Just when you thought it was difficult for Americans to communicate with English language learners, NPR recently did a report, which you can read here, about the collection of regional phrases in English, called the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). This collection of regional spoken English is turning out to be pretty handy for Americans to understand each other from sea to shining sea.
Doctors also use the DARE to understand patients who use colorful language to describe their illnesses. A patient complaining of “the groundage” or “pipjennies” likely has a rash on the feet or pimples.
The dictionary has approximately 75,000 entries of colloquial English usage collected from all over the United States. Some of these unusual phrases are only used within a few square miles of the country!
As for ESL students, it won’t help you speak better if you try to learn all of the colloquialisms; it is argued (in your favor) that English is becoming more homogeneous, probably for the purpose of cushioning the sometimes bumpy pathways of communication…
Stephanie Grayson, the founder of CorporateSpeechTrainer.com, says in some ways, American language is becoming more uniform, and television and the Internet are giving us all a common vocabulary.
In other ways, however, language evolves as a result of more personal conversations within small groups, families, and communities. Here, the article refers to Stanford University linguist John Rickford saying
people speak one way in e-mails and another way at the local coffee shop: “The primary driving force behind language use and language change is face-to-face interaction. And that takes place in smaller communities and smaller groups, the kinds of people you hang out with.”
Who do you agree with? Is it just as important to teach and learn colloquialisms as it is to teach basic communication and fluency? As English speakers, does it bother you to simplify or generalize your speech when speaking to non-native speakers?
If you want an overview of your new language to be able to speak with ease and fluency, you can go with Globish, but if you want an intimate knowledge of the language that people around you are using, I DARE you to dig a little deeper.
When the grammar lesson is complete, and the worksheets are corrected, what comes next? Here are 6 Role PlaySkit ideas for you to use in your classes so your students can practice various grammar functions in a fun and realistic way.
The first one is blank for flexibility.
The best part is…they’re available in PDF.
There are many activity options for Richmonders, native and newcomers alike, this summer. Try this list for some ideas…
Have fun, and if you see me there, stop and say Hi!
Pay students, and they will learn. Why didn’t we think of this before? In this New York Post article, a study shows that students’ grades improve when there is a [privately funded] cash reward for high performance. Hey, money talks. There’s no denying it.
To quote the article…
But many reported seeing indisputable academic benefits — including more motivation, better focus and an increase in healthy competition for good grades among students.
Could more green in the educational diet actually be bad for us? Short-sighted cash for grades seems to be the solution to little more than boredom with the status quo and a lack of creativity for sustainable solutions to inequitable education and poverty. On the other hand, money might just be a good short term solution. It could be used as a lesson to explore investing in one’s future or long term goals (such as purchasing a computer or saving for college).
In the long term, however, it will be important to review the Spark program’s overall value to the students, the teachers, the education system, and to see whether it’s true that as the cash value for a student’s grade increases, the intrinsic value of motivation, volunteerism, teamwork, and teaching decreases (which, coincidentally, are undeniable characteristics of a strong society and a healthy workforce).
I wonder if the program’s founder, Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was paid in middle school and how that would have affected his drive to succeed.
Here’s an activity practicing the use of single and double quotes…when someone is quoting someone else.
Quotation Marks: Single and Double (quoting someone who’s quoting)
Use your main idea skills to answer questions that ask the following:
You can safely eliminate details from your answer choices if the question asks about the main idea.
I saw a tee-shirt at a 10K race that said “Training Trumps Luck”. The shirt implies if you train enough, you don’t have to rely on the hope that you’ll arrive at the finish line without injury. You can’t control when you cross the starting line, but you can train well enough for the duration of the race to get what you want when it’s over. The shirt’s context was obvious at the race, but as I was helping someone with their Standards of Learning Test, I realized that the same theory applies to tests.
Multiple choice and standardized tests all have one thing in common: they require not only subject knowledge, but also some training in test taking strategies. Some common strategies for reading comprehension or English language arts tests are listed (and explained) here:
You can’t control when you will be tested, but you can train well enough for the duration of the test to get what you want when it’s over.
On the surface, putting something you’ve just read in your own words seems like the most natural thing to do while reading.
When you’re stuck on a question, you can rely on this easy and oftentimes overlooked test technique. Ask yourself:
Be careful with cause and effect questions for this reason: they may be confused with sequencing questions. Sequencing asks about the order of events only. Cause and effect, on the other hand, asks about the relationship between two events.
Cause and effect questions typically appear in one of the following forms:
Just remember: in cause and effect relationships, there is also sequence. However, in sequence, there is not always cause and effect.
![[del.icio.us]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Google]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[LinkedIn]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/linkedin.png)
![[MySpace]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[Technorati]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Twitter]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Email]](http://allenglish.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
