Yesterday’s Radio 4 programme carried a fascinating little piece on the work of Dr Paul Tench, a retired linguist from Cardiff University. Paul has been helping the Shanjo people of Zambia to develop a writing system for the first time. The twenty thousand or so Shanjo people are but one group in a country of 13.5 million… Continue reading They used to hunt animals
National Public Radio (npr) in the USA are currently running a piece on recommended ‘Freshmen common reads’. These are books many colleges and universities ask their new intake of students to read over the summer and be prepared to talk about in the first week of the first semester on campus. Npr have been asking… Continue reading Freshmen common reads
Talking of cognitive connections, my friend Ginny has just directed me to this! Looks as if some of the kids are not making the kind of cognitive connections we’d want!
David Crystal has posted a couple of noteworthy pieces on his blog just lately. One is ‘On linguistic apps’, in which he points readers in the direction of a grammar app from the Survey of English Usage at University College London. According to David, ‘it’s called iGE, the interactive Grammar of English, and it’s available… Continue reading Crystal clear
I have to admit that it’s a bit nerdy of me to return from holiday – not really! I was doing an intensive course in Spanish – and direct readers to Diacritics, a blog I discovered through Mr Verb. The latest posting by John Stokes asks the question: ‘Why are humans smart? Language and LEGOs’.… Continue reading Language and LEGO? Where’s the connection?
Time for some R&R
I would like to apologise to Dianne Murphy in jumping the gun by suggesting that her approach to the teaching of reading was Whole Language. Dianne has written a comment on the tail of the posting to say that the approach is “definitely not ‘Whole Language’ and nor is it ‘drill and practise’ in the… Continue reading Murphy’s law corrected
There’s been a lot of adverse criticism recently of the Oxford Reading Tree series, featuring Biff, Chip et al, and teachers often ask me on Sounds-Write courses if they shouldn’t just throw them all out because they do not conform to what most people recognise as decodable readers. The answer, of course, is absolutely not!… Continue reading Biff and Chips to go? Oh no!
What was Christopher Middleton at the Telegraph thinking when he called what Dianne Murphy is doing a ‘literacy revolution’? He evidently has never read Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louise Napoleon, which, prompted Marx to remark famously that history repeats itself, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’. Far from being a revolution, this kind of methodology… Continue reading Murphy’s law re-stated
In my last posting, I wrote that Rod Liddle’s invocation of ‘ghoti’ as a way of spelling ‘fish’ – ostensibly to demonstrate how ‘unphonetic’ (ridiculous term!) English is – was nonsensical. I also wrote that the notion had been entirely discredited. Well, apparently not! Some of my readers have informed me that they are confronted… Continue reading Why ‘ghoti’ is a red herring