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Re: OT-ish: txt - Could it replace Standard Written English?

From:Tristan <kesuari@...>
Date:Monday, March 10, 2003, 9:45
Roger Mills wrote:
> Well then, you were one of the beneficiaries (or not, there's still
> argument I think) of New Math. We had a discrete maths tutorial today (doing questions on blackboards all around the room, in groups because there wasn't enough chaulk to go round)... It seems calculators have replaced brains and I was one of the few people who could remember long multiplication, ironically because I'm too absent-minded so I kept losing my calculators and never forgot how to do it.
> A similar problem arises teaching US-- Anglophone in general??--
>students about elementary linguistics, especially phonetics/phonemics/ >phonology. It takes them a while to make the disconnect from spelling,
> and learn that "long e" as in meet is [i], "long i" as in bite is
> actually a diphthong [aI] and so on. My solution is to make singing compulsory. At the same time, make it seem like less of a 'girly' thing. Just make absolutely everyone in an area do it. And don't stop at the end of primary school. And have good music teachers. I reckon most 'normal' people (such as may exist) who know that [ai] is a diphthong learnt it because they've done singing and some stage in their life (you can't sing properly without understanding that long i and long a are made up of two sounds (unless they aren't in your dialect :P )). (On the other hand, the problem with this is female voices aren't as good for massed singing as guys IMHO. But maybe I'm biassed, I went to a boys-only school with compulsory singing...) Tristan.