The run-up to a general election in the United States provides an opportunity for observers of English to see it stretched beyond ordinary limits. The winnowing process that will reduce the various Republican contenders in the race to one has begun and as we plod steadily toward the November election, the rhetoric heats up and we may be tempted to ask, as Alice did of Humpty-Dumpty: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Speakers of English who did not grow up in the US may be nonplussed by the recurrence and special emphasis that a few words receive in debate rhetoric: the words are familiar, but the vehemence with which they are bandied about might make you wonder what gives the candidates such animation. The key to understanding this phenomenon lies in the special meaning that a handful of words carry in American politics. Here are a few watchwords that, when used by a candidate for office, may contain meaning or connotation that goes a bit beyond what you will find in a dictionary.

socialist and socialism: Throughout much of the 20th century, and culminating in the McCarthy era witchhunts of the 1950s, communism inspired fear and panic among Americans; it was portrayed as the most tyrannical form of government, and the antithesis of freedom and the American Way. When Soviet and European communism died with a whimper in the late 20th century, there was a need for a new bogeyman, and socialism quickly filled the void. So while Americans today uphold many of the virtues espoused by socialism – such as equality of opportunity and state financing of essential infrastructure and services – being labeled as socialist, or promoting socialism, is equivalent to being called un-American. Not surprisingly, a favorite missile aimed toward president Obama from all of the Republican candidates is that he is a socialist and aims to move the US towards socialism.

liberal: If you read through the several definitions of liberal in the Macmillan Dictionary, you would conclude that being liberal, or even being a liberal, is a Good Thing, and you might consider that you are one yourself. But in American politics, you never want to own the label, and if you are accused of it, the usual thing to do is ignore it or supply as much evidence to the contrary as you can. Americans value liberty (a related word) and personal freedoms perhaps more than any other people in the world, but in politics, liberal is an economical code word meaning “someone who promotes, demands, or gets too much freedom, which will lead to the destruction of society, and I don’t want my taxes to pay for that.”

agenda: the main meaning of agenda is “all the things that need to be done” and so you would think that politicians would embrace the word – they like to be perceived as people that get things done. But there is also a subsidiary meaning of agenda, sense 1a in the Macmillan Dictionary: “a plan that is kept secret.” For this reason, American candidates for office don’t usually talk about their own agendas, for fear of suggesting that they have a secret one. But they talk freely about their opponents’ agendas, and when this happens you can be sure that it’s sense 1a you’re hearing about, or perhaps something even more sinister, along the lines of “something you would hate to see happen in this great country.”

welfare: the preamble to the US constitution states that the document is established, among other reasons,  to “promote the general welfare” – and by that it means “the health and happiness of people.” But that’s not the welfare that candidates for office talk about. They mean something a little closer to Macmillan Dictionary definition 1a, “money given to people who do not have work or who are in need.” It’s likely that what they really mean is something along the lines of “money that the government takes from hardworking taxpayers and doles out to feckless and lazy people who can’t be bothered to earn a living.” Thus, modern American politicians do not promote welfare.

Europe and European: Americans are aware of the fun things about Europe – castles and what not – and they’re wild about European fashions, styling, design, and other consumables. But the Europe that politicians talk about these days is not that place at all. It is a scary place, riddled with debt crises, street riots, monetary chaos, and – yes, you guessed it – socialism run amok. President Obama is regularly accused of wanting to make the United States “more like Europe” and the accusers don’t mean that he wants to build more castles, or insure that money spent prudently on health care actually contributes to better health outcomes, such as you find in many European countries. They mean that his agenda is to create a liberal European socialist welfare state.

You may recall that we completed last year’s world tour of English with a rap battle video between Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman and UK emcee Professor Elemental. You might also remember that we ran a competition in the summer inviting people to contribute with resources specifically written for the video.

Well, the two competition winners produced excellent Lesson Plans to go with the rap battle and the first one is now ready to download from this dedicated page over on Macmillan Dictionary:

Resources for Baba Brinkman vs Professor Elemental rap battle video

The page includes the video itself, and also contains the script and Lesson Plan 1 as downloadable pdfs. Lesson Plan 2 will follow early on in the New Year so keep your eyes peeled!

For more video resources, visit the 21st Century Flux page.

