2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
Traditional dining rooms are disappearing as people turn their backs on formal eating with the whole family sat around the table, a report says. Iconic images of families such as television's "Oxo family" gathered together eating at the end of a busy day are rapidly being consigned to history. Smaller households, cafeteria-style dining in the home and the popularity of the television as the focal point at dinner time have made dining room furniture almost obsolete in many houses across Britain, said the report by Mintel.
(Telegraph, 16 December 2005)
The children's television favourites Dick and Dom are to come under a linguistic microscope as part of a BBC drive to weed out poor grammar in children's programmes. The corporation's governors have cautioned that slang and poor language employed by the corporation's stars could create a generation of children unable to master English.
Lynne Truss commented:
"The way I see it, the BBC when it is speaking directly to the viewer through an announcer or if the script is written before it is read, does have a responsibility to abide by conventional English. People learn from example. Traditionally, the example from the BBC has been a good one…
"The trouble is, language changes all the time. It is increasingly common for reporters to say (neglecting the rules of case agreement): 'There's four ways of looking at this.' This annoys me, but I know there's nothing you can do about it…
"Blaming the BBC for such a decline would be to miss the obvious: that the BBC ius reflecting a shift that is occurring elsewhere in the language."
(The Times, 19 October 2005)
Now that TV dinners and "grazing" have largely replaced traditional meal times, teachers and support staff at St Luke's CE Primary School, Heywood, Lancashire, have decided to sit with pupils to create a "family table" during lunch breaks.
Head Teacher Mr Baddeley, who is proving the most popular choice among pupils, said, "Fewer families are meeting on a regular basis to eat round the table. It is a national issue, and certainly not confined to our school. Children are missing out on those conversations with adults that we feel are very important. It is where they learn their language skills."
(TES, 15 April 2005)
If you do not know your stitherum from your knur-and-spell then help is at hand. A giant new archive of regional accents and dialects is preserving the linguistic diversity of England for future generations. Hundreds of recordings of ordinary people from Cornwall to Northumberland have been put online by the British Library Sound Archive, in a project that combines a pioneering survey of speech patterns half a century ago with interviews that the BBC conducted for the Millennium.
At the core of the archive is the work of Harold Orton of Leeds University who, with a Swiss colleague Eugen Dieth in the 1940s, decided it was vital to save examples of dialects before social change wiped them out. Fieldworkers collected data in 313 localities between 1950 to 1961 for the Survey of English Dialects, which remains the only systematic survey carried out in the country's native dialects. Yet when the BBC recorded people's everyday experiences in their own words for a series to mark the Millennium, it transpired that although regional accents were often weaker, the charm of variations in vocabulary remained remarkably intact.
www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/accents.html
(Independent, 3 March 2005)
An audit of the hundreds of minority languages spoken in Britain is to be carried out to find out how useful they are to businesses and the economy. Currently 10.5% of English primary school children and 8.8% of secondary pupils speak another language at home. The survey is to be carried out by CILT, the National Centre for Languages, alongside the Scottish Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research. Isabella Moore, CILT's director, a fluent Polish and French speaker, said, "There is a hidden language resource at the heart of our multicultural society. Cultivating it could bring huge benefits to the economy." The findings will contribute to a Europe-wide survey funded by the Council of Europe, to be completed by 2007.
(TES, 18 February 2005)
Children whose parents play traditional board games with them do better at school, the head of Ofsted says. Chief Inspector of Schools David Bell said youngsters grasp important skills through the interaction involved in playing games such as ludo, Monopoly and Scrabble. They learn to think for themselves, to wait their turn and to hold a conversation with adults. Mr Bell is concerned that computer games and television are discouraging children from pursuing activities that better stimulate their imagination. Sales of games such as Operation, Monopoly, Scrabble, Cluedo, Buckeroo and Mouse Trap were up 20% in 2004 from the previous year.
(Daily Mail, 31 January 2005)
Theodore Zeldin, author of Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives, has set up a forum to promote his idea of a new kind of conversation. The forum is hosted at Oxford Muse, a charity partly funded by the EU and based on the principles of Socrates, "the first conversationalist, who taught people not only how to talk, but how to listen and respond."
www.oxfordmuse.com
(Independent, 26 January 2005)
Schools are to be given official guidance on how to teach pupils standard spoken English. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said it wanted to ensure children were able to communicate "clearly" in all settings. The move comes amid concern that excessive television and computer use are damaging conversational ability. The QCA's 60-page booklet - introducing the Grammar of Talk - will be available to schools in England from October.
