This will be the last Free Resources message until Monday 16^th September: I’m heading off to Cres for a break https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cres

1. Spongebag not Washbag! is the title of the highly readable latest post by Carne Ross on his Gentle Anarchy blog https://carneross.substack.com/p/spongebag-not-washbag It’s all about his grandfather, Alan Strode Campbell Ross, who had at least two claims to fame: one, an important role in the breaking of World War 2 cyphers, still secret in part today; two, the invention, along with Nancy Mitford, of the once hugely influential categorisation of English as ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ (where ‘U’ = upper class and no prizes for which was to be preferred of the two).

If you register for a free JSTOR account https://www.jstor.org/ you can read Carne’s grandfather’s 1954 article, Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English, for yourself (and another 99 articles for free each month) https://www.jstor.org/stable/43344273?read-now=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Alan Ross’s article has some wonderfully confident footnotes, including “Frequently the only commentary needed is my own pronunciation of the relevant word (which may be taken as normal)” and “In any case, boarding-school is little used by U-speakers, for, to most of them, there is no other kind of school”.

2. One from OLDaily, How I Use “AI” by Nicholas Carlini  https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html No, I didn’t follow all (any!) of the coding/programming tasks that Carlini had AI do for him, but you certainly get a general sense of the power and potential of AI.

3. Learning a language? Four ways to smash through the dreaded ‘intermediate plateau’ is a piece from The Conversation by Jill Boggs of Swansea University about the impact on her own language learning (and her students’ language learning) of her discovery of Paul Nation’s teaching methodologyhttps://theconversation.com/learning-a-language-four-ways-to-smash-through-the-dreaded-intermediate-plateau-236648

He (Nation) suggests a balanced approach to language learning and it transformed my (Jill Boggs’s) entire perspective. He proposes that language education should be evenly divided among four critical strands:

1. Meaning-focused input

2. Meaning-focused output

3. Language-focused learning

4. Fluency practice

PDF of the Paul Nation piece that Jill refers to below.

4. A piece from SPIEGEL International about Brigadier Mbeirik Messoud and the unit of Méharistes (the Mauritanian National Guard) that he leads which suggests that not quite the whole world has lost the plot, Keeping the Peace on Camelback: Mauritania’s Secret to Stability https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/keeping-the-peace-on-camelback-mauritanias-secret-to-stability-a-223fc1f0-c4fe-4483-9815-d6040d659c91

5. And, finally, Chow Mein, a short story by Durga Karki, translated from Nepali by Sandesh Ghimirehttps://www.himalmag.com/culture/chow-mein-durga-karki-nepali-literature-translation-sandesh-ghimireI’ve just – thanks to John Drew – discovered Himal https://www.himalmag.com/ Highly recommended!

See you in September!