At the recent eLEX 2011 conference in Slovenia (for earlier posts, see here and here), the discussion focussed on the future of dictionaries – or, more broadly, on the various ways in which reference needs might be catered for in years to come. What often happens in this field is that people working in universities and research groups develop software tools or learning materials for their own (local) users, but their ideas and methods are then taken up by more mainstream providers. Serge Verlinde of Leuven University in Belgium gave one of the keynote speeches. Serge is a great example of someone who has done pioneering work over many years to develop online reference tools, in this case for learners of French. His ‘Base lexicale du français’ (BLF) not only supplies information about word meanings, grammar, and collocation, but also guides the user to make the right word choices when writing in French or translating from French to another language. The BLF also includes a ‘reading assistant’ (providing various kinds of help to enable you to understand a text), and a tool for helping users write a text is in development.

This theme of aids for writing (what are sometimes called ‘text remediation’ tools) appeared in several other talks, too. We heard from Magali Paquot about the Louvain English for Academic Purposes Dictionary (LEAD), a web-based resource designed to assist in the production of academic writing, and from another group about resources being developed in South Africa to aid ‘text production’ in a number of languages.

One of the features of resources like this is that they should be ‘dynamic’: that is, the system should learn from what users do, and what information they look for, and adapt itself as it goes along. Of course, much of this is still in the planning stage: we know what we want to do, but haven’t yet fully worked out how to do it. Part of the solution lies in having computational tools that can, for example, identify errors or unnatural features in a text supplied by a user. One research group from Barcelona showed how it had achieved a success rate of almost 90% in automatically detecting ‘bad’ collocations, and this kind of tool could form one component of a writing assistant that really worked. In the long term, devices like this could replace conventional dictionaries – at least for language production – because they would do one of the jobs dictionaries have traditionally done, but do it much better.

Another theme at the conference was ‘UGC’ (user-generated content), already such a big feature of the online world. News programmes, for example, routinely include information supplied by their viewers and listeners in the form of tweets, emails, or comments posted on their websites. In the world of reference, Wikipedia is the obvious example of a resource created entirely by its users, but the trend is spreading to dictionaries too. Wordnik has huge amounts of UGC, with numerous words added by members of the public, example sentences ‘harvested’ from the Twittersphere, and all sorts of lists created by the site’s users. A new translation tool being developed by the Russian company ABBYY will include a facility for users to contribute their own translations. And of course Macmillan has its Open Dictionary – an ever-expanding record of the most up-to-date uses of English around the world.

The conference provided a perfect snapshot of current activity and thinking in this exciting field. We may not be much closer to knowing how things will pan out over the next ten years (or even the next two). Developments in information technology, and in the skills, needs and expectations of its users, are all racing ahead at breakneck speed, so we can’t make predictions with any confidence. It brings to mind the famous remark made by Zhou Enlai, the Prime Minister of China till his death in 1976. When asked what he thought was the long-term significance of the French Revolution of 1789, he replied ‘It’s too soon to tell’.

This week’s ‘language in new media’ post comes courtesy of the Global author podcast series.

Jamie Keddie talks about words and pictures and using flashcards and flash images with students. There are great practical ideas plus information about where you can find and how you can generate flashcards.

We introduced Macmillan’s Sounds: The Pronunciation App a while back. The excellent news is that it’s now also available for purchase from the Apple app store in a Premium Edition (at just £3.99 / $6.99).

Exciting features of the Premium Edition include the following:

- Fully interactive phonemic charts for both British and American English
- A wordlist with over 650 selected high-frequency vocabulary items (taken from the Macmillan English Dictionary), including audio recordings and phonemic spellings. There’s also a recording function so you can compare your own pronunciation with models
- Practice activities for reading, writing and listening
- Two different types of quizzes (3 minutes & 3 lives) where you’re up against the clock – quite a challenge!
- A phonemic typewriter for free practice with the phonemic symbols
- Top tips for both students and teachers by pronunciation expert Adrian Underhill
- A complete one hour workshop video on ‘Teaching with the Chart’

If you’d like to try the app before you buy it, the Free version of Sounds is availabe to download here (both for Apple and Android operating systems). You’ll find fully-working tasters of both the Practice and Quiz sections available in the Free app (or simply update the version on your device if you have it already). You can find more information about Sounds on this website or watch this video (4:15) to find out more about the thinking behind and the making of the app:

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

We are in the final week of Green English month. To provide a practical way of discussing the environment in your English language class, the blog today brings you a lesson plan by Claire Hart, a Business English teacher based in Southern Germany. Claire also gives teacher training workshops and publishes free lesson plans.

For more on teaching (about) green English in class, see our teaching tip series here.

