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After Great Britain left the European Union this year, its said that it would try to trade more with China. However, Mandarin Chinese education in Britain is not very extensive, and both the government private industries are taking a new approach - immersion and bilingual schools - to try to teach young children Mandarin. The UK hopes for 5000 fluent students by 2020.

Learning English as a second language is far from uncommon around the world. Looking more specifically, what is it like learning English as a Chinese first language individual. This paper covers three main topics: 1. The differences between the Chinese and English languages 2. The differences between Chinese and American culture 3. The differences between Chinese and American educational practices When teaching English as a second language, it is important to know the what fits the students particular needs in learning and how your teaching will be most effective. This paper allows teachers to understand more about their Chinese students and their general linguistic and cultural background.

Jennifer Sclafani, an associate teaching professor in Georgetown University's Department of Linguistics, has been studying the way Trump speaks. She notes that the way Trump speaks, he speaks was a commoner rather than a president, who is usually someone that sounds more educated, and more refined than an average American. She has noticed that through hyperboles and directness from his words, he creates a feeling of strength and determination that he can get the job done. Trump also omits the word "well" which makes him come across as a straight talker and not someone that tries to escape a question.

This article discusses six benefits to bilingualism. It touches on matters like: increased attention/flexibility in learning; better understanding fo social cues; lower risk of dementia; smoother assimilation into schools; and better school performance and enjoyment. It cites current and past bilingual studies from UC Riverside, Harvard, and other top universities.

The Atlanticʻs Alia Wong writes about the U.S. Censusʻ recognition of Hawai`i Creole English (sometimes termed "pidgin" in local Hawai`i parlance). Wong sees it as a symbolic gesture acknowledging the "legitimacy of a tongue widely stigmatized, even among locals who dabble in it, as a crass dialect reserved for the uneducated lower classes and informal settings. It reinforces a long, grassroots effort by linguists and cultural practitioners to institutionalize and celebrate the language-to encourage educators to integrate it into their teaching, potentially elevating the achievement of Pidgin-speaking students. And it indicates that, elsewhere in the country, the speakers of comparable linguistic systems-from African American Vernacular English, or ebonics, to Chicano English-may even see similar changes one day, too."

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.

This paper is about the Hawaiian language in the form of education in our islands. It analyzed how attending a Hawaiian language immersion school affects students. After interviewing students who attend Papahana Kaiapuni (a Hawaiian immersion school), they found that students were more invested in practicing traditional Hawaiian values, and influenced cultural pride among family members. Attending the school also positive community views and about both Hawaiian language and cultural revitalization efforts.

This article outlines research-based advice regarding teen use of social media. Psychological scientists examine potential beneficial and harmful effects of social media use on adolescents' social, educational, psychological, and neurological development. This is a rapidly evolving and growing area of research with implications for many stakeholders (e.g., youth, parents, caregivers, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and members of the tech industry) who share responsibility to ensure adolescents' well-being.b Officials and policymakers including the U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy have documented the importance of this issue and are actively seeking science-informed input.c

This website highlights a 5-part documentary series which explores the most controversial and misunderstood language variety in the United States: African American Language (AAL). With the perspectives of everyday people and the guidance of historians, linguists, and educators, the series showcases the history of the language, the symbolic role it plays in the lives of African Americans, and the tremendous impact on the language and culture of the United States. Contains video clips, educational resources.

A research paper analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of distance learning for upper education and adult learners.

When children start studying music before the age of seven, they develop bigger vocabularies, a better sense of grammar and a higher verbal IQ. These advantages benefit both the development of their mother tongue and the learning of foreign languages. During these crucial years, the brain is at its sensitive development phase, with 95% of the brain's growth occurring now. Music training started during this period also boosts the brain's ability to process subtle differences between sounds and assist in the pronunciation of languages - and this gift lasts for life, as it has been found that adults who had musical training in childhood still retain this ability to learn foreign languages quicker and more efficiently than adults who did not have early childhood music training. Humans first started creating music 500,000 years ago, yet speech and language was only developed 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary evidence, as interpreted by leading researchers such as Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, indicates that speech as a form of communication has evolved from our original development and use of music. This explains why our music and language neural networks have significant overlap, and why children who learn music become better at learning the grammar, vocabulary and pronounciation of any language.

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.

This Scientific American blog article provides a handy run-down of research findings re: music's effect on the brain, including 1. Musicians are better able to process foreign languages because of their ability to hear differences in pitch, and have incredible abilities to detect speech in noise. Even those w/ a few years of music training showed more robust neural processing of sounds. Music "tones auditory fitness", critical for perceiving speech and distinguishing, recognizing and processing conversation in noisy environments. 2. Musical training and education may confer linguistic, mathematical, and spatial benefits, and promote social development/"team player" capacities.

Lingua Franca, a blog from The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses various issues related to language and applied linguistics, including poetry, style, grammar, dialects, words.

Santiago Swallow is "a Mexican-born, American motivational speaker, consultant, educator, and author, whose speeches and publications focus on understanding modern culture in the age of social networking, globally interconnected media, user generated content and the Internet," and has "dedicated himself to helping others know more about how media and personality can manipulated in the 21st Century." Though completely fictional, he boasts a Wikipedia biography and a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers. Making up-or at least "enhancing"-an identity like this is something real people do to increase their reputation, look popular, and sell themselves. There are equally real people who profit from this by selling fake followers created by software at the push of a button. Be afraid.

Bradley Hayes, a post-doc student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has invented @DeepDrumpf, an amusing bit of artificial intelligence. DeepDrumpf is a bot trained on the publicly available speech transcripts, tweets, and debate remarks of Donald Trump. Using a machine learning model known as a Recurrent Neural Network, the bot generates sequences of words based on priming text and the statistical structure found within its training data. Created to highlight the absurdity of this election cycle, it has amassed over 20,000 followers and has been viewed over 12 million times -- showcasing the consequences of training a machine learning model on a dataset that embodies fearmongering, bigotry, xenophobia, and hypernationalism. Here's a sample tweet: "We have to end education. What they do is unbelievable, how bad. Nobody can do that like me. Believe me."

The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval, which can lead to risky behavior. But researchers and educators are noticing that young people are also more sensitive to notions of social justice and autonomy. Teenage rebellion can be virtuous - even wholesome - depending on the situation. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that teenagers make wiser choices if they are encouraged to reimagine healthy behavior as an act of defiance.

Swearing, the critics say, may make us appear ill-educated, rude and untrustworthy, as our mothers might have tried to drill into us. But it could have some surprising benefits, from making us more persuasive to helping relieve pain.