Critics say that slang is sabotaging language, with some teenagers unable to speak in any other way. One school in Manchester is so concerned it has recently banned slang. BBC News Magazine reports:
From the Cockney rhyming calls of London's East End traders to teen speak, slang has always been part of Britain's rich and diverse language.
But young people are increasingly unable to distinguish when it's appropriate to use it, say some linguists. Their language is becoming saturated by slang, leaving them ill-equipped to communicate in the wider world.
Paul Kerswill, professor of sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, is studying street language in London. He says an entirely new dialect is emerging.
"Young people are growing up with a new form of composite language. It's a bit cockney, a bit West Indian, a bit West African, with some Bangladeshi and Kuwaiti - and it seems to be replacing traditional cockney."
This "multicultural English" is now the ordinary way of speaking for many young people, he says. Instead of just using it to be cool or to fit in with peers, they use it when they speak to everyone. Full article >>
COMMENTS BBC Radio 4 has just started a series about slang called Mind Your Slanguage. You can listen to the first episode here.
The New Oxford American Dictionary has named 'unfriend' its 2009 Word of the Year. This Newsy video uses multiple sources to cover the story. Transcript here.
India is falling behind countries such as China in its attempts to increase the use of English among its population, a new report says.
The study by the British Council says a "huge shortage" of teachers and quality institutions is hampering India despite a growing demand for English skills.
The study says China may now have more people who speak English than India. Full story >>
They are some of the most memorable and stirring words of the 20th century, but Churchill’s speech exhorting the British to “fight on the beaches” would fail if submitted as a school essay and subjected to a proposed computerised marking system.
The wartime leader had a style that was too repetitive, according to the computer being tested for the online marking of school qualifications. It rated Churchill as below average in the equivalent of an A level English exam.
His reference to the “might of the German army” lost him marks because the computer interpreted this as an incorrect way of writing “might have” rather than recognising “might” as an abstract noun.
Other authors, including Ernest Hemingway and William Golding, were also dismissed by the computer as not being up to standard in the American equivalent of an A-level English exam. Full story >>
COMMENTS ETS has been using computerised marking for the GMAT since 1999, albeit in conjunction with a human corrector. In theory, the idea is very attractive—it takes me around four hours to mark a batch of forty 300-word essays (and it's not my favourite activity!) See here for a research paper on automatic evaluation of essays.
Although The Times 2010 Spelling Bee Championship is only open to full-time pupils in schools in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, anyone can practise their spelling with a great range of games on the Spelling Bee website.
COMMENTS A useful feature for learners is the "Word Help", which gives you clues about the word you've been given to spell.
LESSON IDEA Get your students to challenge each other to head-to-head games (they'll have to register for that).
The Times reports on the results of a new study which has found that "newborn babies mimic the intonation of their native tongue when they cry, indicating that they begin to pick up the first elements of language in the womb."
The study, which is published today in the journal Current Biology, recorded and analysed the cries of 60 healthy babies: 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 from German-speaking families. The recordings were made in maternity wards when the babies were 3 to 5 days old. Analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the babies’ “cry melodies”, which appeared to accord with their mother tongue.
French newborns tended to cry with a rising melody contour, starting at a low pitch and ending on a high note, whereas German babies preferred a falling melody.
While the average volume of crying was the same, the French babies started more quietly and built up to a crescendo, while the German babies did the opposite. These patterns are consistent with characteristic differences between the two languages, according the researchers. Full story >>
French children generally spend years learning foreign languages in school, but the results are often dismal. So President Nicolas Sarkozy called Tuesday for an emergency plan to make schools produce more bilingual students.
In a speech outlining wider education reforms, Sarkozy underscored that "a foreign language is meant to be spoken," and suggested that language instruction should be shifted away from written grammar and memorization to emphasize oral skills.
Students in French public schools begin a second language in middle school and often receive up to six years of foreign language instruction. Still, many high school graduates struggle to express even the simplest of thoughts in English, Spanish, German or the other foreign languages on offer. Full article >>
TRANSCRIPT FIRST MAN: Hey, aren’t we all in the same English course ?
FIRST WOMAN: Oh yeah. How’s it going?
FIRST MAN: Not bad—except I sometimes have trouble with my grammar, isn’t it? I mean, sometimes I perfect but other times I don’t, won’t they?
SECOND MAN: See, I’m alright with my grammar. My problem is spelling. I can’t spell to save my loaf.
FIRST WOMAN: Yeah?
SECOND MAN: Yeah. I have to rely on the spell chalk on my compluter.
FIRST WOMAN: Well, you know, look at it this way. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t eat it too. You know what I’m saying?
SECOND MAN: No, no, not really.
FIRST MAN: Oh, I think that she sometimes has trouble mixing metaphors, aren’t she?
FIRST WOMAN: Yeah. Sorry you guys, I’m always crying over spilt chickens before they’re hatched.
SECOND WOMAN: It’s alright for you all, I’ve got a very small vocabulary.
THIRD MAN: What’s that like?
SECOND WOMAN: It’s alright for you all, I’ve got a very small vocabulary.
THIRD MAN: That’s OK—I have problems with my emphasis.
FIRST WOMAN: Your emphasis?
THIRD MAN: Yes, my emphasis on different parts of the sentences. In my job that can cause a lot of awkwardness.
