Using more than one language when teaching and learning science in schools can greatly enhance concept development. This in fact goes to the heart of science.
Perfect spelling, vocabulary, usage, grammar, punctuation and style do not necessarily correlate perfectly with intelligence and competence, but most people infer that they do. Thus perception is reality.
Within Australia, there has historically been a clear social distinction between Cultivated (British-oriented) and Broad or General, distinctly Australian ways of speaking.
Research tells us that multilingual literacy matters. But teaching children in Africa to read in their mother tongues as a springboard to literacy in other languages can be a fraught process.
Everyone knows that in the sentence “Jane is washing her”, the pronoun “her” cannot refer back to Jane. Over the last four decades, researchers have established that adults reject the interpretation of…
Being able to communicate effectively in a foreign language is a challenge faced by many of us. If you’re a newcomer to a country, conveying a message in a language that is not your mother tongue is often…
The education of children who speak more than one language is being used as part of a wider debate about immigration just months before the UK’s 2015 general election. But there is surprisingly little…
From time to time, Australians complain about the apparent encroachment of Americanisms in our language, and the Brits seem none too happy about it either. George Bernard Shaw famously said: England and…
With a joint population of 1.6 billion, the South Asian countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are home to nearly one quarter of the world’s population. It is the most…
An hour of homework or an hour of World of Warcraft? It’s not hard to guess what many ten-year-old boys would rather be doing when they get home from school. But now research shows that in non-English…
A new report from the think-tank Demos is calling for a new national strategy for the way we teach English to migrants in the UK. Its researchers point to 850,000 people in the most recent census who said…
Listicle: an article made up of lists. This may be regarded as [Bare](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/bare#bare21) lazy as it obviates the need for coherent paragraphs, or as Douchebaggery…
It’s not often that grammar makes the news, but there’s currently a good natured spat going on between Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys. Bragg hosts a long running BBC Radio discussion show called In Our…
Sticklers beware. The British Library is hosting it’s English Grammar Day, a day to finely split hairs over split infinitives, apostrophe’s (sic, sic, sic), and Oxford commas (sick!). Yes, in the case…
You have to look long and hard to find a joke with “grammar” in the punchline. But recently, a very funny grammar joke turned up on Twitter, thanks to the American Nazi Party, which feels bound to maintain…
In a recent enquiry into alleged sexual abuses by priests, Cardinal George Pell said: Mistakes were made by me and by others in the church that resulted in driving Mr Ellis and the archdiocese apart rather…
Thankfully, nobody speaks academic English as a first language. The English of the university is a very particular form that has specific features and conventions. Sometimes, this is just referred to as…