This article talks about the academic benefits of exercise. Here is an excerpt.
The California Department of Education (CDE) looked for a correlation between fitness scores and test scores. They found that kids who were deemed fit (by a standard test of aerobic capacity, BMI, abdominal strength, trunk strength, upper body strength and overall flexibility) scored twice as well on academic tests as those that were unfit. In the second year of the study, socio-economic status was taken into account, to possibly eliminate that variable as an explanation. As expected, those in the upper-income brackets scored better overall on the academic tests, but within the lower-income set of students, the same results were observed – kids who were more fit performed better academically.
We’ve been hearing that exercise is good for us for years and years, but is it possible that jumping jacks and a couple of sit ups make you smarter? Exercise has benefits to your grades, but exercise alone will not improve your grades. The activity your brain gets from exercise helps prepare it for an optimal learning to take place, according to John Ratey, a Harvard clinical associate professor of psychiatry.
Verb: It’s what you do!
This online UVA lecture titled “Learning with Conversational Agents” by Arthur Graesser focuses on AutoTutor, an animated learning agent.
While the AutoTutor system is not perfect, and as far as the data provided by the lecturer is concerned, is not as effective as a trained human tutor, research in the development of AutoTutor sheds light on some ways that human tutors and other teachers can improve their effectiveness in responding to students’ emotions.
A quick summary is as follows:
|
If the student exhibits: |
The tutor should respond by: |
|
· frustration |
· giving a hint |
|
· boredom |
· engaging the student in something |
|
· flow/being absorbed in the lesson |
· not interfering |
|
· confusion |
· manage the confusion to maximize learning |
There are a lot of people in your shoes
who continuously mix up who’s, who, and whose.
If you’re one of the people who gets them confused,
read on and follow these rhyming clues…
Whose is possessive and Who is a pronoun, and
Who’s is a contraction sure to confound!
After reading this, if you still mix up these,
Click below for two practice activities!
Who, Whose, Who’s Practice Activity 1
Who, Whose, Who’s Practice Activity 2
What makes during and while so confusing for some ESL students is that they have the same general meaning but they are different parts of speech. The result is that students often use one in place of the other.
During is a preposition. Prepositions are followed by a noun, pronoun, noun phrase, or noun clause.
While is used as the subordinating conjunction in an adverb clause. In other words, you need a subject and a verb to follow while.
A quick way to remember this is:
during + noun
while + sentence
In looking at error correction as a method of analyzing students’ achievement in grammar areas, some materials for testing are designed solely for the native speaker of English, and their use in classrooms with mainstreamed ESL students or bilingual classes is not always appropriate.
In some error correction materials that teachers give their elementary students, the errors are common for a particular first language group. The expectation of the author is that an English language learner (ELL) should be able to, after being taught and having practiced the structure, understand the err of their ways, so to speak. For example, “should of” must be changed to “should have”. The use of “should of” is an error that is common (perhaps exclusively) to native English speakers. Asking ESL students to correct an error that they never made will create confusion. They might not even be aware that the structure (modal + base form of the verb) exists, and of course adding a preposition to the problem (which any ESL teacher can tell you is most problematic for their students) adds insult to injury.
It’s important to analyze the materials that ELLs are being graded on so we don’t lower ESL students’ grades for something they never got wrong in the first place.
Get it? A Merry Christmas?
No matter what your religion or nation of origin is, if you are in the United States from the end of November through New Years, you can’t avoid seeing some evidence of Christmas. For those of you who are interested in some useful vocabulary this season, keep reading…
Other vocabulary of interest follows:
What you’ll hear:
Sleighbells, jingle bells, chestnuts roasting on an open fire, and these songs (click to listen and sing along)…
Where to go:
What to say to people:
What to call the days:
Prepositions to use:
What you’ll see:
If you’re lucky, you’ll see Santa in a sleigh being pulled by his reindeer: Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, Blitzen. Other items include: a Christmas tree, presents, gifts, wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, ornaments, lights, tacky lights (especially in Richmond, VA), fruitcake, peppermint sweets, candy canes, a miniature train, Frosty the Snowman, the abominable snowman, Christmas cards, and eggnog.
Of course, it’s difficult to summarize a “typical” American Christmas because there are so many people with a variety of traditions, so if I’ve forgotten something, feel free to comment.
Merry Christmas!
On more than one occasion I have heard students use here or in here as nouns. They say things like “Here have big buildings.” “In Here is cheap to live.”
Neither here nor in here can be the subject of a sentence! Why? Well, simply put, subjects are always nouns, pronouns, or clauses acting as nouns (appropriately named “noun clauses”).
In here is a prepositional phrase with here as the object (the noun meaning location).
Here is an adverb describing where an action took place.
If…
Then you can’t logically put here or in here in the subject section of a sentence.
Knowing the parts of speech of each word in a sentence (which can change depending on the context, as you see here) helps you choose the right words and be able to put those words in the right order in your sentences.
Click here for an activity that will help you decide when to use here or in here.
ALLENGLISH (or more specifically Debra Allen) is now on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter @debraallen.
I will write about a variety of things to include links to sites I like, retweets of education and speech-language related articles, ESL tips, highlights from my blog posts, as well as some of the regular Twitter banter that naturally ensues.
Although it’s incorrect, a lot of people say they live near to school or close the store. I’m willing to bet they are mixing up which adverb of proximity takes a preposition and which one doesn’t.
Here’s the correct way to use near, close, and nearby:
Close uses the preposition to
Near is followed by a noun (an object)
and
Nearby doesn’t take any object
Examples:
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