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@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.

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?

English education and development

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.

Google has taken Wittgenstein's theory of language and created a new kind of search engine. Their own presentation of this  'Knowledge Graph' can be found at:  http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

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.

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?

Thought this was interesting.

What do you think of this website which is to help with speed reading? Is it relevant for second language learners? You can adjust the speed and the chunking but the chunking is random, not natural chunks that might occur. When I tried it I could really see how if I didn't use my 'inner voice' I could read so much faster. Of course our students tend to be vocalizing, not only using their inner voice and maybe this is necessary for word recognition?

I think your right about not using the inner voice helping with speed. What about the odd chunking though? It caused me one or two problems and one thing I like about speed reading is that it helps students to see more natural chunks like noun phrases, verbs and infinitives and things like that. It might be a good resource we can recommend for SDL.