By Kamil Wiśniewski Sep 10th, 2007

Modern English language had been subdivided into Early Modern English which was used from the fifteenth century, more or less up to end of the seventeenth century, or according to some scholars even in the eighteenth century, and Modern English was used from that time till now. Only recently was this division renewed as with the end of the twentieth century the time perspective enabled linguists to look at the English language (learn English :-) from a different angle and thus nowadays Modern English is subdivided into Early Modern English and Late Modern English (more or less 1700-1900), while the language used in the twentieth and twenty first century is called Contemporary English, or sometimes Present Day English.

There are numerous factors influencing the development of the English language in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The technological advances enabled faster travels, therefore people started visiting different parts of Britain more often and so the dialects blended. At that time in America sound voices supported the division between British and American English. Dictionaries were published in the USA which provided deliberately distinct norms of spelling to make the American variety more distinguishable. In addition to that many new words came from the British colonies with the new concepts, inventions customs and scientific discoveries.

The grammatical peculiarities of the Late Modern English are divided into two types: changes in syntax which begun in Early Modern English and continued till that time, and totally new aspects introduced in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The former include the use of ‘do’ in questions and negatives which became a standard at that time. Moreover, the rules regarding the use of wh-relatives: who, whom, whose, which became standardized and more stable. Innovations introduced in the Late Modern English include the ‘be + -ing’ construction not only in Present Continuous tense, but also in passives. Also at that time the two schools of approaching grammar emerged. According to some linguists grammarians should only describe the language as it is actually used, while others provided rules that should be obeyed in the ‘correct’ English. The long discussion between the representatives of the two different schools of thought is still serious.

In the period of Late Modern English the standard of pronunciation which is aimed at by all the contemporary learners of English as a foreign language, namely Received Pronunciation (RP), emerged. Since that time Received Pronunciation has been a standard for noblemen and upper class of society in Great Britain. However, unlike nowadays in the Late Modern English RP the phoneme was pronounced in all positions.

When it comes to the sources of Early Modern English loanwords what is interesting is the fact that at that time the Englishmen opposed the influx of French words to their language. Thus the major sources of lexis were Latin and Greek. According to current estimates about two thirds of loanword of Late Middle English have either Latin or Greek etymology.

Brown K. (Editor) 2005. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics – 2nd Edition. Oxford: Elsevier.

Contexts, prompts and methods used in grammar presentation in the language classroom:

Model sentences for oral practice + picture e.g. The butcher's got some meat. He hasn't got any lamb. Contrasting sentence pairs.

Question & Answer e.g. pattern practice drills of both the "meaningless" and "meaningful" variety.

Dialogues e.g. A. I'd like some bacon, please. B. I'm sorry, we haven't got any. Streamline Departures - Yes, dear. Did you get any bread?

Situations e.g. I'm going to pack / take a bus to….. Robert O'Neill's "English in Situations" See also the situations and conversations in Kernel Intermediate. Julia.

Demonstration e.g. prepositions of place - I'm going to put the cassette tape into the cassette player.

Texts e.g. The sun shines more in Spain than in England. Contextualization.

Grammatical explanations - e.g. "some" used when the quantity is definite for plural or uncountable"

Diagrams - e.g. Time Line for Present Perfect v Past Simple

Drawings

Translation

Grammatical explanations in student's mother tongue

Students' suggestions - e.g. activation of previous language knowledge through The Silent Way

Language bath - Suggestopaedia

By Kamil Wiśniewski, Aug. 12th, 2007

The oldest cave drawings representing important information were made 20,000 years ago and clay tokens with marks suggesting some writing attempts are about 10,000 years old, yet they are considered to be only the precursors of writing and not fully developed writing systems. The first systematic writing systems were developed about 5,000 years ago. Cave drawings are treated as a tradition of pictorial art as the history of writing systems starts with pictograms.

A pictogram is a drawing which is used in a consistent way in order to represent an object. Thus, a form such as might be used to represent sun. It is remarkable that thanks to the conventional relationship between the symbol and its referent users of different languages should understand the meaning of pictograms in a similar way, as with the contemporary pictograms in common use:

With time the sign representing sun might develop into a more symbolic and abstract form, like for example, and start to be used with several additional meanings such as ‘heat’ and ‘daytime’. Then, such a type of symbol is no longer a pictogram, but it is a part of a system based on idea-writing called ideogram. The difference between pictograms and ideograms is that the former represent their referent in a conventional way and the latter are more abstract and arbitrary, as well as less picture-like.

When a further development of the writing system occurred one symbol started to represent one word. A writing system based on arbitrary relationships between the written form and the object it represents is known as word-writing or logogram. The oldest logographic writing was used by the Sumerians about 5,000 years ago, yet because of the shapes they used as symbols their writing system is known as cuneiform. The arbitrary forms of logograms have no resemblance to the entities they represent which the example of cuneiform symbol for sun clearly shows: .

The next step in the development of writing was using symbols to represent the sounds of language. In rebus writing the symbol for an entity starts to be used as the symbol for the spoken word, subsequently used in any place the sound of the word occurs. In such a way it is relatively easy to reconstruct how this system worked. Taking the pictogram as an example, supposing it developed into the logogram meaning ‘eye’. In rebus writing it could be used always when the sounds which are pronounced when saying ‘eye’ are used as in ‘I’, or ‘cross-eye’. Therefore, you might refer to yourself as , or to the latter example as .

The last but one step of writing system development towards the most popularly used system nowadays is the syllabic writing. In syllabic writing (also known as syllabary) each symbol represents one syllable. The first fully developed syllabic writing systems were used by Phoenicians in between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. The final stage of the evolution of writing systems so far is the inventing writing by use of an alphabet. An alphabet is a set of symbols in which one symbol represent one sound. Interestingly, the first alphabets of languages such as Arabic and Hebrew consisted only of sounds representing consonant. The history of the majority of alphabets used nowadays can be traced back to the Phoenicians and their writing system.

