Is Texting Killing the English Language?

People have always spoken differently from how they write, and texting is actually talking with your fingers
By John McWhorterApril 2 , 2!"##$ %omments

Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, penmanship for illiterates, as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isnt writing at all its actually more a in to spo en language. !nd its a spo en language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.

"irst, some historical perspecti#e. $riting was only in#ented %,%&& years ago, whereas language probably traces bac at least '&,&&& years. Thus tal ing came first( writing is )ust an artifice that came along later. !s such, the first writing was based on the way people tal , with short sentences thin of the Old Testament. *owe#er, while tal is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. O#er time, writers too ad#antage of this and started crafting tapeworm sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire+ The whole engagement lasted abo#e ,- hours, till the gradual retreat of the .ersians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was gi#en by the principal leaders and the /urenas himself.

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1o one tal s li e that casually or should. 2ut it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions, and thats what oratory is, li e the grand5old inds of speeches that $illiam 6ennings 2ryan deli#ered. 7n the old days, we didnt much write li e tal ing because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of con#ersation. 2ut texting and instant messaging do and a

re#olution has begun. 7t in#ol#es the brute mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and e#en #ulgarity, texting is actually a new ind of tal ing. There is a #irtual cult of concision and little interest in capitali8ation or punctuation. The argument that texting is poor writing is analogous, then, to one that the9olling /tones is bad music because it doesnt use #iolas. Texting is de#eloping its own ind of grammar and con#entions.

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Texting is de#eloping its own ind of grammar. Ta e LOL. 7t doesnt actually mean laughing out loud in a literal sense anymore. LOL has e#ol#ed into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used e#en when nothing is remotely amusing. 6ocelyn texts $here ha#e you been; and !nnabelle texts bac LOL at the library studying for two hours. LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of e<uality. 7nstead of ha#ing a literal meaning, it does something con#eying an attitude )ust li e the 5ed ending con#eys past tense rather than meaning anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.

Of course no one thin s about that consciously. 2ut then most of communication operates below the radar. O#er time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts meatused to mean any ind of food, silly used to mean, belie#e it or not, blessed.

:i#ili8ation, then, is fine people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no e#idence that texting is ruining composition s ills. $orldwide people spea differently from the way they write, and texting <uic , casual and only intended to be read once is actually a way of tal ing with your fingers.

!ll indications are that !mericas youth are doing it <uite well. Texting, far from being a scourge, is a wor in progress.

This essay is adapted from McWhorters talk at TED 2 !"#

SOURCE : http://ideas.time.com/2013/04/25/is-texting-killing-the-englishlanguage/

When Homework is a Waste of Time

=etty 7mages

$e often hear passionate arguments about how !merican students ha#e too much homewor , or too little. 2ut 7 belie#e that we ought to be as ing a different <uestion altogether. $hat should matter to parents and educators is this+ *ow effecti#ely do childrens after5school assignments ad#ance learning;

The e#idence suggests that as of now, homewor isnt ma ing the grade. !lthough sur#eys show that the amount of time our children spend on homewor has risen o#er the past three decades, !merican students are mired in the middle of international academic ran ings+ ,>th in reading, -?rd in science, and ?,st in math, according to the latest results from the .rogram for 7nternational /tudent !ssessment 0.7/!4. 7n a -&&' sur#ey, one5third of parents polled rated the <uality of their childrens homewor assignments as fair or poor, and four in ten said they belie#ed that some or a great deal of homewor is busywor . ! recent study, published in the @conomics of @ducation 9e#iew, reports that homewor in science, @nglish and history has little to no impact on students test scores. 0The authors did note a positi#e effect for math homewor .4

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"ortunately, research is a#ailable to help parents, teachers and school administrators ma e homewor smarter, although these particular inno#ations ha#e yet to be applied outside the

classroom. ! new discipline, nown as Aind, 2rain and @ducation, has recently emerged that is de#oted to understanding and impro#ing how people absorb, retain and apply nowledge. ! collaboration between psychologists at $ashington Bni#ersity in /t. Louis and teachers at nearby :olumbia Aiddle /chool, for example, liftedse#enth5 and eighth5grade students science and social studies test scores by ,? to -% percent. The fields methods may seem unfamiliar and e#en counterintuiti#e, but they are simple to understand and easy to carry out. !fter5school assignments are ripe for the ind of impro#ements this new science can offer.

