Saturday 31 December 2022

So long and thanks for all the fish!

10 years ago I posted my first post on this blog. 

It was a criticism of people taking the word "literally" too literally. Now, 10 years later, this is my final post. 

A lot has changed in ELT in the last 10 years. Learning styles and some of the other weird practices I criticised seem to be on their way out. This would be cause for celebration but I am worried that new whacky ideas have rushed in to fill the gap. I'm not sure that ELT is any more evidence-based now than it was 10 years ago. 

A lot has changed for me too. Since starting this blog I have written a book which was nominated for an ELTon, a number of papers and I have been invited to speak in a number of countries. I couldn't have imagined when I started the blog back in 2012 that anything like that would have happened but it's been a (mostly) fun experience and I have got to meet some really great people.
  

10 years in numbers

In 2012 I wrote a post celebrating the fact the blog hit 1,000 views. Since then it has been viewed more than half a million times. The most popular nation for views was the US followed, rather curiously, by Russia. The most common search term that led to the blog is xxxxxx (no doubt related to this). 

This post will be the 152nd post on this blog. 

So after 10 years what were the most popular posts of all time? 

10. Chris Smith's guest blog on oral error correction 

9. Leo Selivan on Misapplied linguistics 

8. The Myth of neat histories (one of my favourite posts) 

7. 2018 wrap up post (a rather odd one for the top 10) 

6. Is Korea the worst place to teach English

5. Learning Styles: Facts and Fictions

4. Philip Kerr on left and right brains in ELT

3. Skimming and Scanning 

2. Swearing shows a lack of intelligence

1. MA or DELTA: which to do

If you want to explore other posts on this blog then there is an incomplete index here

Unwritten blog posts 

I have a bad habit of starting blog posts but never finishing them. At present there are about 60 half written blog posts that seemed doomed to stay half written. So here are some of the delights I never got round to finishing. 

1. A post defending learning styles, as an intellectual exercise. 

2. A post on language and religion, with specific reference to Mormons. 

3. Something about the number of rejections I have had when submitting articles to journals and some things you could do to increase your chances of getting an article accepted. 

4. A long post on Krashen 

Note: I did a poll and many people replied that Krashen has been proved "generally right" about most things. The post was looking at how wrong he is about so many things, like teaching reading (he is seriously anti-science in his views), input only approaches, rejection of error correction as useful, and some of the weirder things he has claimed such as his views on bilingual education and how he treats suggestopedia as a serious approach. Krashen is charismatic, funny and persuasive and the closest thing in ELT to a real cult-of-personality Guru and I'm a little surprised academics give him as much credit as some do. 

5. A post on cancel culture in ELT

6. A post on creativity and if it can be taught

7. A whole series of posts on testing

8. A whole series of posts on Chomsky 

Note: I have so many notes but no complete posts. Chomsky is endlessly interesting but if you want to know more I suggest reading "The Linguistics Wars" edition 2 which is excellent on the subject OR Christina Behme's book on the subject which is an exceptional piece of writing.  

9. A post on bad science for good causes

Note: This will probably appear somewhere in some form. 

Finally! 

I want to say thank you to the few people who have approached me over the years at conferences and other events and said they enjoyed reading the blog. It really meant a lot and I appreciate it. 

I've had a strange relationship with twitter over the years. I have met some great people there and it's a great resource for academics to find each other and share work. It can also be incredibly toxic and has some bad incentives programmed into it. 

I will likely keep my twitter account but these days I find myself checking it less and less. I will lurk so feel free to send me a DM but don't be offended if I don't get back to you very quickly. 

Anyway, I am now off to work on a much bigger and more personal project that I expect to take up almost all of my time. 



Thanks for reading!

Russ Mayne

2023/1/1







Tuesday 18 January 2022

Is there a replication crisis in ELT?

