Thursday, May 5, 2011
Singing competition in English Week
all the pictures above are taken in English Week singing competition activity at SMKSP 2011..
Thursday, April 21, 2011
If We Taught English the Way We Teach Mathematics...
Imagine that your only contact with "English" as a subject was through classes in school. Suppose that those classes, from elementary school right through to high school, amounted to nothing more than reading dictionaries, getting drilled in spelling and formal grammatical construction, and memorizing vast vocabulary lists -- you never read a novel, nor a poem; never had contact with anything beyond the pedantic complexity of English spelling and formal grammar, and precise definitions for an endless array of words. You would probably hate the subject.
You might come to wonder what the point of learning English was. In response perhaps the teachers and education system might decide that, to help make English relevant to students, they need to introduce more "Applied English". This means teaching English students with examples from "real life" (for varying degrees of "real") where English skills are important, like how to read a contract and locate the superfluous comma. Maybe (in an effort by the teachers to be "trendy") you'll get lessons on formal diary composition so you can better update your MySpace page. All of that, of course, will be taught using a formulaic cookbook approach based on templates, with no effort to consider underlying principles or the larger picture. Locating the superfluous comma will be a matter of systematically identifying subjects, objects, and verbs and grouping them into clauses until the extra comma has been caught. Your diary will be constructed from a formal template that leaves a few blanks for you to fill in. Perhaps you might also get a few tasks that are just the same old drills, just with a few mentions of "real world" things to make them "Applied": "Here is an advertisement for carpets. How many adjectives does it contain?".
In such a world it wouldn't be hard to imagine lots of people developing "English anxiety", and most people having a general underlying dislike for the subject. Many people would simply avoid reading books because of the bad associations with English class in school. With so few people taking a real interest in the subject, teachers who were truly passionate about English would become few and far between. The result, naturally, would be teachers who had little real interest in the subject simply following the drilling procedures outlined in the textbooks they were provided; the cycle would repeat again, with students even worse off this time.
And yet this is very much how mathematics tends to be taught in our schools today. There is a great focus on the minutiae of the subject, and almost no effort to help students grasp the bigger picture of why the subject might be interesting, and what it can say about us, and about the world. Mathematics has become hopelessly detail oriented. There is more to mathematics than mindlessly learning formulas and recipes for solving problems. And just like our imaginary example, the response to students lack of interest in mathematics has only served to make the problem worse. The "applications" and examples of using the mathematics in the "real world" are hopelessly contrived at best, and completely artificial at worst, and still keep a laser like focus on formulas and memorizing methods without ever understanding why they work.
Of course the opposite situation, with no focus on details, can be just as bad. Indeed, that is where English instruction finds itself today, with students never learning the spelling, formal grammar, and vocabulary needed to decently express the grand big picture ideas they are encouraged to explore. What is needed is a middle ground. Certainly being fluent in the basic skills of mathematics is necessary, just as having a solid grounding in spelling and grammar is necessary. What is lacking in mathematics instruction is any discussion of what mathematics is, and why mathematics works as well as it does.
The discovery and development of mathematics is one of the great achievements of mankind -- it provides the foundation upon which almost of all modern science and technology rests. This is because mathematics, as the art of abstraction, provides us the with ability to make simple statements that have incredibly broad application. For example, the reason that numbers and arithmetic are so unreasonably effective is that they describe a single simple property that every possible collection possesses, and a set of rules that are unchanged regardless of the specific nature of the collections involved. No matter what collection you consider, abstract or concrete, it has a number that describes its size; no matter what type of objects your collections are made up of, the results of arithmetic operations will always describe the resulting collection accurately. Thus the simple statement that 2 + 3 = 5 is a statement that describes the behaviour of every possible collection of 2 objects, andevery possible collection of 3 objects. Algebra can be viewed the same way, except that instead of abstracting over collections we are abstracting over numbers: elementary algebra is the combination of objects that represent any possible number (as numbers represent any possible collection with the given quantity), and the set of arithmetic rules for which all numbers behave identically. Numbers let us speak about all possible collections, and algebra lets us speak about all possible numbers. Each layer of abstraction allows us to use an ever broader brush with which to paint our vision of the world.
If you climb up those layers of abstraction you can use that broad brush to paint beautiful pictures -- the vast scope of the language that mathematics gives you allows simple statements to draw together and connect the unruly diversity of the world. A good mathematical theorem can be like a succinct poem; but only if the reader has the context to see the rich connections that the theorem lays bare. Without the opportunity to step back and see the forest for the trees, to see the broad landscape that the abstract nature of mathematics allows us to address, it is rare for people to see the elegance of mathematical statements. By failing to address how mathematics works, how it speaks broadly about the world, and what it means, we hobble children's ability to appreciate mathematics -- how can they appreciate something when they never learn what it is? The formulas and manipulations children learn, while a necessary part of mathematics, are ultimately just the mechanics of the subject; equally important is why those mechanics are valuable, not just in terms of what they can do, but in terms of why they can do so much.
