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Should Computer Coding Be Considered A Foreign Language in School? Some Say Yes - 0 views

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    A movement by parents and lawmakers to get computer coding classes to count toward foreign language credits in school. Supporters say that it will expose students to coding and will provide them with a valuable skill in the workplace.
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    A movement by parents and lawmakers to get computer coding classes to count toward foreign language credits in school hit a snag this month - but advocates aren't giving up. Sen.
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From busuu to Babbel, language-learning startups adapt to thrive - 0 views

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    This article was about the struggles and successes of several language businesses. A lot of these businesses had started out as a website and had to adapt their business to fit the time periods and society by turning into apps. Several of these businesses also had to use their own funds to support themselves in the beginning because of the economy at the time wasn't the best.
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Gender and verbs across 100,000 stories: a tidy analysis - 0 views

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    Analyzing the verbs that followed male and female pronouns in 100K stories, the following patterns were observed: 1. Women are more likely to be in the role of victims- "she screams", "she cries", or "she pleads." Men tend to be the aggressor: "he kidnaps" or "he beats". Not all male-oriented terms are negative- many, like "he saves"/"he rescues" are distinctly positive- but almost all are active rather than receptive. 2. There's an old stereotype (that's appeared in works like Game of Thrones and Sherlock Holmes) that "poison is a woman's weapon", and this is supported in our analysis. Female characters are more likely to "poison", "stab", or "kick"; male characters are more likely to "beat", "strangle", or simply "murder" or "kill". Men are moderately more likely to "steal", but much more likely to "rob". 3. Based on this text analysis, a fictional murderer is about 2.5X as likely to be male than female, but in America (and likely elsewhere) murderers are about 9X more likely to be male than female. This means female murderers may be overrepresented in fiction relative to reality. David Robinson, the data scientist who ran the text analysis, offers these questions for future research: 1.Is the shift stronger in some formats or genre than another? We could split the works into films, novels, and TV series, and ask whether these gender roles are equally strong in each. 2. Is the shift different between male- and female- created works? 3. Has the difference changed over time? Some examination indicates the vast majority of these plots come from stories written in the last century, and most of them from the last few decades (not surprising since many are movies or television episodes, and since Wikipedia users are more likely to describe contemporary work). 4. I'd also note that we could expand the analysis to include not only pronouns but first names (e.g. not only "she tells", but "M
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Four Ways to Be More Effective in Meetings - 0 views

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    Useful strategies to get the most out of meetings: 1. Learn the art of the pre-meeting: Get the agenda well in advance. Relentless preparation and studying the agenda will help you plot the moments for your contributions. Think of some specific ways you hope to add value or your point of view ahead of time. Before the meeting, build support for your ideas in casual chats. The direction of a meeting, including who will be contributing, is often decided in the first few minutes: participate early. 2. Be actively engaged; speak up. By not doing so, you're withholding something valuable from the team. Silence is not an act of generosity when you have a great idea. 3. Embrace the uncomfortable; speak truth to power; don't be afraid to dissent. The benefits often far outweigh the risks, even if your workplace has not embraced dissent as a necessary tool for improvement. If something does not feel right to you, odds are it is not just you. 4. Be selective re: what meetings you attend. Acknowledge the invitation and express your appreciation, then politely explain that you are unclear about how your presence will add anything and suggest that you skip it. Frame your absence as an opportunity for others to add more to the meeting.
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The Idiolect of Donald Trump - Scientific American Blog Network - 0 views

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    Jennifer Sclafani, Georgetown University linguist, examines the idiolect of Trump. Everyone possesses an idiolect: an idiosyncratic form of language that is unique to an individual. Trump's idiolect seems particularly polarizing. Critics might decry Trump thusly: "He doesn't make any sense." "He uses a lot of small words." "His speeches are non-substantive." On the other hand, supporters see Trump as "authentic," "relatable," and "consistent." He's a "straight shooter" who "doesn't mince words." So how does one idiolect produce such polarizing evaluations? It has to do with the precarious connections between linguistic form and meaning. The relationship between the two, as the anthropologist Elinor Ochs describes, is non-exclusive, indirect, and constitutive. Put simply, there are multiple meanings associated with any given linguistic feature, and the connection between form and meaning is a two-way street Whichever meaning is activated by a specific pronunciation, or any other aspect of your idiolect, has everything to do with context: Where are you? Who is your audience? What is your purpose? What image are you trying to project? These are factors that candidates are always taking into account as they put forth their presidential selves on the campaign trail. Tailoring their speech to the context, like when a candidate takes on a drawl while campaigning in the South, has been grounds for being labeled "inconsistent" or "fake," as we've seen with Hillary Clinton, even though this type of linguistic accommodation is a perfectly natural feature of everyone's idiolect.
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The Emoji Have Won the Battle of Words - 2 views

