Group items tagged

English education and development

This is a very useful site for phonetics. For each IPA symbol they play an audio recording plus you get an animated diagram of the mouth position, step by step pronunciation descriptions, and a video clip of someone making the sound. Only available for American English (or German or Spanish).

Jeremy ,thanks. Think it could go to students' groups to.

that is ,tooo

Although written about English language learners in a middle school environment, this article has a lot of practical ideas about teaching morphology (word forms) that could apply to our students as well. Plus, on the first page there are quotes from Jebediah Springfield and George W. Bush.

Yo, Jeremy! This requires a login. What gives?

Interesting discussion about the evolution of the concept of a fact. I think we all probably claim the authority of a 'fact' sometimes, so it's relevant to understand how they are changing. The psychology behind wanting to believe facts is fascinating.

This has some interesting perspectives, but it does little to address belief. The people interviewed seem frustrated by belief, so they take a negative stance. I would like to know more about the experiment where participants had a more open-minded response to climate change after writing an essay about a time they fought for something they believe in. In that case, belief played a constructive role because of their lateral entry. There is a greater thinking level to this issue.

Another interesting avenue my mind took while reading this was toward Owen Barfield's early 20th century investigation of history in English words. He shows how thinking develops through language. It is a good read if you can get past some of the antiquated language he uses to categorize his thoughts. It is titled, History in English Words. I have a copy if anyone wants to check it out.

Part of the NY Times' Learning Network, this series on English language teaching offers ideas and plans for using newspaper articles in the classroom. Nothing groundbreaking here, but a nice selection of scalable activities.

Hmmm...thinking I won't share this to the student sites...what do you think???

I remember doing this in Junior High English and then in Linguistics at uni. Does it serve any purpose in helping students understand sentence structure?

This post adds to my thinking about how we can facilitate classroom discussions appropriately.

@Mike: It may be useful to use this article as an introduction to the New Scientist article in the CCC class as students tend to find that article very difficult. There's also an other article from the same guy where he claims that speaking English causes people to save less money. Follow this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574

This is very interesting. I wonder the extent to which the language itself might well reflect values/way of thinking, though. Perhaps your 'saving' cultures developed language structures like this partly because these structures fit in with their values.