Tag: Language

Bookmarked “Eduspeak” Reconsidered (alfiekohn.org)

Not all of our lingo can or should be replaced with simpler words. Nor would everyone who criticizes it be satisfied with greater clarity. Nevertheless, educators, like other professionals, have a responsibility to communicate as clearly as possible with people outside their field. It’s a matter of basic courtesy to elucidate terms that may be puzzling to others even though we’ve come to take them for granted. And that clarity may also help more people to understand why traditional practices so often fall short and thus to build a constituency for change.

Alfie Kohn explains that the complexity of language depends upon the context and situation.
Bookmarked 7 Browser Extensions to Help Translate Different Languages by Reece Rogers (WIRED)

Whether you’re learning a new language entirely or just need a quick translation, these aids and interactive video captions can boost your skills.

I am really intrigued by translation solutions in regards to communicating information to different school communities. Without an understanding of the knowledge you are translating into, it is hard to judge the authenticity. I wonder though whether some sort of communication is better than no communication?
Liked The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift (daily.jstor.org)

Taylor Swift isn’t alone in being accused of faking an accent. American pop-punk bands like Green Day have been accused of faking British accents in imitation of the Sex Pistols, just as non-American groups (such as the French band Phoenix) put on their best-dressed American accents during performances. Code switching in genres is not uncommon and generally passes unnoticed, especially if listeners never get a chance to hear an artist’s normal speaking voice—unless that voice sings in a new genre where a different accent might be the norm.

Bookmarked 4 ways to teach you’re (sic) kids about grammar so they actually care (theconversation.com)

If we want children to use pronouns effectively in their writing, we need to teach them how authors use them for literary effect in texts. Research has shown children learn to apply grammar in their writing carefully and creatively when we teach it in the following ways.

Brett Healey discusses some strategies for teaching grammar:

  1. Show how grammar works in texts
  2. Use examples and make them authentic
  3. Make room for discussion
  4. Encourage language play
Bookmarked Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language (the Guardian)

The long read: People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?

In an adaptation from Don’t Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, David Shariatmadarin reflects on the continual fear over time of the death of the English Language. Rather than death, he argues that it is continually changing.

Any given language is significantly reconfigured over the centuries, to the extent that it becomes totally unrecognisable. But, as with complex systems in the natural world, there is often a kind of homeostasis: simplification in one area can lead to greater complexity in another. What stays the same is the expressive capacity of the language. You can always say what needs to be said.

Some of the ways that language changes, include:

  • Reanalysis: when a word or sentence has a structural ambiguity and changes to a new understanding.
  • Grammaticalisation: a phrase is made into a word with a solely grammatical function.
  • Sound Changes: where certain ways of saying things are seen as having prestige, while others are stigmatised.

Another reason that writer’s fear death is that it is the death of the English language as they know it. Shariatmadarin argues that older people experience greater linguistic disorientation as the language that they have grown up with changes.

Bookmarked What the earliest fragments of English reveal (bbc.com)

The earliest fragments of English reveal how interconnected Europe has been for centuries, finds Cameron Laux. He traces a history of the language through 10 objects and manuscripts.

This collection of historical artefacts is insightful both from the perspective of language, as well as the origins associated with each. It seems that every piece involves some element of luck as to how it survived that it makes you wonder the texts that have been lost over time and how this may impact our appreciation of the past.
Bookmarked Tech, Agency, Voice (On Not Teaching) | Hybrid Pedagogy by Chris Friend (Hybrid Pedagogy)

We are too often expected to create classes like the opera house, where a “successful” course gets all students, no matter where they come from or what they care about, to think “glacier” when given the right stimulus. To give the correct answer on a test given a specific predetermined question. But what would our classes look like if they instead replicated the experience of a sculpture garden, with that evocative face, filling me with a sense of wonder, compelling me to physically turn around despite myself and investigate a question I developed on my own?

We shouldn’t teach students. We should inspire them. And then we should get out of their way.

In a keynote for PL 2018 New Learning Horizons: Digital and Hybrid Pedagogy, Chris Friend discusses the way in which the language that we use in educational technology (especially around learning management systems) reinstates power and hierarchy:

A learning management system of one form or another seems ubiquitous in today’s universities. We’ve grown so accustomed to them that we expect to use one even in our face-to-face classes. But their ubiquity brings with it their ability to change the way we see learning. What exists in an LMS becomes the way we see our classes. What if inside that LMS, the button students clicked when they finished a project read, “share my creation” rather than “submit”? How would that small change influence students’ relationships to their own work, much less the class they are a part of? These small reminders of authority structures appear throughout our environments. In my school’s LMS, I work with “users” in an “org unit”, not students in a class. Every time I see the words “org unit” I question how we view our institution and whether we really think we work in the best interests of students.

Friend suggests that rather than ‘teaching’ and ‘submitting’ work, we should be ‘inspiring’ and asking students to ‘share’ their work. Associated with this, rather than dictate the end outcome, allow students to interpret it themselves and provide their justifications for the standards:

My favorite way to assess students? Ask them. Ask them to show what they’ve done for a class. Ask them to show how they know they’ve achieved the course outcomes or standards or learning goals or whatnot. In an engineering class, ask them how they know they’ve solved a particular design challenge. In a science class, ask them how they know they performed a viable experiment and can trust their results. In a music class, ask them how they know whether their performance of a piece accurately or creatively interpreted the intentions of the composer.

Although Friend is talking about a post-secondary environment, this still has ramifications for primary and secondary schools.

Listened Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet? – podcast by Andrew Dickson;Andrew McGregor;Simon Barnard from the Guardian

For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality – but will it spell the end for dictionaries?

This is an intriguing insight into the effort to organise language. It is interesting to think about this exercise in regards to Google Books and machine learning. I feel that this is as much about world views and perspective.

The text version can be found here.