In a 2012 post I talked about the famous Pygmalion effect in education which shows that teachers expectations for students alone were enough to influence actual outcomes. It’s a truly amazing finding and minimizes the influence of home life, peer group and IQRosenthal and Jacobson showed that, as I noted, "teachers' attitudes towards their students can affect students in quite remarkable ways". The authors were lauded and their paper has been cited over 12,000 times but there was just one problem, it probably wasn't true. 

As I noted in that original post, there were some failed attempts to replicate the results. What I didn't realise at the time is just how shaky the original research was (Thorndike wrote that the study “is so defective technically that one can only regret that it ever got beyond the eyes of the original investigators!”) and just what a controversial subject it has become (there is a nice overview here). 

The Pygmalion effect is not, however, an anomaly. In fact a host of famous psychological studies have come under scrutiny in recent years. The Stanford prison guard experiment, for example, has, to date, not been successfully replicated. Nor has the claim that holding a pencil in your teeth will make you feel happier by creating a "smile".  Did you hear the one about how priming people with adjectives relating to old age can make them walk like old people? That didn't replicate. Neither did the one in which thinking about professors makes you smarter. How about the one about how standing in a power pose makes you actually more powerful? You guessed it. 

In one incredible article with over 270 authors that attempts to replicate 100 studies in top ranking psychology journals, researchers found that only around one third to a half replicated. This finding is part of the replication crisis in science, which has involved fields from medicine to cognitive psychology. One paper notes that "Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak." 

Bad news for science, but what's the situation like in ELT? 

The simple answer is that no one really knows as replication is vanishingly rare in SLA and applied linguistics. One of the people pushing for replication in ELT is Emma Marsden, co founder of the oasis database. In a comprehensive 2018 paper (which stretches to 70 pages) Marsden and colleagues investigate the state of replication in the field. They note that at present "little is known about replication in second language (L2) research". 

In the paper Marsden et al surveyed the literature for replications, finding 67, a number they describe as "very low". The authors estimate that for every 400 papers published, 1 gets replicated. Of the 67 papers they found around a third of the replications they looked at did not produce the same result as the original study. At a rough estimate then 30% of the research out there is wrong.  (Edit: Dan Isbell correctly points out that failure to replicate does not mean the original study was "wrong". As he notes "a single replication is not a final verdict.")

Replication can provide important insights for teachers. A replication of nations work on 432 for instance, showed that merely repeating the task, without shortening the time, led to the same increases in fluency as practice + time reduction. That means 4/4/4 is as effective as 4/3/2. Replication can also help by testing claims in non-"weirdpopulations (particularly useful for ELT)The lack of replication may explain the surprisingly low level of retraction in ELT

There are efforts to change the situation and increase the amount of replication. For instance, Language Learning is publishing a special "replication" edition.  The publication of this project is set of for June of this year and will make interesting reading. But as things stand the lack of replication in SLA should seriously worry those trying to argue for the importance of research in supporting teaching. 

Monday 4 October 2021

It's over 9000!!

(This post includes video clips that may not show up on mobile devices)

The recent hit Netflix show Squid Game has caused controversy online after reports that the translation is not correct. 

Podcast host Youngmi Mayer caused a stir when she tweeted out that the English translations of the Netflix show were "botched" and that "if you don’t understand Korean you didn’t really watch the same show". She noted that "zero" of the original dialogue was preserved. So, what happened? How could a huge company like Netflix make such a mess of translating a show like this? 

I decided to investigate. 

The first thing to understand about translations are that there are different types. One is literal and another is localised. For an example of the problems that translating can cause think about the phrase "bless you". In Japanese no one says "bless you" after someone sneezes so if you were translating a "bless you" in a movie into Japanese, how would you do it? 

A literal translation would have you translate the phrase "bless you" into Japanese. That would be weird because it would imply some kind of religious experience. So, you might opt instead to "localize" the dialogue and have someone say something like "caught a cold?" which might express the same level of concern as "bless you". 

