Talking vs texting

One conflict that has been produced by the surge in mobile phone use is a rift between people who like to talk and people who prefer to text. Sending text messages has become a medium of choice for mobile phone users.

Young people are increasingly prone to texting and shy away from making calls, which are more direct – but also less permanent forms of communication. Ironically, the speed at which instant messaging or texting takes place means that mistakes and shorthands are common: but we often let each other get away with them because we know what they mean.

Many teachers in primary and secondary schools have expressed concern at the number of children whose literacy levels are dropping; and who are not even able to write by hand, so accustomed are they to computers, tablets and mobiles.

Some texting terms have even made it into common parlance: ‘lol’ (laugh out loud), ‘omg’ (oh my god), pls (please). The craze for shortening words, absorbed from texting, is also changing how we speak – ‘amaze’ for ‘amazing’, ‘totes’ for totally, ‘blates’ for blatantly: these are all largely teenage usages that are becoming mainstream.

But does this mean it’s turning us all into inarticulate blobs?

Mini-debate:

This house proposes that text messaging is ruining the English language

FOR

You only need to look at recent education statistics to see that text messaging is completely devastating the English language. Recent findings have suggested that schoolchildren in the 1960s and 1970s were far more literate than children of today. In 2013, the average schoolchild struggles more with spelling, grammar and essay-writing: essential skills which before now were considered key to a good grasp of the English language. Text messaging is alienating English speakers from their native tongue and confusing non-natives who wish to learn the language. It promotes mis-spelling. English is a beautiful tongue with a rich literary history which does not deserve to be overshadowed by phrases like ‘c u l8r’ and ‘megalolz’.

AGAINST

As any linguist knows, language is not a static thing. Change and development is the one constant in life, and the changing sounds and phrases of a language are merely reflections of the changes in a particular society. You cannot expect the English language to remain the same while the world around us – and particularly the way we communicate – is subject to so much variation. Text messaging can be a fun and playful way to communicate – the important thing to remember for education is teaching children how to employ different ways of communication. Writing an essay and writing a text are different things; children can learn both. What is more, texting is being used to actually help literacy in developing countries: a UN SMS-based literacy program in Pakistan aims to help women in Islamabad to read. Now what’s so bad about that?

What do you think? Does text messaging make it harder to learn and speak a language? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Language

English textbooks should have correct, natural, recent, and standard English. Since students' vocabulary is limited, the vocabulary in textbooks should be controlled or the textbooks should provide information to help students understand vocabulary that they may not be familiar with. For lower-level students, grammar should also be controlled. Many textbooks use narratives and essays. It would be useful to have a variety of literary forms (for example, newspaper articles, poetry, or letters), so that students can learn to deal with different forms.

Information on Culture

The cultural information included in English textbooks should be correct and recent. It should not be biased and should reflect background cultures of English. It should include visual aids etc., to help students understand cultural information.

From Learners' Viewpoints

Content English textbooks should be useful, meaningful and interesting for students. While no single subject will be of interest to all students, materials should be chosen based, in part, on what students, in general, are likely to find interesting and motivating.

Difficulty. As a general rule, materials should be slightly higher in their level of difficulty than the students' current level of English proficiency. (Exceptions are usually made for extensive reading and extensive listening materials, which should be easy enough for students to process without much difficulty.) Materials at a slightly higher level of difficulty than the students' current level of English proficiency allow them to learn new grammatical structures and vocabulary.

Instructional issues. English textbooks should have clear instructional procedure and methods, that is, the teacher and students should be able to understand what is expected in each lesson and for each activity.

Textbooks should have support for learning. This can take the form of vocabulary lists, exercises which cover or expand on the content, visual aids, etc. Traditionally, language teaching materials in Japan are made up mostly of text, with few, if any, visual aids. However, with the development of technology, photos, visual materials and audio materials have become very important components of language teaching materials, and they are becoming easier to obtain. Teachers need to learn how to find them, and how to best exploit these characteristics.

Materials are getting more complicated, and instructional philosophy, approach, methods, and techniques are getting more important. Teachers need to be able to evaluate materials involving photos, videos, and computers now. 

10 steps to Lesson Planning

This is a general overview that highlights the key points of creating a lesson plan. Below is a list of the steps involved in developing a lesson plan as well as a description of what each component should be.

