Playing a game with the Times to improve English language skills
By Katherine Schulten and Dinah Mack, The New York Times

Overview | How can students improve English language skills by reading The New York Times? In this lesson, students first compile lists of their own personal “grammar, punctuation, spelling and usage demons,” then play a bingo game to find examples of correct usage in The New York Times; finally, they track particular words, marks of punctuation or elements of grammar or usage through a week’s worth of The Times to view examples.

Materials | Computers with Internet access and/or several print copies of any day’s New York Times (enough so that each student, or pair of students, has access to a section.)

Warm-up | Put the two sentences “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma” on the board and ask students what each sentence means. Then ask why a Facebook group that uses these two sentences in its title is subtitled “Punctuation Saves Lives.” (If time permits, you might even take a moment to challenge students to write their own pairs of nearly identical sentences in which one punctuation mark completely changes the meaning.)

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Should high schoolers read aloud in class?
By Jay Mathews, education columnist, The Washington Post

Recently I visited a history class at a local, low-performing high school where students read in turn from the autobiography of a famous American. The teacher was bright and quick. He interrupted often with comments and questions. The 18 sophomores and juniors seemed to be into it, but it was such an old-fashioned—and I suspect to some educators elementary—approach for that I decided to see what other educators thought of it.

I love spending time in classrooms, listening and watching. Often I see something new and surprising, or sometimes old and surprising like one young English teacher diagramming sentences. Was round robin reading (what educators usually call the read aloud technique I witnessed) bad or good? Was it a time-wasting throwback or a useful way to involve every student?

Yes and yes, teachers told me. That is the problem judging the way teachers teach. It all depends on the circumstances, the students, the object of the lesson, the style of the instructor and the judge. Read these and tell me who is right:

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Some thoughts about E-reading
By Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times
 
As always, I am reading several books at a time—actually, several stacks. One is the stack of heirloom books by my bed, which begins with the engaging and soon-to-be-published “Camel” by Robert Irwin and works haphazardly outward to Rose Macaulay’s “The Towers of Trebizond” and Bronislaw Malinowski’s “A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.”

And then there is a virtual stack of e-books. There is Alvin Kernan’s “Crossing the Line,” which I’m reading on my laptop via ebrary. I’m using other e-book software, like Kindle for the Mac and Stanza. My iPad is on its way.

In one way or another, I’ve been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading — the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I’m discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing.

I love the typefaces and the bindings and the feel of well-made paper. But what I really love is their inertness. No matter how I shake “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” mushrooms don’t tumble out of the upper margin, unlike the “Alice” for the iPad.

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Little words raise big questions in English language
By Barbara Wallraff, TheWhig.com

Tracy Hastings, of Belfast, Maine, writes: “‘Try and’ versus ‘try to’: The latter is obviously correct, yet the former seems to be almost universal usage. I myself have to constantly fight to not say ‘try and,’ even though I know better. How did this come about?”

Dear Tracy: You’re being too hard on yourself—and on “try and.” This construction isn’t some foolish upstart but, rather, harks back to the earlier patterns that also gave us the likes of “come and get it,” “stop and think,” and “wait and see.” Granted, in all these phrases, we could substitute “to” for “and,” and the result probably would strike everyone as more logical and literal. And yet “and” is perfectly capable of combining the meanings of two verbs, like the verbs in those pairs, much the way it blends the ingredients in a banana “and” strawberry smoothie.

To switch metaphors in midstream: I think of “try to” as business dress for our thoughts, suitable for communication at work, school-board meetings and so on. “Try and” is more like clothes that thoughts might choose to wear on their days off.

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My third favorite word
By Yvonne D. Hawkins, ArgusLeader.com

I often wonder if other people have favorite words.

You know, favorites like songs or sweaters or a piece of candy.

I have three favorites in the English language—and one in Hebrew. And there’s a word in Greek that has captured my heart to the point that sometimes when I’m driving alone in my car I practice saying it just so I don’t forget how.

Two of my three favorite English words have prefixes, which themselves are rather exciting because of their ability to make all things new.

My all-time favorite word is “transform,” followed closely by “recreate.” But it’s my third favorite word that calls to me lately.

It happens every spring as the diamond’s fans gear up for fresh roasted peanuts, seventh-inning stretches and pennant predictions.

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Teaching of functional English in Taiwan continues to languish
By Mo Reddad, Taipei Times

The state of TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) in Taiwan continues to languish. The recent test results of English as a foreign language (TOEFL) among Taiwanese nationals and the writing skills of high school students have recently shown significant declines.

The decline points to one major culprit: A lack of analytical abilities spawned by an educational system that relies heavily on memorization and mechanical learning.

