Author: gustavorernesto

PDF #61 –  Gustavo Rubino Ernesto – American Words that Became British, 31.05.2019, Friedrich Alexander University

“English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.”
― H. Beam Piper, Fuzzy Sapiens

This paper will present the American English that occurred in the eight editions A, B and C entries (the sixth edition could not be found) of the well-known Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionaries. More than 4300 entries were extracted from about 100,000 entries that were analyzed. The first edition (1948) set the tone of the research with forty-six entries taken from it, which six served as an example of the analyses conducted in all eight editions. All editions were compared using the copies obtained at the FAU library located in Bismarckstrasse 1, Erlangen during the period of March, April and May of 2019.

PDF #62 – Gustavo Rubino Ernesto – False Cognates English – Portuguese, 2.06.2019, Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen

This paper investigates several word etymologies in order to present a strong connection between word origins and false friends linking two major languages of the world. It is important to show that some of the ways in which lexical meanings typically change over time, affect one or even more languages, in the case of this paper English and Brazilian Portuguese. Semantic change itself is rarely neat, and usually involves more than simply the shift from a single ‘old’ meaning to a single ‘new’ meaning. Much more often, one or more meanings declines or drops out of use over time, or additional new meanings emerge from existing senses, perhaps changing the prototypical use of the word.

PDF #60 – Joh Amos Comenii – Orbis Sensualium Pictus

Orbis Sensualium Pictus (Visible World in Pictures), is a textbook for children written by Czech educator John Amos Comenius and published in 1658. It was the first widely used children’s textbook with pictures, published first in Latin and German and later republished in many European languages. The revolutionary book quickly spread around Europe and became the defining children’s textbook for centuries.

Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction. Besides his native Bohemian Crown, he lived and worked in other regions of the Holy Roman Empire, and other countries: Sweden, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Transylvania, England, the Netherlands and Hungary.

John Amos Comenius was born in 1592 in the Margraviate of Moravia in the Bohemian Crown. His birthplace is uncertain and possibilities include Uherský Brod (as on his gravestone in Naarden), Nivnice, and Komňa (from this village he took his surname, which means “a man from Komňa”), all of which are located in Uherské Hradiště District of today’s Czech Republic. John was the youngest child and only son of Martin Komenský (died 1602–4) and his wife Anna Chmelová. His grandfather, whose name was Jan (János) Szeges, was of Hungarian origin. He started to use the surname Komenský after leaving Komňa to live in Uherský Brod. Martin and Anna Komenský belonged to the Moravian Brethren, a pre-Reformation Protestant denomination, and Comenius later became one of its leaders. His parents and two of his four sisters died in 1604 and young John went to live with his aunt in Strážnice.

After reading “Joh Amos Comenii – Orbis Sensualium Pictus” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my Youtube channel.

PDF #59 – Shih-Chuan Chang – A Contrastive Study of Grammar Translation Method and Communicative Approach in Teaching English Grammar, October 21, 2010, Cheng Shiu University

The Grammar Translation Method and the Communicative Approach have both played important roles in grammar teaching. Which is better, the Grammar Translation Method or the Communicative Approach? This paper aims to compare the controllability and feasibility of these two approaches and find out which one is more suitable for grammar teaching in Taiwan. Two classes were selected and taught by the Grammar Translation Method and the Communicative Approach respectively. The college admission test showed that they share a similar level of the overall English proficiency before the intervention. The pre-test demonstrated that there wasn’t any distinction between the two classes in their grammatical competence. The post-test embodied that there was significant difference in their grammatical competence between the two classes. The scores of the students in the Experimental Class were higher than that in the Control Class. The result showed that grammar teaching in the framework of the Grammar Translation Method is better than the Communicative Approach. Nevertheless, the Communicative Approach emphasizes fluency and the Grammar Translation Method is concerned with accuracy. Fluency and accuracy are the target for English learning. So the best way to improve the situation is to combine both methods in teaching English Grammar.

PDF #58 – H Douglas Brown – Principles of Language Learning and Teaching 

Since its first publication in 1980, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, here in its fifth edition, has served a number of purposes for many audiences around the world. For graduates or advanced undergraduates in language-teacher education programs, it is a textbook on the theoretical foundations of language teaching, a survey of what research has revealed about how human beings acquire a second language. For a surprising number of people it has become a book that Master’s degree candidates pore over in preparation for the SLA section of their comprehensive examinations or for references for their thesis research. For experienced teachers, it has become a handbook that provides an overview of current issues in the field with an index and bibliographic entries to aid in that overview.