Humor4u

Traditional lexically-enriched end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year By Anthony Quintano  via Flickr [ CC BY 2.0 ] In keeping with the tradition started when this blog was born (4 years ago today), here is my end-of-year news quiz.  As usual, it's available in two levels (advanced and intermediate) and comes complete with a 9-page teachers guide with ideas on how the quiz can be used in class. A word of reminder: the quiz is not meant to test your students' general knowledge but to expand their vocabulary. Over the years I've begun to feel that every year my quiz contains the same language such as cause controversy, got into hot water, battle with drug addiction, came to an abrupt end  to describe politicians' faux pas and celebrity deaths that occur with unwavering regularity every year. So this year, a slew of new lexical chunks make their debut in the quiz: quirky sense of humour , eligible bachelor and ruffle feathers to name but a few .  See f

Photo by Sudhamshu Hebbar on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] An article written by the British linguist Vyvyan Evans entitled “Language Instinct is a Myth” which I shared on Twitter the other day triggered a lively discussion with my colleagues . One of the questions raised on Twitter was how come the idea that we are born with a built-in language capacity (aka the innateness hypothesis ) has prevailed for so long and Chomsky, its main promoter, is part of all Master's in TESOL programmes if the theory has largely been discredited (Scott Thornbury asks the same question on his in X is for X-bar Theory ). This was indeed the case on my MA programme: Behaviorism and Chomsky took up a large part of two of my Psycholinguistics courses while such a fascinating, more recent theory as Connectionism received scant or almost no attention. Now that I am on the giving end, i.e. giving rather than listening to lectures, I was also surprised at the lack of references to Connectionism in an SLA course syll

Sounds great, doesn't it? Getting clinical trial results quickly has so much going for it. Information sooner! More affordable trials! Substituting outcomes that can take years, or even decades, to emerge, with ones you can measure much earlier, makes clinical research much simpler. This kind of substitute outcome is called a surrogate (or intermediate) endpoint or outcome. Surrogates are often biomarkers - biological signs of disease or a risk factor of disease, like cholesterol in the blood. They are used in clinical care to test for, or keep track of, signs of emerging or progressing disease. Sometimes, like cholesterol, they're the target of treatment. The problem is, these kinds of substitute measures aren't always reliable. And sometimes we find that out in the hardest possible way. The risk was recognized as soon as the current methodology of clinical trials was being developed in the 1950s. A famous statistician who was key to that process, Austin Bradford-Hill , pu