Scones in Wisconsin: British English vs. American English

As an Anglophile and a teacher of Linguistics, I had to spend talking with my students about the differences between American and British English.  The Project Britain website provides wonderful resources on lexical differences between British and American language and culture.  I used their fill-in-the-blanks worksheet as a small group activity while we all enjoyed some tea and biscuits.  Then each group got a hand-out related to either food, people, places, clothing, or school and hand to come up with a sentence using as many British English words as possible.  

An example sentence students wrote and then "translated" for us is:  "My mate met a lollypop man and the lad turned out to be a nutter and wouldn't let my chum cross the lane even after a bobby came by."

http://www.projectbritain.com/activities.html

Pidgin Dinner 2013

It's a funny thing to walk into an English classroom where English is not allowed, but that's what my students did yesterday.  MSL Linguistics students shared a feast seated next to fellow classmates who speak different native or second languages than they do.  Students spoke Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Wolof, Hmong, and Serbian and managed to be able to get the chicken, egg rolls, tacos, noodles and desserts passed around the room.  We all recognized the importance of facial expressions and gestures in our communication.  

Enjoy some photos from the event!

TED Talk on Language Acquisition

This TED talk is a great 10 minutes spent learning about language acquisition.  It's very accessible for high school students:
http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_kuhl_the_linguistic_genius_of_babies.html

NACLO 1/31/13

We participated in NACLO this year at Marquette University.  Thanks so much to organizational mastermind Dr. Joyce Tang Boyland whose efforts led to the Marquette/UWM sites having more students participating in NACLO than anywhere else in North America!

We also enjoyed meeting up with MSL (and Linguistics class) alumni and current Marquette freshmen Kylie Dolphin and Daniel Bernard.

In the afternoon, we had a chance to visit the Raynor Library to see their collection of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts, including his original drafts of The Hobbit.

NACLO Practice

Our thanks to Dr. Steven Hartman Kaiser and his students from Marquette University for helping us to prepare for this year's North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad!