ghoti

Maths and Reading Ability Same DNA Link Shown

So now that math and reading (and presumably language) are shown to be linked to the same group DNA how do we apply this knowledge to the teaching of language? Does developing math skills then improve language skills or vice versa? What implication does this have on content and language integrated learning (CLIL), content-base instruction…
Solution to problem with Japanese input in Apple Pages

Equipment used in this problem: iPad Air, Apple wireless keyboard (MC184J/B), Apple Pages app (2.2.1). This problem occurs when you are using an external keyboard like Apple’s wireless keyboard on an iPad to input Japanese text into Apple’s Pages. When zoomed at greater than the width of the entire page text alternatives for your input…
Skitch – Quick Review

Have you ever wanted to annotate an image to highlight something important and had to resort to low-tech techniques like using the default Paint program in Windows? Are you looking for a better alternative? Look no further. Skitch is the quick and easy way to add annotation to your images. Overview Skitch, by Evernote, is…
Keywords List – AntConc

The keywords list in AntConc is, as the name suggests, a tool to create a list of keywords. To do this your target corpus is compared to a reference corpus. The target and reference corpora do not need to be of the same size. The comparison is then done statistically. The statistics in AntConc used…
Zamurai Mobile Whiteboard – Short Review

Back in the 1990s I was fascinated with electronic whiteboards. These things work like ordinary whiteboards on which you would write then press a button to print the content of the whiteboard for copying and distribution. It was better than taking a photograph, print or nowadays digital. The problem back then and still now is…
Apple Wireless Keyboard and iPad Air – Hands-on test

The other day I made friends with someone who had a similar approach to technology as me. He had bought an Apple wireless keyboard to go with his iPad. As logic would dictate genuine Apple products should work seamlessly with their other products. But this was not the case. Soon after I bought my keyboard…
Man vs. X … The language of literature

Grant Snider has come up with another great comic summary of life. This time his attention is turned to literature and the concept of conflict within it at different stages of Western culture. Check out more of his work here.
The language of life

Life used to have four molecules known as G, T, C and A. Readers, now meet X and Y. Scientists have successfully created DNA which can carry the extra molecules and replicate itself. In other words the language of life has just gotten more complicated unnecessarily. Does life really need the extra pair of molecules?…
AntWordProfiler short review

I have been playing with Laurence Anthony’s AntWordProfiler for a bit now. It is a corpus linguistic tool to “profile” coverage of texts in terms of comprehensibility particularly for reading in a second language. To understand how it works one must understand its predecessor Range by Paul Nation. Paul Nation is a researcher in Vocabulary…
type-token ratio

The type-token ratio (or TTR) is used to compare two corpora in terms of lexical complexity. The formula is the number of types divided by the number of tokens. The closer to 1 the greater the complexity. The closer to 0 the greater the repetition of words. There is not a specific ratio which can…