1. The first thing to consider, obviously, is what you want to teach. This should be developed based upon your state (or school) standards. You also need to be aware of what grade level you are developing the lesson plan for (and keep that in mind of course), and also record a time estimate for your lesson plan to help in time budgeting. Once you have your topic, you can begin determining how you want to teach the topic. If you didn't use the state standards to help in developing your topic, refer to them now to see what specific standards your lesson plan can fulfill. Having your lesson plan correctly aligned with state standards helps to prove its worthiness and necessity. It also helps in assuring that your students are being taught what your state requires. If you are able to correlate your lesson plan with standards, record links to those standards in your lesson plan. If writing this lesson plan for a website (The Lesson Plans Page) be sure to include a title that properly reflects your topic.

2. To make sure your lesson plan will teach exactly what you want it to; you need to develop clear and specific objectives. Please note that objectives should not be activities that will be used in the lesson plan. They should instead be the learning outcomes of those activities.

Objectives should also be directly measurable (we'll get to this in assessment / evaluation). In other words, make sure you will be able to tell whether these objectives were met or not. You can certainly have more than one objective for a lesson plan.
To make objectives more meaningful, you may want to include both broad and narrow objectives. The broad objectives would be more like goals and include the overall goal of the lesson plan, i.e. to gain familiarity with adding two numbers together.

3. You would probably find out exactly what materials you are going to use later, but they should be shown early in your lesson plan. This way if someone else were going to use your lesson plan, they would know in advance what materials are required. Be specific here to make sure the teacher will have everything they need.

4. You may also want to write an Anticipatory Set, which would be a way to lead into the lesson plan and develop the students' interest in learning what is about to be taught.

5. Now you need to write the step-by-step procedures that will be performed to reach the objectives. These don't have to involve every little thing the teacher will say and do, but they should list the relevant actions the teacher needs to perform.

6. After the procedures have been completed, you may want to provide time for independent practice.

7. Just before moving on to the assessment phase you should have some sort of closure for the lesson plan.

8. Now you want to write your assessment / evaluation. Many lesson plans don't necessarily need an assessment, but most should have some sort of evaluation of whether or not the objectives were reached. The key in developing your assessment is to make sure that the assessment specifically measures whether the objectives were reached or not. Thus, there should be a direct correlation between the objectives and the assessments.

9. Adaptations should also be made for students with learning disabilities and extensions for others

10. It's also a good idea to include a "Connections" section, which shows how the lesson plan could be integrated with other subjects. Putting a lot of work into this can develop complete thematic units that would integrate related topics into many different subjects. This repetition of topics in different subjects can be extremely helpful in ensuring retention of the material.

Jacobean literature

After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioural differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.
Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.
Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and those new social classes were on the rise.
Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. James I headed this project himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.

Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 1600s, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.

CONSTRUCTIVISM: A SHORT SUMMARY

“Constructivism is a theory of learning, and it is also a theory of knowing.  It is an epistemological concept that draws from a variety of fields, including philosophy, psychology, and science” (Walker & Lambert, 1995 p. 1).  Constructivism "has become de rigueur in educational circles and ... stems from a long and respected tradition in cognitive psychology, especially the writings of Dewey, Vygotsky, and Piaget" (Danielson, 1996, p. 23).  Ernst von Glasersfeld's basic principles of radical constructivism are the following:

1.  Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication, but it is actively built up by the cognising subject.

2.  The function of cognition is adaptive and serves the subject's organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of an objective ontological reality.  (von Glasersfeld, 1988, p. 83)

His principles are built on the ideas of Jean Piaget, who applied the biological concept of adaptation to epistemology (von Glasersfeld, 1996).  Von Glasersfeld (1993, p. 24) refers to his ideas as "postepistemological" because his radical constructivism posits a different relationship between knowledge and the external world than does traditional epistemology.

Theories about conceptual change have been built on constructivist principles.  Conceptual change can be subdivided into differentiation in which new concepts emerge from more general concepts, class extension in which existing concepts become cases of another subsuming concept, and re-conceptualization in which nature of and relationship between concepts changes significantly (Dykstra, Boyle and Monarch, 1992).  After dissatisfaction with existing conceptions, requirements for conceptual change are that the new conception be intelligible, plausible, and fruitful (Posner, Strike, Hewson, & Gertzog, 1982).  The status of a conception is increased as more of these three conditions are met (Hewson, 1996).

