Lingversity

12/13/2022

On Sunday, December 11, members of the community gathered in the Clarksburg Cottage, Clarksburg, MD, to attend a reading of selected poems by Alexander Blok, a famous Russian poet of the early 20th century. The first event of Lingversity’s December Evenings featured the linguist and poet Natalia Romanova, who read Blok’s poems in the original Russian.

Carefully selected poems were introduced by musical compositions that expressed the theme of each poem.

The program had two parts: one part included Blok’s dark poems, and the other part depicted his search for light. Audience found Blok’s poems full of vivid imagery and tinged with hope, and Romanova’s performance compelling and engaging.

One audience member said, “Listening to poetry can remind us that there is beauty and joy in language, that poets have insights worth paying attention to, and that there is a purpose in our struggles.”

Thank you all who attended the event! We look forward to seeing you at our next event soon.

To learn about upcoming events, please visit https://www.lingversity.com/resources

12/09/2022

* Are you learning a second language?
* Do you wonder how you could communicate more effectively in your second language at work?
* Do you need to know how to help your bilingual children succeed at school? Or
* Are you just curious about language learning?

Come to the talk and learn from an expert about different paths to language proficiency and strategies to be successful language learners and users.

https://facebook.com/events/s/paths-to-language-proficiency/1629391467636750/

http://wix.to/R3n8MPG

11/27/2018

How did we ever live without Google providing all kinds of information on the internet? Who now opens a paper dictionary when one can type in  any word into the...

05/26/2018

Something to think about.

https://www.facebook.com/NeuroNewsResearch/posts/1941516825867066

10/08/2017

We enjoyed a successful exhibition, where we had an opportunity to meet new people and learn about their expectations. Thank you, all, who stopped by to talk to us and learn about Lingversity. We have big plans for the future and look forward to working with you!

10/07/2017

Lingversity at the 2017 WATESOL.

09/06/2017

We are proud to be exhibiting at WATESOL 2017 in October and would love to meet you there!

Second-language users of English are bi/multilinguals with rich communication repertoires. Yet all too often their English is construed as deficient and their multilingual prowess is erased. In this talk, I reflect on what it means for multilinguals to be communicatively competent and suggest ways i...

03/07/2017

Researchers at the University of York have analyzed trends in British language over the past 50 years and have predicted that the next 50 years will see a homogenization of spoken English, due to the influence of multicultural English, development of new population centers, and the impact of technology in our lives.
For example, the fricative 'th,’ pronounced as [ð] or [θ], will be replaced by [d] and [f], which means that ‘this’ or ‘that’ will be pronounced as ‘dis’ and ‘dat', ‘thin’ will become ‘fin’, and ‘think’ will change to ‘fink.’ ‘W’ and ‘r,’ already similar for many southern English speakers, will collapse into one sound.

These and other changes seem to suggest the end of Received Pronunciation – aka 'the Queen's English' – the upper-class accent, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "the standard accent of English as spoken in the south of England." It also means that the broad variety of regional accents could be on the way out.

It's worth noting, though, that the study, commissioned by British bank HSBC launching voice biometrics, has not been peer-reviewed.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/sep/29/its-the-end-of-the-frog-and-toad-for-regional-slang-says-report

Sounds of 2066 report says ‘talking to machines and listening to Americans’ will kill off British accents and slang in the future

03/04/2017

Are there advantages to having a bilingual (or multilingual) brain? Yes! Listen to find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMmOLN5zBLY

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-speaking-multiple-languages-benefits-the-brain-mia-nacamulli It’s obvious that knowing more than one language...

01/30/2017

http://www.lingversity.com/single-post/2017/01/29/Reasons-for-learning-foreign-languages

According to a recent research report by the International Association of Language Centers (IALC) that compared current and future demand levels for each of 9 m...

01/17/2017

Exposure to input in a foreign language and practice alone do not generally push students to higher levels of proficiency because  many of the pragmatic and soc...