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    This article focuses on the emergence of emoji's and how widespread it has become. The first emoji alphabet was created in 2008, and adopted in 2011 by Apple. Even though emoji have only been around for a short time, it has gained huge popularity. Some of its successes are that it was crowned as this years' top-trending word by the Global Language Monitor, and was even added to the Oxford dictionary. According to an emoji tracker by twitter, "people are averaging 250 to 350 emoji tweets a second," showing how culturally diverse emoji has become. Although emoji are rapidly increasing in popularity, it is still not considered its own language because it has been criticized as being too limited. However, it is sure to gain more support in the mere future and maybe even replace some of the English language, as emoji's are said to be used as punctuation, emphasis, and as a replacement for words or to replace words altogether.
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Ancient Migration Patterns to North America Are Hidden in Languages Spoken Today | ... - 0 views

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    Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that the ancestors of Native Americans left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago. With ice covering much of Alaska, the ancestors of Native Americans might've lived in Beringia for about 10,000 years before moving on. Now linguistic evidence may help support that theory. A pair of linguistics researchers, Mark Sicoli and Gary Holton, recently analyzed languages from North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family (spoken thousands of miles away, in central Siberia), using similarities and differences between the languages to construct a language family tree. As they note in an article published today in PLOS ONE, they found that the two language families are indeed related-and both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland-a refuge, where people could build a life."
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Language Is In Our Biology - 2 views

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    A good working memory is perhaps the brain's most important system when it comes to learning a new language. But it appears that working memory is first and foremost determined by our genes. Mila Vulchanova, a professor at NTNU's Department of Modern Foreign Languages, led a study of approximately one hundred ten-year-old elementary school students from Norway. Her research suggests that a good working memory is a decisive factor in developing good language skills and competency. Vulchanova states, "Not only is working memory important in learning new words, it is also important in our general language competence, in areas such as grammar skills. Working memory is connected to our ability to gather information and work with it, and to store and manipulate linguistic inputs as well as other inputs in the brain." Vulchanova's results run contrary to some conventional assumptions in both linguistics and cognitive sciences. Quite often it is believed that children acquire languages regardless of their cognitive abilities, such as perception, spatial understanding, and working memory. In other words, children don't need to learn language per se. It just comes on its own. The results from Vulchanova's research contradict this idea. Not only did the researchers find out that there is a close relationship between language competence in the first language and working memory, but that language competence in the mother tongue correlated highly with skills in a foreign language. "We have found evidence that there is a link between language development and the capacity of our working memory, and that there are common cognitive mechanisms that support the ability to learn both your mother tongue and a second language," Vulchanova says. "This is important, because it has been the tradition in linguistics to maintain that learning your native language is qualitatively different from learning a foreign language," she says.
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Pidgin and Educatino - 12 views

  • When asked what it would be like if he couldn't speak Pidgin, one Oahu man said "Would take me long time fo' say stuff." Another Oahu man compared speaking Standard English and Pidgin in this way: "When I speak Standard English I gotta tink what I going say... Pidgin, I jus' open my mout' and da ting come out."
  • wo programs in Hawai`i in the 1980s to early 1990s (Project Holopono and Project Akamai) included some activities to help Pidgin speaking students recognize differences between their language and Standard English. This recognition of the children's home language was further supported with the use of some local literature using Pidgin. Both projects reported success in helping the students develop Standard English proficiency.
  • When the home language is acknowledged and made use of rather than denigrated at school, it has been found to have these positive consequences: it helps students make the transition into primary school with greater ease; it increases appreciation for the students' own culture and identity and improves self-esteem; it creates positive attitudes towards school; it promotes academic achievement; and it helps to clarify differences between the languages of home and school.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • causal aswai.
    • Lisa Stewart
       
      or the "swa swa"
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Multilingualism: What Makes Some People Excellent Language Learners? - Tracey Tokuhama-... - 2 views

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    Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is a neuroscientist and Professor of Education and Neuropsychology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She's also been a consultant to Punahou for Mind-Brain Education. In this interview, she discusses the benefits of knowing multiple languages and states 10 key factors leading to successful second and multiple language acquisition: 1. Timing and The Windows of Opportunity 2. Aptitude for Foreign Languages 3. Motivation 4. Strategy 5. Consistency 6. Opportunity and Support (Home, School and Community) 7. Language Typology and Similarities 8. Siblings 9. Gender 10. Hand Use as a reflection of cerebral dominance for languages.
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Foreign Language Study and SAT Scores - 0 views

