Author: gustavorernesto

The most popular searches in 2010 on Cambridge Dictionaries Online (CDO) show that idioms and slang held the key to learning English as a second language. The CDO search results from 2010 show that some of the top terms language learners searched for weren’t just words, but idioms and slang – showing how they can be one of the hardest aspects of the English language to learn and teach.

The top single word searched for in 2010 was ‘dictionary’, closely followed by ‘bigot’, which showed a huge spike in April 2010 after Gordon Brown made his infamous gaffe on the UK election campaign trail, and ‘inception’, which spiked after the movie of the same name came out in July 2010.

18.4 million visitors made 56.5 million visits to CDO in 2010, making it the most visited learner’s dictionary site in the world. To build on its success, CDO has just launched its biggest ever changes to enhance the learning experience for its visitors.

The search function and its results have been improved, and a blog called About Words, which looks at how the English language behaves, is being developed. The team behind the blog are writers Kate Woodford and Elizabeth Walter, co-authors of the award-winning Collocations Extra, and Hugh Rawson, whose books include Rawson’s Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk; Wicked Words. New Words, a listing of words and meanings that have just started to be used in English, has also been launched. Users of the site can join in the discussion by leaving comments or voting.

Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys. 

After reading “Decrease anxiety about learning English with mobile gaming” you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs, and visit my YouTube channel.

Building first languages – Parents are often amazed how fast children build their first language. Children become fluent around three years of age. Compare this with the average adult attempting to acquire a second language, and it’s a quite remarkable achievement.

A five-year research project led by Professor Ian Roberts from the University of Cambridge aims to work out what it is about how a language is built that guides a child’s innate ability to acquire it.

In the late 1950s, the American linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that children are born with an innate ability to acquire language – a ‘blueprint’ for speaking any language on the planet. According to Chomsky, encoded in the human brain is an innate set of linguistic principles he called the ‘universal grammar’ that encompasses all of the properties that any language can have. The language the child then actually speaks is simply determined by exposure to the language (or languages in the case of a multilingual family) they hear as they develop.

But precisely how a universal grammar might underlie the range of languages we have today, not to mention the many past languages that have vanished completely, is a continuing puzzle, as Professor Roberts explained: “If you talk about a universal grammar then you might naturally think there is a universal language, when of course there isn’t. Rather, there are thousands of different languages.”

“The central notion is that the specification that the child has in the genome, the universal grammar, must be of the most abstract, general, structural properties of language and that different languages manifest these properties in slightly different ways,” he added. “The empirical question then is to work out what it is about a language that guides the child’s innate ability to acquire it. In other words, to understand how Chomsky’s theory could work, we need to work out how languages are built.”

Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys. 

After reading “Building first languages”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.

How people acquire language – A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the verb second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people acquire language. It’s safe to assume that when Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches in August 1940, the possible existence of universal grammar was far from his mind. 

Nevertheless, it now appears that phrases such as “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” could hold the key to understanding how humans acquire language from birth.

The sentence features a remnant of something called the “verb second” constraint; a linguistic construction which appears in most Germanic languages, but has disappeared from Romance (Latin-based) grammars, such as Spanish or French.

In simple terms, verb second, or “V2” languages are, as the name suggests, defined by the fact that the verb tends to take second place in a sentence. Understanding why the principle was abandoned by one language family, but retained by the other, is the central objective of a new project that is being carried out by an international team of language scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Oslo, among others.

The researchers believe that the verb second constraint could be used to test Noam Chomsky’s famous, but contested, idea of universal grammar. The theory, developed in the 1950s, argues that humans acquire language because we possess an innate, hard-wired ability to do so.

Sam Wolfe, from the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics and St John’s College, University of Cambridge, said: “If we want to know whether or not universal grammar exists, we need to model what is actually going on inside our heads when we learn a language, so that we can better understand the toolbox we all make use of. The question is, how do you do that? One solution is to study language properties that might give us a clue, and the verb second constraint seems to be one of the best examples available – a lens to test that theory.”

Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys.

After reading “How people acquire language”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.

5000 speak Cherokee – Yet in recent years it has experienced a remarkable revival as a second language. But what happens when entire generations may have learned to speak the language but not read or write it?

Research from the University of Kansas shows children learning to write Cherokee in an Oklahoma immersion school internalized both English and Cherokee to develop an idiosyncratic writing style.

KU researchers Lizette Peter and Tracy Hirata-Edds have worked with Tsalagi Dideloquasdi, a Cherokee immersion school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, for several years to learn more about the revitalization of the language and how students acquire Cherokee. The recent findings are among the first studies to examine writing in the language, and the researchers found the students developed their own style of writing never seen in the language. Peter and Hirata-Edds argue it is not bad or incorrect, and it gives teachers important information to develop new approaches to help learners continue to build their bilingual skills.

“We didn’t know what to expect regarding how proficient their writing would be,” said Peter, associate professor of curriculum & teaching. “Oral language is different because you have an interlocutor, in the schools’ case, a teacher. When writing, the students have to rely on all they know about both Cherokee and English.”

Cherokee uses an orthography known as syllabary in its written form. Developed by Cherokee folk hero Sequoyah in the 1820s, it is unique among American Indian languages. The written form has many differences from English; for example, it does not use articles such as “a,” “an” or “the” before nouns, and it synthesizes morphemes to a much higher degree than English. However, when analyzing students’ writing samples and comparing them to samples of oral stories by Cherokee adults, the students often used grammatical conventions characteristic of English, such as creating an article where none was required.

Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys. 

After reading “5000 speak Cherokee”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.

Idioms help L2 learners

Idioms help L2 learners – Idiomatic expressions like “kick the bucket” or “send someone packing” constitute a special element of a language, and one that is difficult to learn. 

This is because the meanings of these idioms cannot be derived directly from the meanings of the separate words. On 28 January, the linguist Ferdy Hubers of Radboud University will defend his doctoral dissertation on the process by which such idioms are internalized by people acquiring a second language.

“It is truly one of the most difficult things to “get the hang of,” and native speakers use these idioms “at the drop of a hat.” They are everywhere; I used two in my last sentence,” remarks Hubers.

It can be learned

In his research, Hubers demonstrates that, given enough focused practice (e.g. using a computer program), language learners are indeed capable of learning these difficult-to-master idioms.

His investigation started by identifying the idioms that are known to native Dutch speakers by presenting them with 375 Dutch idioms. He then tested some of the idioms on German students who were learning Dutch. “We wanted to know whether they could be brought up to the same level as native Dutch people and, if so, to identify the best way to do this.”

Difference in experience

In his research, Hubers focuses on Dutch. As he explains, however, “The results can be interpreted very broadly. In theory, it works the same way in most other languages.” The differences that can be observed between native speakers and language learners are thus more a result of differences in experience than of differences in the underlying mechanisms, as is sometimes thought.

The research also provides important information for the field of education. Because there is usually not much time available for learning idioms, computer-supported language education could be very useful in this regard. He continues, “We also now know which different types of idiomatic expressions are more difficult to learn and require more attention when teaching a language.”

Learn more about this topic by reading this article on Phys.

After reading “Idioms help L2 learners”, you can check important issues for ESL teachers on the section PDFs. And visit my channel by YouTube.