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.