Speaking and reading a second language offers huge benefits, but if you remember high school Spanish class you know it can be tough. However, teaching children from a young age makes it easier and gives them an edge. Now, a new language learning app for kids is also giving them a leg up like never before.
Learn more about this topic by reading on Parentology.
After reading “Teacher Goes Outside The Classroom” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
The Federation of English Language Teaching Organizations of Malta (FELTOM) has welcomed the Budget 2021, describing its measures as a step in the right direction that will help operators in this fragile sector alleviate the difficult scenario of the past and coming months.
“The extension of the wage supplement to March 2021 …will ensure minimal staff loss , whereas the tax deferral, also up till March of next year, should help our member organizations retain a stronger cash flow,” the federation said.
Learn more about this topic by reading on TimesMalta.
After reading “Teacher Goes Outside The Classroom” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
In the past several decades, a few novel approaches to analysis and teaching of English grammar constructions have been proposed. These are based on several theories that seek to account for how language structures are produced and understood.
After reading “Teacher Goes Outside The Classroom” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
Families Struggle With Online Learning – An ESL teacher from Dover High School is making efforts to ensure that English second language families are succeeding with online learning.
Carmen Crowley is an ESL teacher at Dover High school. She says online learning has been especially challenging for non-English speaking students and parents at the district.
After reading “Families Struggle With Online Learning” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
Teachers work to replicate bilingual experience – Lesley De Paz would normally be giving instructions and having conversations with her third-grade students in Spanish, able to offer praise or a gentle grammar correction in real time.
That changed when the pandemic hit and her classroom went virtual. Gone was the easy back-and-forth chatter. In the first week of distance learning, her students were quiet and hesitant.
Learn more about this topic by reading on StarTribune.
After reading “Teachers work to replicate bilingual experience” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
Recent studies in corpus linguistics have shown that intuitions about language use are not always the best way to understand the nature and structure of the language itself
Cornell University, an elite Ivy League institution in upstate New York, made history in early September when its English department became the first in the United States to change its name to reflect the global diversity of those writing in the English language.
Staff at the department voted overwhelmingly to change “English Literature” to “Literatures in English” – a symbolic shift away from an overwhelming focus on England.
Learn more about this topic by reading on AlJazeera.
After reading “Teachers work to replicate bilingual experience” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
Almost every account of colonialism describes how the colonists planned to use education as a means of stabilizing and strengthening their rule. There was one system of education for those who were to rule and their abettors and quite another for those who were to be ruled.
Learn more about this topic by reading on TheNews.
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this vowel shift, the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels was changed. Some consonant sounds changed as well, particularly those that became silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is sometimes used to include these consonant changes.
English spelling started being standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations. The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
What is the Great Vowel Shift?
The Great Vowel Shift was a massive sound change affecting the long vowels of English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.
Otto Jespersen
Basically, the long vowels shifted upwards; that is, a vowel that used to be pronounced in one place in the mouth would be pronounced in a different place, higher up in the mouth. The Great Vowel Shift has had long-term implications for, among other things, orthography, the teaching of reading, and the understanding of any English-language text written before or during the Shift. Any standard history of the English language textbook (see our sources) will have a discussion of the GVS. This page gives just a quick overview; our interactive See and Hear page adds sound and animation to give you a better sense of how this all works.
The main difference between Chaucer’s language and our own is in the pronunciation of the “long” vowels. The consonants remain generally the same, though Chaucer rolled his r’s, sometimes dropped his aitches, and pronounced both elements of consonant combinations, such as “kn,” that were later simplified. And the short vowels are very similar in Middle and Modern English. But the “long” vowels are regularly and strikingly different. This is due to what is called The Great Vowel Shift.
Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing until the eighteenth century (but with its main effects in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) the sounds of the long stressed vowels in English changed their places of articulation (i.e., how the sounds are made).
Old and Middle English were written in the Latin alphabet and the vowels were represented by the letters assigned to the sounds in Latin. For example, Middle English “long e” in Chaucer’s “sheep” had the value of Latin “e” (and sounded like Modern English “shape” [/e/] in the International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA]). It had much the same value as written long e has in most modern European languages. Consequently, one can read Chaucer’s long vowels with the same values as in Latin or any continental European language and come pretty close to the Middle English values.
The Great Vowels Shift changed all that; by the end of the sixteenth century the “e” in “sheep” sounded like that in Modern English “sheep” or “meet” [IPA /i/]. To many it seemed that the pronunciation of English had moved so far from its visual representation that a new alphabet was needed, and in the sixteenth century we have the first attempts to “reform” English spellings, a movement still active today. In 1569 John Hart (in his Orthographie) went so far as to devise a new phonetic alphabet to remedy what he considered a fatal flaw in our system of language. (His alphabet and the work of other language reformers provides us with our best evidence for the pronunciation of English in his time).
After reading “The Great Vowel Shift” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
A, B, C. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Or is it? A kindergarten teacher on TikTok is going viral for revealing a new version of the alphabet song that is being taught at her Los Angeles elementary school.
Arielle Fodor, who goes by @Ms_Frazzled on the video-sharing app, posted a clip to the site this week debuting the remixed song, which has racked up 2.2 million views.
After reading “Teachers work to replicate bilingual experience” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.
