Pig Sty Avenue

That's the NW bed, with its new fence. Remember, all of this, the whole perimeter, will be hedgerow a few years from now, so it needn't be Hadrian's Wall in terms of durability. The bit of actual fence you can on the far left of the photo is the old fence. It's got another year or two in it, just, so it'll just have to do, and it can quietly rot away as the hedgerow grows into it. Next to the old fence, I've got a couple of pallets, wired into place, (the whole structure is held together with bit of wire), topped of with the smaller of the rectangular wire grids, and then a strand of barbed wire. Running down to the big Council fence at the end, the rest is made up of more of those rectangular grids, all sizes, fixed with more wire to both metal and wooden posts hammered into the ground. Behind the fence you can see the common raised beds area, with apple trees planted just a couple of feet back from the boundary. There's been work going on there, I don...

Sunday, there was stuff scattered around, I realised later it was firelighters. All of the garden tools were fine. I knew the most likely casualty of unwanted visitors would be the heavy duty wire cutters, (thieves love those things), and so it proved. The "fence" along the NW bed was actually just a single line of barbed wire. It had been cut in two places. Then I realised they'd also pinched my Aramco shirt, which was just plain weird. A little downcast, I carried on with the last leg of the fruit bush disinterment marathon. I'd just got started when I heard a shriek. It was that kind of shriek that you hear from a young man high on booze, probably helped along with a bit of amphetamine. And there they were, three lads about 15 years old, in the allotment on the other side of the raised beds area, quite oblivious to the fact that I was staring at them, from an allotment they'd just plundered, 30 yards away. I was nonplussed. Then a man showed up in the lane, a...

That's common bulrush, though it has other names .  Magnificent plant, growing taller than a person. I remember being fascinated by them growing along the Basingstoke Canal when I was a bairn in the 60s. Shelter for frogs, and cover for emerging froglets. And cut them off for the flower vase. Eat the roots. This looks like the best deal for seeds .  Prices for plug plants elsewhere are just silly. The link doesn't say how many seeds you get, but I think they're tiny, so maybe its countless thousands.  Will update on this next year.

I'm working through this paper and noting it up in Mendeley. Here I'm going to note some (perhaps tangential) observations. Linking the test of those wanting visas or citizenship to the CEFR effectively lets the test designer off the hook. If you say to them, "How does your test give the inference that the test taker is fit for leave to remain?" They are liable to reply, "We are saying no such thing, we're saying that the test taker has B1 level speaking in accordance with the CEFR." And they may be able to point to research which validates the test in those terms.  And so we need to turn to the test's principal stakeholder, the UK government, and ask, how CEFR level B1 can  be interpreted (in effect) as a score which measures fitness for leave to remain? Where is the validity argument?  It's unlike, for example, an IELTS score of 6.5, which it is generally assumed fits an L2 undergraduate to study hard science in an English medium University...

Looking at the blog's stats, I saw someone had searched this post today. I wrote that shortly before moving to Scotland and giving up the allotment I shared with Dad, so never followed up on the plan I was jokingly suggesting, of becoming a monkey puzzle tree tycoon. A quick google shows that it's not difficult to grow, propagated only from seed. They are pricey, about a quid each, but for some reason 3 year old plants are going on eBay for between £10 and £50. So that could make up for the loss of the Salvia divinorum trade, which hit us when eBay decided it didn't want hallucinogenic plants sold on its site; (and anyway, the Daily Mail put the kibosh on it, when Dad read a story there about a woman who thought she was a pumpkin after ingesting Sally D).  Thing is with an allotment, you want something that'll cover the costs of seeds and oomska. It's not-for-profit, but it needs to be not-for-loss, too.

These long winter nights, imagination drifts away to next year's growing, (in a well-drained, level allotment of course). Got an email from The Real Seed Company today. I don't want to order loads of stuff, plenty seeds in  the fridge already, so I'll make a list of the ones I want here. Really looking forward to some home grown veg next year. Anyways:     French beans  - Cherokee Trail of Tears.     Runner beans - czar.    Cabbage         - Asturian tree.    Cauliflower       - don't know    

What with this morning's battery charging , and the postgrads' Xmas party in an hour or two, (hopefully a rather tame affair, by my former party standards) and a seminar this evening on collecting qualitative data, I'm a bit short on time today.  But yesterday I got back through Language Testing to the October of 2013, and it's clear that since then no big rows about validity have broken out, and that any serious researchers are using "argument based validity" or "validity arguments" without taking any pains to explain why they're doing so. All of which suggests that this is the current paradigm. I'll continue the trawl backwards through LT later, (I felt that just reading the titles of the papers the last couple of years was helping get me up to speed: some things I must get back to when I have more time, like, "A testlet response theory modelling approach", whatever that is when it's at home).  Kane (2013) is 64 pages long...

