"In fact, there is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth."
Every article, in every newspaper, that discusses creationism should include such a clear statement. Too often you get so-called balanced reporting where creationism and belief in evolution are both put forward as viable alternatives, as in this Canadian Press story in the Globe and Mail.
To give you some context anathema, which is about the 23,800th most common word in the British National Corpus, occurs 1.42 times per million words. In other words, unless a learner of English has a huge vocabulary, there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of more useful things teachers can be teaching them than gambling idioms (or almost any other idiom, for that matter).
The following is a sample of the responses. Over the next few days I'll try to untangle some of them.
"So I think we can safely say that there are times that word frequency lists can be misleading."
" I have noted, at first with some dismay, the rabid attacks on any form of linguistic sophistication. Apparently, our foreign students have far better things to do than learn the subtleties of the language they are studying."
"Comments have been made on teaching idioms. Idioms are of utmost necessity in using and understanding English. "
"I have never said the word anathema, partly cos I'm not sure how to say it. But the gambling idiomatic terms turn up frequently - maybe once a month for each, in colloquial speech in NZ, so they should/could be taught."
"None of the correspondents have suggested that they have any difficulty recognising or understanding “hit the jackpot”, yet the low level of occurrence of the expression in corpora suggests that it should be so unfamiliar as to cause difficulty even to native speakers (I could imagine that there are many native speakers of English who would have problems with “anathema”). If the expression is so uncommon, how do we all know it?
"One possible explanation is that the corpora that we have available seriously misrepresent the language we encounter in our daily lives."
Details:
According to a report by the Auditor General of Ontario, schools get $225 million (all figures in Canadian dollars) in funding for ESL students. That works out to about $980 per student. In contrast, Korea with a population of about 72 million people spent $17.7 billion on English-language tutors last year. That works out to $245 for every Korean man woman and child. For tutors.
We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
And, these are the facts:
My earliest memory (true or created, I'm not sure) is of hanging on a fence in my Grandpa's backyard in Pipestone, Manitoba. A barb was impaled in my left palm, but the memory is simply a placid image, nothing more.
When I was living in Chiang Mai, thinking a bicycle would be be a great way to get around, I bought a mountain bike. It was, indeed, a wonderful means of transportation and afforded me a good deal of exercise as well. One day, I decided to ride the bike to Wat Phrathat Doi Suthep the top of Suthep mountain. I made my preparations and set out the next morning, early before the sun was too high. I rode out past Chiang Mai University and started up the mountain. Soon, however, I had run out of water and food and the temperature was well up into the 30s. The climb was much harder than I had anticipated and I was just about done in. I hadn't passed anywhere to get food for a long distance and had no idea if I could make it back. Just then, I came around a bend in the road and over to my left saw an open-air restaurant. Salvation! I coasted down to the edge and then, dripping with sweat, red in the face, rubber legged, dressed in cycling shorts and feeling very foolish, I walked over to the buffet. I looked around but could see no wait staff. Eventually a woman came and asked me what I wanted. I pointed it out and reached for my money. "Not to pay," she said. "Is wedding."
In grade 3, I won the school speech contest with a speech about goldfish. The first line was "Blub, blub, blub, swish, swish, swish. Ladies and gentlemen, my speech is on fish, goldfish that is."
When I was teaching jr. high school English in Japan, I was dealing with a very rowdy bunch of first year girls. One girl, in particular, who was very weak academically was fooling around not paying attention. After using various tactics, including explicit warnings, most of the class had settled down. Then I saw the girl writing a note on some cutesy Hello Kitty stationary. I blew up. I grabbed the note from her and berated her harshly. I had no more problems for the rest of the class, but at the end, when I looked at what she had written, I saw it was not a note, but notes related to the lesson. I stopped everyone from leaving and apologised to her. Since then I've done my best never to make assumptions about my students intentions.
One fall, I made about ₤20 per hour busking on the Queensway, just north of Hyde Park in London.
My first bicycle was a light-blue CCM with 16-inch wheels and a movable crossbar.
After racing to Ambon on the Summer Wind II out of Australia, we sailed back south towards Bali. The race had been marked by a lack wind and many of the boats had turned on their engines. After five days at sea, the captain, a 50-something Aussie who wanted to sail around the world, had promised us a leisurely trip with lots of stops. One, however, he discovered that it was hard to get steak and potatoes and that the locals didn't understand him E V E N W H E N H E S P O K E S L O W L Y A N D L O U D L Y, he rescinded that offer and headed straight for Bali. Things came to a head at Komodo where I was put off.
My second toe is longer than my big toe.
Now, as for the 8 people I tag, I'm ignoring rule 5. I'll list the blogs and if these fine folks find this and respond, wonderful. And if they don't, that's just swell too.
"One of the biggest surprises from the survey, community leaders said, is the time employers think it takes to learn English. Almost half of employers said it should take six to 12 months to learn English, the survey said."
The US Department of State classifies various languages by difficulty; it all depends on your first language. But let's look at category III, which for English speakers would include Russian and Persian. According to the National Foreign Language Center, the DoS estimates that
"44 weeks of intensive language training in U.S. government language schools (five days per week, six hours per day) are required to achieve minimum working proficiency... Similar results are achieved after five years of typical college language courses, especially if students spend at least one semester abroad learning the language, in addition to their language courses in the US..."What is 'minimal working proficiency?' Someone able to function on their own, able to talk about familiar topics and daily life."