So why is it that this broader view is so rarely taught? There are, of course, many reasons, and it is not worth trying to discuss them all here. Instead I will point to one reason, for which clear remedies to exist, and immediate action could be taken. That reason is, simply, that far too many people who teach mathematics are unaware of the this broader view themselves. It is unfortunately the case that it is only at the upper levels of education, such as university, that any broader conception about mathematics becomes apparent. Since it is rare for people going into elementary school teaching to take any university level mathematics, the vast majority of elementary teachers -- the math teachers for all our children in their early years -- have little real appreciation of mathematics. They teach the specific trees outlined in textbooks, with no real idea of forest. A simple but effective measure that could be taken is to provide stronger incentives and encouragement for prospective elementary school teachers to take extra math; whether it takes the form of courses, or math clubs, doesn't matter, the aim is to get teachers more involved and better exposed to mathematics in general so that they can become familiar with the richer world beyond the specific formulas and algorithms. This exact approach was tried in Finland as part of their LUMA project starting in 1992. As a result the number of teachers graduating with higher level had increased dramatically by 1999. And the results are also clear: Finland finished first, showing continued improvement in mathematics and science, in the 2003 PISA survey of the reading, math, and science skills of 15-year-olds in OECD countries (Finland finished second, just behind Hong Kong, in the mathematics section). Finland has continued to do extremely well in other more recent (though less major) studies.
Whether you view mathematics as an important subject or not, it is hard to deny that, currently, it is being taught poorly in many countries around the world. With such scope for improvement, and clear examples such as Finland showing the way, isn't it time that we took at least some of the obvious steps toward improving the quality of mathematics education?
sources: taken from here
In such a world it wouldn't be hard to imagine lots of people developing "English anxiety", and most people having a general underlying dislike for the subject. Many people would simply avoid reading books because of the bad associations with English class in school. With so few people taking a real interest in the subject, teachers who were truly passionate about English would become few and far between. The result, naturally, would be teachers who had little real interest in the subject simply following the drilling procedures outlined in the textbooks they were provided; the cycle would repeat again, with students even worse off this time.
And yet this is very much how mathematics tends to be taught in our schools today. There is a great focus on the minutiae of the subject, and almost no effort to help students grasp the bigger picture of why the subject might be interesting, and what it can say about us, and about the world. Mathematics has become hopelessly detail oriented. There is more to mathematics than mindlessly learning formulas and recipes for solving problems. And just like our imaginary example, the response to students lack of interest in mathematics has only served to make the problem worse. The "applications" and examples of using the mathematics in the "real world" are hopelessly contrived at best, and completely artificial at worst, and still keep a laser like focus on formulas and memorizing methods without ever understanding why they work.
Of course the opposite situation, with no focus on details, can be just as bad. Indeed, that is where English instruction finds itself today, with students never learning the spelling, formal grammar, and vocabulary needed to decently express the grand big picture ideas they are encouraged to explore. What is needed is a middle ground. Certainly being fluent in the basic skills of mathematics is necessary, just as having a solid grounding in spelling and grammar is necessary. What is lacking in mathematics instruction is any discussion of what mathematics is, and why mathematics works as well as it does.
The discovery and development of mathematics is one of the great achievements of mankind -- it provides the foundation upon which almost of all modern science and technology rests. This is because mathematics, as the art of abstraction, provides us the with ability to make simple statements that have incredibly broad application. For example, the reason that numbers and arithmetic are so unreasonably effective is that they describe a single simple property that every possible collection possesses, and a set of rules that are unchanged regardless of the specific nature of the collections involved. No matter what collection you consider, abstract or concrete, it has a number that describes its size; no matter what type of objects your collections are made up of, the results of arithmetic operations will always describe the resulting collection accurately. Thus the simple statement that 2 + 3 = 5 is a statement that describes the behaviour of every possible collection of 2 objects, andevery possible collection of 3 objects. Algebra can be viewed the same way, except that instead of abstracting over collections we are abstracting over numbers: elementary algebra is the combination of objects that represent any possible number (as numbers represent any possible collection with the given quantity), and the set of arithmetic rules for which all numbers behave identically. Numbers let us speak about all possible collections, and algebra lets us speak about all possible numbers. Each layer of abstraction allows us to use an ever broader brush with which to paint our vision of the world.
If you climb up those layers of abstraction you can use that broad brush to paint beautiful pictures -- the vast scope of the language that mathematics gives you allows simple statements to draw together and connect the unruly diversity of the world. A good mathematical theorem can be like a succinct poem; but only if the reader has the context to see the rich connections that the theorem lays bare. Without the opportunity to step back and see the forest for the trees, to see the broad landscape that the abstract nature of mathematics allows us to address, it is rare for people to see the elegance of mathematical statements. By failing to address how mathematics works, how it speaks broadly about the world, and what it means, we hobble children's ability to appreciate mathematics -- how can they appreciate something when they never learn what it is? The formulas and manipulations children learn, while a necessary part of mathematics, are ultimately just the mechanics of the subject; equally important is why those mechanics are valuable, not just in terms of what they can do, but in terms of why they can do so much.
So why is it that this broader view is so rarely taught? There are, of course, many reasons, and it is not worth trying to discuss them all here. Instead I will point to one reason, for which clear remedies to exist, and immediate action could be taken. That reason is, simply, that far too many people who teach mathematics are unaware of the this broader view themselves. It is unfortunately the case that it is only at the upper levels of education, such as university, that any broader conception about mathematics becomes apparent. Since it is rare for people going into elementary school teaching to take any university level mathematics, the vast majority of elementary teachers -- the math teachers for all our children in their early years -- have little real appreciation of mathematics. They teach the specific trees outlined in textbooks, with no real idea of forest. A simple but effective measure that could be taken is to provide stronger incentives and encouragement for prospective elementary school teachers to take extra math; whether it takes the form of courses, or math clubs, doesn't matter, the aim is to get teachers more involved and better exposed to mathematics in general so that they can become familiar with the richer world beyond the specific formulas and algorithms. This exact approach was tried in Finland as part of their LUMA project starting in 1992. As a result the number of teachers graduating with higher level had increased dramatically by 1999. And the results are also clear: Finland finished first, showing continued improvement in mathematics and science, in the 2003 PISA survey of the reading, math, and science skills of 15-year-olds in OECD countries (Finland finished second, just behind Hong Kong, in the mathematics section). Finland has continued to do extremely well in other more recent (though less major) studies.
Whether you view mathematics as an important subject or not, it is hard to deny that, currently, it is being taught poorly in many countries around the world. With such scope for improvement, and clear examples such as Finland showing the way, isn't it time that we took at least some of the obvious steps toward improving the quality of mathematics education?
sources: taken from here
Monday, February 14, 2011
Spelling Problems in English
Spelling words in English is challenging work. As a matter of fact, many native speakers of English have problems with spelling correctly. One of the main reasons for this is that many, many English words are NOT spelled as they are spoken. This difference between pronunciation and spelling causes a lot of confusion. The combination "ough" provides an excellent example:
Tough - pronounced - tuf (the 'u' sounding as in 'cup')
Through - pronounced - throo
Dough - pronounced - doe (long 'o')
Bought - pronounced - bawt
It's enough to make anyone crazy!!
This feature provides a guide to the most common problems when spelling words in English.
Swallowed Syllables - Three Syllables Pronounced as Two Syllables
Aspirin - pronounced - asprin
Different - pronounced - diffrent
Every - pronounced - evry
Swallowed Syllables - Four Syllables Pronounced as Three Syllables
Comfortable - pronounced - comftable
Temperature - pronounced - temprature
Vegetable - pronounced - vegtable
Homophones - Words That Sound the Same
two, to, too - pronounced - too
knew, new - pronounced - niew
through, threw - pronounced - throo
not, knot, naught - pronounced - not
Same Sounds - Different Spellings
'Eh' as in 'Let'
let
bread
said
'Ai' as in 'I'
I
sigh
buy
either
The following letters are silent when pronounced.