A constructivist view does not lead to a simple, uncontested set of rules for pedagogical practice.  General agreement is that students need interaction with the physical world and with their peers to stimulate meaning-making.  The teacher elicits students’ initial beliefs about the subject to be studied and about the nature of learning.  The teacher sets up situations that will cause dissatisfaction with existing ideas.  Realizing that students' expectations affect their observations and that multiple approaches to problem solving are acceptable, the teacher monitors students' understandings, requests from them evidence and justification, provides constraints for their thinking, and gives them opportunities to represent their knowledge in a variety of ways.  The teacher's role also includes introducing, when necessary, new ways of thinking about phenomena and working with symbols.  Then the teacher guides and supports students as they make sense of these ideas and tools for themselves in cooperation with their classmates (Driver, 1995; Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer, & Scott, 1994; Duit, 1995; Fosnot, 1996; Lewin, 1995; Rubin, 1995; Tobin & Tippins, 1993; von Glasersfeld, 1995).

Constructivist approaches to teaching and cooperative learning techniques can be thought of as having both personal and interpersonal components.  Each person constructs his or her own mental frameworks and conceptions using preferred learning styles.  However, this is seldom done in isolation.  The cognitive developmental perspective emphasizes that participants should engage in discussion in which cognitive conflict is resolved and inadequate reasoning is modified.  Language passing back and forth between individuals in written and oral forms is viewed as indispensable for the development of understanding (Belenky et al, 1986; Driver, 1995; von Glasersfeld, 1995).  The social interdependence perspective has the assumption that the way social interdependence is structured determines how individuals interact.  This, in turn, determines what is accomplished by the group (Johnson & Johnson, 1994).  Intrinsic motivation is generated by interpersonal factors and joint aspirations.  At the same time that students become more aware of and take more responsibility for their own thinking, they increase their understanding and appreciation of other people’s thinking.

REFERENCES

Belenky, M. F., Clinchy, B. M, Goldberger, N. R., & Tarule, J. M.  (1986).  Women's ways of knowing: The development of self, voice, and mind.  New York, NY: Basic Books.

Danielson, C.  (1996).  Enhancing professional practice:  A framework for teaching.  Alexandria, VA:  Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Driver, R.  (1995).  Constructivist approaches in science teaching.  In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 385-400).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Driver, R., Asoko, H., Leach, J., Mortimer, E., & Scott, P.  (1994).  Constructing scientific knowledge in the classroom.  Educational Researcher, 23(7), 5-12.

Duit, R.  (1995).  The constructivist view: A Fashionable and fruitful paradigm for science education research and practice.  In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 271-285).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dykstra, D. I., Boyle, C. F., & Monarch, I. A.  (1992).  Studying conceptual change in learning physics.  Science Education, 76(6), 615-652.

Fosnot, C. T.  (1996).  Constructivism: A psychological theory of learning.  In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (pp. 8-33).  New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Hewson, P. W.  (1996).  Teaching for conceptual change.  In D. F. Treagust, R. Duit, & B. J. Fraser (Eds.), Improving teaching and learning in science and mathematics (pp. 131-140).  New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T.  (1994).  Learning together and alone: Cooperative, competitive, and individualistic learning (4th ed.).  Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

Lewin, P.  (1995).  The social already inhabits the epistemic: A discussion of Driver; Wood, Cobb, & Yackel; and von Glasersfeld.  In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 423-432).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 271-285.

Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A.  (1982).  Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change.  Science Education, 66(2), 211-227.

Rubin, D.  (1995).  Constructivism, sexual harassment, and presupposition:  A (very) loose response to Duit, Saxe, and Spivey.  In L. P. Steffe & J. Gale (Eds.), Constructivism in education (pp. 355-366).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tobin, K., & Tippins. D.  (1993).  Constructivism as a referent for teaching and learning.  In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science education (pp. 3-21).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

von Glasersfeld, E.  (1996).  Introduction: Aspects of constructivism.  In C. T. Fosnot (Ed.), Constructivism: Theory, perspectives, and practice (pp. 3-7).  New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

von Glasersfeld, E.  (1995).  Radical constructivism: A way of knowing and learning.  London: Falmer Press.

von Glasersfeld, E.  (1993).  Questions and answers about radical constructivism.  In K. Tobin (Ed.), The practice of constructivism in science education (pp. 23-38).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

von Glasersfeld, E.  (1988).  The reluctance to change a way of thinking.  The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 83-90

Walker, D., & Lambert, L.  (1995).  Learning and leading theory: A century in the making.  In L Lambert, D. Walker, D. P. Zimmerman, J. E. Cooper, M. D. Lambert, M. E. Gardner, & P. J. Ford Slack, The constructivist leader (pp. 1-27).  New York, NY: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.