Localisation explains why the 90s show Pokemon rendered Rice Balls into "donuts". Presumably Western 90s kids had never seen rice balls before and the translator opted to go for a more familiar food. 

Another issue with translation is that it often differs depending on whether you are translating for a dub or for subtitles. With dubbing, getting a translation that matches the mouth movements of the actor may take precedence over literal accuracy. If someone says "Get out!" in English, you would look for a similar phrase in the other language which had two syllables (Check this video out for an interesting look at this process). 

Rumour has it that the infamous "over 9000" meme (original "over 8000" in Japanese) was dubbed as 9000 because it better fit the mouth movements (I can't find any evidence to support this claim though it would be a curious change to make for no reason). 

For subtitles, the main concern is space. Time reading is time not watching the show. Some people are also much slower readers than others and so brevity is key. If you are interested in the rules for subtitles you might want to peruse this Channel 4 guide. For dramas, they allow 38 characters per line. That's about the length of the previous sentence. 

All of this means, if you watch a dubbed foreign show with the subtitles on you will find that they don't match at all. Both are good translations but the subs and the dub are working with different constraints. 

With further ado, let's take a look at the complaints about Squid Game. 

The first one is that one of the female players, Han Mi-Nyeoswears a lot and the swear words get removed in the translation. The example she gives is when the player says "what are you looking at" and the subtitles say "go away". 

The problem with this criticism, as a few twitter users pointed out to her, is that rather than watching the subbed version she seemed to be watching the [CC] closed caption version. As this account points out, the closed caption is a transliteration of the dub. The line is actually correctly translated in the subtitles as "what are you looking at" but in the CC version it's just "go away". But why the difference?  As Yuri7 notes, the original Korean phrase is two syllables so the dub opted for the two syllables "go away" presumably to fit the mouth movements better. 

The next example Mayer uses is a character who says "I'm not a genius but I can work it out" rather than the correct, "I'm really smart but I never got a chance to study". As it turns out though, Yuri yet again notes that Mayer was watching the closed captions and not the subtitles, which did accurately render that line as "I never bothered to study but I'm unbelievably smart". The Gganbu scene can also be explained as an issues with space and reading the CC instead of the subs. 

So this all seems to have been just a simple misunderstanding. No harm, no foul, right?

Perhaps, but something that makes me a little uncomfortable about all of this is the speed at which this spread and was reprinted in several newspapers (for example, in the BBC, the NY post and the Independent.) without really anyone bothering to check the accuracy of it.  

I also feel a little sorry for the translator(s) who worked on the show. To her credit, Mayer wrote that it wasn't the fault of translators but the industry which overworks and underpays them. Presumably though, Mayer has no idea if the translating agencies Netflix employ, overwork or underpay employees, but this tweet has 33k likes and so most people will be left with that impression. 

Mayer's original tweet has 116k likes and her tiktok video has 2 millionMost people who have seen this story are now left thinking that Netflix subtitles are rubbish and this is because translators are exploited. All of this is because of one person's misunderstanding. Also, rather disappointingly, after having the mistake pointed out to her and admitting she got it wrong, Mayer still has not deleted the original post or published a correction. 


*notes: I don't speak Korean and I'm not a translator so if any of the information in this post is wrong let me know and I'll correct it. 

Saturday 25 September 2021

Everything you ever wanted to know about massing, blocking, spacing and interleaving (Interview with John Rogers)

While writing our recent book, an introduction to evidence based ELT, we contemplated writing a chapter on grammar teaching using massed and spaced conditions. Quickly it became clear that this was a rather complicated area and not one with clear findings, and so the chapter didn't make it to the book. This was a shame because there was a lot of interesting research we came across when planning it. 

While reading around the subject, one name that kept coming up in the SLA research was John Rogers. So I was delighted when I discovered John's account on twitter and when he agreed to talk to me about this area of research. 