Finch G. 1998. How to study linguistics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Yule G. 1996. The study of language. Cambridge: CUP.

The question of authenticity as applied to learners at different levels
AUTHENTICITY - REAL COMMUNICATION

EXAM TITLE: Some extremists argue that no language used in a classroom can be "real" because of the very fact that it is used in a classroom. Others would argue that classroom language is as real as any other language. In other words, the language teacher need not make any concessions towards authenticity. What in your view are the criteria that make the use of language in a classroom "real" and what kinds of activity do these criteria give rise to? (Question from David Jones' RSA Course in Stockholm).

It is probable that much of the criticism of "language used in the classroom" has arisen as a result of the limited view of language which underlies many syllabuses.

WHY GOD CREATED TEACHERS

When God created teachers,
He gave us special friends
To help us understand His world
And truly comprehend
The beauty and the wonder
Of everything we see,
And become a better person
With each discovery.

There was a time, not so long ago, when virtually every high school English teacher who heard the word "grammar" could immediately recall Warriner's, diagramming sentences, and endless skill and drill exercises.

These teachers embraced the notion of prescriptive (also called traditional or school) grammar. Grammar was taught as a discrete set of rigid rules to be memorized, practiced, and followed.

During the height of the whole language movement, when teaching grammar in isolation became taboo, these teachers were left frustrated and baffled by the lack of grammar instruction in the classroom.

English teachers of later generations, on the other hand, joined the profession embracing ideas of descriptive (also called transformational) grammar. These teachers believed that grammar instruction should be matched to the purpose of the user. Teachers found descriptive grammar theories to be more flexible, reflecting actual usage and self-expression over "correct" structures.

Some people credit the descriptive approach with a general loosening of rules regarding grammatical structures that were once considered unacceptable, such as split infinitives.

Boy Drowns in Neighbor's Pool

Hunter Smith, 5, drowned in a swimming pool after apparently wandering away from two teenagers, one of whom was his babysitter. Paramedics and hospital staff members spent several hours trying to revive Hunter. Police pulled the unconscious boy from the cold water of the neighbor’s pool about 3:20 p.m. Wednesday.

The babysitter was 16. The other teen was her boyfriend, 17. The boy’s parents had no comment about their son’s unfortunate death.

Police questioned both teens separately as to how the accident occurred. Their stories did not match. The girl said Hunter disappeared while she was using the bathroom. The boy said Hunter disappeared while he was using the bathroom. After further questioning and some searching around the house, the police determined that the boy disappeared while both teens were using the bedroom.

“They had actually put him in the bedroom closet, but were so busy with each other that they never saw or heard the boy leave the closet and the house,” an officer said. Charges might be filed against the teens for involuntary manslaughter and against the neighbor for leaving the gate to the pool unlocked.

DEFINITION OF DISCOURSE

Since its introduction to modern science the term 'discourse' has taken various, sometimes very broad, meanings. In order to specify which of the numerous senses is analyzed in the following dissertation it has to be defined. Originally the word 'discourse' comes from Latin 'discursus' which denoted 'conversation, speech'. Thus understood, however, discourse refers to too wide an area of human life, therefore only discourse from the vantage point of linguistics, and especially applied linguistics, is explained here.

There is no agreement among linguists as to the use of the term discourse in that some use it in reference to texts, while others claim it denotes speech which is for instance illustrated by the following definition: "Discourse: a continuous stretch of (especially spoken) language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit such as a sermon, argument, joke, or narrative" (Crystal 1992:25). On the other hand Dakowska, being aware of differences between kinds of discourses indicates the unity of communicative intentions as a vital element of each of them. Consequently she suggests using terms 'text' and 'discourse' almost interchangeably betokening the former refers to the linguistic product, while the latter implies the entire dynamics of the processes (Dakowska 2001:81). According to Cook (1990:7) novels, as well as short conversations or groans might be equally rightfully named discourses.

Seven criteria which have to be fulfilled to qualify either a written or a spoken text as a discourse have been suggested by Beaugrande (1981). These include:

• Cohesion - grammatical relationship between parts of a sentence essential for its interpretation;
• Coherence - the order of statements relates one another by sense.
• Intentionality - the message has to be conveyed deliberately and consciously;
• Acceptability - indicates that the communicative product needs to be satisfactory in that the audience approves it;
• Informativeness - some new information has to be included in the discourse;
• Situationality - circumstances in which the remark is made are important;
• Intertextuality - reference to the world outside the text or the interpreters' schemata;

Nowadays, however, not all of the above mentioned criteria are perceived as equally important in discourse studies, therefore some of them are valid only in certain methods of the research (Beaugrande 1981, cited in Renkema 2004:49).

• Features of discourse.

Since it is not easy to unambiguously clarify what a discourse is it seems reasonable to describe features which are mutual to all its kinds. To do it thoroughly Saussurean concepts of langue and parole are of use. Ferdinand de Saussure divided the broad meaning of language into langue, which is understood as a system that enables people to speak as they do, and parole - a particular set of produced statements. Following this division discourse relates more to parole, for it always occurs in time and is internally characterized by successively developing expressions in which the meaning of the latter is influenced by the former, while langue is abstract. To list some additional traits: discourse is always produced by somebody whose identity, as well as the identity of the interpreter, is significant for the proper understanding of the message. On the other hand langue is impersonal that is to say more universal, due to society. Furthermore, discourse always happens in either physical, or linguistic context and within a meaningful fixed time, whereas langue does not refer to anything. Consequently, only discourse may convey messages thanks to langue which is its framework .