LANGUAGES

The Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (Southampton University) includes in its website different kinds of resources, among them a list of 700 reasons for studying languages, all of them quoted from diverse sources such as linguists' works, surveys done to sixth form students, EU documents, and many more. After a bit of browsing, I have chosen this reason in order to provide an example:

"Languages give us access to other "countries of the mind", and help us to look back at our own country and culture from a different and more healthily critical perspective"

Reference:

Footitt, H. (2001) 'Lost for words' in the Guardian, Tuesday October 23 2001

Another section of this website contains the Power Point presentation Why Study Linguistics?, an informative and entertaining slide show aimed at encouraging people to study linguistics.

I've stopped at the following slide:

"What makes a word beautiful?" When reading it I have recalled an evening among friends when someone proposed us to say our favourite words. I found it curious the possible reasons that could make us select words. I'm not saying them here before inviting readers -anyone around here?- to share their favourite word in any language.

LOST CONSONANTS

Yesterday I read a mention about Lost Consonants cartoons in Language Play by David Crystal. Their author, Graham Rawle, bases the wit of his pictures and captions on the simple fact of altering the meaning of one word by leaving out one of its letters. Crystal tells in his book about the need to know the norm, the correct form of any linguistic form, when they are purposely modified in order to produce a humorous effect in the reader or listener. This can be a good exercise to test our lexical knowledge: to try and identify the original word and compare sentence meanings.

RAP, HIP-HOP AND CLASSICS

The other day I read this post by David Crystal in which he commented a project led by hip-hop artist Akala to work on Shakespeare with young people.

After watching the video below, I also think that the activity can be really positive to approach classic literature to the youth apart from the opportunity to practise reading, pronunciation, rhythm... in a fun way.




By chance, I have also come across a video recording where two Secondary students recite "Lo que puede el dinero" written by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita. The video can be watched from the bottom of Leer.es website.

GROUSE-BEATER

After reading today's Quote of the Day (see below), I followed the recommended link and read about Kazuo Ishiguro having worked "as a as a grouse-beater for the Queen Mother at Balmoral before enrolling at the University of Kent". I had no idea about the meaning of that word and tried to look it up by googling the expression.

It has not been an easy task. I can find what a grouse and I understand the general meaning of beater but I have to rely on my "knowledge of the world" to imagine that a grouse-beater's job is to harass birds so someone hunts them easier when moving. Is it like that? Anyway, a curious job for a future writer and a curious employer for the activity.

" I couldn't speak Japanese very well, passport regulations were changing, I felt British, and my future was in Britain. And it would also make me eligible for literary awards. But I still think I'm regarded as one of their own in Japan."

Kazuo Ishiguro

TEXT RECONSTRUCTION

Benjamin Franklin used the following strategy to improve his writing: when he liked how a text was written, he noted down several words from each sentence. Next, he mixed them and set them aside for a time. Some weeks later, he tried to reorganise the text by placing the words in the logical order and completing it.


Similar ideas lie under the design of exercises used in language learning. They are particularly useful to practise logical order, coherence and cohesion in a text.

This website collects some activities of the kind.

Other types of text reconstruction exercises are based on the learner’s capacity to guess the words in a text and test their knowledge about word frequency, collocations and vocabulary.

We can see some examples here.

QUIZZES

Quizicon web site offers a collection of more than one hundred quizzes about a variety of topics.

Some of them are related to language and literature:
- 10 most common English words.
- 10 most common Spanish words.
- Authors of classic novels.
- Punctuation symbols.
- Cockney alphabet.
- Shakespeare's plays.

Why not try one of them as a means of revision, a mental challenge or just for fun?

Image source: Flickrcc
www.flickr.com/photos/83073875@N00/2291816634

SUBTITLING VIDEOS

dotSUB is a tool that allows anyone to translate and subtitle video content into multiple languages. It can be helpful and fun for those who may like to practise translation while creating something useful for others at the same time.

The example below shows Claude Piron making a spirited defense of Esperanto as the best international language:

I´M JUST PRACTICING MY ENGLISH

Practicing English is a nice excuse to listen to Neil Young. Although to be true, who needs excuses to listen to Neil Young (others than remember the Golden Years)?

Come a little bit closer
Hear what I have to say
Just like children sleeping
We could dream this night away.

But there`s a full moon rising
Lets go dancing in the light
We know where the music`s playing
Lets go out and feel the night.

Because I´m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I´m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

When we were strangers
I watched you from afar
When we were lovers
I loved you with all my heart.

But now it`s getting late
And the moon is climbing high
I want to celebrate
See it shining in your eye.

Because I´m still in love with you
I want to see you dance again
Because I´m still in love with you
On this harvest moon.

VISUAL LEARNERS, LINGUISTIC LEARNERS

A recent study carried out by the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals that those who consider themselves as visual learners convert linguistically presented information into a visual representation of such information.
On the contrary, verbal learners tend to convert visual information into linguistic representations.

By means of magnetic resonance imaging technology, professor Sharon Thomson-Schill and her team scanned the brains of 18 subjects while performing several tests that involved both word-based and picture-based feature matching conditions. The results demonstrated that modality-specific areas of the brain were activated depending on how the subjects consider themselves: visual or linguistic learners.

So, once again, science confirms what everybody knows intuitively. Now investigators expect that further research will be useful for educators in helping them to determine the most effective way to learn for each individual.

I think it would be also interesting to determine if one learning system is more effective than the other and –as a mere curiosity- if there are more visual learners than linguistic learners or vice versa.

PRACTISING PHONETICS

Phonetic Flash is a section in the UCL Phonetics & Linguistics website which includes some activities useful to practise and revise English phonetics.

