The English Blog

US Election Sites 17 - Race to the White House

 Biography.com's Race to the White House 2008 features an impressive collection of resources. One of the best is Meet the Candidates, where you can find in-depth biographies of the two presidential contenders and other key players. The video biographies of Obama and McCain are also worth a look as is the Photo Gallery.

 

Speech Accent Archive

The Speech Accent Archive  presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is useful for people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers.

Verdict: A great site for exposing learners to different accents. The phonetic transcriptions should be of interest to TEFL trainees (or teachers).

The UK's First National Spelling Bee

The Times is launching the UK's first National Spelling Bee championship for schools. Libby Purves has written an article which looks at the fascination of spelling and why it still matters.

There is no point in pretending that English spelling is easy. But then neither is water-skiing, nor horsemanship, nor playing the guitar, nor doing tricks on a skateboard. And the rewards are curiously similar: precision, communication and aesthetic satisfaction. English words are not dull products of an isolated and narrow monoculture: they reflect the kaleidoscope of history. They are eccentric, wayward and playful, thumbing (with that crazy b in the middle) their nose at dull phoneticists. No vowel sound depends on only one letter: we have peep and leap, weird and police, ski and key and people; we have truth and fruit and tomb and blue. Read on >>

How We Became the United States of France

Time magazine has a great tongue-in-cheek article arguing that the USA has become the new France when it comes to economic policy.

This is the state of our great republic: We've nationalized the financial system, taking control from Wall Street bankers we no longer trust. We're about to quasi-nationalize the Detroit auto companies via massive loans because they're a source of American pride, and too many jobs — and votes — are at stake. Our Social Security system is going broke as we head for a future in which too many retirees will be supported by too few workers. How long before we have national health care? Put it all together, and the America that emerges is a cartoonish version of the country most despised by red-meat red-state patriots: France. Only with worse food. Read full article >>

 

US Election Sites 16 - TheBostonChannel.com

TheBostonChannel.com has an excellent collection of US Election resources including articles, videos, slideshows and interactive features such as maps and polls. I particularly liked the Fun Facts in the Compare the Candidates section. For instance, did you know that Barack Obama would have liked to be an architect? Or that John McCain's favourite film is Viva Zapata?

Planet Green Game

The Planet Green Game is a collaboration between Starbucks and Global Green and is designed to educate the public about climate change. Your mission is to explore the town of Evergreen looking for ways to reduce CO2 emissions. Along the way, you visit key destinations, each of which presents its own specific challenge.

Paul Newman

Screen legend Paul Newman has died at the age of 83. This CNN video looks back at his life. You can download a transcript and view the BBC's obituary.

WordWeb Pro

WordWeb is a comprehensive one-click English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows. It can be used to look up words from almost any program, showing definitions, synonyms and related words. It includes pronunciations and usage examples, and has helpful spelling and sounds-like links. The 'Pro' version costs £18 to download for a single user and has more definitions and features than the free version but the free version should be more than sufficient for most users.

Verdict: WordWeb is a very helpful tool for teachers or more advanced learners. I downloaded the free version and was impressed by its user-friendliness and speed.

U.S. Election Sites 15 - President for a Day

President for a Day is part of The Democracy Project from PBS Kids Go!. This activity provides a job description for the presidency, so students understand what kinds of skills and competencies are necessary in that office. Students have the opportunity to role play the president for a day, making decisions about different events that a president might actually experience (meetings with Cabinet members, speeches to the public, bowling in the White House).

You can find related lesson plans here.

The collapse of the English language

Craig Brown has written a humorous article on telegraph.co.uk poking fun at the idiosyncracies of English spelling and pronunciation. Here's an extract:

SIR - Yesterday, I heard John Humphrys on Today say the word "collapse". Needless to say I was horrified, as he singularly failed to enunciate the second "l". This is, I fear, yet another example of declining standards. Read full article >>

US Election Sites 14 - The Road to the Capitol

The Road to the Capitol is a free game published by the National Student/Parent Mock Election for use by students, parents, and teachers. Here's the scenario:

Wealthy businesswoman, Roberta Glass, has a heart of stone. She is running for a seat in the U.S. Congress, so she can keep kids away from movies, music, books, and video games that aren’t "approved" by the government.

YOU need to enter the race to stop her and protect the basic freedoms of America's kids! Getting elected isn't easy though. To win this election, you'll need to prove you're the most qualified candidate by showing off your knowledge of key principles of democracy.

Verdict: The Road to the Capitol is a really fun game which gives practice in both listening and reading.    

 

1000 images on the tip of my tongue

1000 images is a trilingual index which offers explanations and translations of idioms in English, French and Spanish. You can search for idioms using keywords or by category. You can then display the equivalent expression in one of the other languages. For instance, in English we say 'to be a copycat'. In French this is 'faire le singe' (to be the monkey).

 

Too much English spoken in Europe?

From cafébabel.com:

The European Day of Languages on 26 September has prompted some to ask whether we need to re-assess the dominance of the English language in Europe, and in the European economy. Should there be a linguistic tax on English speakers? Read the article >>

Visit the Council of Europe's European Day of Languages site.

Is the English language full?

Alex Beam writing in the Washington Post considers whether new words are necessarily a good thing.

Conventional wisdom likens the English language to a healthy, growing organism that easily generates new words like "poke" (in the Facebook sense), "ginormous," "crowdsource," or "webisode." Every few years, a new edition of Merriam-Webster or American Heritage issues a press release commending themselves for integrating words like "Web-surfing" and "Islamo-fascism" into their dictionaries. Read full article >>

US Election Sites 13 - In Quotes from Google

The first presidential debate takes place today at the University of Mississippi. This debate will focus on foreign policy and national security and will no doubt provide plenty of material for In Quotes, a new tool from Google Labs. As the name suggests, In Quotes allows you to find quotes from different people in the news about a particular topic. You can compare quotes made by Obama and McCain about a range of key election issues.

There are also U.K., Indian and Canadian editions so you can see what Gordon Brown and David Cameron have to say about the economy, for example.

Verdict: A very useful tool for researching what the key players actually said about the issues without the bias which often appears in news reporting.