By Geoffrey Pullum. People sometimes take my skeptical comments on animal-language news stories (“Dolphin Talk and Human Credulity,” for example) as evidence that I regard animals as inferiors. Jeremy Hawker complained on Language Log that I showed no interest in animal communication, and that linguists “cannot mention the subject without making a snotty comparison with human language.” More...
By Rose Jacobs. A new semester of classes started at German universities this week, which means I’ve spent the last few days asking fresh rounds of students about their language goals. The greatest number in any class want, above all, to improve their speaking skills. But a significant group has also mentioned vocabulary expansion. Given that most of the students are on course to complete master’s degrees in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering, which at the Technical University of Munich means most will need to both read and write academic texts in English, this has me mulling a creature called AWL. The Academic Word List was developed 15 years ago by Averil Coxhead, then a master’s student at Victoria University of Wellington, and contains about 3,000 words from 580 word families—groups of words that share a stem—which are not among the 2,000 most commonly used words in English but appear and reappear across a corpus of academic writing. More...
By William Germano. In the greatest English theatrical comedy of the 19th century, a peculiar series of events involving an infant and a handbag are the subject of an 11th-hour confession by one of my favorite literary inventions, a governess named Miss Prism. More...
By Allan Metcalf. Just as California offers the most neutral and unobtrusive variety of American English (we don’t think of someone having a “California accent”), so The Associated Press Stylebook offers the most neutral, unobtrusive, and inoffensive choices in spelling, punctuation, and usage. For this reason both are worthy of note as reflecting the norm, the unmarked version of American English. More...
Adjunct faculty members at the Maryland Institute College of Art are preparing for a union election in which they will decide whether to join Local 500 of the Service Employees International Union. Organizers among the institute’s adjuncts, who say they earn about $4,000 a course, hope to join 2,400 other part-time professors at colleges in Maryland and the District of Columbia who are represented by the union. The SEIU is making a push to help adjuncts gain power through regional organizing efforts. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “STEM Majors, the Liberal Arts, and the Great Recession” (report not yet available online)
Authors: Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Linda J. Sax, a professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles. More...
Report: “STEM Majors, the Liberal Arts, and the Great Recession” (report not yet available online)
Authors: Jerry A. Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania; and Linda J. Sax, a professor of education at the University of California at Los Angeles
Organizations: University of Pennsylvania; University of California at Los Angeles; presented at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting
By . Central Piedmont Community College, in North Carolina, on Tuesday announced that it had planned a series of discussions with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups after a transgender student accused the campus-security staff of harassing her when she left a women’s restroom, The Charlotte Observer reported. More...
By Chronicle Staff. Report: “How America Saves for College 2014″
Organization: Sallie Mae
Methodology: Ipsos Public Affairs interviewed 2,020 parents with a child under age 18. The survey was conducted online, in both English and Spanish, in November and December 2013. The sample was selected to be nationally representative on certain demographic variables. More...
By . New testing of a fragment of papyrus that is said to refer to Jesus’ being married shows that it is very likely ancient and not a modern forgery, according to research described by The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
The existence of the papyrus fragment was revealed by Karen L. King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard University’s divinity school. Ms. King has said that the text does not prove that Jesus was married. Her presentation of the fragment, at a conference in Rome in 2012, prompted heated criticism—the Vatican declared it to be a fake, and skeptics later raised questions about why the analysis was taking so long. More...
By . Report: “Lessons Learned: Implications From Studying Minority-Serving Institutions”
Authors: David A. Bergeron, vice president for postsecondary education; Farah Z. Ahmad, policy analyst; and Elizabeth Baylor, associate director for postsecondary education, all at the Center for American Progress. More...
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