Language Log Plaza has been the source of a couple of recent posts concerning rude and disagreeable English (here) and (here). In stark contrast with these rants about how bad things are these days comes some good news about rudeness as a promising tool for diagnosing language learning. Linguists at Orizen Technical University in Canada have isolated a new way to assess language fluency--students' ability to use rudeness effectively. This discovery challenges the long-standing notion that mean length of utterance (MLU) is the most useful indicator of language ability.
The researchers began their study with the belief
that a student's ability to write English functionally matters far more
than how long their utterances turn out to be. "New learners can write
long sentences that produce a high MLU score without saying anything
worth reading," reports the Director of the project. "We find that more
advanced language learners have shown a highly developed sense of
meanness in their texts."
The research team, which included a classroom teacher, first
investigated various speech acts, excluding agreeing, requesting,
giving opinions, etc. before hitting on those speech acts that came
closest to reflecting real fluency-the students' ability to communicate
effectively their wrath, meanness, ill-temper, rudeness, insults, and
disdain.
Thus, the researchers came up with the length of mean utterance (LMU)
to replace the mean length of utterance (MLU), suggesting that it
should be used in future studies of written language fluency. According
to this study, students who remain focused longer on meanness and
rudeness invariably display the greatest progress in their ability to
produce effective written texts.
Methodology:
Finding it difficult to simulate real life rudeness through experiments
(after all, the research was done in Canada), the research team
rejected controlled experimentation in favor of a more ethnographic
approach. From students in the English teacher's class, they collected
writing samples from ten adolescent language learners during the 2005
school year.
Results:
A total of 480 really mean utterances were recorded, distributed as
follows:
At first the team members were puzzled by this perfect bell-curve distribution, so they set about to discover which students fit into each of these four categories. Not surprisingly, the most effective language learning correlated with the length of the writers' mean utterances (LMU). Closer examination of the data is illustrative, including the following examples:
1-2 word utterances:
You jerk!
Bitch!
Hell no!
Drop dead!
Baloney!
Crap!
3-5 word utterances:
Go to hell!
Man, you're really stupid!
This is utter nonsense!
Get out of here!
Like you bore me silly!
This is crap!
6-10 word utterances:
All year long you've said absolutely
nothing to convince me.
I've been more impressed by a blank wall.
Your dress looks like a raggedy brown potato sack.
I'll never take your courses again in my life.
This year was one of the dullest in human history.
Here's that damn who/whom rule again.
Over 10 word utterances:
This is, beyond question, one of the
most boring courses I have ever taken in my life.
There are few, if any, teachers at (name of school deleted), or any
other school, who could qualify as well as you for the title of Miss Emptyhead of 2006.
Whatever else might be said, this research study sucks worse than
anything ever concocted by human beings and it ought to be
outlawed, if possible, in the future.
These sentences made it patently clear to the research team that
students who produced 3-5 word LMUs had not yet mastered English
properly. Those who wrote longer, really mean sentences, however,
developed their insults thoughtfully, elaborated on their basic
nastiness, gave rude specifics, used ugly comparisons, and even created
some syntactic embedding.
It was also noted that neophytes used exclamation marks while
experts did not, a result that the research team plans to examine next.
"We will really need to explore this!" explained the director.
Discussion:
The discovery of the length of mean utterance (LMU) as an indicator of
written language fluency holds great promise for future studies of
language acquisition. Not surprisingly, the research project was
amazingly well received by the subjects.* Even beginning level students
displayed positive attitudes toward the program, especially when told
that they were free to use any expletive they wished.
*It should be noted that some of the example
sentences above were found in the course evaluations.