The TOEFL test results started to hit a severe decline after the spoken English component was introduced, which indicates that the problem basically lies in a skill that requires the creative production of meaningful utterances (the same applies to writing), unlike the listening and reading components.

The latter are passive skills as the materials in the exams are already provided. This is a clever strategy and cramming could help the test taker in listening, reading and grammar structure, but not in the speaking and writing components, because in this case the materials are not provided, and the examinees are expected to create meaningful materials—a daunting task for learners who have spent years consumed learning by rote.

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English, language of the future
By Rema Nagarajan, Times of India

Parents have ensured the number of children in English schools has doubled in just five years—from 61 lakh to 1.5 crore. But there are concerns that the growth is still not fast enough...

Maniram Sharma studied in Hindi medium and took the civil service examination in that language before clearing all the tests to become an IAS officer. He is very clear, though, that he wants his two children to study in an English school. “I respect Hindi, my mother tongue,” he says. “But English is the language of the future and it opens up the whole world to you.”

It is this realisation of opportunities which English offers that is persuading a growing number of Indian parents to opt for sending their kids to English-medium schools. And the poor are often more desperate to do so, rejecting the option of free education in a government school, where the medium of instruction is usually Hindi or the primary language of the respective region. They willingly bear the burden of not-so-cheap private school education to have their children learn a language that might take them where they, their fathers and grandfathers never went.

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Using phonics to help pupils learn to read
The Malaysia Education Ministry, TheStar.com.my

We would like to refer to a letter by Liong Kam Chong “Stress on grammar not phonics,” (The Star, March 24).

The Education Ministry is implementing a new English Language curriculum for Year One pupils effective 2011.

One of the main objectives is to build a strong foundation of competency in basic literacy skills and reading through phonics and penmanship.

In order to help pupils learn to read, phonics will be used to enable them to get a sound knowledge of letter sounds, to recognise words and to engage in reading.

There are three main varieties (corpus) of the English language i.e. British, American and Australian.

The ministry has to set a standard version to be taught in schools which should be followed by all teachers.

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The trouble with business gobbledygook
By Lilia Borlongan-Alvarez, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Let’s face it – The current global financial crisis which has led to the mass firing of employees has spawned popular euphemisms which both government and private organizations find convenient to use to protect the latter from embarrassment or legal action.

So, “involuntary separation,” “letting go,” “downsizing,” “re-engineering,” “restructuring,” and “streamlining” are preferred to “layoffs.” The word “challenge” is used to actually refer to “a problem.” “Recession” is used to mean a “depression.” When one is given the “pink slip,” he or she is “fired!” And a company “disinvests” when it fact it “closes a retail outlet in a community.”

Everywhere one turns, euphemistic language pervades the workplace and almost all business dealings. No matter how you look at it, a euphemism’s real meaning is always worse than its apparent meaning, says Hugh Rawson, author of “A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk.”

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I, Translator
By David Bellos, Op-Ed contributor, The New York Times

Everybody has his own tale of terrible translation to tell—an incomprehensible restaurant menu in Croatia, a comically illiterate warning sign on a French beach. “Human-engineered” translation is just as inadequate in more important domains. In our courts and hospitals, in the military and security services, underpaid and overworked translators make muddles out of millions of vital interactions. Machine translation can certainly help in these cases. Its legendary bloopers are often no worse than the errors made by hard-pressed humans.

Machine translation has proved helpful in more urgent situations as well. When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages—but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.

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Hang on English speakers, it might get weird
By Christopher Moore, Huffingtonpost.com

Here’s the thing: the Oxford English Dictionary gives William Shakespeare first citation credit for more than 500 words. In fact, Will is credited with coining anywhere from a thousand to ten thousand new words, with consensus among academics coming in around 1700. Whatever the actual number, Shakespeare was a singular genius, a quantum leap in rhetorical invention, the twenty-nine foot long jump of English—but he was also the product of a revolution in the language in general, and we may just be rushing into another one.

From 1476, when William Caxton began setting Chaucer and other classic literature into print, until around 1611, when the King James Bible was widely released, the English language consolidated a scattering of regional dialects with disparate spellings and pronunciations into a single language, but a young one that left room for the extraordinary inventiveness of Shakespeare. The printed word moved the English meme in geometric, rather than linear, progressions, causing a demand for more and different units of information (i.e., words), and Shakespeare provided them.

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No
By Ben Zimmer, language columnist, The New York Times

Two of the most basic words in the English language, yes and no, are locked in a constant struggle, embodying abstract forces of agreement and opposition, positivity and negativity, acceptance and denial. Just look at the recent Congressional wrangling over health care reform, where the words have come to stand for much more than simply the up or down votes that legislators may cast. Democrats seeking a final compromise over health care legislation have talked optimistically about getting to yes. “I just wish and hope some of my colleagues will be willing to help us get to yes on this,” Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said. And a House leadership aide told The Huffington Post, “We do have an environment where people can now get to yes.”