If you would like to read more of John's work then check out his profile here or if you have any questions then follow him on twitter



Wednesday 7 July 2021

Interview with Sue Leather and Jez Uden (Extensive Reading)

Sue Leather and Jez Uden have a new book out on the topic of Extensive Reading and Motivation. I was keen to talk to them after looking into research on extensive reading and finding it to be one of the most effective interventions available to teachers. Here we chat about their new book, and some of the benefits of extensive reading. 


If you would like to read the book then you can get it from Amazon or directly from the Routledge site.


Thursday 1 July 2021

An introduction to evidence-based teaching


So, rather unbelievably, I have a book coming out

In February 2019 I gave a plenary at Ireland ELT. Afterwards, Kirsten Holt of Pavilion said she enjoyed the talk and that someone should really write a book about this kind of thing. Later, at a Pavilion event Kirsten mention the same idea to Carol Lethaby. As it turned out, Carol and I had previously worked together on a couple of papers and Carol and Patti Harries were already working on proposal for a book. 

Two years later and the book is finally out to buy! 

I think this book is quite different to other books on teaching and research (but then again, I would say that). A lot of books about research into teaching are written by researchers attempting to bring research findings to a more general audience. What we have attempted to do is something similar but as all of us are teachers, not researchers, we hope that this will give the work more of a teacher's perspective on things. 

An interesting aspect of the book for me was that it touches on topics that aren't discussed that frequently in ELT. for instance, the information on Cognitive Load Theory, retrieval practice and the importance of background knowledge was largely new to me (though I had seen it mentioned in non ELT books). 

We have tried to provide clear sources for all the claims and pack as many useful ideas into the text as possible. I feel pretty confident that even those who know quite a lot about research will find some interesting takeaways in here. 

And while we do mention learning myths and things that don't have good evidence to support them it isn't 200 pages of slamming learning styles. There is as much "what works" as "what doesn't". The book also features advice for teachers who want to look at research themselves. 

The books is not a "how to" or a "100 great games" type of book. There are no photocopiable practical activities for teachers to use in their next class. That said, it does have a lot of practical suggestions on what teaching techniques might be effective and how materials can be adapted or replaced. The second half is also practical and contains activities for teachers or trainee teachers, so the book could be used on teacher training courses like the DELTA, CELTA or even on MA courses. 

Despite bearing the title "evidence based" we are not making any claims that the book is flawless or the definitive word on best practice in ELT. The word "introduction" is used to indicate that we do not go into minute amounts of detail on every topic. Rather, the book gives and overview on a number of topics. No doubt there will be some who disagree with our conclusions on some topics as it's hard to find 100% agreement on much. There are even parts that the authors don't entirely agree on. That being said we believe we have gone with reasonable positions on the issues we have dealt with. 

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice or constructive feedback over the years! 

I hope you enjoy the book 

Tuesday 1 June 2021

A list of lists

While reading for my forthcoming book I came across a lot of lists that authors had put together based on what we could say about teaching from the available evidence. I thought they were interesting but they didn't make it into the book. So here is a list of those lists. 

(There are some other interesting lists which are too long to include here. They include Swan's list of things he believes about language teaching, Thonrbury's 12 observations, and Hattie's list of principles.)

Mike Long (2014

  1. Use task, not text, as the unit of analysis 
  2. Promote learning by doing
  3. Elaborate input (do not simplify; do not rely solely on “authentic” texts). 
  4. Provide rich (not impoverished) input.
  5. Encourage inductive (“chunk”) learning.
  6. Focus on form (TBLT)
  7. Provide negative feedback
  8. Respect “learner syllabuses”/ developmental processes.
  9. Promote cooperative/ collaborative learning.
  10. Individualize instruction