/paced repetition is one example of the ind of e#idence5based techni<ue that researchers ha#e found has a positi#e impact on students learning. *eres how it wor s+ instead of concentrating the study of information in large one5shot doses, as many homewor assignments currently do reading about, say, the :i#il $ar one e#ening, and 9econstruction the nextlearners encounter the same material in briefer sessions spread out o#er a longer period of time. $ith this approach, students would be re5exposed to information about the :i#il $ar and 9econstruction in their homewor a number of times during the semester. 7t sounds unassuming, but spaced repetition produces impressi#e results. @ighth5grade history students who tried a spaced approach to learning had nearly double the retention rate of students who studied the same material in a consolidated unit, reported researchers from the Bni#ersity of :alifornia5/an Ciego in -&&>. The reason the method wor s so well goes bac to the brain+ when we first ac<uire memories, they are #olatile, sub)ect to change or to disappear. @xposing oursel#es to information repeatedly o#er time fixes it more permanently in our minds, by strengthening the representation of the information that is embedded in our neural networ s.

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! second learning techni<ue, nown as retrie#al practice, employs a familiar toolthe testin a new way+ not to assess what students now, but to reinforce it. $e often concei#e of memory as something li e a storage tan , and a test as a ind of dipstic that measures how much information we#e put in there. 2ut thats not actually how the brain wor s. @#ery time we pull up a memory, we ma e it stronger and more lastingso that testing doesnt )ust measure, it changes. /imply reading o#er material to be learned, or e#en ta ing notes and ma ing outlines, as many homewor assignments re<uire, doesnt ha#e this effect. 7n one experiment, language learners who employed the retrie#al practice strategy to study #ocabulary words remembered '& percent of the words they studied, while learners who used con#entional study methods rememberedonly about a third of them. /tudy sub)ects who used retrie#al practice to learn from a science textboo retained about %& percent more of the material than those who studied in traditional

ways, reported researchers from .urdue Bni#ersity in -&,,. D,&E /tudentsand parentsmay groan at the prospect of more tests, but the self5<ui88ing in#ol#ed in retrie#al practice need not pro#o e any anxiety. 7ts simply an effecti#e way to focus less on the input of nowledge 0passi#ely reading o#er textboo s and notes4 and more on its output 0calling up that same information from ones own brain4.

!nother common misconception about how we learn can render homewor much less effecti#e than it might be. Aost of us assume that if information feels easy to absorb, we#e learned it well. 7n fact, )ust the opposite is true. $hen we wor hard to understand information, we recall it better( the extra effort expended signals the brain that this nowledge is worth eeping. This phenomenon, nown as cogniti#e disfluency, promotes learning so effecti#ely that psychologists ha#e de#ised all manner of desirable difficulties to introduce into the learning process+ for example, sprin ling a passage with punctuation mista es, deliberately lea#ing out letters, shrin ing font si8e until its tiny, or wiggling a document while its being copied so that the words come out blurry. Teachers are unli ely to start sending students home with smudged or error5 filled wor sheets, but theres another ind of desirable difficultycalled interlea#ingthat can readily be applied to homewor . !n interlea#ed assignment mixes up different inds of situations or problems to be practiced, instead of grouping them by type. $hen students cant tell in ad#ance what ind of nowledge or problem5sol#ing strategy will be re<uired to answer a <uestion, their brains ha#e to wor harder to come up with the solutionand the result is that they learn the material more thoroughly.

! study published in -&,& in the )ournal !pplied :ogniti#e .sychology as ed fourth5graders to wor on sol#ing four types of math problems, and then to ta e a test e#aluating how well they had learned. The scores of those whose practice problems were mixed up were more than double the scores of those students who had practiced one ind of problem at a time. The effecti#eness of interlea#ing has been demonstrated many times in the laboratory, yet real5world homewor assignments still commonly present problems of a single type together.

