruise.
Clarissa's Blog 
This math-envy that plagues many fields is making them dumber, not smarter. I once watched lectures given by a professor of political science at Brown called Ashutosh Varshney, and one of things he’s famous for is using linear regressions in Excel to explain riots in India lol.
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I once met somebody who was trying to apply this method to literary criticism. “23% of metaphors in this novel are aquatic while 6% refer to other natural phenomena.”
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Now I have a burning desire to know what was the rest of the metaphors (71%) about.
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They were all different and couldn’t be categorized.
I earned this scholar’s eternal hatred for asking, “and so what? What is the conclusion you draw from it?”
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So 1 out of the 7 subjects!
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Yes. Individual idiosyncrasy raised to the level of scientific fact.
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What is linguistics like elsewhere? For obvious reasons I’m mostly familiar with the North American variety.
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“What is linguistics like elsewhere?”
In most of Europe it’s tied to philology and connected closely to literature and other written texts. In some countries (Czechia or Norway for example) it was tied to validating the national language. In some places it got tied up in mathematical theory (including set theory) and there’s lots of stuff with complicated formulas with math symbols. In the UK… I dunno….just kind of scattershot with some sociolinguistics and studies of languages of former colonies (esp Africa and South Asia) and then ESL (more of a pyramid scheme than a real branch of science imho).
In the US it first developed as a branch of anthropology and was primarily about analyzing indigenous languages (which led to a big split with Europe over terminology because the existing nomenclature didn’t work for languages like Bella Coola or Hopi). In WWII that method got extended (thanks to generous government grants) to some Asian languages which led to new analyses of those (Bloch with Japanese, Haas with Thai).
This also led to studies of Creole languages (previously thought to be just ‘bad’ English or French) and also the first modern linguistic analyses of sign languages (previously thought to be pantomime or improvised gestures).
American linguistics didn’t really look much at English until the ascension of Chomsky in the 1960s which had some… weird detours.
Then I want to say sometime in the mid to late 1970s it got subsumed into English as a Second Language studies (that’s where the money was).
I’m going to be charitable and assume the student in this case was just starting research (maybe ESL) and is just in a pilot study stage
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Yes, it’s all weird type of language teaching stuff. I have no idea why it’s called linguistics at all.
Language teaching produced zero new insights since the sixties, so it’s unclear why more disciplines need to be subsumed into a very dead field.
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That sounds more like College of Education research than Linguistics to me. I once encountered an Education dissertation that was addressing issues related to teacher education based on a study of TWO first year teachers. There were some interesting questions and observations, but absolutely no basis for any of the conclusions made.
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I have every respect for actual linguistics. My father was a linguistbsnd wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject of the uses of the definite article “the” in the English language. To me, it always seemed deathly boring but it’s a real, serious discipline. The endless milking of ESL teaching methodologies is not.
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I agree with you. And those people somehow also manage to publish like machines, which looks good to the eyes of administrators.
Ol.
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And it’s always the same tired ideas. Yes, speaking practice in real-life situations is fantastic for foreign language learning. We’ve only known this since 1962. Can anything possibly be more boring, true as it might be?
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I… had never heard of anything like this.
When I took linguistics we had a TA who was recruiting native speakers of Russian in order to stick a scope down their throats and watch them pronounce certain phonemes, for her dissertation.
Which sounded very weird and uncomfortable, but… recognizably something to do with linguistics. This sounds like just… opinion research on pedagogy. Teacher college stuff.
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