And how many of these immigrants have the wherewithal to attend high-quality full-time English-language courses?
By the way, the survey also found that more than 80% of immigrants and refugees say they have formally tried to learn English.
"The right to bargain collectively with an employer enhances the human dignity, liberty and autonomy of workers by giving them the opportunity to influence the establishment of workplace rules and thereby gain some control over a major aspect of their lives, namely their work."
However, the Ontario government will not reconvene until after the October election, so there will be no legislative changes until then. As far as I can tell, none of the parties, not even the labour-friendly NDP, has made any mention of this ruling in their platform. Finally, the Supremes have given governments a year to address the issue, so we shouldn't expect anything to change soon.
What really kept needling me though was his habit of stressing the final noun where we would normally stress the modifier. For example, we would usually say soccer ball, but Li would call it a soccer ball. Here are some examples from his broadcast:
This seems to jive with general findings that it tends to be the suprasegmental aspects of accent that bother people more than individual vowels and consonants.
"If Little Princess is an average child, she'll know 6,000 root-word meanings by the end of Grade 2. That's okay, but nothing special: At that point, the top 25 per cent of children already know twice as many words as the lowest 25 per cent, and the gap grows exponentially."
I don't think that Brown means exponentially in the literal sense. Such a literal meaning would be described by the formula:
where Gy is the gap in year y, y is the number of years that has elapsed, and Gb is the gap in the base year. This kind of exponential growth would soon have adults knowing hundreds of thousands of words, far beyond what any reasonable estimate claims.
Part II:
"But by (graduation) the foundation of her so-called mind has hardened. Limited by early lexical laxity, the average North American adult knows only 30,000 to 60,000 words, out of a potential "working vocabulary" of 700,000. If only Little Princess had learned more words earlier! If only you were a better parent!"
Brown is right about something: People learn fewer and fewer words as they grow older. But how much has it to do with calcification of the synapses and how much with the frequency of words? This brings us to our second equation of the day.
This second equation describes a distribution that is knows as Zipf's Law after George Zipf (not to be confused with the ill-fated George Zipp). In other words, the second most common word is about 1/2 as frequent as the first (which happens to be the), the third most common is only about 1/3 as frequent as the, and the fourth most common is only about 1/5 as frequent.
Now this isn't exponential change either, but it sure means that the frequency of words drops off pretty darn fast. Consider then a child's chances of meeting and learning their 3000th word compared to an adult's chance of meeting and learning their 60,000th word. At less than 1/60,000 the frequency of the, you could easily be well into middle age before you even encounter the word for the first time. If you're lucky enough to encounter it again before you retire, you're unlikely to recall that first meeting when you do. In other words, it's mainly the inherent distribution of words that makes it so hard to learn new words as you get older.
"This website allows you to quickly and easily search more than 100 million words of text of American English from 1923 to the present, as found in TIME magazine. You can see how words and phrases have increased and decreased in usage and see how words have changed meaning over time."The interface will be familiar to anyone who has used his excellent
"the linguists, who have the upper hand at the moment, (and) are very much of a type. They tend to be acolytes of American scholar William Labov, who developed the concept of code-switching. Standard vocabulary doesn't need to be taught, the Labovites claim, because there's no such thing as a standard vocabulary... Teaching a standard vocabulary today isn't just ineffective: According to the linguists, it's undemocratic and limiting."
Some of the most militant linguists are Canadian. Clive Beck, a professor of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, relishes the collapse of the standard Western vocabulary. "I think it's partly a democratization, of getting teachers to have a closer relationship with their students, and being able to talk on the same level. I love correctness in speech and in writing. But I think to some extent I have to go with the change."
Here I fight my innate desire to smother hyperbole with sarcasm and simply note that the phrase, "I think to some extent I have to" doesn't exactly reek of militancy or relish. Indeed, there is little truth to be found in this quoted section (though the lack doesn't stop there).
All in all, Brown misses the point that it's simply impractical to teach someone enough words to have a large vocabulary (problems with counting words aside, his numbers are wonky; high school graduates know 6,000 + 35,000 = 41,000 words, but the average adult knows only 30,000?) A large vocabulary is merely a symptom of an educated person. Yes, some direct vocabulary teaching is probably useful with young children and ESL students, and having a good basic vocabulary will bootstrap other learning, but simply stuffing a bunch of words into your head is a trivial pursuit. The benefits that come with a broad vocabulary are those that stem from having a variety of interest, reading widely, and discussing concepts in some depth with other interested parties.
Which leads us to one more of Brown's forced choices: deploy grandiloquent vocabulary indiscriminately or use only short simple words. This is like saying that your wardrobe should be limited to white t-shirts & jeans or formal-wear. It should be obvious that you match your vocabulary to the topic and audience at hand. Occasionally using a rare but fitting word in a context that will make it clear is fine. Weighing down your speech with word after word that your audience is unlikely to be familiar with is like wearing a tux to your child's soccer practice. What purpose could the speaker have other than obfuscation or pretentiousness? I suppose there is one other likely explanation: an abiding lack of empathy. Either way, you're going to arouse suspicion. And that's why Black's lawyer kept him from testifying.