*omewor has long been an academic laggard, slow to adopt scientifically5supported approaches to learning. 1o wonder its assailed by critics on all sides, whether they belie#e homewor is piled on too hea#ily or gi#en too sparingly. Aaybe the heated debates about the amount of homewor children are assigned would cool if it became clear that the homewor was effecti#ely ad#ancing their learning. !t our resource5strapped public schools, the application of such research5based strategies to homewor is an untapped opportunity. /cience has shown us how to turn homewor into a potent catalyst for learning. Our assignment now is to ma e it happen.

This article is from the $rilliant Report% a &eekly ne&sletter &ritten 'y (nnie M)rphy *a)l#

Source: http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/05/when-homework-is-awaste-of-time/#ixzz2fbPAHAfI

Psychology

Over-Practicing
By Annie

akes Perfect

-he 'rain can get 'y on less energy when you overlearn a task
u!phy "aul #anniemu!phypaulAug. 20$ 20135 %omments

=etty 7mages

$hy do 7 ha#e to eep practicing; 7 kno& it alreadyF Thats the familiar wail of a child seated at the piano or in front of the multiplication table 0or, for that matter, of an adult ta ing a tennis lesson4. :ogniti#e science has a persuasi#e retort+ $e dont )ust need to learn a tas in order to perform it well( we need to o+erlearn it. Cecades of research ha#e shown that superior performance re<uires practicing 'eyond the point of mastery. The perfect execution of a piano sonata or a tennis ser#e doesnt mar the end of practice( it signals that the crucial part of the session is )ust getting underway.

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@#idence of why this is so was pro#ided by a study published recently in the ,o)rnal of -e)roscience. !ssistant professor !laa !hmed and two of her colleagues in the integrati#e physiology department at the Bni#ersity of :olorado52oulder as ed study sub)ects to mo#e a cursor on a screen by manipulating a robotic arm. !s they did so, the researchers measured the participants energy expenditure by analy8ing how much oxygen they inhaled and how much

carbon dioxide they breathed out. $hen the sub)ects first tac led the exercise, they used up a lot of metabolic power, but this decreased as their s ill impro#ed. 2y the end of the learning process, the amount of effort they expended to carry out the tas had declined about -& percent from when they started.

$hene#er we learn to ma e a new mo#ement, !hmed explains, we form and then update an internal modela sensorimotor mapwhich our ner#ous system uses to predict our muscles motions and the resistance they will encounter. !s that internal model is refined o#er time, were able to cut down on unnecessary mo#ements and eliminate wasted energy.

O#er the course of a practice session, the sub)ects in !hmeds study were becoming more efficient in their muscle acti#ity. 2ut that wasnt the whole story. @nergy expenditures continued to decrease e#en after the decline in muscle acti#ity had stabili8ed. 7n fact, !hmed and her coauthors report, this is when the greatest reductions in metabolic power were obser#edduring the #ery time when it loo s to an obser#er, and to the participant herself, as if nothing is happening.

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$hats going on here; !hmed theori8es that e#en after participants had fine5tuned their muscle mo#ements, the neural processes controlling the mo#ements continued to grow more efficient. The brain uses up energy, too, and through o#erlearning it can get by on less. These gains in mental efficiency free up resources for other tas s+ infusing the music youre playing with greater emotion and passion, for example, or eeping closer trac of your opponents mo#es on the other side of the tennis court. Less effort in one domain means more energy a#ailable to others.

$hile !hmeds paper didnt address the application of o#erlearning to the classroom or the wor place, other studies ha#e demonstrated that for a wide range of academic and professional acti#ities, o#erlearning reduces the amount of mental effort re<uired, leading to better performanceespecially under high5sta es conditions. 7n fact, research on the audience effect shows that once we#e o#erlearned a complex tas , we actually perform it 'etter when other people are watching. $hen we ha#ent achie#ed the reduction of mental effort that comes with o#erlearning, howe#er, the additional stress of an audience ma es stumbles more li ely.

The message from this study is that in order to perform with less effort, eep on practicing, e#en after it seems the tas has been learned, says !hmed. $e ha#e shown there is an ad#antage to continued practice beyond any #isible changes in performance. 7n other words+ Goure getting

better and better, e#en when you cant tell youre impro#inga thought to eep you going through those long hours of practice.

This article is from the $rilliant Report% a &eekly ne&sletter &ritten 'y (nnie M)rphy *a)l#

Source: http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/20/dont-just-practice-overpractice/#ixzz2fbPpHIfb