Joe McVeigh’s Intro to TESOL course put together a great slang dictionary last month. Slang is a bit like IT vocab - some of it gets obsolete quickly - so this is a nice example of what’s current in US universities. It also has audio examples. Follow the links off the post.
And in case you haven’t checked out Joe’s site, there are some great resources there - he’s the real deal - including some nice needs assessment stuff.
Fascinating article in the Telegraph about the work at Elizabeth Spelke’s “baby brain” research lab at Harvard, where they study infant cognition and learning:
More fascinating still is that Spelke’s lab has revealed a deep-seated prejudice, present in infants, that trumps racial bias: language. Dr Katherine Kinzler, though based in Harvard, spends much time running parallel studies in France. ‘Five-month-old babies will look longer at somebody who spoke to them in their language. Older infants want to accept a toy from someone who has spoken their language,’ Dr Kinzler says.
‘They like toys more that are associated with someone who has spoken their language. They prefer to eat foods offered to them by a native speaker compared to a speaker of a foreign language. And older children say that they want to be friends with someone who speaks in their native accent.’ Accents and vernacular, far more than race, seem to influence the people we like. ‘Children would rather be friends with someone who is from a different race and speaks with a native accent versus somebody who is their own race but speaks with a foreign accent.’
These findings make perfect sense according to two California-based pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides. In the Stone Age, race was next to useless as an identifier, because most people would never have travelled far enough to see anyone of a different skin colour. Accent, vocabulary and dialect would have helped distinguish friendly tribes from foes. Tooby and Cosmides concluded that humans are born with a predisposition to divide the world along ethnic lines traced out by language and accent, more than racial lines.
Via Kottke.