Rod Ellis (2005) principles of instructed language learning 

  1. Instruction needs to ensure that learners develop both a rich repertoire of formulaic expressions and a rule-based competence
  2. Instruction needs to ensure that learners focus predominantly on meaning
  3. Instruction needs to ensure that learners also focus on form
  4. Instruction needs to be predominantly directed at developing implicit knowledge of the L2 while not neglecting explicit knowledge
  5. Instruction needs to take into account the learner’s ‘built-in syllabus’
  6. Successful instructed language learning requires extensive L2 input
  7. Successful instructed language learning also requires opportunities for Output
  8. The opportunity to interact in the L2 is central to developing L2 Proficiency
  9. Instruction needs to take account of individual differences in learners
  10. In assessing learners’ L2 proficiency it is important to examine free as well as controlled production

Nation's principles of vocab learning (2013)

1. Provide clear, simple, and brief explanations of meaning
2. Draw attention to the generalisable underlying meaning of a word
3. Give repeated attention to words
4. Help learners recognize definitions
5. Prioritise what should be explained about particular words
6. Help learners remember what is explained
7. Avoid interference from related words

Hunt and Beglar (1998) principles of vocab learning

1. Provide opportunities for the incidental learning of vocabulary.
2. Diagnose which of the 3000 most common words learners need to study.
3. Provide opportunities for the intentional learning of vocabulary.
4. Provide opportunities for elaborating word knowledge.
5. Provide opportunities for developing fluency with known vocabulary
6. Experiment with guessing from context.
7. Examine different types of dictionaries and teach students how to use them.

Lightbown generalizations drawn from research (1985)

  1. “Adults and adolescents can ‘acquire’ a second language.”
  2. “The learner creates a systematic interlanguage which is often characterized by the same systematic errors as the child learning the same language as the first language, as well as others which appear to be based on the learner's own native language”
  3. “There are predictable sequences in acquisition such that certain structures have to be acquired before others can be integrated”
  4. “Practice does not make perfect”
  5. “Knowing a language rule does not mean one will be able to use it in communicative interaction”
  6. “Isolated explicit error correction is usually ineffective in changing language behaviour”
  7. “For most adult learners, acquisition stops—'fossilizes'—before the learner has achieved native-like mastery of the target language”
  8. One cannot achieve native-like (or near native-like) command of a second language in one hour a day
  9. “The learner's task is enormous because language is enormously complex”
  10. “A learner's ability to understand language in a meaningful context exceeds his/her ability to comprehend decontextualized language and to produce language of comparable complexity and accuracy”

Palmer's principles of language teaching 

(1) The initial preparation of the student by the training of his spontaneous capacities for assimilating spoken language.
(2) The forming of new and appropriate habits and the utilization of previously formed habits. 
 (3) Accuracy in work in order to prevent the acquiring of bad habits. 
 (4) Gradation of the work in such a way as to ensure an ever-increasing rate of progress. 
 (5) Due proportion in the treatment of the various aspects and branches of the subject. 
 (6) The presentation of language-material in a concrete rather than in an abstract way. 
 (7) The securing and maintaining of the student’s interest in order to accelerate his progress. 
 (8) A logical order of progression in accordance with principles of speech-psychology. 
 (9) The approaching of the subject simultaneously from different sides by means of different and appropriate devices

Van Patten 5 implications of research

1. The more input the better
2. The more interaction the better
3. All learner production should be meaning based or communicative
4. Focus on Form should be meaning based or tied to input or communication
5. We should watch out for what we expect from our learners

Ortega 5 generalizations of interlanguage research (2009)

1. Instruction affect the route of L2 development in any fundamental way
2. Instruction can have some effect on processes, fostering some and inhibiting others
3. Instruction can be ineffective and even counterproductive when it ignores developmental readiness
4. Not all sequences present equal challenges for instruction
5. Instruction has a large positive effect on rate of development and ultimate attainment

Ferris’s principles of preparing teachers for written error correction

1. Teachers of L2 writers need to study aspects of grammar that are particularly problematic for non-native speakers of English.
2. Teachers of L2 writers need practice in recognizing and identifying errors in student writing.
3. Teachers of L2 writers need practice in developing lessons and teaching grammar points and editing strategies to their writing students.
4. Teachers of L2 writers need to understand the principles of second language acquisition and of composition theory.
5. Teachers of L2 writers should become familiar with language structures needed for different task types and academic disciplines.