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    A connection has been found between students who study foreign language and higher SAT scores. For each additional year that students study a foreign language, they are expected to perform better on both the math and language portions of the SAT. Although the SAT is not a direct measure of intelligence by any means, this gives evidence to support that studying a foreign language helps develop both math and English language skills. I would be interested in seeing how foreign language study affects IQ Test scores.
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Here's The Phatic Expression You Should Never Say To Remote Employees - 0 views

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    While the title is somewhat unrelatable, the premise of the article is. Essentially, it explains how using a phatic expression like "how's it going?" won't amount to anything beyond a one word answer. The article further supports this claim by elaborating on the fact that if you ever need to check up one anyone, the question should be phrased more accordingly. There's also this great video by Tom Scott explaining more about this linguistic device (https://youtu.be/eGnH0KAXhCw).
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The World Has Millions of Colors. Why Do We Only Name a Few? |Science| Smithsonian Maga... - 3 views

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    This article talks about how people across many cultures are generally better at describing warm colors than cool colors. A study they conducted supports their hypothesis that people are better at communicating warm colors than cool colors because most of the objects they see are warm in color, while backgrounds tend to be cool in color. Therefore, since people are more likely to describe an object than the background behind it, they have developed a larger vocabulary for warm colors. The article also says that interestingly, industrialized cultures have more words for colors than non-industrialized cultures. For example, in English there are 11 color words that basically everyone is familiar with whereas in the language Tsimane', there are only three color words that everyone knows.
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Socially isolated people have differently wired brains and poorer cognition - new research - 1 views

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    A 2022 University of Cambridge study conducted by Sahakian, Langley, Chen, et al., and published in the journal _Neurology_, shows that that social isolation is linked to changes in brain structure and cognition - the mental process of acquiring knowledge - it even carries an increased risk of dementia in older adults. Previous research established that brain regions consistently involved in diverse social interactions are strongly linked to networks that support cognition, including the default mode network (which is active when we are not focusing on the outside world), the salience network (which helps us select what we pay attention to), the subcortical network (involved in memory, emotion and motivation) and the central executive network (which enables us to regulate our emotions). This particular study examined how social isolation affects grey matter - brain regions in the outer layer of the brain, consisting of neurons. It investigated data from nearly 500,000 people from the UK Biobank, with a mean age of 57. People were classified as socially isolated if they were living alone, had social contact less than monthly and participated in social activities less than weekly. The study also included neuroimaging (MRI) data from approximately 32,000 people. That data revealed that socially isolated people had poorer cognition, including in memory and reaction time, and lower volume of grey matter in many parts of the brain. These areas included the temporal region (which processes sounds and helps encode memory), the frontal lobe (which is involved in attention, planning and complex cognitive tasks) and the hippocampus - a key area involved in learning and memory, which is typically disrupted early in Alzheimer's disease. We also found a link between the lower grey matter volumes and specific genetic processes that are involved in Alzheimer's disease. Follow-ups with participants 12 years later showed that those who were socially isolated, but not
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The U.S. has spent more money erasing Native languages than saving them (The U.S. has s... - 0 views

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    According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.
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Legislator wants ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi to be taught at every grade level across the ... - 0 views

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    House Bill 157, introduced by State Representative Diamond Garcia, proposes requiring and implementing the teaching of the Hawaiian language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, for public school students grades K through 12. The proposal would appropriate $5 million to create ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi curriculum and hire teachers to implement the program. The state Department of Education said in a statement they strongly support expanding ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi in public schools. The DOE currently offers it as a language course at 32 of its 64 high schools and Hawaiian language immersion is an option at 22 of its schools statewide. DOE officials say they would need to look at their ability to teach ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi at every grade level in all schools because qualified Hawaiian language teachers are already a high-need area with recruitment challenges.
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Positive Self Talk: Self talk may affect an athlete's sports performance - 11 views

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    One of the simplest concepts of sports psychology is developing positive self talk. It's also one of the hardest sports psychology skills to master. Research supports the theory that an athlete who continually practices positive self talk will improve his or her sports performance. Succumbing to negative mental self talk is a sure way to reduce performance and sports success. Over time and with repetition an athlete can develop a new habit of thinking positive statements and thoughts and expect a more positive outcome. It's this connection between the words and the belief that is the ultimate goal of this technique. Another important factor of positive self talk is that it must be possible and believable.
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ADHD in the Classroom | CDC - 0 views

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    This is a CDC document that shares information on ADHD in the classroom, what can be done to aid students with ADHD, etc. Overall this site gives information on ways to teach students with ADHD, methods, and more.
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Can songs save an endangered language? - 0 views

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    For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.
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