Children aged 12 to 16 will learn the benefits of using correct grammatical constructions, such as "you were" rather than "you was", in everyday speech. They will look at how they use speech differently when talking to friends and when addressing a large group in a formal setting. It is hoped this will improve their social skills and career prospects. A QCA spokesman said: "This is based on recent research in universities. For the first time, teachers will get structured guidance in how to help pupils with speech. "Children will learn what is appropriate in a certain context." The QCA hope that discussing the "grammar of talk" will help listening and speaking skills. The spokesman said "Over the last five years we've focused on literacy, but there is a whole spoken language out there which operates very differently."
(www.newsvote.bbc.co.uk, 9 August 2004)
Let's hear it for the commentators, the blokes who so often sound as if they have two left tongues. The Plain English Campaign tells us: 'Football pundits do a very good job and make relatively few errors for the amount they say.'
John Lister, who speaks for the Plain English Campaign, insists: 'Football commentators are speaking at great speed and never have a chance to rewind what they say, so inevitably they start mixing their metaphors and tripping over their tongues. They have a wide audience and put things in a popular way but make it accessible without being patronising.' For instance when John Motson told us: 'The World Cup … a truly international event' or as Garth Crooks explained: 'Football's football: if that weren't the case it wouldn't be the game that it is.'
(The Times, 15 June 2004)
Using computers during lessons can make pupils more sociable and open about their emotions, according to research commissioned by the Government. Researchers from Lancaster university studied 17 schools in England and found that classes involving information technology had an unexpectedly broad range of positive effects on children's work and attitudes.
While some teachers and parents said they feared that computer-use could turn children into loners, the pupils suggested it made them more sociable. "Use of the internet and email encouraged more positive activities, longer engagement with school work, deeper and wider discussion with a broader group of friends and a sharing of emotions through chatting," the report said.
Although the report focused on the educational use of computers, primary pupils listed their two favourite uses as games, then "looking at pop stars or other things on the net".
The Motivational Effect of ICT on Pupils, www.dfes.gov.uk/research
(TES, 2 April 2004)
Music lessons have an unexpected payoff. Psychologists have found that music lessons, even for as little as a year, improve the verbal memory of children.
They believe that learning music encourages the development of the left temporal lobe of the brain, which is responsible for remembering words. Visual memory, which uses the right temporal lobe, shows no improvement.
A team, led by Agnes Chan, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recruited 90 boys between 5 and 15 from a boys' school. Half took music lessons, the others did not. Both groups were given memory tests on lists of 16 words read out to them. The group trained in music consistently remembered about 20% more words than the untrained group.
A year later, the pupils were retested. Nine had given up music and their verbal memory was about the same. Those who had stuck it out had continued to improve.
(Times, 28 July 2003)
Professor Ron Carter, who is leading the Curriculum Qualifications Authority's pilot project on the grammar of speech, believes that pupils should not be discouraged from using vague terms such as "like" or "whatever", which he says can be quite sophisticated uses of language.
He argues that teenagers and others often deliberately use vague language ("or something", "sort of", "like") because they did not want to alienate people by sounding too authoritative. Professor Carter said: "I call this successfully vague language. Words such as 'like' and 'thing' are inclusive, because they are not threatening for the listener. They also give the speaker thinking time."
Pupils understood that vagueness would not be appropriate in a formal context such as a job interview. Professor Carter is compiling a new grammar of the English language which incorporates everyday speech. He concludes that informal verbal communication has conventions which are just as valid as the rules of formal writing.
The QCA project includes teachers in 30 schools carrying out experimental lessons where pupils conduct a short discussion, then analyse it to judge how they used grammar and how effectively they used language.
The QCA will publish a report on the project in 2004 and will issue guidance on improving the teaching of speaking and listening in summer 2003.
(TES, 7 March 2003)
According to research, early years workers, who are expected to play a major role in identifying speech and language disorders, are not getting the training they need.
Researcher Maria Mroz, of Newcastle University, surveyed 829 early-years workers for the Nuffield Foundation. She found that nine out of 10 had had no post-qualification training in speech and language work.
She also found that almost a third had sought help about language disorders from informal sources, such as magazines, friends or relatives with specialist knowledge or through experience with their own children.
A follow-up study of 50 workers found that 46 wanted training in speech and language. Ms Mroz's report says: "The roles of an early years professional are multiple but it is clear that talking and playing are not as prominent as one might wish in terms of developing children's language.
"Early-years professionals are united in recognising their broad responsibility to access all of the children in their setting.
"However, they lack tools and knowledge to specifically assess speech and language development and to identify delay or disorder."