There are four kinds of exercises:

Labels. Choosing the correct voice, place, and manner labels for a given symbol.
Symbols. Choosing the appropriate symbol for a given label.
Words. Choosing the appropriate symbol for the vowel in a word.
Hit and miss. Choosing the words which contain the sound symbolised.

LEARNING AND REVISING PHRASAL VERBS AND IDIOMS

Face Up to Phrasals is one of the many sections in the BBC Learning English website. Its structure is nice (three sets of short spoken dialogues, each of them showing a particular phrasal verb in context) and allows learners to measure out the number of phrasal verbs they want to learn or revise at a time.

Other sites, such as English Idioms & Idiomatic Expressions provide explanations and examples of a good number of idioms sorted out according to topic.

In case we just want to test our knowledge on these items, we can try some of the exercises collected in Self-Study Idiom Quizzes.

There are even videos to help students widen their range of idiomatic expression, such as this one about ‘dog idioms’.

TEACHING READING

Researchers at the Florida State University have come to the conclusion that regarding to teaching children to read what work best are individual programs. Sounds logic, but they have proved it by systematic field studies. "There is too much of a tendency in education to go with what ‘sounds’ really good”, says Carol M. Connor, researcher at the Florida Center for Reading Research. In a study published in the Science Magazine, "Algorithm-Guided Individualized Reading Instruction", Connor shows how individualized instruction works better that the usual approach of using the same system to teach all the students traditionally used in most of the schools.
Probably Connor is not discovering anything new to experienced teachers, who face the problem to teach too many students to dedicate personalized attention to each one. However, she, Frederick J. Morrison and Barry Fishman, professors at the University of Michigan, have developed "Assessment to Instruction”, a web-based software program designed to help teachers to create particular reading programs adapted to each pupil. So, the teacher would have to monitor the students, check their progress and adapt the individual programs for each children in the classroom. Which, by the way, seems a lot of work, too and probably it would require a considerable effort.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/fsu-nos012507.php

Dr SULZBERGER'S THEORY

Good news for language learners! Have you ever turned on the BBC News as a kind of ‘background noise’, just for the sake of ‘hacer oido’? If you felt intuitively that get used to the particular sounds of the language that you were learning may enhance your language skills, then you were right! At least, according to recent studies developed in the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, by PhD Paul Sulzberger.
Frequent exposure to the sounds patterns of a language is the best way to learn it, says Dr Sulzberger: “However crazy it may sound, just listening to the language, even though you don’t understand it, is critical.”
Of course, we all may see how frequent listening of conversations or speeches in other languages will help us to discriminate words, but Sulzberger goes further. He considers that such simple activity sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the words. It seems that the key is in the way the brain develops neural structures. Dr Sulzberger: “When we are trying to learn new foreign words we are faced with sounds for which we may have absolutely no neural representation.” So, frequent exposure to the sounds of these new words would create such neural structures.
What immediately come to my mind are two questions: First, if the same hypothesis is applicable to reading texts in a foreign language although you don’t know the words, and second, would the old theory of listen foreign languages recordings while you are sleeping has any sense at all?

VIDEO COURSES ONLINE

Academic Earth website gives access to full video courses and lectures from scholars at various universities, particularly Yale. There are courses on several subjects including English
a section in which we can find talks on The American Novel Since 1945, Milton, and Modern Poetry.

Open Culture is another interesting site to get video and audio recordings related to English Language and Literature, among other subjects.

EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS

Studio 4 Learning website contains some educational videos aimed at American students so they can use them to revise school contents or prepare their tests. They are sorted out in categories according to subjects. These are links to several examples:

• Shakespeare
• English Punctuation
• American History
• Spanish Demonstratives I found the examples chosen to illustrate their use quite funny.

WIDENING AND TESTING VOCABULARY

The Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary Online contains around 6,000 labelled pictures organised in topics such as 'Earth', 'Human Being', Clothing', etc. and more thoroughly classified in subcategories within each field. It also provides games for testing word knowledge and sound to check pronunciation.

We can test our knowlegde through a series of 'drag-the-label-to-the-right-blank' games.

ONELOOK DICTIONARIES

OneLook Dictionary Search provides a list of links to a set of online dictionaries and encyclopaedias which contain definitions for the word you are looking up. It also allows to search for words and phrases that start or end with a particular word or morpheme; words that have a meaning related to a concept, etc.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary can be useful on these occasions when we feel that we have a word in the tip of our tongue but cannot retrieve it from memory. It works in this way: you try to describe a concept by typing key words, a question, a sentence... and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept.

TWO SITES TO PRACTISE ORAL ENGLISH

These are two websites that foster practice of oral skills:

Yappr. Videos sorted out according to their level of difficulty (easy, medium, hard) or genre (commercials, music, nature...) The recordings are accompanied by thier scripts in English and, sometimes, Spanish.

Pronunciar inglés. A blog devoted to phonetics in order to help readers improve their pronunciation.

DIRECCIONES A TENER EN CUENTA

Maite nos remite las primeras direcciones recomendadas para todos aquellos que deseen seguir aprendiendo inglés y perfeccionar el que ya saben. Seguiremos añadiendo direcciones en la medida en que nos vayan llegando. Un saludo a todos.
British Council: Learn English Central:
http://www.britishcouncil.org/central.htm?mtklink=central-learnenglish-portal-main-promo
BBC Learning English:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/
Dictionaries:
Word Reference
http://www.wordreference.com/es/
Merriam Webster:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/
Answers.com:
http://www.answers.com/