“Teacher lang”
By Raul Pangalangan, Philippine Daily Inquirer

Once, after the oath-taking of successful bar examinees, I joined a group of law professors from various schools all over the country for the traditional merienda with the Supreme Court justices. One professor recounted that he had just come back from a trip to Japan, and that to his amazement, he got more respect when he was introduced as a law professor rather than as an attorney. It drew oohs and aaahs around the table, with everyone delighted and surprised that the Japanese would bow lower to a sensei rather than to a bengoshi.

Compared to other Asian countries, Filipinos will actually be alone and isolated in their surprise. In Confucian societies especially, the scholar and teacher has a revered place at the top of the societal food chain, right below royalty and certainly high above merchants.

Yet if you’re joining the ranks of Filipino teachers in school year 2010, I tell you now: Brace yourself to hear the words “Teacher lang.” Someone said it to me on my way home after I finished my doctorate at Harvard, someone well-educated and who said it with genuine empathy and concern.

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Studying engineering before they can spell it
By Winnie Hu, The New York Times

GLEN ROCK, New Jersey—In a class full of aspiring engineers, the big bad wolf had to do more than just huff and puff to blow down the three little pigs’ house.

To start, he needed to get past a voice-activated security gate, find a hidden door and negotiate a few other traps in a house that a pair of kindergartners here imagined for the pigs—and then pieced together from index cards, paper cups, wood sticks and pipe cleaners.

“Excellent engineering,” their teacher, Mary Morrow, told them one day early this month.

All 300 students at Clara E. Coleman Elementary School are learning the A B C’s of engineering this year, even those who cannot yet spell e-n-g-i-n-e-e-r-i-n-g. The high-performing Glen Rock school district, about 22 miles northwest of Manhattan, now teaches 10 to 15 hours of engineering each year to every student in kindergarten through fifth grade, as part of a $100,000 redesign of the science curriculum.

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Gene Weingarten teaches you to be funny
By Gene Weingarten, The Washington Post

I teach a class in English as a second language. My students struggle with humor, trying to be funny in a language that is not their own. Can you help them by outlining the basic forms and structures of English-language comedy?—Sarah Hopson

Dear Sarah—It is indeed a tragedy when the great gift of humor is denied to people merely because of a language barrier. Fortunately, you came to the right place! By deconstructing some timeless jokes, I shall create a brief tutorial in American Humor Appreciation so your students can experience the same unbridled joy as the rest of us.

“Take my wife ... please.”

This classic Henny Youngman formulation deftly combines the rhetorical devices of irony and surprise: At first, Henny appears to be referencing his wife as an example of something; then, we learn that he is instead offering the lady to anyone who will take her off his hands.

We laugh, but why?

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English language learners and the power of personal stories
By Katherine Schulten, The New York Times

We’ve asked Larry Ferlazzo, a prolific blogger and Twitter user who has written a recent book called “English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work,” to do a guest post for us today.

More than five million children in the United States enter school each year speaking a language other than English. That amount is expected to grow to 25% by the year 2025. It’s not surprising, then, that we hear from readers regularly that the more we can offer for this group, the better.

Larry has an interesting background: he spent the first twenty years of his career as a community organizer in California, often working with foreign-born populations. When he became a high school teacher six years ago, he realized that many of the strategies he used as an organizer translated easily to the classroom.

We’ve asked him to detail the ways he’s adapted what he calls the Organizing Cycle to his current students, and he’s provided some very easy and quick lesson ideas (off Times resources, of course) to show how anyone can do it.

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Do we need an Academy of English? The experts argue for and against

YES: Rhea Williams, chairman of the Queen’s English Society

People always say to me that English is a living language, and ask: “Why do we need something like an academy?”

English is a beautiful language—it has an enormous vocabulary, much bigger than that of many other languages. People misunderstand things if language is not used correctly. Misuse of apostrophes is the best-known problem, but people also don’t seem to know about tenses any more, for example, you hear “we was” a lot.

Successive governments have changed the rules about teaching grammar in schools. Now there are a lot of teachers who do not know the rules themselves. There are mispronunciations and misunderstandings galore.

An academy is needed because the correct information is not something that people can find easily. I suspect that many people in this country have easier access to a computer than to a reference book.

