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The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar

The Wrong Way to Teach Grammar
A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons—those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech—don’t help and may even hinder students’ efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work. There is a real cost to ignoring such findings. These students are victims of the mistaken belief that grammar lessons must come before writing, rather than grammar being something that is best learned through writing. Happily, there are solutions. There are also less immediately apparent costs to having generations of learners who associate writing only with correctness. Schools that have shifted from traditional “stand-alone” grammar to teaching grammar through writing offer concrete proof that such approaches work. In 1984, George Hillocks, a renowned professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago, published an analysis of the research on teaching writing. Related:  Language

20 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays Infographic Higher Education Infographics 20 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays Infographic 20 Useful Words and Phrases for Top-Notch Essays Infographic Being inspired and following some basic rules of writing may not be enough to create an outstanding essay. Your great ideas can be ignored and underrated if your vocabulary is poor. Instead of “and” try to use: FurthermoreLikewiseSimilarlyAs well asWhat’s more Instead of “but” try to use: On the other handThen againHaving said thatHoweverYet For general explaining try to use: In other wordsTo that endThat is to sayYo put it another wayIn order to Instead of “for example” try to use: For instanceLet’s sayIn particularTo give an illustrationMarkedly Via: essaypro.com Embed This Education Infographic on your Site or Blog!

8 Reasons The IQ Is Meaningless Humans The average person has an intelligence quotient of 100. An unsourced claim gives O. J. Simpson’s IQ as 89. Marilyn vos Savant has been cited in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest measured IQ of 228, a number that can be sourced back to…Marilyn vos Savant. The first standardized attempt to measure the human’s mental capacity was courtesy of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, who formulated a test to measure verbal ability. Once an average person reaches the age of 15 or so, the IQ test is no longer important, since the mental age has reached maturity. Extremely high scores are routinely inaccurate. 180 on the Standford-Binet is typically the top of the scale, and anything measured over it has few precedents for comparison and should be taken with a grain of salt. All the various tests can do is discover the very low scorers among children, and these scores are quite accurate. Quite a few IQ tests measure “general knowledge.” Children are mean. Close

The study of adjective order and GSSSACPM. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Silense/iStock/Thinkstock It is a lovely warm August day outside, and I am wearing a green loose top. Katy Waldman is a Slate staff writer. If you’re someone whose reflexes scatter the moment you try to lift the veil on your unconscious, this fascinating little-known field (little-known fascinating field?) Maybe I am overqualifying this article about qualifiers (or is that the point?). Linguists have broken the adjectival landmass into several regions. On his blog, the linguist Neal Whitman calls adjectives from the same semantic region—the ones where swapping their placement in a sentence neither sounds strange nor scrambles the meaning—correlative. Whitman distinguishes between correlative pairs of modifiers and the fussier cumulative ones. But what about modifiers that sound good in one order and bad in another, even if they convey the same meaning both ways? All of which can get really confusing.

Which languages rule the internet? Google recognises the most languages, across its Translate and Search services – with 348 languages supported on Google Search. The following infographic from Statista explores how some of the world’s biggest websites deal with the globe’s linguistic diversity. Source: Statista In terms of social media websites, Facebook recognises the most languages – some 120 in 2015.

How Typography Can Save Your Life — Pacific Standard How Typography Can Save Your Life What words look like matters — in some cases, a whole lot. By Lena Groeger After decades of silently shouting at the top of its lungs, the National Weather Service recently announced that it’s going to stop publishing its forecasts and weather warnings in ALL CAPS. Beginning May 11, for the first time ever, we’ll start seeing mixed-case letters. The weather service’s caps-lock habit didn’t happen entirely by choice. For type nerds everywhere, this is a triumphant typographic victory the likes of which we haven’t seen since Massimo Vignelli re-designed the New York City subway sign system. In the case of the weather service’s all-caps type, it’s the font version of the boy who cried wolf. Now that the weather service can use ALL CAPS sparingly — as a tool to highlight real danger — the public is more likely to pay attention. “We realized we could still use ALL CAPS within products to add emphasis, such as ‘TORNADO WARNING. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Study: You Really Can 'Work Smarter, Not Harder' - Nanette Fondas Research shows that reflecting after learning something new makes it stick in your brain. This Year's Love/Flickr Two weeks ago, my oldest son taught my youngest son how to perform a corner kick during half time of my middle son’s soccer game. He demonstrated the correct way to swing the leg, angle the foot, and launch the ball toward the goal. When the referee blew his whistle, resuming the game, we moved to a spot of grass nearby. Learning is more effective if a lesson or experience is deliberately coupled with time spent thinking about what was just presented, a new study shows. In the lab portion of the study, participants completed a math brain teaser under time pressure and wrote about what strategy they used or might use in the future to solve the problem. The study also tested the adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. For younger students, teaching someone else is a good way to practice synthesizing content after a lesson.

Learning English | BBC World Service The link between English and economics Billions of people around the globe are desperately trying to learn English—not simply for self-improvement, but as an economic necessity. It’s easy to take for granted being born in a country where people speak the lingua franca of global business, but for people in emerging economies such as China, Russia, and Brazil, where English is not the official language, good English is a critical tool, which people rightly believe will help them tap into new opportunities at home and abroad. Why should global business leaders care about people learning English in other parts of the world? Research shows a direct correlation between the English skills of a population and the economic performance of the country. The interaction between English proficiency and gross national income per capita is a virtuous cycle, with improving English skills driving up salaries, which in turn give governments and individuals more money to invest in language training. It’s not just income that improves either.

No, No That’s Not How You Say It – John DeVore – Medium Americans talk funny. We don’t think we do, but we do. We’re usually too busy talking at or over or directly through each other to notice. Every so often, though, we stop long enough to listen to one another and then laugh and point. The middle-aged Persian woman I hired to teach me how to drive made fun of me when I mispronounced Cahuenga Boulevard. I had just moved to Los Angeles a few months prior from New York City, where I considered myself a native despite the disagreements of many native New Yorkers. Her teaching method was an unorthodox form of politically incorrect mockery. I was a stranger in her city but my advanced age and inexperience amused her. During one lesson she said, “You people are good drivers.” You people? She shrugged. Because of her I passed my driver’s test, got my first license to operate a motor vehicle, and then proceeded to not drive for years. Here’s the truth about food in L.A.: it’s pretty good. But it’s not as if Los Angeles has no roast meat sandwiches.

Maxwell's Equations. From Einstein Light Maxwell's equations: symmetric form Although the equations are simple, they are notated in a few different ways, for use in different circumstances. The variable quantities are the electric field E (written in bold here to indicate that it is a vector), the magnetic field B, the electric charge density ρ (the amount of charge per unit volume) and the electric current density J (the amount of electric current flowing through unit area). There are also properties of the medium, even if it is vacuum. ε is the dielectric permittivity. It is a property of a medium that determines the strength of the electric field produced by a given electric charge and geometry. Isn't that lovely?

newyorker Not long ago, I walked into a friend’s kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we will find a way to use it for something other than its intended purpose. We commandeer cafeteria trays to go sledding, “The Power Broker” to prop open the door, the Internet to look at kittens. We do this with words as well—time was, spam was just Spam—but, lately, we have gone in for a particularly dramatic appropriation. Here’s Lena Dunham demonstrating this development, during a conversation with the comedian Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF.” MARON: They can look at any painting and go, “Eh.” Dunham is twenty-eight years old, but the “No, totally!” “No, totally.” Such words—also called auto-antonyms, antagonyms, Janus words, and antiologies—can arise for different reasons.

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