Uprooted five or six more bushes during a quick visit this morning. Man, it's hard work. You see five or six stumps coming out of the ground, all within a foot of each other, and there's no way of telling if that's one plant or five or six. This fruit bush job was just a little something I did to pass the time whilst the Storm Desmond flood waters receded, and here I am, maybe ten hours into it, still not done. But this morning I counted up 13 more bushes, or thereabouts, to go, so that's another 2-3 hours, I can do them in one visit. Speaking of the waters receding, I think they have as much as they're going to. This is how things looked on Saturday, - that's the hole-in-the-north-east-bed, (I can't call it a pond, yet, with its vertical sides) - and it's gone down a couple of inches since then. When I was digging it out, I noticed that within an inch of its top surface, the boulder clay was dry and powdery, so it must be pretty impervious to water....

I'm still going back in time through Language Testing to get a handle on the current paradigms relating to Test Validity. Chapelle et al (2015) examine two EAP automated diagnostic assessments for writing by means of validity argument. All assessments, they suggest, "need to be evaluated in view of the validity of their intended interpretations, uses and consequences", (p385-6). The question is, "how to frame a validity argument by identifying five types of inferences that one might wish to make on the basis of results from an assessment".  I need to see Chapelle et al (2008) for Domain Definition. Also important are the warrants, inferences, assumptions and ramifications, (consequences?) of an assessment. From these we can build a framework for a validity argument. [This has echoes of Bachman and consequential validity]. Resist temptation to go sideways from this ref, but just bear in mind the concepts for now and come back later. Youn (2015) is also intere...

First real frost of the winter. To the left is a photo of the cuttings from the fruit bushes, which I'm leaving put until spring, as a refuge for anything that needs it over the cold months, and then it'll be firewood. The allotment I used to share with Dad, when I moved north of the border he started to share with a family. They're bloody good gardeners. Disapprove of glyphosate, yet there's not a weed in sight. Anyway, one of them makes wood burning stoves out of calor gas bottles. I've put in a request for one, and that's what all this wood is for. Of course, I have to sort the shed out before I can put a stove in, and I'm too busy now to be drinking tea. But next winter will be slower. The ground was frozen, but only and inch or two down. So I set about the fruit bushes again. It's a bugger. My theory of what's happened is: bushes were planted some years ago, and everything was fine. But when The Predecessor, (I'm going to refer to him as...

It's a fact which seems to leave academics scoobied . When a person finishes their MA, and gets a job outside of the University, the keys to the Ivory Tower are taken away without ceremony. This means you can't keep up with published research and thought on your discipline, (or on anything else academic). My keys were taken from me in 2010, I only got them back two months ago, and all paradigm shifts during that time have passed my by. I'm having to work hard to catch up. For example, Bonfiglio's (2010) castigation of the "native speaker" construct, and Garcia's (2009) taxonomical "emergent bilingual", are, I would suggest, significant shifts which I needed to get to grips with, and which have, furthermore, had time to mature. Today and tomorrow I need to see what test validity has been up to since 2010. My starting point will be Language Testing, (the assessment person's trade journal) starting with 2015 and working backwards, noting al...

As Lyle Bachman didn't say to me, that evening we drank too much whisky in Boston, "It's all about validity, kid. The rest is just conversation." But it's a sentiment he might approve, if we mean consequential validity. We need to be sure about test fairness and reliability, too, but validity (construct as well as consequential) is The Father in that Trinity. See, test validity is something people in education bang on about without really understanding it. They want valid tests, naturally, but don't want to invest in the time and independent research that's needed to validate a test. They just don't get it. On top of that, it's a complicated thing, not quite quantum mechanics, but not straightforward, either. Even people who specialise in Assessment, (I don't exclude myself) don't always know this essential concept back to front. Yet it's vital. The "people in education", (for example, managers in a private English langua...

It looks like I've enough bricks to build a small house, but it's surprising how many it takes to lay three or four courses beneath a path, as I found when I started to do that at the far North boundary. But I might need more. I need to see how it goes next year: if there are still water-logging problems on the West bed, I'm going to put in another deep, though narrow, path along there, and another going across the bed, and the most water-logged part, and thence into the pond. I've got a long (20ft?) section of pipe which I could put holes into and run under the path, straight to the pond. Not that I'm obsessing about the allotment, water-logging, and drainage or anything... But I needed to get that off my chest before I begin EdD work for the day. In respect of which, btw, there's been something of a eureka moment in the last 24 hours.