Dornyei's 10 commandments of motivation 

1. Set a personal example with your own behaviour
2. Develop a good relationship with the learners
3. Increase the learners’ linguistic self-confidence
4. Make the language classes interesting
5. Promote learner autonomy
6. Personalise the learning process
7. Increase the learners’ goal-orientedness
8. Familiarize learners with the target culture
9. Create a pleasant relaxed atmosphere in the classroom
10. Present the tasks properly

Grabe and Stoller reading syllabus principles (2020)


1. Ask students to read a lot and often for well-defined purposes.
2. Incorporating deliberate practice into reading curricula supports reading skill development
3. Promote discussion about the text
4. Build students motivation to read
5. Teach vocabulary as the foundation to reading
6. Make students aware of textual features
7. Work on fluency
8. Teach learners to be strategic readers
9. Teach rather than test for main idea comprehension
10. Reading lessons should be pre- during post style
11. Texts should be selected based on students needs and ability
12. Digital literacy needs should be considered
13. Connect reading to writing
14. Assess their progress

Wednesday 5 May 2021

EBEFL asks: should we use translation software?

 I was recently presented with an almost flawless piece of writing from a students whose English level precluded her producing such an almost flawless piece of writing. Initially I thought, “oh no…we have to have *that* conversation”…

In her tutorial the student guilty confessed to using translation software. I told her I was surprised because google translate famously produces awful translations from Japanese to English. “ah” she said, “I didn’t use google”.

She directed me to a site called DeepL. I threw a bit of Japanese in from Wikipedia and this is what I got out.

DeepL

Now this isn’t perfect but it’s pretty damn good. For good measure I threw it into google translate and got a pretty good rendering too.

google translate

I was quite surprised at how good the Google Translate version was. But I shouldn’t have been . Sure, it was an endless source of comedy in 2004 when it produced weird and wacky sentences, but that was 15 years ago and technology moves on (in 2004 no one thought computers would beat humans at Go any time soon, that happened in 2015. There is an excellent documentary about it online). Google translate switched to using “Neural Machine Translation” around 2017 and this has reportedly led to much better quality translations.

So, is there any point in banning students from using translation software to write their essays anymore, particularly in EAP contexts? We wouldn’t mind them using dictionaries to translate words, and rather than just banning them, perhaps we could focus on getting them to use this tool more effectively? It certainly beats receiving a paid for or plagiarised submission.

Let me know your thoughts.

Retraction in ELT

 I am currently reading the new book, Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie. It deals with meta research (research about research) and outlines all the ways in which science is currently going wrong. In one section dealing with retraction, Ritchie notes that “1.97 per cent of scientists admit to faking their data at least once” and suggests that that number is probably an underestimate as people are unwilling to admit to things like this even when asked in anonymous surveys.

This number means that for every 50 papers published in ELT one is likely to contain faked data. Some of these cases have come to light in biology and psychology and this led me to wonder if there were many retractions in ELT. So I asked twitter.

Marc Jones instantly found two (here and here) both of which were retracted due to plagiarism. One was plagiarism of another scholars work and the other was self plagiarism (submitting the same paper for double credit). I also found one from The journal of Computer Assisted Language Learning retracted for (self) plagiarismSo far no fraud.

Stuart Ritchie pointed me to the retraction watch searchable database. I tried searching by journal and found a RELC paper published by Ivan Chong which was withdrawn for “significant data errors“. There was also The journal, System which had the misfortune to publish one article twice –in the same issue!

The journals Applied Linguistics, ELTJ and TESOL Quarterly have apparently had 0 retractions to date. The database is not complete though and I was also sent this piece which was retracted from the prestigious “language learning” journal. It’s not that clear what went on here but it seems like one author noticed errors in the data and requested a retraction.

