The Dark side … may the force find us

English is growing at the rate of 8,500 words a year. What is more, there may be now a million words in English, far more than any standard dictionary contains: more than half the language in use is “dark matter” which effectively avoids dictionaries. These are just two of recent conclusions from a study by physicists (yes!) of the Google collection of scanned books. The study is being called the first study in the new field of Culturomics. Read the complete article at: http://tinyurl.com/88oosnv

Far older but perhaps related is the concept of Zipf’s law which states: “that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.” The quote is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf’s_law but do search Google for more information.

So, what does it all mean for us teachers in the classroom? Well, the old chestnut that the language and vocabulary found in textbooks is incredibly limiting as, perhaps, are the language tasks we ask students to complete. Back to Dogme perhaps on one level but it has to be Dogme including the wider world: will students needs alone guide them to exploring all that dark matter out there? What is the role of the teacher in introducing our students to the dark side?

Chattering charts

Here is another fun google tool which allows you to search a corpus and compare frequency of usage, not just at the moment but how that statistic has changed over time! Try for say, tell or look forward to, looking forward to and see what happens. Then change the date to an earlier starting point and watch how things may have changed. http://books.google.com/ngrams/

Shake it up speare

Four short days to the TESOL-SPAIN 2012 convention where David Crystal is one of the plenary speakers and will also be doing a reading of Shakespeare at the opening cocktail. I have followed his blog for a long time but have only recently become acquainted with his website on Shakespeare www.shakespeareswords.com following an interview on the TESOL-SPAIN website. The shakespeareswords website is absolutely fabulous if you have any interest at all in the man, his work, or simply the English language. Do check it out!

It’s only words

I have always been fascinated by dictionaries and how they are compiled and particularly the use of technology in the process. The Macmillan Dictionary blog makes great reading on this front. As an example check out Michael Rundell on the past tense of verbs http://tinyurl.com/6shxn6c