Drawing the lines between ELL and EL&U

Question

Proposal: English Language Learners

Since the proposal has been re-opened and given the excitement its closure caused, I think it is appropriate to further discuss the delineation between ELL and EL&U.

Let us begin with the focus of the sites.

ELL is intended to be geared toward the needs of both people learning English and people teaching English. I feel these general topics (which are currently housed on EL&U) encompass many of those aspects:

• article usage (a, an, the, no article)
• preposition usage
• verb tense
• basic, common syntactical structures
• meanings of slang terms and common idioms
• single word requests in the vicinity of "how is this concept/idiom expressed in English?"
• standard writing etiquette
• methods for learning how to pronounce English sounds clearly

EL&U is geared toward expert and advanced level question about the English language and how it is used. I feel that these general topics represent the level of questions that are desired on that site:

• complex syntax
• unusual or academic structures
• origin/history of words and idioms
• meanings/usages of obscure or archaic words
• interpretation of jokes/puns
• analysis of dialects, pidgins, creoles
• analysis of grammatical structures
• evolution of spelling, pronunciation, etc.

I put this out for your review. I am interested to know what people think about this delineation. I offer it as a starting point and fully expect that it will evolve from here.

Answer 1

One thing that's off-topic on ELU but is frequently asked-for is interpretation of words in poems, songs, or literature. Currently this is deemed too subjective and argumentative and thus OT, but I'd argue that it's also a form of advanced word usage and thus of interest to our users.

Answer 2

KitFox, I agree with you (+1) and appreciate your operative intent to delineate the boundary of the new proposal: yes, the two Q&A sites should be complementary, and, hence, there is no need to list both the kind of questions that will be better to ask on ELL rather than on EL&U, or vice versa.

ELL-list-question is sufficient for that purpose ["Is it correct to write 'ELL-list-question' ?"]

On the point, I would say as follow.

ELL, as its name suggest, should have practical purpose to give learners the most important information they need in order to deal with common language, instead EL&U should have to deal with all the details of complex structural points.

So I would add to your ELL list the following topic:

• be, do, have and modal auxiliares ["Is it grammatical to add the auxiliary 'do' to the second verb in V+V structures?"];

• infinitives and participles ["Is it grammatical to say 'I stopped to run'?  If not, why?"];

• pronouns ["Is there difference between 'some-' and 'any-' prefixes?"];

• determiners (article, possessives, demonstratives | other determiners on EL&U);

• adverb position ( other adverb topics on EL&U);

• spoken grammar ["Can he swim? 1) 'Yes, he can'. 2) 'Yes, he can swim': which one is more natural?"];

• spelling & punctuation ["Is there any correlation between language and punctuation?"];

• age & date.

I added some example questions with the only purpose to explain the limit of the associated topic, but incidentally I noticed that there is already an answer to these questions in EL&U. So another question arise in my brain (yes, I have a brain!): "Will EL&U be a general reference site respect to ELL?"

Answer 3

This is an important contribution to the discussion. Defining specific question topics moves us towards clear, and operationally very useful, distinctions between the two sites.

I think it also points towards another type of distinction: the two sites require very different sorts of answer. And here I think it may be useful to recall the prescriptivist/descriptivist distinction, which Cameron’s recent ELU blog post reminds us need be neither futile nor contentious.

• In my opinion (subject to correction by people who actually know something about it), ELL should be expressly and unapologetically prescriptivist. Learners are not helped by finely discriminating subtleties; they need simple, easy-to-understand and easy-to-follow rules which will give them confidence to move upward to the next level. Give them no more than three registers to distinguish—say, Formal, Colloquial, and Vulgar—and draw firm lines between them. And put the emphasis on the Formal register. Test-Takers in particular need to be told, wherever possible,“Do it this way and you will never be wrong.”

True story: In WWII my father’s CO asked how he, an honors graduate of one of the most prestigious English departments in the country, could possibly fail the exam for OCS. My father responded “Bad questions, and worse answers to choose from.” A lot of learning is in some circumstances a dangerous thing.

• ELU, by contrast, should be descriptivist in its approach to grammatical matters, scholarly in its approach to historical and theoretical matters. They’re the same thing, really: resting arguments on the evidence for assertions and the descriptive adequacy of concepts.

So if OP wants a rule, the question goes to ELL; if she wants analysis, research, theory, the question goes to ELU.

I don’t put this forward as an alternative to KitFox’s approach, but as a supplement. I think that looking at both the subject-matter of the question posed and the kind of answer required will dissipate much of the fog and help draw the line between the two sites more clearly.

Answer 4

meanings/usages of obscure or archaic words

The problem is learners often don't know the word is obscure or archaic (and use it in common speech and sound like morons!). I think recommending a brief answer detailing "this is a very rarely used word" or "this word fell out of use and is archaic" with a single common synonym would be quite satisfactory type of answers to these. Alternatively, migrate to ELU but hammer it into their heads not to close that as general reference!

interpretation of jokes/puns

I strongly disagree. This is one of best ways of learning English and in particular of its caveats: avoiding misunderstandings. Of course it is dead boring and lame and nausea-inducing plus a crime against humor for advanced English users, so the motion to forbid it is understandable, but it's an invaluable learning resource for idioms, phrasal verbs and homophones.

analysis of grammatical structures

I wouldn't treat this point as a law. I mean, to perform a complete analysis or describe a complete set of tenses used in a sentence is too much, but pointing out if given word in a sentence should be understood as a noun or verb or adverb shouldn't be too bad - if they want to use the dictionary but don't know which of the entries to pick, they should be encouraged, not discouraged.

Other points:

• I'd definitely request picking one of the sites (probably ELL because ELU seems to hate the idea, even though personally I believe it belongs there) as one allowing requests for references to resources: "Where can I learn more about?" "What should I read to understand this [far too broad and bound to be closed as "non-constructive"] topic?" because it appears .se becomes a site for "Answers for questions that have concise answers". In other words, close as non-constructive only if the answer is a subject to argument. Not when it's too broad to fit in an answer, but exists elsewhere as an article or a book.

• On similar note, one of most frequently closed as "not constructive" ELU question types is "open word choice", where the asker asks "what word would fit a given bill" and will always get a list of words that do. The argument goes "Since there is no single correct answer, no answer is better than three different answers, all correct". I hope you see the fallacy here?

• I wonder what about differences between close synonyms, as the dictionaries commonly fail to underline these and learners really follow (commonly wrong) hunch. You can recognize a learner by awkward word choice. I think this descriptive study should belong to ELU but it's currently quite unwelcome there.

• A pretty frequent thing on ELU is questions of type "Is this sentence correct, and if not, what is wrong here?" The two intuitive answers to these two are "Yes, it is" and "no, here's why". The most common answers on ELU to these are "This is a general reference [close vote]" and "We are not a proofreading service [close vote]" I think the former should be more welcome on ELL.