As an interesting aside, Richie notes that people continue to cite retracted articles even after they have been retracted. I was curious about this so I used google scholar to check citations of the 2003 Language Learning article. There were hits from 2018 and even from 2019. I don’t know the date of the retraction but I feel pretty confident it was well before these dates.

Out of thousands of papers in ELT I could find only two that were withdrawn due to data issues. So either ELT is a paragon of virtue or we haven’t got very good at sniffing out fraud yet.

But how easy is it to get a journal to retract a paper? While researching an article on learning styles, I came across a couple of very curious articles. The first was Hyland 1993, the second was Hyland 1994. While reading the 1994 article I got a strange sense of Deja Vu:

In essence, learning style research suggests that people make sense of the world in different ways and these ways are partly created by cultural experiences (Hyland 1994)

Learning style research therefore suggests that people make sense of the world in different ways, more importantly however, these ways are partly created by cultural experiences (Hyland 1993)

and

Eight Japanese universities participated in the survey with 265 undergraduate students responding. The questionnaire was also administered to 140 Japanese students at various English proficiency levels at a tertiary college in New Zealand to determine whether overseas study influenced modality and group preferences. (Hyland 1993)

Eight Japanese universities participated in the survey with 265 undergraduates responding. The questionnaire was also administered to 140 Japanese students at different English proficiency levels at a tertiary college in New Zealand. (Hyland 1994)

and

Essentially the concept expresses the simple idea that each learner has a clear and coherent set of learning likes and dislikesbut studies have addressed an enormously wide range of factors. (1993)

Learning style research expresses the simple idea that each learner has a clear and coherent set of learning likes and dislikesbut people differ in their learning styles in a number of ways and studies have addressed a huge range of factors. (1994)

Most of the later (1994) article is a verbatim copy of the earlier one with minor phrasing adjustments such as those shown above. This type of thing is usually known as either self-plagiarism (see the examples above) or, on a smaller scale, text recycling and is considered unacceptable in academic publishing. Many journals have rules against it, such as JALT itself:

Papers sent to JALT journal should not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

I thought this was a bit strange and so I contacted JALT, the 1994 publisher, to make them aware of the issue. They told me that they take such matters very seriously and would investigate. After an investigation they informed me that this was all just an honest mistake, a bit of a mix up. The paper had been submitted to two journals by accident and and as a previous editor had dealt with the matter, it would be wrong to retract the article now.

How one accidentally submits the same article to two journals is, I must confess, a mystery to me. More mysterious was JALT’s reasoning. Regardless of what a previous editor had decided, a repeat publication is still in the literature with no indication that it is a repeat.

I wrote back suggesting that since I was unaware that it had all been resolved, as was the current editor and presumably future readers, it might be worth retracting the article, or at least adding a note to explain what had happened. They told me they were very grateful for my suggestion but no, they weren’t going to do anything. And so both articles remain in the literature.

It is also odd that Hyland himself, a incredibly respected editor and prolific author would not want the article to be retracted. In fact, until recently he continued to list both papers among his publications (his new blog, however, only lists papers from 2003). Not retracting the paper may be less embarrassing in the short term but it means that there is always the chance for some annoying blogger to bring attention at some point, to what was a mix up .

In truth, I’m not ‘that’ surprised that nothing happened here. Brendan O’Connor a student at the University of Leicester discovered that a well respected psychologist was “recycling” parts of papers into new publications to an alarming degree. Although O’Connor has documented this to an impressive degree, some journals were reluctant to do anything at all when confronted with these findings.

As whistleblowers, data sleuths and anyone else who’s contacted a scientific journal or university with allegations of impropriety will tell you, getting even a demonstrably fraudulent paper retracted is a glacial process – and that’s if you aren’t simply ignored or fobbed off by the authorities in the first place.

Science Fictions

Well quite.