Group items tagged

History of English (Source: A History of English by Barbara A. Fennell) The English language is spoken by 750 million people in the world as either the official language of a nation, a second language, or in a mixture with other languages (such as pidgins and creoles.) English is the (or an) official language in England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; however, the United States has no official language. Indo-European language and people English is classified genetically as a Low West Germanic language of the Indo-European family of languages. The early history of the Germanic languages is based on reconstruction of a Proto-Germanic language that evolved into German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and the Scandinavian languages. In 1786, Sir William Jones discovered that Sanskrit contained many cognates to Greek and Latin. He conjectured a Proto-Indo-European language had existed many years before. Although there is no concrete proof to support this one language had existed, it is believed that many languages spoken in Europe and Western Asia are all derived from a common language. A few languages that are not included in the Indo-European branch of languages include Basque, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; of which the last three belong to the Finno-Ugric language family. Speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) lived in Southwest Russia around 4,000 to 5,000 BCE. They had words for animals such as bear or wolf (as evidenced in the similarity of the words for these animals in the modern I-E languages.) They also had domesticated animals, and used horse-drawn wheeled carts. They drank alcohol made from grain, and not wine, indicating they did not live in a warm climate. They belonged to a patriarchal society where the lineage was determined through males only (because of a lack of words referring to the female's side of the family.) They also made use of a decimal counting system by 10's, and formed words by compounding. This PIE language was also highly infl

Tony Vincent's lovely graphic of essentials for iPad use

For primary school children. Young girl teaching on word choice for writing.

Video by young girl teaching on the six +1 traits of writing.

(1) A wiki debate visualization tool that lets you: present the strongest case on any debate that matters to you (2) A web-based, creative commons project to increase the transparency and rigor of public debate everywhere-by making the collective insight and intelligence of the global community freely available to all and filtering out the noise. (3) A global graph of all the debates that enables us to visualise and deepen our understanding of the ways in which different debates are semantically interrelated, and ways in which these interrelated debates shape, and are shaped by, each other.

The problem with 40 students is that there is no way to read (much less comment upon) every post if every student is posting every week. I am toying then with a rotation model (inspired by Randy Bass), in which students are divided into five groups of eight students, cycling through these five roles: * Role 1 - Students are "first readers," posting initial questions and insights about the reading to the class blog by Monday morning * Role 2 - Students are "respondents," building upon, disagreeing with, or clarifying the first readers' posts by class time on Tuesday * Role 3 - Students are "synthesizers," mediating and synthesizing the dialogue between first readers and respondents by Thursday * Role 4 - Students are responsible for the week's class notes (see next section on Wikis) * Role 5 - Students have this week "off" in terms of blogging and the wiki I like the rotation model because each group of students is reading for and reacting to something different. The shifting positionality affords them greater traction, offers greater variety, and guarantees a dialogue without comments from myself.

The test consists of 1 reading comprehension paragraph, and 12 multiple - choice questions for this text, the time limit is 20 minutes. Hope you do it best! Read the text below and answer the questions: Carbohydrates, which are sugars, are an essential part of a healthy diet.

Describes examples of features of EL books

 I believe "iFake Text" is a great example of  a simple tool that can allow your students to show what they know in a unique or novel way by emulating a text message conversation on an iPhone. Tammy Worcester

Being literate in a real-world sense means being able to read and write using the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. For centuries, consuming and producing words through reading and writing and, to a lesser extent, listening and speaking were sufficient. But because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, and widely available new tools, literacy now requires being conversant with new forms of media as well as text, including sound, graphics, and moving images.

Article of the Week - New York Times piece on identity and social networking.