D - sandwich, Wednesday
G - sign, foreign
GH - daughter, light, right
H - why, honest, hour
K - know, knight, knob
L - should, walk, half
P - cupboard, psychology
S - island
T - whistle, listen, fasten
U - guess, guitar
W - who, write, wrong
Unusual Letter Combinations
GH = 'F'
cough, laugh, enough, rough
CH = 'K'
chemistry, headache, Christmas, stomach
EA = 'EH'
breakfast, head, bread, instead
EA = 'EI'
steak, break
EA = 'EE'
weak, streak
OU = 'UH' country, double, enough
Words Differentiations
Another vs The other another - another thing or person means an additional thing or person of the same type as one that already exists. The other - the other thing or person means the only remaining thing or person except the existing one. * Have another piece of cake. * Please fetch another cup for me. * That's quite another matter. * Both my uncles are abroad, one in Paris and the other in New York. * One of them is yours; the other is mine. When we are given two options, we say one or the other. When we are given more than two options, we say one or another. |
Anyway vs Any way anyway - ( in any case ) ( at any rate ) * Anyway, we can try. * " I can give you a lift if you wait ". No, I'll walk. Thanks, anyway. * I will not change my mind, anyway. any way - any possible method * If there is any way in which you can help me tide over the difficulties, let me know. * He could not find the way to the village in any way. * I cannot manage it any way. |
Asleep vs Sleeping asleep - someone who is asleep is sleeping. Asleep is adj being placed in front of the verb to be. It cannot be used before a noun. * Looking at the asleep baby. ( wrong ) * Looking at the sleeping baby. ( right ) sleeping - ( present participle of sleep ) Sleeping is adj that precedes a noun such as sleeping baby etc. While it is used after the verb to be, it is functioning as a verb. * Who is that sleeping man ? * Keep an eye on the sleeping baby. * Let sleeping dogs lie. |
accept vs except accept - is a verb * We accept your apology. * Do you accept credit cards? except - is a preposition. * All of us failed the test except John. * The museum is open daily except Mondays. |
cross vs across across - is a preposition * I want to go across the road. * They're building a new bridge across the river. cross - is a verb * I want to cross the road. * Look both ways before you cross over |
already vs all ready already - means ' before the time specified '. * We had already prepared lunch by noon. * The concert had already begun by the time we arrived. all ready - means ' completely prepared '. * She is all ready to go. * We are all ready to study English. |
effect vs affect affect - is a verb; it means ' to influence '. * Smoking affects your health * It's a disease which affects mainly older people. effect - may be a verb or a noun. The verb effect means ' to cause to happen'. The noun effect means ' the result '. * What are the effects of pollution ? * The radiation leak has had a disastrous effect on the environment |
beside vs besides beside - means ' next to '. * May I sit beside you ? * Our school was built right beside a river. besides - means ' in addition to '. * Besides tennis, he is good at football. * Do you play any other sports besides football and basketball? |
boring vs bored bored - is used to describe how we feel * Staying at home all day makes me feel so bored. * He was getting bored with the same thing every day. boring - is used to describe the person or thing that makes us feel bored. * The film was really boring. * She finds opera boring. |
compliment vs complement compliment - is to praise. * He complimented me for helping the poor family. * I must compliment you on your handling of a very difficult situation. complement - is to go well with another thing. * The necklace complements the suit. * The music complements her voice perfectly |
elder vs older elder - is used to compare the ages of people within a family. * Let me introduce you to my elder sister. * You should listen to the advice of your elders. older - is used to show the difference in years. * Carlos is a year older than Shabby * He's a couple of years older than me |
a few vs few few - means ' not many ' * Few people live to a hundred years old. * Few things in this world give me more pleasure than a long bath a few - means ' some '. * You will have to wait a few minutes. * There are a few cakes left over from the party |
little vs a little little - means ' not much ' * He cannot help you because he has little knowledge of the subject. * There's so little choice a little - means ' some '. * If you add a little salt to the soup it will taste better. * He gave a little smile. |
Altogether vs All together All together - Used of a group whose members acted or were acted upon collectively * At the class reunion, we sang the college song all together. * The books lay all together in a heap. Altogether - Entirely, with all included or counted, with everything considered * The work is altogether unnecessary. * It was not altogether her fault. |
in the end vs at the end At the end - at the time when something ends. * I'm going away at the end of January. * At the end of the concert, there was great applause. In the end - finally * He got more and more angry. In the end he just walked out of the room. * Jim couldn't decide where to go for his holidays. He didn't go anywhere in the end. |
because vs because of because - is a conjunction; it is followed by a clause. * I took a taxi because I was late. * We can't go to Julia's party because we're going away that weekend. because of - is a preposition; it is followed by a noun or noun phrase. * She failed the examination because of her laziness. * The train was delayed because of bad weather. |
bring vs take bring - used for a movement from a further to a nearer place * Bring your book to me. * If you come to my house tomorrow, bring your friends with you. take - used for a movement from a nearer to a further place * He often takes his children to the beach. * You can take my calculator with you, but you must bring it back when you have finished with it. |
cloth vs clothes cloth - material used for making clothes; a piece of garment * He wiped up the mess with an old cloth. * Get a cloth and wipe the table, please. clothes - garments worn on the body * His clothes are always beautifully ironed and so he looks very smart. * It's time you bought some new clothes. You look very untidy these days. |
character vs characteristic character - moral nature; combination of qualities which distinguishes a person, place or thing * London has a character of its own. * In searching for a life partner, we must look for someone of good character. characteristic - a quality, a trait * His kindness is one of his most pleasing characteristics. * One of the most important characteristics of a good student is diligence. * His one negative characteristic was his very hot temper. |
dissatisfied vs unsatisfied dissatisfied - not satisfied with the quality of something * I am dissatisfied with the quality of your work. * We were very dissatisfied with the hotel so we complained to the manager * I feel very dissatisfied with my new car. It isn't really going well at all unsatisfied - not satisfied with the quantity of something * The demand for Volvo in the U.K. is still unsatisfied. * After two plates of rice and curry, his appetite was still unsatisfied |
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