NO: Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society, which aims to promote remedies to improve literacy, including spelling reform

In many ways I have sympathy with the Queen’s English Society because accurate spelling is essential. However, variations in spelling will happen regardless of what people wish to say about it. In English we have the example of the word “show”, which in the 19th century was written “shew”. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that pronunciation shifts according to the way that a word is written.

There is overwhelming evidence of fluidity, and in a sense this is unpredictable. The difficulty for the QES arises when pronunciations are repeated in writing. The argument rests on the question: is there merit in spelling and the way that it is spoken being more closely aligned?

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Scots: an auld dug with plenty of bite
By Brian Logan, Guardian.co.uk        

I saw Rory Bremner performing recently, impersonating Gordon Brown. So leaden are his public pronouncements, joked Bremner, he sounds as if he's speaking a second language. How the audience laughed—in innocence, presumably, of the fact that, when Brown speaks standard English, he is speaking his second language. Brown is of a generation with my parents, and grew up calling a chimney a “lum,” an ear a “lug,” a frog a “puddock,” and the likes of David Cameron, a “sleekit skellum.” Gordon Brown grew up speaking Scots.

It’s no surprise that Bremner (a Scotsman) should neglect this fact. As a Scottish government report revealed this year, 64% of people in Scotland do not consider Scots a language, “just a way of speaking.” We Scots have spent 400 years being told (or worse, telling ourselves) that the language of Barbour’s Bruce, of Robert Burns and Gavin Douglas—who wrote the first translation into any Anglic language of Virgil’s Aeneid—is nothing more than a slovenly version of its sister tongue, English. But an “auld dug snaks siccar”—an old dog’s bite holds fast. Despite centuries of neglect, the Scots language refuses to let go.

Should its tenacity be encouraged? That was the subject of a “carnaptious” (or bad-tempered) debate in Scotland after the release in January of Public Attitudes Towards the Scots Language.

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Expats in UAE learn to mind their language
By Alice Johnson, GulfNews.com

DUBAI—What does it mean to have a chip on your shoulder—literally a fried piece of potato lying on your shoulder, or to have a problem that happened in the past, that you can’t get over?

Having a chip on your shoulder is just one idiom (a saying with a different meaning to what the words actually say) in English — known to be a complex language.

It is such idioms that prove to be stumbling blocks for those learning the language, as well as other aspects such as homonyms (words pronounced and spelled in the same way but with a different meaning), grammatical quirks and silent letters.

A homophone on the other hand is pronounced the same, but has a different meaning — these can either be spelled in the same way or differently.

When you add in words with silent letters, for example the “k” in knight and “w” in write, English can be daunting to learn.

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India chases language of success

For business, government and millions of ordinary people, proficiency in English has come to be seen as a key to prosperity, but evidence that this hope will be fulfilled is lacking

India will become the world’s most populous country within decades. Already it has more children in its schools than China. And there is now a huge and growing demand from parents from all social backgrounds that their children learn English.

English may now be regarded as a key ingredient in India’s economic success, but estimates of how many Indians actually know the language lack credibility, with numbers ranging from 11 million to 350 million.

As with most things in India, English proficiency is distributed very unevenly across the diverse socio-economic groups. Because there is no assessment of spoken language proficiency in education exams, there is no way of knowing what range of skill levels exists in the population.

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Functional Igbo—saving a fading language
By Ebenezer Edohasim, AllAfrica.com

Some years back, this writer, who is Igbo, visited a fellow Igbo family based in Lagos and was discussing in Igbo language with the head of the family.

Interestingly, the man’s six-year old daughter called Nkonye, who was in primary two then, clung to her father, obviously listening to our discussion.

Suddenly, the little girl burst into laughter, rushed to her mother in the near by kitchen, and told her while still laughing that myself and her father were speaking French.

The father, who felt embarrassed, looked into my eyes in disappointment. I told him that if his six year old child could not identify her mother tongue, he and the wife are in real trouble.

Again, just some weeks ago at Ogudu, Lagos, where we reside, my wife called a girl that hawks plantain because she wanted to buy. I asked the girl of her name and she said Ngozi, an obvious indication that she is Igbo by tribe.

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