-
‘I’m sorry, Mr Shakespeare, you’ve failed your Key Stage 2 grammar test’
Awful, embarrassing news about our education system from the American grammar blogger David Crystal. (Spotter’s badge to the estimable John E McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun.) Asked to include an “appropriate” adverb in the phrase “The sun shone ________ in the sky”, children were marked down for using “bright” and “dutifully”. Crystal points out, rightly […]
-
Hey guess what, kids don’t speak the same as we did! Let’s be all ‘swag! Jank! Ho ho ho’
Does anyone else slightly want to cry at that thing John Humphrys does on the Today programme about once every two years, when new slang words are put in the dictionary? You know, the thing where he pronounces each of the terms that the Youth of Today use, in a voice that suggests he is […]
-
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://jesusromerotrillo.tumblr.com/post/61114778496
-
Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? (NYT 11-Sept-2013)
THE EDUCATION ISSUE Can Emotional Intelligence Be Taught? One day last spring, James Wade sat cross-legged on the carpet and called his kindergarten class to order. Lanky and soft-spoken, Wade has a gentle charisma well suited to his role as a teacher of small children: steady, rather than exuberant. When a child performs a requested […]
-
Ugly Disagreements
Singular goes with singular, plural with plural. Sounds easy. Yet agreement problems abound in our prose, between subjects and verbs, between nouns and pronouns. The perils are all familiar: phrases intervening between subject and verb that throw us off track; collective nouns that veer from singular to plural; tricky words like “each”; and, of course, […]
-
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin
New issue of the Linguistics and Education Bulletin via Tumblr http://jesusromerotrillo.tumblr.com/post/60452869615