The shed is still full of The Predecessor's stuff. There are tools buried under there. Old chairs. A hosepipe, netting to keep birds off the beds, several pairs of old boots, bits of wood, watering cans, an occasional table, saws, a child's toy wheelbarrow.... At least one mouse lives there. The plan was to buy a new shed and demolish this one. But now, that feels a bit Daesh, or Year Zero. It might be older than me, probably is. So one fine day I'll get it emptied out, put aside anything worth keeping, and learn to live with it. On an allotment, you need a place to get out of the rain. Eventually I want a wee log-burning stove to make a cup of tea, (plenty of wood, especially once the hedgerow's got up a head of steam). And anyway, you know, it's so kind of beat, in the Keroucian sense. So it's reprieved. With apologies. No more insulting references to "the shed". It's The Shed. 

This is where I got about 90mins rain-free time this morning, digging out the fruit bushes. This is where I dug out the edging, you can just about see the excavation just to the right of the centre there. And those yellow alien like roots are nettle roots. I believe you can make a tea from it, which is said to be good for your prostate or something but there's no way, I've battled with so many of these yellow tangles that I'm sick of them, and want nothing more to do with them beyond putting them on a fire. You might think digging out fruit bushes is a simple task: dig around it, and then up it comes? No. Not these ones. I've worked out what's happened. Each year the bushes and the cherry trees' leaves have fallen, lain there, and turned to leaf mould. Over many years, the bushes have gotten buried. Their lateral shoots have grown roots and thrown up new bushes. Nettles and bushes have been in combat for rootspace beneath the ground. Brambles have entered th...

The feedback for Submission 2 was about 1000 words, but it could have been 4: You Need to Focus! Quite right, too. I haven't really got a research question. I mean, for example, "Is it fair to require new Scots to undertake language testing?" Well, ok, but it gets binary, (Yes it is. No it isn't.) And anyway, could boil down to a semantic discussion about "fairness", which has meaning in language testing, but is a shoogly peg to hang a doctorate on. The economic aspect is interesting. It can be argued that, economically, demographically, we (Scotland) needs more people, and that means mostly people who know enough language to participate in our society and culture. But that's all assertion by me just now, I have no evidence, and I would struggle to get any because economics and demographics are not within my fields of previous knowledge. Maybe I need a narrative or story to get me into it. Not for actual research, but to identify where the research ...

The old fruit bush area is putting up quite a fight. 4 hours or so of serious spadework, (the grunting, cursing kind), and I've done maybe 1/3 of it. On Sunday, digging down I found a bit of edging, which turned out to be 8ins in width, about 10ft in length. It's difficult to get at because of the path-edge effect, roots from the nettles, cherry trees and fruit bushes have naturally made their home next to, under, and over it. But still it would have been not too bad, but for the fact that the last three foot, there was another metal enamel sheet of... something, just a few inches behind it, and thick root from the cherry tree, (thick as a child's wrist) with a sucker growing out of it, between the two. This made for a difficult excavation, but I got there with an increased amount of grunting, a pruning saw on the tree root, and more cursing. The 10ft strip will come in handy for edging elsewhere. The mysterious metal enamel you can see in the photo, about a yard long ...

As I went into the Allotments' community hut on Saturday, I met the lady who keeps bees. She asked me if I was flooded, and said almost everyone else was too. As you can see in the photos, we went from a pond on Thursday to an inundation on Saturday. I was down yesterday, and it hadn't receded by more than an inch or two. On a brighter note, I was at the community hut to sign the missive and pay the rent for the whole plot. It might be under a lot of water, but it's all mine. The thing is with water and a flood like this, it acts as a kind of giant spirit level, showing where the low points of the allotment are. Saturday and Sunday I spent some of the time just standing and looking and thinking. I've puzzled it out. It's confirming what I suspected way back in the later summer. The North West bed is still too low. I don't mind so much if the NE bed gets flooded, that's where the pond/bog are (now) going to be. But the NW bed is going to be properly cu...

Meanwhile, in non-pond news, I've got approx 400 hawthorn and 200 rose seeds to be stratified, and sown in early spring, together with the 400 gorse, (which are scarified in hot water, apparently). So that's 1000 seeds, even with a 50% germination rate, it's a hedgerow. I might splash out and get some bare root alders and oaks this winter, and I've got a couple of dozen fruit bushes, a packet of scots pine seeds, and a few other odds and ends of hedging plants I've been given. Honestly, I've been wanting an allotment with a pond and a hedgerow for a decade, and here we are with one in the post.

