David Crystal – texts and tweets: myths and realities

Thanks to Ben Jones for alerting me to David Crystal’s recent talk. Like you, I have many of his books on my shelf and find his insights into language, especially the English language, sage. David Crystal – Texts and Tweets: myths and rea…, posted with vodpod

Readability

Readability is a simple tool that ‘makes reading on the Web more enjoyable by removing the clutter around’ what you’re reading. Check out how it works:   Great, definitely a useful tool but what interests me is the opportunity it offers English teachers to explore how ‘Readability’ (and similar technologies) change the nature of the meaning of the text. I am sure [...]

Twitter

Since Mark Pesce spoke about Twitter at an education.au conference earlier in the year, I have been embarrassingly evangelical about this microblogging service. Quite simply, Twitter lets you microblog pithy 140 characters posts, known as ‘tweets’, to your friends or followers. This often seems inane to the uninitiated but the growing number of influential educators and teacher [...]

National English Curriculum: Initial Advice

The nation’s newspapers reported on the release of the National English Curriculum: Initial Advice paper with the following opening lines: ‘GRAMMAR will return to the classroom‘ ‘CHILDREN will be taught grammar for the first time in more than 30 years’ ‘ENGLISH will be stripped back to basics under a draft national curriculum so students learn more [...]

‘How English Is Evolving…’

My travels in India gave me an appreciation of ‘Hinglish’ and I wasn’t in Singapore long enough to experience much ‘Singlish’ but hopefully, with Chinglish on the rise, opportunities will present themselves to enjoy the richness of this derivation in the not too distant future. How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even [...]