The debate over what is a language and what is a dialect may seem like a linguistic issue best suited for the halls of academia, but the distinction actually has far-reaching real-world implications that can affect the welfare of millions of people worldwide. Anything as fluid and nebulous as language is difficult to classify, and linguists, researchers, and politicians [...]
The audio-lingual method focuses on speaking with the elegance and fluidity of a native speaker, and aims to accomplish this through repetition and concentrated practice. It gained prominence in the '50s and '60s, and is known as the "Army method" because of its implementation by the US Army during WWII. Its strict focus on precise communication made it ideal [...]
International airports are multilingual and multicultural places by nature, but no matter where you are in the world, you're likely to hear English inside a plane. But this goes past the familiar airline phrases – "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking" and "The seatbelt sign is on," and goes more specifically into the plane's cockpit. All pilots [...]
Cultural differences are impactful because our instinctive "obvious common sense" can in fact be "complete nonsense" in a different culture. These differences are often hidden in plain sight, and rather than debating which is "right," the important thing is simply to recognize that they are there. Consider your initial reaction to the idea of a man eating chicken stew [...]
The direct method of teaching was a rebellion against the somber and book-intensive grammar-translation method of the previous era. The pendulum swung hard away from verb conjugations and towards speaking/listening skills. Rather than having students pore over volumes of ancient Latin texts, this teaching method incorporated lots of visual aids, role-playing activities, and pictures. Another major change was in [...]
Some school lessons give students a sneaking suspicion that they're being forced to learn something they won't need in real life - long division, memorizing the periodic table, writing in cursive, etc. Learning how to write an argumentative essay, however, will pay dividends down the road. Strictly speaking, an argumentative essay is "a piece of writing that uses logical [...]
Most language learning systems address four basic skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The grammar-translation method focuses solely on the first two, largely ignoring listening and speaking. This method has been around since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome, then experienced a bit of a resurgence in the early 1900s. Since then, it has fallen out of [...]
A joke really only has two parts – the set-up (I'm on the new whiskey diet…) and the punchline (I've lost three days already). The punchline is of course the funny bit and comes at the end, though for a longer joke, smaller humorous parts, known as jab lines, can be sprinkled in. If you've ever heard an unfunny [...]
Language is one of our world’s most powerful tools, and throughout history, governments and large organizations have used different forms of language planning as a way to control that power. In a broad sense, language planning is an organized effort by a major entity to change a society’s language. These efforts can be, and usually are, done for the [...]
As students, many of us took part in some type of foreign language instruction at school, and depending on your age and country, this could have ranged from incomprehensible teacher lectures to singing songs, to intense grammar drilling. In the world of education, second language acquisition philosophies and practices change at a rapid clip, and the new breakthrough methodology [...]
