Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

DICTIONARY DEEP DIVE Join David Voisin on a rich, and sometimes surprising journey through the points at which literacy, language and vocabulary intersect... SAME ROOT, DIFFERENTWORDS PARDON MY FRENCH Mymother was born in Champagne. No, that’s not some avant-garde birthing method – I refer, of course, to the French region where the famous sparkling drink is made. The ‘appellation contrôlée’ (controlled naming) prevents any drink not originally hailing from the eponymic geographical area from adopting the name. The same applies to cognac. In French, it goes under the label ‘Eau de Vie’ (water of life) – which, interestingly, is also the meaning of ‘whisky’, if one traces that word’s etymological roots back to the Celtic language. ‘Bordeaux’,meanwhile, shares its name with a French city located on the Atlantic coast, which literally means ‘Waterside’. LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS Language is evidently about meaning, but limiting it to sheer semantics is to underestimate its potency. If words have the power tomesmerise us, it’s because language is about muchmore than conveying amessage; it’s also about aesthetics . In this sense, you could argue that it’s almost likemusic – so why do certain structures ‘sound’ right? Elegant language appeals to our senses because it follows certain structural and cognitive principles.Just the addition or omission of an adjective or adverb can affect the pace of a sentence. Interestingly, numbersmatter when it comes to language,with the number three often at the centre of eloquent constructions. This stems fromthe fact that three is a small number, and thus relatively harmless in terms of cognitive load – but also because of the symmetrical word formations it allows us to construct. It helps the speaker generate both beauty and efficiency. It’s why famous leaders are fond of using rhetorical devices such as the tricolon (see Julias Caesar’s ‘Veni Vidi Vici’ ), epizeuxis (Tony Blair’s 1996 ‘Education, education, education’ speech) and anaphora (Obama’s 2008 exhortation of ‘Yes,we can’ ).These can sometimes be combined, as with Lincoln’smemorable ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ in his GettysburgAddress (which employs both tricolon and anaphora). Too often,we can dichotomise language and mathematics – yet the Greeks taught us both geometry and rhetorics for a reason... TEACHING TIP: ACRONYMS Any field of language is suffusedwith acronyms, and education is no exception.We’ve all heard of SPaG, ERIC, DEAR et al ., and as mnemonics – named afterMnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory – acronyms have their place. But do we sometimes go overboard? Possibly.Those of amore cynical inclinationmight even see the acronymas an Annoyingly Cringe Rhetorical Operation Numbing YourMind, but the real problem is when acronymsmislead students. I recently saw a social media post urging teachers to introduce a small number of words that students could use to embellish and improve their language, grouped together as acronyms – ‘AMAZE’ and ‘IMPRESS’ being two examples.The definitions and examples given for each word groupwere highly restrictive, however, and contained some egregiousmistakes.One suggested that the verb ‘regress’ could be used as a synonym for ‘deteriorate’. The obvious issue here can be neatly illustratedvia an episode of the sitcom Friends .The characterJoey is attempting towrite a love letter to someone he wants to impress, but he alas doesn’t possessmuch in theway of linguistic knowledge or flair.He resorts to using a thesaurus, and ends up producing a hilarious cacophony of over-complicatedwords thatmake little sense.The key lesson is that there’s no such thing as an ‘impressiveword’ – at least not in isolation.Vocabulary instruction is about word depth , not word hierarchy . Accuracy and beauty are sometimes best achieved through simplicity and parsimony. David Voisin is a head of MFL A trans gres sion refers to a move across or beyond conventions When we di gress , we’re moving away from the topic at hand Making pro gress means ‘moving forward’. 11 teachwire.net/secondary