(TES, 7 March 2003)
The Birmingham accent has long been maligned as the least attractive in Britain but it seems Brummies have a quality which allows them to ignore such criticism - they don't care. Brummies have been found to be the Britons who feel they have the least to do when it comes to improving how they express themselves in public.
A survey for colleges of further education found that just 42% of Brummies felt the need to be able to speak clearly. 50% of Welsh people felt the need to improve along with 51% of Londoners and 54% of Scots. The study was carried out ahead of a campaign by colleges and the BBC to improve communication skills with a programme of short courses and a related television series.
(Independent, 10 February 2003)
The importance of speech in our lives is revealed by the fact that a person may utter as many as 40,000 words in a day but most of these are trivial. Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University discovered by monitoring common-room chat that 86% of our daily conversations are about personal relationships and experiences. Most of the time we use language to gossip.
The observation suggests that the root of human language is social. Intriguingly, recent research by Dunbar and colleagues suggests that language may have developed in combination with the use of music and singing. "Our work suggests early humans indulged in a lot of chanting and choral singing," he says. "It is the equivalent of tribal singing on football terraces or Welsh community singing - that sort of thing. It was a way of identifying ourselves."
(The Observer, 12 January 2003)
Every primary school in the country should hold classes for parents to teach them how to play with their children in an attempt to stop language skills disappearing from some homes, the head of the Basic Skills Agency told the North of England Conference in January 2003.
Alan Wells said headteachers were reporting a steady rise in what has been called the "daily grunt" - monosyllabic conversational skills and a basic lack of language ability that was not connected to the problems of learning another language.
"This is about children sat in front of TVs or their computers, and it's about a lack of families having food together and a general lack of conversation," said Alan Wells.
Mr Wells said standards had risen further from a lower base in Wales where no compulsory literacy strategy has been imposed on schools.
He said that programmes on a national scale were needed to teach some parents how to play with their children, read to them regularly and demonstrate conversational skills within the family.
(Financial Times, 9 January 2003)
Too much emphasis on reading and writing for under-fives is hampering the development of their speaking skills. New research from Sheffield University suggests children's speaking ability got worse after two years of early education, despite improvements in their cognitive abilities. The speech development of the 240 three-year-olds from deprived areas already lagged behind that of their peers before they joined the four nurseries in the study.
Around a third of the English national curriculum is made up of speaking and listening tasks but the national literacy strategy and national tests focus heavily on reading and writing skills. The researchers, Anne Locke and Jane Ginsborg, attribute their findings to the children's limited exposure to spoken language - initially at home but also in the early years of education.
The three-year-olds were tested for language skills and cognitive abilities in their first term, and retested two years later. While the proportion identified as having language difficulties of some kind declined slightly over the two years (from 55 to 49%) the number of children with severe language problems almost trebled (from 9 to 26%).
The children with the best language scores at three were doing worse at five, while the least able boys and most of the "middling" children showed no improvement after two years of early-years education. While speech-delayed children might grasp early reading and writing, research in the United States suggests that underdeveloped oral skills will hamper understanding and comprehension of text later, says Dr Ginsborg.
"There is evidence that reading skills are dependent on spoken language skills. If that's the case, we need to be putting more emphasis on more rich language environments in nursery and reception and even in year 1, with activities such as telling nursery rhymes and stories," she said. "If you don't know that spoken language is what underlies reading and writing, you are going to follow Government advice to copy words with them rather than tell stories," added Dr Ginsborg.
(TES, 11 January 2002)
Teachers may soon be expected to do more to help children to speak, as well as write, grammatically following the launch of a study by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to look at ways to improve spoken English.
Pupils' oral language is a largely unresearched area and the mechanisms by which speech can be improved have not been spelled out by the authority as they have for writing. Yet speaking and listening tasks account for a third of the national curriculum in English. At key stage 1 pupils need to be able to speak clearly, fluently and confidently. The curriculum says children should be taught to use clear diction and appropriate intonation. It also says that students should be introduced to the main features of spoken standard English.
However, the primary literacy strategy makes little reference to speaking or listening. National tests assess reading and writing skills, so teachers have felt forced to focus on them. The only chance many pupils have to develop their oral language skills is during group discussions.
Now Professor Ron Carter of Nottingham University is to lead a project that will develop ways to improve spoken language. He will work with a group of teachers to develop materials that will be tried out in schools. Ruth Moore, president of the National Association for the Teaching of English, said: "Speaking and listening has been neglected because of the emphasis on testing. I think the outcome of this will be really useful to teachers as long as it is used for teaching. However, the fear is that, if you identify rules and frameworks, they are used as a means of testing rather than a way of teaching."
A QCA publication on spoken English and grammar is expected to be published late in 2002.
