[TED.COM] by Patricia Kuhl "The linguistic genius of babies"

 summary

The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. After puberty, we fall off the map. No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way. Patricia Kuhl works in her lab that focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language. When babies are  listening, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear, and those distributions grow. And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. The babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are, but we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development. When monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate. In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives.

[Ted.com] by Patricia Ryan "Don’t insist on English "

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Patricia Ryan as the speaker who are living and teaching in Gulf for over 30 years  talks about language loss and globalization of English. She tells about her friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. Her friend decided to make them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary, but it was her friend who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. Today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. A language dies every 14 days. Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. The speaker along with her friend  were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education, and  the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth.

Patricia tells a story about two English scientists. They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. But they couldn't get the results they wanted. They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. So bingo, problem solved. If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more.

In short, she talks that people who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. Let us celebrate diversity.Mind your language. Use it to spread great ideas.

[TED.COM] by John McWhorter "Texting is killing language".

 summary ted talk

John McWhorter talks about texting is killing language. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability. Language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. Writing is something that came along much later. Writing has certain advantages when you write, because it's a conscious process, and you can look backwards. Casual speech is something quite different. Speech is much looser, more telegraphic, and much less reflective. It is very different from writing.

The speaker tells that texting involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense. For  example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud."  theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is much subtler. Another example is "slash." Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session." That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.

John concludes that texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writingthat young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire.

[TED.COM] by Diana Laufenberg "How to learn from the mistake"

 summary ted.com

Diana Laufenberg tells the audiences about her experience in teaching in some schools. Right about the time that the Internet gets going as an educational tool, she took off from Wisconsin and move to Kansas. She teaches a subject about American Government. In the first year, kids in the 12th grade not exactly all that enthusiastic about the American government system. The second year, she changes her tactic. She puts in front of them an authentic experience that allowed them to learn for themselves. She didn't tell them what to do or how to do it. she posed a problem in front of them, which was to put on an election forum for their own community.

From Kansas, she moved on to Arizona. She taught in Flagstaff about geography. She asked the students to identify someone in their own life and produce a short movie about it, and nobody really knew how to make these short movies on the computer. Next, teaching Science Leadership Academy in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. The students have to bring in  laptops with them everyday and take  them home to access the information to produce these info-graphics as a result of a unit that they decided to do at the end of the year responding to the oil spill. They were a little uncomfortable with it, because they had never done this before, and they didn't know exactly how to do it. But she gave them the room to just do the thing, go create, go figure it out to see what they can do. And the student that persistently turns out the best visual product did not disappoint. This was done in like two or three days. And this is the work of the student that consistently did it.

The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark. And everything that everybody is talking about today isn't possible if we keep having an educational system that does not value these qualities, because we won't get there with a standardized test, and we won't get there with a culture of one right answer. We know how to do this better, and it's time to do better.

Ted.com by Jamila Lyiscoot

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Jamila lyiscottis is an articulate woman. In her talk, she tells about how she deliver a message in three ways to speak English when talking at home with her family, at school with her teacher/ lecturer, and with her friends as she is an articulate woman. For example, when her professor asks a question, her answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion,there’s no misdirected intention pay attention, it cause she is “articulate”. When her father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?”, her articulate answer never goes amiss, she says “father, this is the impending problem at hand”. But who controls articulation? Because the English language is a multifaceted oration subject to indefinite transformation. Jamila tells  to the audiences that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British. She is a tri-lingual orator. Sometimes she is consistent with her language, then switch it up so I don’t bore later. Sometimes she fight back two tongues, while she use the other one in the classroom. In short, her explanation means that we can speak English in the way that we want.

[Ted.com] by Shaolan Hsueh

Summary

Shaolan Hsueh is one of the speakers  of ted talks, she said about …

She has learnt about how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence of Chinese characters since her age of five. In her speaking, she told to the audiences about eight characters that are the basic ideas, which called characters radicals.

Below the following picture of the characters:

First character means that it is fire. Next symbol means that tree. Next, the sun, the moon, a person, mouth, the door and mountain.

They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. From the each characters,  Shaolan explain more detail to audiences about how to make these characters to have a large meaning.

Summary ted by christine Sun Kim "The Enchanting Music of Sign Language"

The Enchanting Music of Sign Language

The speaker says about the enchanting music of sign language. The speaker was born deaf, and she was taught to believe that sound was not a part of her life, but now she realize that sound was very much a part of her life. She learns about American sign language (ASL). She found out the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical not cannot be fully captured and expressed on paper. It has same holds true for a concept in ASL. They're both highly spatial and highly inflected — meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.

She shared about a piano metaphor, to have the audiences a better understanding of how ASL works. So, envision a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano — such as facial expression, body movement,speed, hand shape and so on, as you play the piano — English is a linear language, as if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord — all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneouslyto express a clear concept or idea in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch, tone and volume.In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical parameters, you can express different ideas.

She also told about how ASL is alive and thriving in her speaking, just like music is. However, in this day and age, we live in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency — without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music.