My senior year of high school I spent an entire semester trudging through Francisco Jiménez’s autobiographical novel, Cajas de Cartón. Though the book was middle grade fiction, my English-speaking mind had to take its time moving in this new language. Sentence to sentence, the new vocabulary padded around in my brain, each phrase a new net of meaning that gave these words a [...]
Though most teachers roll their eyes at the class clown, humor can actually have a beneficial role in the classroom. While the usual comic interruptions to a lesson may not be helpful, incorporating play and laughter into a lesson plan is an effective way of encouraging children’s social emotional development, particularly for children with developmental disabilities. Clowning is a form of comedic performance [...]
What is Multicultural Literature? Culture is everything—it’s how we define ourselves and perceive the world in our own, idiosyncratic ways, and it’s an essential part of one’s identity during childhood. It’s also during the first three years of childhood[1] when one’s foundations for literacy is laid in place, as well as the development of their self-concept including a sense of their own culture [...]
As daunting as learning a second language may feel—after all, you have to learn grammar, pronunciation, and even some culture among other things to really effectively communicate—the struggle of doing so pays off eventually. Forget bragging about being bilingual or multilingual! Learning a second language comes with a variety of benefits, ranging from having a higher paying job to improving cognitive skills. Acquiring [...]
Language is always a topic of conversation at our office. We love words (no surprise there), but there are certain words that we love more than others. My favorite word is antidisestablishmentarianism because I love the way it sounds and I love that it’s a double negative. Antidisestablishmentarianism was a political ideology that opposed the withdrawal of state support from the Church of [...]
Much like the seas incarnadine, the English language is multitudinous! We have so many words for various feelings and experiences, yet we’re missing some important ones. Luckily, many other languages have evocative words that perfectly describe common situations. Here’s a few I enjoyed! Tartle (Scottish) The moment of panic that happens when you can’t remember someone’s name when you’re about to introduce them. [...]
Did you know that English is full of little unspoken rules? One of these strange rules happens in ablaut reduplication, which is the repetition of a word with a change in one of its vowels. Terms like criss-cross, Kit-Kat and sing-song are examples of this linguistic phenomenon. But have you ever noticed that there’s a pattern to these phrases? Try saying them backwards: cross-criss, Kat-Kit, song-sing. [...]
Here at Publishing Solutions Group, we are passionate about punctuation. We take joy in seeing em dashes used properly in subway signs and cringe when holiday cards incorrectly include our beloved serial comma before an ampersand. So it should be no surprise that a New Yorker article about the roots of popular punctuation marks as well as more archaic ones quickly made its [...]
In our previous blog about language barriers, former intern Nora Chan went into detail about Google’s translation app, which features a voice-to-text translation option. Nora highlighted the app’s contribution to travel with its ability to translate the sound of your mother tongue into a written translation of another language. Although trying to communicate in a foreign country can be part of the fun [...]
How did you learn how to speak your first language? Don’t remember? Don’t worry…you shouldn’t! Theories and research about human language acquisition have been abounding for decades—from B. F. Skinner’s idea that we learn language from operant conditioning to Noam Chomsky’s opposition that language is innate. Now, recent studies suggest that humans are actually born with biases in language structure. A team at [...]