(TES, 4 January 2002)
Consideration about what children should be taught about the rules of language structure has, in the past, been closely linked to their work on writing. Now, however, there is to be an official focus on what should be taught about the grammar of spoken language.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority in England has embarked on a study of what grammatical terms are needed to describe speech, and how some of these can be made explicit to children. This is a complex and largely unexplored area since the rules of language have until now been seen largely in terms of writing - almost as though speech were an aberrant form of written language. The QCA has brought in a leading linguistics academic, Professor Ron Carter of Nottingham University, to work with them on the project. The QCA sees the project as vital to primary teachers, who have to help pupils make the transition from speech to writing and understand the difference between the two forms.
The spoken grammar initiative was launched at a seminar Spoken English, Grammar and the Classroom in 2001. Following the seminar, participants produced written responses to the issues raised and made suggestions for classroom work. QCA is now exploring the latter with a group of teachers and, as a result of these consultations, materials will be produced for trialling in primary and secondary schools. The initial focus will be on key stages 2 and 3.
The primary literacy strategy, which has transformed English teaching in the past few years, has no speaking and listening learning objectives. National tests assess reading and writing skills, so teachers have focused on these.
(The Primary Education Magazine, December 2001)
A gene that controls the development of speech and language has been identified for the first time in a breakthrough that will transform understanding of a uniquely human ability.
British scientists, led by Tony Monaco, Professor of Human Genetics at Oxford University, have pinpointed a single genetic defect that causes a rare hereditary language disorder, providing the strongest evidence yet that mankind's sophisticated communication skills are determined by DNA.
The discovery is likely to lead to new screening techniques for detecting speech disorders in early childhood and to improved methods of therapy. It will also offer important clues to the evolution of the power of speech. It proves an observation made by Charles Darwin 130 years ago: "Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, while no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew or write."
(The Times, 4 October 2001)
The Hanen programme, developed in Toronto, Canada, has been designed to give parents the skills to encourage speech-delayed children to talk. Lasting 13 weeks, it involves eight group sessions and three home visits with video feedback. The programme is driven by evidence that early intervention is crucial. Targeted at children who are too young to respond to formal clinic-based speech therapy, it is based on the principle that intensive therapy at home is the most effective way to promote language development.
Over the past five years 6,500 families have participated in Hanen, which has trained therapists in 30 countries. Elaine Weitzman, executive director of the Hanen charity said, "Our goal is to change the way parents interact with their child in everyday situations." One parent who took part in the course to help her son George, said that she and her husband had initially been put off by the jargon of the course but they used the strategies at home and found that they worked. They began to observe, wait and listen for George's communication signals. We'd been talking to him in sentences. Now we talk simply, slow down and wait for him to respond. But I had to be shown how to do it. It's a big commitment in terms of time but soon becomes part of your life. You don't sit down and do 'Hamen', you incorporate it into everyday life. It changed everything: it removed the bleakness and gave us the momentum to persevere.
Research by the University of Toronto confirms Hanen's effectiveness, and the organisation has attracted Canadian government funding since 1981.
Although 1,400 speech and language therapists in the UK have attended Hanen workshops, the provision of programmes around Britain is patchy. A pilot project in Scotland, funded by the Scottish Office in 1995, found that parents who had done the course had interacted longer and communicated better with their children; the number of words these children used rose by more than 100% against 20% for the control group.
Dr Gillian Baird, a consultant paediatrician at Guy's Hospital in London, says Hanen is efficient and effective: "Parents soon recognise that they were talking too fast, too much and not waiting. It enables them to change their behaviour and to understand how young children's language develops."
For further information: www.hanen.org
Anne McDade, the hanen UK-Ireland co-ordinator and a speech and language therapist, operates a helpline: 0141 946 5433; email: uk_ireland@hanen.org
Hanen also runs "More Than Words" for children with autistic spectrum disorder, and "Learning Language and Loving It" for pre-school workers.
(The Times, 31 July 2001)
Constructive classroom discussion teaches primary pupils more than the results of scientific experiments, according to the findings of a study presented at the international conference on communication, problem solving and learning, held in Glasgow recently.
Christine Howe, of Strathclyde University Centre for Research into Interactive Learning, said; "there is a great deal of emphasis on experiments to get children to understand a scientific interaction. But what we found was that the talk was much more important than feedback from experiment results."
"Experiments should be used to give the children a scaffold for their talk . They have to engage in constructive dialogue. It won't happen by accident. Highly structured workbooks have to be provided. We're not telling pupils what to say but what they should talk about at each stage."
(TES Scotland, 13 July 2001)
| 80px.gif)
