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The Hidden Maths Behind Why Sentences Look The Way They Do
Ever wondered why languages organise themselves the way they do –how they arrange sounds, words & phrases into patterns that feel natural to speakers? A new paper by Richard Futrell (UC Irvine) & Michael Hahn (Saarland University), published in Nature Human Behaviour, offers a fresh angle: perhaps the structure of language didn’t emerge from cultural…
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The Coherence Illusion: What Psychosis Reveals About Language
Is it possible to measure how close two words are to each other? Cat & kitten, teacher & classroom, hope & optimism, for example. Surprisingly, yes. This is what researchers call semantic similarity‘ – a way of quantifying how related words are in meaning. Because it feels intuitive, many people assume that if the words…
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Reading Between the (Cognitive) Lines
Most of us imagine fluent reading as something smooth & almost automatic. Our eyes move forward, our brain keeps pace, & we barely notice the tiny guesses we make about what’s coming next. In the classroom we often build on this idea, encouraging learners to “predict from context” as if the brain does this with…
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Grammar: flatter than we thought
How do you imagine the brain goes about constructing a sentence? You’d think it grabs a pronoun, looks around for a verb, then starts arranging everything into a tidy hierarchy -what linguists would call a syntax tree (or parse tree), with words stacked in layers of structure. However, a new study by Yngwie A. Nielsen…
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What Inclusion Fails to Include
When the term inclusive classroom began circulating in mainstream teacher education in the late 80s & early 90s, it was almost entirely learner-focused. Inclusion meant adapting materials, differentiating tasks, scaffolding reading, supporting SEN, later reframed as SEND, learners & removing barriers to participation. Over time, it became a core value in ELT -a shorthand for…
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Negotiating Meaning: Lessons from a Clinical Encounter
Inspiration for what to write about comes from many places. Often, they may be only tangentially connected to teaching English. That’s the case with today’s study which comes from The Lancet, a journal not typically known for its classroom insights. What caught my attention wasn’t medicine, but rather what the study has to say about…
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