SECOND MAN: What do you do?
THIRD MAN: I’m a speech therapist.
SECOND MAN: A peach therapist that can’t spike priperly. Surprised your boss hasn’t sucked you.
SECOND WOMAN: It’s alright for you all, I’ve got a very small vocabulary.
THIRD MAN: Can I make a suggestion? Why don’t you purchase a dictionary—you’ll save yourself a lot of embarrassment.
FIRST MAN: I’ll tell you what. Why doesn’t we all try studying together, isn’t it? How doesn’t next week sound, didn’t we?
SECOND MAN: Grape idea.
THIRD MAN: Fabulous.
FIRST WOMAN: Yeah, you give ‘em an inch, it’s worth two in the bush.
SECOND WOMAN: It’s alright for you all, I’ve got …
ALL: Shut up!
FIRST MAN: Isn’t it!
LESSON IDEAS 1. Give students the transcript and ask them to correct the mistakes (marking the correct stress on the words in bold). 2. Use the video to introduce the topic of word stress. 3. Use the video to introduce a lesson about proverbs.
British undergraduates are nearly three times more likely to make errors in English than those from overseas, according to new research.
A study of written work produced by final-year students revealed that, on average, they had 52.2 punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors per paper compared with just 18.8 for the international students.
Spelling errors included "flourescence" for "fluorescence", "alot" for "a lot", "seperate" for "separate", "yeild" for "yield", "relevent" for "relevant", "introduications" for "introductions" and "pail vains" for "pale veins".
"There were hundreds of cases of disagreement in number between subjects and verbs (such as 'male sterility are useful', 'fertility in most breeds have low heritability')," added the research. Wrong plurals – such as varietys, two theorys and the two hypothesis – were common, it added.
Grammatical errors included "done by my partner and I" and "a women".
On punctuation, it added: "Semicolons were often used to introduce lists. Very few students used colons.
"Some never used possessive apostrophes, and there were many apostrophes used in non-possessive plurals – 'the cows rectum' and 'the harem's of seals'. Full story >>
COMMENT What do you expect from science students?
FOOTNOTE Listen to an interview with the author of the study from Radio 4's Today programme.
Today is National Punctuation Day. You will find a good collection of punctuation resources and information about each of the punctuation marks pictured below on the official NPD site.
Parents who struggle to understand the language of their teenage children can now brush up on their slang skills with a new dictionary of “teenglish” terminology.
Called Pimp Your Vocab, the book aims to demystify the jargon adopted by British youngsters.
Other terms explained are “teek”, which means very old, and “fraped” – a compound of Facebook and rape, describing someone's social networking profile being hacked into and changed.
The book’s author, Lucy Tobin, said she got the idea to create the dictionary while studying English at university, when a tutor was left baffled by the term “IM-ing”. Full story >>
Take the Pimp Your Vocab quiz to find out how in touch you are with the word on the street.
This press release should interest anyone involved in preparing students for IELTS or the TOEFL.
Pearson Test of English Academic (PTE Academic), a new English language test owned by Pearson and developed in collaboration with the Graduate Management Admission Council,
will debut on October 26, 2009.
The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers
the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), began working with Pearson in
2006 to conceive and develop a test that would more accurately measure the
English language skills of students than existing exams. The computer-based
test includes speaking and voice recording capabilities; score reports sent to
schools will include a 30 second audio clip of the test taker's speech. Full text >>
COMMENT Do we really need yet another test of English? I thought the IBT was supposed to test academic speaking skills. And I wonder how much this new test is going to cost. A 3-hour exam with voice recording isn't going to be cheap. The French have a good expression: "c'est une usine à gaz" (literally "a gasworks", but meaning an unneccessarily complicated creation that functions poorly).
Julia Angwin poses an interesting question in an article in the Wall Street Journal:
Do we still need dictionaries in the age of Google?
Dictionaries are, after all, giant databases of words compiled by lexicographers who investigate word usages and meanings.
These days, however, Google is our database of meaning. Want to know how to spell assiduous? Type it incorrectly and Google will reply, in its kind-hearted way: "Did you mean: assiduous"? Why yes, Google, I did.
Google then spits out a bunch of links to Web definitions for assiduous. Without clicking on any of them, the two-sentence summaries below each link give me enough to get a sense of the word: "hard working," and "diligent."
Still not satisfied? Fine, click on the Google "News" tab – and you will be directed to a page of links where the word assiduous appears in news stories. Presto, sample sentences and usage examples.
"You and I can be our own lexicographers now," says Barbara Wallraff, the longtime language columnist for The Atlantic magazine. "We don't need dictionaries." Full article >>
USEFUL TIP You can get Google to give you a definition of a word by typing "define: word" in the search box.
COMMENT I agree with the article that Google is a great source of information about words and I use it all the time to check meanings and find examples of words in context. I rarely consult my printed dictionaries any more (except to find definitions for this blog!). As for online dictionaries and dictionary software, they're just too slow if you just want to look up one word. However, I did recently treat myself to an electronic dictionary, which allows you to find definitions and synonyms much more quickly than a printed or online dictionary. It's also very useful for solving crosswords.
The BBC News Styleguide is a 92-page PDF document which you can download for free. In it you will find lots of fascinating entries about modern English usage, including Americanisms, Foreign Phrases, Vogue Words and Danglers (!).
