“An educated man…is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself, and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.”
Alan Simpson on becoming president of Vassar College (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“relevant: An adjective usually attached to an activity or reading assignment to show that it has some relationship to students own lives. Relevance has become very important in modern education, on the assumption that students want to learn mostly about ideas, events, and processes that they can connect to their personal experiences. The belief that whatever is studied must relate directly to students’ own lives ignores the fact that students need extensive background knowledge on which to build new understandings. If students learn only what is directly connected to their own lives, their universe of learning will be severely limited and dependent on their family and community resources.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Lingua Franca: Frankish language: a hybrid language that serves as a common mode of discourse between groups or peoples speaking different languages, especially as a commercial or trade jargon; a useful makeshift lingo (formerly a language used in Mediterranean commerce).
‘The thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate.’ Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“substitution: A reading error made when an individual replaces the written word with a different word based on structural or semantic cues.
A structural substitution is when the reader guesses a word based on its visual structure. For example, a reader reads the word stipulate as stimulate because they look similar.
A semantic substitution occurs when a reader replaces a word that means the same thing. For example, a reader might add ‘Then they went to her house’ as ‘Then they went to her place,’ replacing house with place.
Substitution is common in the oral reading of all students and by itself should not be considered as evidence of a reading disability. Tracking reading errors through error analysis can help determine reading patterns and problems.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Elocution: The study and practice of oral delivery, including control of breath, voice, pronunciation, stance, and gesture (Has he taken elocution lessons?); the way in which someone speaks or reads aloud, especially in public (flawless elocution). An early meaning of the term was literary style as distinct from content, and relates to the Latin meaning of elocutio (‘speaking out’), one of the canons or departments of rhetoric. Elocution training in how to speak ‘properly’ (as in taking elocution lessons) was a feature of education, particularly for girls, in the 18th and 19th century. Shaw, who gave an extended dramatic treatment to elocution in Pygmalion (1912), added to his will in 1913 a clause giving some of the residue of his estate to ‘The substitution or a scientific training in phonetics for the makeshifts of so-called elocution lessons by actors and others who have hitherto prevailed in the teaching of oratory.””
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Characterization (noun): Portrayal or description so as to distinguish; the creation and representation of characters in fiction; delineation; the use in journalism of descriptive or categorical words as modifiers, sometimes irrelevantly (physical value judgments) and sometimes prejudicially (subtly moralistic or pejorative words). Adjective: characterizable; verb: characterize.
‘Characterization, too, can border on opinion, and should be excluded from the news columns. A paragraph about the President’s conference contained this sentence: “The ambiguity of his replies sent some men away convinced that the major policy change was indeed in prospect, but the White House later took pains to explain that this was not the case.” Strike out the words “the ambiguity of” and your retain the same meaning without the editorial flavor.’ Theodore Bernstein, Watch Your Language”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“visual perception disabilities: Students with visual perception disabilities have trouble making sense out of what they see, not because they have poor eyesight but because their brains process visual information differently.
Children with this problem have trouble organizing, recognizing, interpreting, or remembering visual images. This means that they will have trouble understanding the written and picture symbols they need in school—letters, words, numbers, math symbols, diagrams, maps, charts, and graphs.
Because this type of visual problem is subtle, it is often undiscovered until the child starts having problems in school. Visual perception problems include the ability to recognize images a person has seen before and attach meaning to them; to discriminate among similar images or words, and to separate significant features from background details; and to recognize the same symbol in different forms (understanding, for example, that the letter ‘D’ is the letter ‘D’ whether it is uppercase or lowercase, in different colors or fonts). Sequences are another important visual perception skill; a child with a visual sequencing problem may not understand the difference between the words ‘saw’ and ‘was.’
Students with visual perception problems are usually slow to learn letters and numbers, and often make mistakes, omissions, and reversals. They often have trouble with visual memory and visualization and may be extremely slow readers.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.”
William J. Bennett “Report on Condition of Elementary Schools” (1986)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Suggestopedia: A method of foreign-language instruction developed by Bulgarian psychologist Georgi Lozanov in the 1970s that uses the power of positive suggestion. Teachers trained in Suggestopedia’s techniques create a calm physical classroom environment that relaxes the students and lowers their affective filter, or resistance to learning. The teacher first introduces the words and grammar of the lesson, Then, during a concert session, students listen to the teacher read the lesson while Baroque music plays in the background. Other forms of art, such poetry, drama, and puppetry, are also employed to stimulate students’ perceptions. The students sing songs and play games, using what they have learned, and then interact with one another in the new language, without correction. The method is also referred to as desuggestopedia to reflect advances in its theoretical development.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
Here is a worksheet on differentiating between the adjectives fortuitous and fortunate. This is a full-page worksheet with ten modified cloze exercises that provide students an opportunity to use these words in a structured setting. You, however, can do with it as you wish, because like most things on Mark’s Text Terminal, this is a Microsoft Word document.
Confusing these two words remains one of the most common lapses in usage I see on a regular basis. Just the other day I received an email whose author used fortuitous when she meant fortunate. I suppose it’s the sound of these two words that makes them so easy to misuse. For the record, fortuitous means, simply, “occurring by chance.” Fortunate, on the other hand, means “bringing some good thing not foreseen as certain,” “receiving some unexpected good.” or, more simply, “lucky.” As the reading in this document points out, a car accident can be fortuitous in that it occurs by chance, but few people would characterize it as fortunate.
This is a contested area of usage. I’ll guess that if you looked up fortuitous in Garner’s Modern American Usage, Bryan Garner would tell you that the use of fortuitous to mean fortunate has gained widespread acceptance in the American vernacular. Nonetheless, sticklers continue to emphasize the distinction limned above. What do you think? More importantly, what do your students think? Should a sharp distinction between these words continue to be observed? That’s an essential question in usage, I submit: how do words maintain their narrow meanings and therefore, arguably, their integrity?
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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