In the words of YouTube user kriss3d:
Dear Japan.
WTF.
Sincerely: the rest of the world.
READ MOREFebruary, 2011
Cross-Continental Language Classes
Language teaching is taking a new (for me) and exciting step. Last year, the Australian National University offered students the opportunity to learn Mongolian from classes held at Indiana University (in exchange for our Indonesian lessons), a program set to continue, thanks to a recent agreement signed with the Mongolian Prime Minister. Now ABCNews tells [...]
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Culturomics and Google Books
James McElvenny writes: As many of Fully (sic)’s readers will be aware, there’s been quite a bit of buzz lately about a project led by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel at Harvard University that bills itself as the beginning of ‘culturomics’, a new paradigm for studying cultural trends using large amounts of textual data. [...]
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Who did you verse?
I can’t yet come to grips with a new verb that has crept its way into young people’s English: verse (verb) – to compete against someone, e.g. in a tennis match…
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Hearts and darts
Piers Kelly writes: On the 15 February, 1839, a full 172 years ago tomorrow, The Sydney Monitor and Commercial Advertiser published the following: That the posties are described as ‘messengers of love’ with ‘flushed countenances and sweating brows’ suggests that their present reputation for hanky-panky has an impressive pedigree. But what of the ‘hearts and [...]
READ MOREOzCLO – the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad
In my years studying linguistics, I have found that few people arrive at a university thinking “I want to study linguistics.” More often, people say “What’s linguistics?”, and upon taking a course, discover that it’s the subject they’ve been looking for for years. OzCLO is helping to change that. The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad [...]
READ MOREWord nerds are the next national heroes
The academic field of linguistics is hardly something that leaps to front of Aussie minds when thinking of sources of national pride. But based on the scorecards handed out to Australian universities this week…
READ MORELanguage teaching in the National Curriculum
The SMH and the Courier Mail are both discussing the teaching of language in the National Curriculum.
There are three issues that seem to be important in these articles:
- When should children start learning foreign languages?
- How long should they be spending on them?
- Which languages should they be learning?
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