Friday, April 12, 2013

A gap to plug

Yesterday's post on 'The language deficit' picked up on Tina Rosenberg's article in The New York Times about programmes designed to bridge the gap between kids brought up in rich language environments (i.e. those getting a great deal of language used around and towards them) and those in a more impoverished (often economically, as well as well as linguistically) environment.

Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has written a piece on it too, which can be found in The Boston Globe, and in this he looks at similar territory to Rosenberg but also brings in a bit more of a linguistic focus, quoting Deb Roy, whose Speechome Project is something we've looked at in class (and through the links here and here).

Connections between texts on Paper 1: dealing with AO4

Question 3 on Paper 1 has often been a bit of a low-scorer for students and you can maybe see why. It comes an hour in to the exam, and you’...