via eflclassroom.com
These are all great issues for teachers, administrators, and policymakers to consider. “Common sense” isn’t always the best approach in education.
Many of the questions are phrased in a way that could easily be either true or false, but you’ll get the idea. The great justifications will help.
Take the quiz at http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/quiz.html This is pretty fun, but not all that easy, even the “easy peasy” setting. Might be a little easier for someone raised in the UK, but not much easier I’d guess.
I especially like the corrective feedback.
——————————— EDIT —————————-
The quiz is no longer there, but you can see the results.
For many people, job interviews are the most stressful part of the job-search process. And it’s true that an interview is often a make-or-break moment: If you flub the interview in a big way, you probably won’t make the cut–no matter how good your resume is, or how excellent your qualifications are.
You can combat nerves and increase your chances of success by practicing your answers to difficult interview questions. Here are some of the toughest, with suggested answers:
Make sure to check out the full list of questions with answers at http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/career-articles-15_toughest_interview_questions_and_…
Thanks to @10_Magazine @holterbarbour @a_ahmad and @hanbae for this resource and their discussion of it on Twitter.
I’ve heard about this problem for a long time and it’s good to have some examples of the differences.
It’s common to hear Seoulites talk/complain about dialect distinctions that, not just with North Koreans but in those from other Provences as well. I’ve long held that Koreans in general, but Seoulites in particular, have very difficult time with language variance.
There are many reasons why this might exist, if it does. One of my theories is that Koreans have not had to deal with foreigners learning and using their language in the same way that Americans, for example, have. This may be true for Americans in more isolated areas, but in large urban areas you are likely to hear/interact with non-native English speakers every day. This has resulted in better coping mechanisms for language variation.
This is purely anecdotal, but a good deal of experience in both places leads me to believe this might be true. This is not to say that all Americans are better with language variation than Koreans, but I do suggest that this is likely a cognitive skill that is developed more in areas that see more variation.
Communicative Language Teaching
Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has enormous intuitive appeal. Despite this, I have come to believe that at the heart of CLT – especially in fundamentalist versions of it – we find a naive, even impoverished view of language. To demonstrate what I mean, let me examine six propositions upon which I think CLT is based. I am going to argue that if these propositions are true at all, they are only superficially and trivially true – and true only in essentially uninteresting ways. In other words, they are just as true as statements like “When people speak, they use words”. Such a statement tells us nothing about what kinds of relationships there may be between words, how people learn to assemble them into larger units, or what else they do to construct or interpret meaning. I will try to show this through six counter-propositions. Then – finally -I will briefly suggest an alternative – and also suggest reasons why pluralist methodologies are more likely to be successful than any single orthodoxy.
via btinternet.comI really do like a good attack on CLT. All those smug teachers I had in the 90s pushing this method with little critical discussion really put me off of prescribed methods altogether. For this, I should probably thank them.
This piece has some great points. I’m not entirely thrilled with the way that fundamentalist CLT is positioned as the strawman in this arguments though. This view of CLT is so rarely pushed that I find the arguments quite weak in that regard. However, discussion of the basic tenets are still valid.
We are in a post-method era. Reasonable (yes, that is loaded speech for people like me 🙂 teachers and teacher-trainers don’t teach methods, but rather a whole tool chest of methodologies that can be used situated a particular context.
Mispredicted Words, Mispredicted Futures
The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. Words never meant very much to computers—which made them ten times more error-prone than humans. Humans expected that computer understanding of language would lead to artificially intelligent machines, inevitably and quickly. But the mispredicted words of speech recognition have rewritten that narrative. We just haven’t recognized it yet.
After a long gestation period in academia, speech recognition bore twins in 1982: the suggestively-named Kurzweil Applied Intelligence and sibling rival Dragon Systems. Kurzweil’s software, by age three, could understand all of a thousand words—but only when spoken one painstakingly-articulated word at a time. Two years later, in 1987, the computer’s lexicon reached 20,000 words, entering the realm of human vocabularies which range from 10,000 to 150,000 words. But recognition accuracy was horrific: 90% wrong in 1993. Another two years, however, and the error rate pushed below 50%. More importantly, Dragon Systems unveiled its Naturally Speaking software in 1997 which recognized normal human speech. Years of talking to the computer like a speech therapist seemingly paid off.
However, the core language machinery that crushed sounds into words actually dated to the 1950s and ‘60s and had not changed. Progress mainly came from freakishly faster computers and a burgeoning profusion of digital text.
Great blog post (long) on speech recognition and the lack of progress experienced in recent years. He makes a great argument. However, you must check out the comments as there are many excellent responses that counter his arguments and some responses from him to those responses.
Deficiency in Foreign Language Competency: What Is Wrong with the U.S. Educational System?
November 9, 2010, 2:45 pm
It doesn’t take much to realize that the U.S. trails far behind other countries on the second language issue. Moreover, we constantly receive clear signals of the need to more seriously discuss the appropriateness and feasibility of implementing a second-language education policy. At the same time, we hear voices telling us that such an idea is just another unnecessary notion. The rationale used by many who justify this widespread second-language deficiency is that English is today’s lingua franca.
I really liked this post. It captures the immediate sense that learning languages is important in the global marketplace, but a lack of actions being taken my institutions and individuals to pursue this goal.
It seems a lot like the obesity crisis in the US (and elsewhere). We know what should be done to solve the problem, but our institutions and, more so, individuals will not do what it takes to live a healthier lifestyle.
I wish I knew what to do. Learning language in America is always compared to the rest of the world, but there are huge differences. The countries we are usually compared to largely have the ability to focus language learning on one or two obviously necessary languages. Just imagine if we, in the US, were able to focus all of our energy on teaching/learning Spanish. The outcomes would likely be much different.
The reality is that this is no focus in our education system across the country in languages for much of the same reason nothing is standardized in American education, local control. I’m not taking a position on good or bad here, just stating the obvious. There’s no agreement on whether or which languages should be learned. Also, there is no immediately clear reason why learning a language will be beneficial. My parent’s generation learned French for the most part. Asking them how they used French they likely answer either that they don’t remember any of it or that it was useful at a French restaurant once 🙂
The problem is, language isn’t something that you can learn in a short time frame when you need it. You can take 6 months of Korean before being transferred to Seoul and think that you’ll be able to function in society. How old are you and where are you from only take you so far. Try dealing with the local government office or diagnosing office problems with your 6 months of Korean study. Language learning takes time and lots of it. Learning a language early can result both in better performance in that language as well as improved ability to learn others.
I like these list not because they make for better objectives. Good objectives will shine through poor language in general. However, these are great words to better explain what you mean. This is particularly important for non-native speakers as they struggle to fully express their thoughts in English.
I further like the categorization, because this is a problem I run into all the time. Getting students to think about what success in an objective should mean. In other words, what should they be able to do, feel, know, …. after this instruction. It’s tough to get people to pin this down.