Category: Literacy

Esperanto: A Humble Lingua Franca

6/1/2021

by Aleksandr Chebotarev

Because of my background in linguistics, people have often told me how great it would be if the whole world spoke one language, if everyone could understand each other without the blockage of language barriers. They say it as if they came up with the idea. I smile and nod, letting them believe they are the egalitarian genius they see themselves as. This idea is nothing new, and it’s been attempted before. Humanity just doesn’t want it. We’re too overpowered by our sense of “us vs. them.”

When people from around the world have tried to speak a unifying language that could end all language barriers, it was attacked time and time again until it was subdued by the language of business.

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A Writing Revolution in American Education and Culture

4/1/2021

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by Connor Buckmaster

Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash

For decades now, the study and practice of writing has been on a revolutionary roller coaster. Leaps in pedagogy surrounding college composition classes, translanguaging, and collaborative learning have changed the way college students today learn and produce writing. At the same time, the (dated) values of Standard American English, the five paragraph essay, and the thesis statement are still upheld in many pockets of American public schools. We wonder why Americans struggle to write, and there seems to be a host of answers: an inability to construct sentences, a fundamentally bad approach in teaching how to read, and a school culture which rewards surface learning and quick responses, viewing texts as inert information rather than an argument. The more and more we look, America seems to be in a literacy crisis.

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Esperanto: A Humble Lingua Franca

A Writing Revolution in American Education and Culture

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