The English Miscellany

" The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." --- F. Scott Fitzgerald Have you recently received your exam results? Are you preparing for an exam? I have made a short list of some of the best tips that will help you to improve your exam results in the future. How many of these strategies DID you follow (or not) in your recent work? Employ short blocks of time for work. Develop a balanced workload between all subjects means variety. Select days off work for leisure. Write down a list of reasons to be motivated. Reward yourself for doing the hours planned. Starting to revise too late in the process. Don't just rely on your revision sessions run by your school or college. Summarize your notes. Create Mindmaps or other visualizations to aid recall. Devise your own mnemonics or memory games. Read and study past exam papers. Ensure that you know what the ...

This petition was submitted during the 2010–2015 Conservative – Liberal Democrat coalition government; the deadline 30 March 2015. At the time is attracted only 366 signatures, despite being widely circulated as a link on social media. Petition: End of GCSE English Literature for All, 2017 GCSE English Literature from 2017 will require students to remember between 15 and 18 (depending on exam board) poems in an exam in order to 'closely analyse' them. Signatories ask government to consult with the English teaching community as to whether this is the fairest and most meaningful way of assessing students' understanding and appreciation of poetry. There has been no such consultation on this matter to date. Meanwhile the learning of poetry for public recitation is increasingly popular. Moving beyond the controversial rote-learning for exams issue, this blog explores some of the advantages and disadvantages of learning poetry for pu...

Have you heard of corpus linguistics ?  Corpus linguistics proposes that reliable language analysis is more feasible with corpora (samples) collected in the field, in their natural contexts, and with minimal experimental-interference. How did it all start? A landmark in modern corpus linguistics was Henry Kučera and W. Nelson Francis's Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967). This work was based on the analysis of the Brown Corpus, a carefully compiled selection of about a million words, drawn from a wide variety of sources in current  American English How did technology help? The first computerized corpus of one million words of transcribed spoken language was constructed in 1971 by the Montreal French Project. This effort inspired Shana Poplack's much larger corpus of spoken French in the Ottawa-Hull area The analysis of academic writing shows that there are many  frequently used words and phrases : a form of...