Getting to yes has become a creaky cliché in political and business circles thanks to a best-selling negotiation manual with that title first published in 1981. The authors of “Getting to Yes,” Roger Fisher and William Ury of the Harvard Negotiation Project, outlined the best strategies for reaching a settlement by identifying “options for mutual gain.” Fisher had been experimenting with the word yes for quite a while. Back in 1969, he argued in the book “International Conflict for Beginners” that the key to getting the other side of the bargaining table to agree is to present them with a “yesable proposition.”

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Immigration changing the language Of America
By Frosty Wooldridge, editor, BeforeItsNews.com
 
Over a decade ago, citizens voted to make English the official language of Colorado.  English remains the national language of America.  English drives the overwhelming majority of conversations in Canada and the United States.
 
But, you cannot help noticing that our English language finds itself being undermined and in competition with Mexico’s national language: Spanish.
 
These days, when I walk into Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Home Depot, Lowes Hardware, Target, Wal-Mart, McDonald’s or phone other companies—I might as well be in a foreign country. Press ‘1’ for Spanish; press ‘2’ for English.  Those businesses feature a language not of our country, which is a direct contradiction to our U.S. Constitution.   I cannot understand anyone in line because they speak other languages. I am irritated that I must contend with my native language being undercut and undermined by my own fellow pretend-Americans. Mind you, I love languages. I studied French and Italian extensively! My brother Howard speaks five languages fluently.
 
But those Spanish speaking aliens disrespect our country’s laws and language while they work illegally and live in contradiction to our laws.  

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Split screen: Metro-textual
By James "DexX" Dominguez, BrisbaneTimes.com

I have a confession to make: I am a dubbing snob. When watching any film originally made in a language other than English, I will always insist on subtitles. There are a few reasons for this, not least that when dubbing a foreign-language film a distributor will usually do it on the cheap and hire terrible actors. Even a good voice cast, in my opinion, cannot capture the quality of a good live performance.

There are linguistic issues on top of the artistic concerns, too. Every language has its own unique rhythm and cadence, its own balance of consonants and vowels, and, more subjectively, its own emotional range and subtleties. What may be expressed in a few words in one language may take three times as long to express in another.

When dubbing a film, even an animated one, the movements of the mouths on screen are locked down, and a translator has to do the best she can to formulate phrasing that will match the action on-screen as closely as possible. Voice actors then have to try to deliver a quality performance while also fitting their words into a precise envelope. The results are often stilted and awkward.

Even though I will always watch non-English language films with subtitles, it had never occurred to me that I could do the same while playing a game. Great games have been coming out of Europe for many years, with the now defunct French company Delphine Software International (Another World, Flashback, Cruise for a Corpse) being one of the most notable early pioneers.

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Abusing slow news days: Common mistakes in English
By Thom Holwerda, OSNews

Since everybody in the technology world is apparently having a vacation, and nobody told me about it, we're kind of low on news. As such, this seems like the perfect opportunity to gripe about something I've always wanted to gripe about: a number of common mistakes in English writing in the comments section. I'll also throw in some tidbits about my native language, Dutch, so you can compare and contrast between the two.

Let me start off by saying that overall, I think the OSNews readership has an absolutely excellent grasp of the English language. This is all the more impressive when you take into account that for about half of our readers, English is not their native language. We have readers from all over the world, and like me, and Eugenia before that, they grew up with other languages.

This means that this little story is not meant as some sort of arrogant diatribe about how the English language is being destroyed or whatever (heck, even after getting a university degree in this language I'm still making mistakes every other sentence). What I want to do here is point out some oft-made mistakes by many non-native speakers of English (and a lot of native speakers!) that are easy to combat.

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English as a life skill

The Sri Lanka India Centre for English Language Training (SLICELT) was opened by Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao recently. It marked a new beginning in English language education in Sri Lanka.

The establishment of SLICELT also marks a radical departure from the past in the way of learning and teaching English. While all other nations were speaking and using English in their own ways, Sri Lanka continued to speak and use English just as the English did. In fact, we were proud to admit that we use English the Queen's way long after becoming independent.

English educated gentry used to mock at other countries that developed their own English. Little did these brown sahibs realise that most of them would have been mocking at Sri Lankans for their attempts at safeguarding a colonial heritage. It was the Americans who started using English in their own way. The influence of American English has been so great that even the orthodox Britishers were compelled to borrow words and phrases from the American diction.

In retrospect we could observe that this overt subservience to the former coloniser’s language practice was a method to keep the knowledge of English language to a select few, to perpetuate a stratum of brown sahibs.

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