The first thing I said on seeing this today was "Flippin' 'eck". Actually, I didn't say that, I said something else, but I don't want too much profanity here. Then I thought, "We're going to need a bigger pond ." I stood on the small rise which is where the fruit bushes used to be (by that white fish-box you can see on the right middle ground), looking long and hard at the situation. There's a natural dip in the allotment, with the lowest point extending from the southern end of the pond, and going 10ft or so to the north, where that heap of topsoil is in the right foreground. The pond needs to be excavated out of all of that. Clearly, it's not going to be enough as I have it. I might take it back a little too, into the fruit bush mound, but that's a whole other story. I was short of time this morning, but I made a start by shovelling that heap of topsoil out of the way. That done, I dug a wee trench about a yard long and a foot ...

Back on the settee at home now, looking at the rain falling through the beams of the floodlights in the all-weather football pitch over the way. It's a beautiful urban sight. And I can enjoy that now, I'm no longer thinking, Oh no, rain! My poor allotment is a swamp! And I can think like this because the rain stopped this morning and I was able to get my pond dug, at last. BEFORE The BEFORE photo shows the lowest part of the allotment, where the path is flooding. The compost is frequently flooded, too. What was I thinking of, putting it there, where it will not only get sodden, but where it's a bloody eyesore, too? See that's the trouble with blogging about the allotment, one's blunders cannot be quietly ignored, they're out there for the world to see. So, first, I had to move the compost cage into the very north east corner. It's held together with wires, and getting them undone, getting the ground dug out and levelled, getting the cage m...

CHAPTER 1: Theory Here I examine literature underpinning the theory regarding the circumstances in which English L2 learners (or “new Scots”) find themselves having to be assessed in their English language ability in order to secure the status of citizen of the UK and Scotland, or person with indefinite leave to remain. This is necessary to give a framework to a complicated situation which crosses several disciplines, (Language Assessment, Educational Policy, Immigration Law and Policy, and Second Language Acquisition Theory). The theory helps to move the research from a narrative of “What happens to new Scots with regard to their emergent bilingualism?” to a more critical field of discourse, “Why does that happen?” and “What does it mean ?”   “Non-Native Speakers” v “emergent bilinguals”. This section looks at theory regarding L2 learners, that is people who are learning a language, (with specific reference to English learners in Scotland) which is not the same as L1 the...

Just to clear my head of allotment thoughts somewhat before getting back to my new Scot emergent bilinguals. There may be a rain window tomorrow afternoon, with a few hours of clear skies, and I need to get a start on the new pond area, just to get some drainage. I'm for digging down a in a 4-5yd sq patch in the NE, (where the  soggy compost cage is now) to the clay, and then down another couple of spade depths. The hope is that the water will run down there, out of both beds, so that I can clear a similar area later on the NW side. Of course, clay needs to be puddled to make a pond, but my urgent object at this stage is drainage. Unpuddled, the water will eventually soak down through the clay. Of course, some puddling will occur anyway as I'm digging. I just hope I can get deep enough before it all fills with water, because I found on the aborted Old Greenhouse Pond area, that digging already water logged clay is problematical. This got me thinking about amphibians' na...

Searching *UK Immigration Policy* (since 2010) in Worldwide Political Science Abstracts on SUPrimo database from library gives 855 results. [NB, access to SUPrimo timed out, and when I tried to get back to my results, couldn't replicate search!]  Khalas. More tomorrow.

Google Search: *Hansard* takes us to (Parliament.uk, 2015a). Go to "Commons Debates" in sidebar. You get these choices:  Or search in top bar, *immigration "points based system"* and get 1635 results. This is a dry run, so let's look at a specific area that's caught my attention. So, add *AND "minister of religion"* to above search. 42 results: I'll look at 1st 5, in the screen grab above.  the 1st brings us to Publication.Parliament.uk (2015)a. It's a section from a Home Affairs Committee report "6.  Points criteria: fair, transparent, flexible?" Paras 105-119 come under the heading "English Language". At para 118 the Committee not their agreement with the Government that Ministers of Religion ought to have higher than basic level of English "in order to communicate with their worshippers" and they should be on a par with academics in this regard.  Go back to this.  References Parliament.uk ...

Garry Nixon University of Strathclyde EdD 2nd Formative Submission  Due: 21st November 2015 Submitted: 1st December 2015 Search Log and Annotated Bibliography Section 1 Mind Map  Section 2 Searches Mostly in Google Scholar. However, where search results turned up a book, I would go to the university’s library site to check its availability, (see Reflections). I used Google for non-academic searches, and the library’s databases for law-based searches.  Below are 6 searches which yielded initial titles relating to policy.  There were too many results in the earliest searches, and I gradually refined the terms to get 66 results on the 6th attempt. On the earlier searches, with many results, I would skim through the first few pages of results, to get a feel for them.  *"English Language" "Asylum Seekers" Refugees Scotland* [Google Scholar, All, 2,260 results] *ESL "Asylum Seekers" Refugees Scotland*  [Google Schola...