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Green English lesson plan: actions to protect the environment

This lesson focuses on the factors which motivate us to take action to protect the environment. The language point which it incorporates is the use of conditionals and the second conditional in particular. The lesson is designed for intermediate to advanced English learners and would take 60- 90 minutes to teach.

1. Give the learners a list of actions that we can take to protect the environment and ask them to say which ones would help to make a difference, while concealing the fact that they would all help. Here are some examples you could use:

insulating your house                                        re-using a bag at the supermarket
buying a smaller car                                           taking the train instead of flying
recycling plastic bottles                                     turning the heating down
turning the television off instead of leaving it on standby

2. Ask the learners which activities on the list they do or have done at some point (this provides an opportunity for some present simple versus present perfect practice). They discuss their responses in pairs or small groups and then feed back to the rest of the group. Aim to facilitate neutral discussions and avoid any possible elements of boasting or learners feeling left out if they are not as active as others. There should be at least one activity that everybody has taken part in.

3. Ask the learners to give a reason why they have done one of the activities that they have done and why they haven’t done one of the activities that they haven’t done. They discuss their answers in pairs or small groups and then feed back to the rest of the group, at which point the teacher could draw a table on the board with the reasons given by the learners: reasons for taking action on one side and reasons for not taking action on the other.

4. Introduce the concept of the “carrot and stick” model for motivation. Carrots are factors which motivate us to do something and sticks are factors that we want to avoid. Ask them to consider if this is an appropriate model for their motivation to help the environment and if so, why or why not. Can they think of a better metaphor?

5. Ask one of the strongest learners in the group:
How motivated would you be to do something to protect the environment if you had to get up early on a Saturday morning?

highly motivated
very motivated
motivated enough to do it
not very motivated
not motivated at all

Elicit the answer in a complete sentence that starts with if, encouraging the learners to recycle the language from the question: If I had to get up early on a Saturday morning, I would not be very motivated. Write up the complete question and answer and then ask the whole group: How motivated would you be, if protecting the environment won you the respect of your friends or colleagues? Ensure that the answer is a complete sentence. Give them some more similar questions to ask and answer in pairs.

6. Ask the learners which of the two components of these if-sentences is the condition for the fulfillment of the other component. The fulfillment of this condition is distant from reality. Draw the learners’ attention to the following structure: If + past simple, would + infinitive without to.

They can then create and ask their own questions about motivation to protect the environment using the same structures.

7. As a follow-up activity, you could discuss factors which motivate them to do other things, for example learning English.

We’re celebrating summer with a special offer that English language lovers are not going to want to miss!

From 1st July through to 6th July you’ll be able to buy any of our Macmillan Dictionary apps for just $1.99 / £1.19. That’s a potential saving of up to £10.80 on the full dictionary with audio app!

To find our apps, simply search for “Macmillan Dictionary” in the Apple App Store. To learn more about our dictionaries and dictionary apps, visit our brand-new website.

Interested in English pronunciation? Check out Sounds: The Pronunciation App FREE (for Apple and Android devices) – find out more here, or watch this video.

The vocabulary of geography

Next in a series of tips for teaching (about) green English.

The worksheet includes key vocabulary used in geography, including geographic features, natural disasters and natural resources. In addition to that, exercises help consolidate students’ knowledge of the terms.

Geography vocabulary and exercises

For further tips for teaching green English, see:
Tip 1: renewable energy (worksheet)
Tip 2: the greenhouse effect (animation)
Tip 3: the language of science (vocabulary)
Tip 4: greenwashing (dictation)

Dictation activity: greenwashing

The dictation activity called ‘Nature’ focuses on the practice of greenwashing. As well as asking students to listen to and transcribe a short text, the dictation encourages them to expand their vocabulary, asking them to explore some of the many new words that have entered the English language in recent years. The activity includes a downloadable audio file, script and teacher’s notes.

For tips for using dictations in the classroom, download this pdf, written by ELT author Philip Kerr.

For further tips for teaching green English, see:
Tip 1: renewable energy (worksheet)
Tip 2: the greenhouse effect (animation)
Tip 3: the language of science (vocabulary)
Tip 5: the vocabulary of geography (exercises)

The language of science

In this useful article, author Keith Kelly provides a list of typical language used in the area of science. His list includes adjectives, verbs, grammar patterns, phrases and discourse markers.

For further tips for teaching green English, see:
Tip 1: renewable energy (worksheet)
Tip 2: the greenhouse effect (animation)
Tip 4: greenwashing (dictation)
Tip 5: the vocabulary of geography (exercises)