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

Vocabulary activity....to use with analogy lessons next year?

Enter a book, CD or DVD that you enjoyed and the site will analyse our database of real users' preferences to suggest other books, CDs or DVDs that you might like.

Arcademic Skill Builders - strike the correct verbs to progress to the next level.

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.

Looking forward to hire an impressive vehicle that makes your next big occasion very special moment of your life.

          Lesson/Moral                   Ask students to compare the characters, plot, and lessons of these stories. Which characters did they like best? Which did they like least? Which story had the best ending and why? Have students compare the animals and their behavior in each story: Why do the types of animals change or not from one culture's fable to the next? How does the behavior change according to the type of animal? What types of behaviors lead to what types of endings in these stories? To see how fables teach universal lessons about human nature and behavior, ask students to think of a real-life situation that applies to one of the stories.

Academy Award winning producer of Godfather II is telling his story to an author for a new book.

Fall 2010 article by Alfie Kohn about things that don't work, and things that do for encouraging a real LOVE of reading. Includes some challenging comments about motivation and traditional methods for teaching reading.