London

Here are some beautiful places from London...

Schoolchildren 'should be encouraged to blog and use Facebook to improve literacy'

Schoolchildren should be encouraged to write blogs and use social networking sites like Facebook to improve literacy levels, experts say.

The National Literacy Trust claims such Internet tools could provide educational benefits for children, such as greater confidence and a more positive attitude towards writing.
Children who kept blogs or had profiles on social networking sites were more likely to enjoy writing and believe themselves to be good at it, it found in a survey.
However, educational experts including Professor Tanya Byron, a clinical psychologist, have warned about allowing children to roam the web unsupervised.
A recent European Union-wide study found 40 per cent of teenagers had been exposed to pornography online, 20 per cent had been bullied and 10 per cent had met someone in the real world they had "met" in a chat room or a social media site.
The National Literacy Trust surveyed 3,001 children from England and Scotland for what it said was the first significant study of young people's attitudes to writing in the UK.
It found that 49 per cent of young people believe writing is "boring". However, 57 per cent of those who used text-based web applications such as blogs, said they generally enjoyed writing compared to 40 per cent who did not.
Those who had a blog or profile on a social networking site (SNS) also appeared to be more confident in their writing ability: 61 per cent of bloggers and 56 per cent of social networkers claimed to be good or very good at writing, compared to 47 per cent of those who had neither.
A total of 13 per cent of children surveyed had their own website, 24 per cent kept their own blog and 56 per cent had a profile on a social networking site.
Such web activity was also credited with encouraging children to engage with more traditional forms of writing. Those who were active online were "significantly more likely" to write short stories, letters, song lyrics and diaries than those who had no online presence, the study found.

From: The Daily Telegraph.

Horrible Americanisms?

Horrible Americanisms?
by Michael Rundell on November 30, 2009


One of our readers – Trauma Queen – made a good point about global Englishes when commenting on Sarah McKeown’s recent blog about the expression “I’m lovin’ it”. Her question:

Who decides what is “good” or “correct” English when the way it is spoken differs from country to country?

raises some tricky issues about the perceived status of the different varieties of English in the world. Not so long ago, there was a notion that “real” English (aka “Oxford English”, “BBC English” or “the Queen’s English”) was what British people spoke – and preferably middle- or upper-class Brits at that. Anything else was not quite “correct”. In the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, some words from outside the UK were actually labelled Colonial. Among linguists and lexicographers, this idea is largely discredited, though even now the OED website can refer to “regionalisms”.

But as so often, the views of language experts and of the general public don’t necessarily coincide, and there are clear signs that linguistic imperialism is alive and well in the UK. Interestingly, though, very few people get worked up about the Englishes of India, Australia or West Africa. No: what British speakers love to hate is “Americanisms”. To quote one of the 450 or so examples of this word in our corpus:

What could have been a gripping tale about … the history of the Loch Ness legend was ruined for me by my literary pet hate : Americanisms.

The corpus also shows that, in a surprising number of cases, the word Americanism is modified by a disparaging adjective. The list includes:

absurd, awful, barmy, bloody, corrupt, disgusting, horrible, insidious, meaningless, nasty, unacceptable and vile

And a Google search for “horrible Americanism” yields a pretty good haul, including gems like this (discussed in an earlier blog post by Susan Jellis):

He … pulled me up for saying “Can I get an apple juice?” at Pizza Hut this afternoon. Leaving aside the “can” / “may” question, the whole “get” thing is yet another horrible Americanism which has insidiously crept into our beautiful language.

Err … whose beautiful language is that? The point, surely, is that – as a global language – English can’t really be said to “belong” to any one group of speakers, and denouncing American English (one of the largest and most influential varieties) as if it is some sort of aberration makes no sense at all.

Starry Starry Night...

I've worked with some of my students on these lyrics...





"Vincent" is a song by Don McLean written as a tribute to Vincent van Gogh. It is also known by its opening line, "Starry Starry Night", a reference to van Gogh's painting The Starry Night. It also describes different paintings done by the artist.
McLean wrote the lyrics in 1971 after reading a book about the life of the artist. The following year, the song became a number one hit in the U.K. and the U.S.
The song clearly demonstrates a deep-seated admiration for not only the work of van Gogh, but also for the man himself.


The painting.

The Starry Night is a painting by the Dutch post impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh. It depicts the view outside his sanatorium room window at night, although it was painted from memory during the day.
Since 1941 it has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Penpal Project

These are some of the photos with the comments sent by the students in Turkey.

Youth Park, one of Ankara's historic parks.



Ataturk's Mausoleum. Ataturk, the leader of the Turkish Independence War and the revolutions. The first president of the Republic of Turkey was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Penpal Project

In September, this year, I started, together with my students in 9th, a letter exchange with some children of a school in the city of Malatya, Turkey (ATATÜRK İLKÖĞRETİM OKULU).
Derya, their teacher, and I met through Facebook on a webpage for English as a Second Language teachers.
The aim of the Project is to give students a real purpose for writing in a second language and to make friends with children their same age, knowing about their country and culture.

Somewhere over the rainbow

Nice lyrics to work not only as a Listening activity, but also to work in the Writing class...