In a report due to be published next month in the Queen’s English Society’s journal Quest, professor Bernard Lamb of Imperial College London claims that his British undergraduates made ‘three times as many grammatical, punctuation and spelling mistakes’ as his overseas students.The figures Lamb refers to are taken from a class of twenty-eight final-year undergraduates… Continue reading Lamb’s linguistic lament
On June 12th I posted on Alan Gibbons’ ‘Campaign for the Book‘. Here’s the latest from Alan on attempts to close libraries. Looks like Alan and his fellow campaigners have won a victory … for the time being at least! Well done to them! Below is a portion of Alan’s campaign email. You can read… Continue reading Wirral council rescinds library closures
When I come into contact with practising teachers and teaching assistants on the Sounds-Write literacy training courses, I am constantly coming up against people who think that their personal opinion, based on nothing but their practice and beliefs, has the same validity as research in the field of teaching reading and spelling.According to Caroline Cox*,… Continue reading Personal beliefs or evidence-based practice?
If you’re a teacher and you can get past the headline, the article by Harriet Sergeant in the Mail on 22nd September is about as hard hitting as it can get. The message is that illiteracy is a blight on our society and that the price we pay for continuing to allow huge numbers of… Continue reading The social cost of illiteracy.
Since the UN started large scale surveys of adult literacy in the developed world in the mid 90’s, politicians in all those countries that have English as their mother tongue have been at a loss to explain their appalling results. In English speaking countries around half of all adults are not sufficiently literate to cope… Continue reading ‘Literacy Standards in the UK – A Reality Check’ by David Philpot
What I remember Umberto Eco for best – and, my goodness, I enjoyed The Name of the Rose – is a long-forgotten piece he wrote on the Bond novels. On reading said piece, I was amazed to see that, apart from The Spy Who Loved Me, all the others conformed to a strict structural pattern. I’d… Continue reading Umberto echoes my fondness for the fountain pen.
Polly Curtis reported in Friday’s Guardian that 10,000 people have signed a petition to scrap SATs.Independent and objective testing is an appropriate way of seeking to find out if pupils are successfully remembering and understanding what society wants them to be taught. Unfortunately there is little evidence that the Government’s SATs papers actually do this… Continue reading The end of SATs?
What’s the future going to be in terms of preparing oneself for a worthwhile job? Is it the law, economics, politics? Not according to Hal Varian, Google’s chief statistician. For Hal, the sexy job to be doing in the next ten years is going to be statistics!In an interview with Tim Harford on Radio 4’s… Continue reading Vital statistics? The ‘sexy job’ of the future, says Google’s chief statistician.
You can tell we’re still becalmed in the silly season when the Indie reports a poll taken in New Zealand ranking ‘naughty’ kids by name! Top of the list was Callum for boys and Chelsea for girls! Not very encouraging for the Clintons then! With not a naughty Nick in sight, Chardonnay came in at… Continue reading Naughty names – a nadir in news reporting.
The Telegraph is asking today if teaching assistants should be allowed to teach. This is a follow-up to the previous day’s piece entitled “School pupils ‘taught by untrained staff”, in which it was revealed that ‘assistants were used as temporary cover in more than 80 per cent of schools’. The blow hards claim everything from… Continue reading Them as can do. And then they teach!