Language, poetry, writing, & higher education
Historical linguists don’t often have reason to rejoice, but they might be excited about this. New research indicates farming exerted an influence on the speech sounds we make–specifically the /f/ and /v/ labiodental fricatives.
The argument for the interdisciplinary approach scores another win.
Here’s the link to the paper published by the University of Zurich.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a poet who doesn’t get nearly as much attention as she deserves, yet she ranks among my favorites. Here’s something to celebrate the spring equinox.
I enjoyed my week in Atlanta while attending the TESOL 2019 conference, and I learned that Waffle House must serve something there it doesn’t serve anywhere else.
The headquarters of the Coca-Cola corporation is in this city. I’m not sure if that’s a highlight or a detriment to be honest, but TripAdvisor ranks it as the #2 thing to do while visiting Atlanta. The aquarium is ranked first, I imagine. Honestly, I don’t remember.
Anyway, I opted to skip the Coca-Cola museum and the aquarium, which struck me as potential cold and flu risks with all those school children running around.
Instead, I opted to go for a stroll through the downtown area and take in the architecture while burning off a few hundred calories.
This is the Bank of America Plaza in downtown Atlanta. The architecture is interesting, especially the vertex. The unfinished scaffolding at the top and the rust color impressed a gothic/industrial aesthetic on me. The apex glows like a torch at night.
The stone perimeter around this Methodist church reads “Since 1841.” It’s one of several beautiful churches on this street.
Do I have a Shakespeare theater in L.A.?
While I know it’s possible to find a Reuben sandwich in L.A., it’s not easy, so being on the east coast, I determined before the trip I’d make a point to avail myself of the numerous delis available on this side of the country. This particular deli is a blend of a N.Y. deli and Korean fast food. The Reuben was excellent, nonetheless, and I liked that they served it with a side of pasta/vegetable salad, rather than some kind of fried potato.
Anyway, to wrap up, the poster presentation on using Microsoft Class Notebooks to administer dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF), which I gave jointly with my friend and colleague Michael Garnett, went well. In fact, it went so well, we forgot to take pictures.
Oh, did I mention people in Atlanta really love Waffle House?
If you’re an applied linguist and you enjoy science fiction, you might want to check out this month’s issue of Analog: Science Fiction and Fact.
Hi, everybody!
I’ve got a new story out! Check out “Applied Linguistics” in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of Analog! It’s available online or in print form, and I’m pretty damned proud of it – it’s about language and learning and how cultural context can change, inform, or even create behavior and self-knowledge. And shape-shifting aliens on alien prison planets, so that’s cool, too!
There are a lot of other very cool stories by very talented authors in there, too. I especially liked “Ring Wave” by Tom Jolly and Adam-Troy Castro’s latest Draiken tale was a lot of fun. Check it out – you won’t regret it!
but this podcast is especially fun because Juan Fernández is doing it in Spanish! Listen to a recent episode of his Español con Juan Spanish-language listening podcast, in which he enumerates the struggles of a college Spanish teacher in London:
I tell my students if they want to write research papers, they must consume the academic literature, and one way to go about it is by subscribing to the RSS feeds of the prominent journals.
The RSS feeds will not deliver entire articles (one will need to access the journal through an academic institution to get those), but they will show the titles and the abstracts in the most recent issues; thereby, providing a snapshot of the hot topics and trends others in a scholastic guild are discussing.
This will not only hone the ability to focus a research question, as one acclimates to the lines of inquiry others in a discipline find interesting, but also to identify the critical gaps in the literature that will compel other members of one’s chosen profession to take interest in his or her work by connecting said work to larger currents in the field as a whole.
Inoreader is the aggregator I prefer, although Feedly is probably the most popular.
Paste the associated links below into the RSS aggregator you prefer, and the list of feeds will populate.
TESOL: https://www.inoreader.com/reader/api/0/bundle/opml/0014cd63e142
Applied Linguistics: https://www.inoreader.com/reader/api/0/bundle/opml/0014cd63e192
If you’re not sure what RSS is, it’s a system by which you can receive every post from a given source in a single application. One of the nice features of RSS is that you receive everything from the sources you select as soon as it’s published, rather than only seeing the sources an algorithm predicts you’re most likely to find interesting.
You can learn more about RSS here:
The public speaking textbooks recommend presenters limit the number of slides to what’s necessary, and with the advent of smartphone scanner technology that’s more pertinent than ever.
I just attended the TESOL 2019 International Conference and English Expo. Almost everyone was snapping photos and scanning the slides as they went by, myself included. What’s more, an attendee using a tablet to take notes, like I do, is lifting a heavy device to snap photos of the information you’re sharing.
I really appreciate it when a presenter puts up a slide with some information and talks (not reads) about it for a few minutes. This gives me an opportunity to capture the visual data and then take some notes about what the presenter projects on the overhead as she unpacks the information.
Also, from my experience, light colors show up better on digital-phone images than bright or loud colors. Pinks and purples fare badly on my devices. Overall, white with black type scans best.
Even in academia, less communicates more.
