Backburner Projects
Here lie the projects that time requires I not focus on for a spell. It doesn't take much to get me interested again.
- Readability
- My main interest in readability is rethinking measures of complexity from a stronger linguistic and psychological standpoint. Also, I would like to see the classic indices extended to account for more language families. Lastly, I am interested in L2 curricula which include ranked readings selected from a wider corpus.
- L2 Education
- I would like to develop curricula for difficulty-ranked readings (mentioned above) to challenge learners and foster organic vocabulary growth. The reciprocal of that project is honing word choice for non-native speakers. I've laid out my initial thoughts in something I call "Ontologically Speaking." Another (as yet unpursued) venue is computer modeling of students' L2 knowledge to predict gaps and help tailor lesson plans. A simple example is documenting the implications and entailments of conjunctions in the source and target languages. A third branch of some interesting L2 research points towards text-based gaming. In the spring of 2008, I failed to get funding for my EduMUDE project.
- Humor
- At my undergrad Grinnell, I explored Gricean Pragmatics as an explanatory tool. Now I am more interested in creating productive and predictive theories of humor in language.
- Fallacy and Language Abuse
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