AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: English teacher Nina Weinstein explains some common idioms in American English. She likes teaching idioms in categories to help her students remember them. NINA WEINSTEIN: Often w...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: remembering a comedian who took a serious interest in language. George Carlin died of heart failure at a hospital in Santa Monica, California, on June twenty-second. RS: The stand...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: what do you call it when someone says one thing but means the opposite, trying to be funny or biting? RS: Are you being sarcastic? AA: Yes -- well, actually, no. I wasn't being sa...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is linguist Herb Stahlke to talk about rhythm in English speech. HERB STAHLKE: Learners of English really have to master the rhythms of English early, and the teaching has to be aimed at rhyt...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: expanding on reductions. When speakers compress a phrase like going to into gonna, or what do you into whaddaya, that's a reduction. We mentioned their importance when we talked l...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: word order and the mind. A new study suggests that people naturally gesture in the order of subject-object-verb, regardless of the rules of their spoken language. Susan Goldin-Mea...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: more of our discussion of gesture language. RS: We don't mean formal sign language taught to deaf people, but the way we use our hands either with spoken language or in place of i...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: how should a teacher handle controversial topics in the classroom? Rutgers University professor Barbara Lee gets asked that question all the time, as she recently did through an o...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: encouraging high school students to write about the issues they want the next U.S. president to address. RS: That is the aim right now of the National Writing Project, a federally...
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: we continue our discussion on an effort to improve writing in American schools. RS: Elyse Eidman-Aadahl is co-director of the federally-funded National Writing Project. ELYSE EIDM...
