Do Actions Speak Louder than Words?
Our society is fast paced. We are all rushing from one place to the next, blowing our horn at slow drivers who may be singing songs in the car with their children or pointing out some interesting sights. We don't have time for that silliness today. But we try to say to ourselves that we will make time for fun tomorrow. It is time to take a few deep breaths and think about our actions and our words.
Have you ever really thought about the saying “Actions speak louder than words”? Think about it now. If you say one thing and act in an opposite way, will the words be ignored and just the actions remembered? I don’t think so.
“I can live for two months on a good compliment (夸奖)”, said Mark Twain. Children grow stronger when they feel appreciated and understood.
| A．The pen is more powerful than the sword. |
| B．Is it really reasonable to do something like that? |
| C．Do they display the attitude that we want to convey? |
| D．It is important to have your words match your actions. |
| E．Behavior is a mirror in which everyone shows his image. |
| F．Those words did lasting damage to you, the relationship or both. |
| G．Don’t be afraid to shower your child with encouraging words all day long. |
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【推荐1】Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent time there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers, small, tightly knit (联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.
Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalization and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant (占优势的) languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.
At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the America about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3,200, of which Papua New Cuinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world’s languages are spoken by fewer people than that.
Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (8 remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (2 or 3) or Wadjigu in Australia (1, with a question-mark); none of these seems to have much chance of survival.
1. What can we learn about language development from the passage?| A．Globalization has brought about more new languages. |
| B．Settling down makes people develop more kinds of languages. |
| C．Education is one of the reasons for some languages’ disappearance. |
| D．Around 1,000 languages only have a few elderly speakers left. |
| A．Not equal. | B．Not narrow. |
| C．Not limited. | D．Not good. |
| A．6,800. | B．2,400. |
| C．3,400. | D．1,200. |
| A．Human being has created a great number of languages. |
| B．Language disappearance leads to the extinction of some cultures. |
| C．Geography is one factor of language evolution. |
| D．Globalized events cause languages to be fewer. |
【推荐2】Jonathan Agnew recently described “unofficial interviews” as those where you agree that it’s “between you and I”. And a Times journalist wrote about someone who had “made Jenny and I feel so welcome”. They are both intelligent people with the ability to express ideas fluently and logically. And yet they wrote “I” where they meant “me”.
It’s happening more and more. We are scared of the mistake like “Terry and me went to the pub”. We’ve all been taught that it should be “Terry and I went to the pub”. Plus we’ve heard the Queen say “my husband and I” a lot. So we begin to use “and I” even when it should be “and me”.
But my point here is not to support the correct usage. It’s the opposite: I want to reject the idea that there’s such a thing as “correct” English at all. Language isn’t like maths, where you can show that two plus two is four. Language has no fundamental rights and wrongs, only conventions. You cannot definitively prove that any are “right” and others “wrong”.
Sometimes correct language sounds absurd. Look at Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) who came up with a new rule. Primary school children now have to be taught that “inverted commas” is right, while “speech marks” is wrong. You and I know that those terms are interchangeable. And the child who looks at those marks on the page can see that both make perfect sense. That’s because a primary school child is more intelligent than the Ofsted turkey who came up with this rule.
As the teacher who told me about the ludicrous rule pointed out, there is no doubt that in a few years’ time, the “incorrect” term will become the “correct” one. But the truly horrible thing about an education system like this is that it destroys children’s love of language. It tells them they have to worry about rules, instead of encouraging them to read and write for its own sake. Let them read for fun and they’ll absorb the rules — or conventions — anyway. Have them shaking in fear about English tests, and you’ll increase their insecurity about getting language “right”.
Then one day that insecurity will have them saying “and I” even though they mean “and me”.
1. Why do people use “and I” when it should be “and me” according to the text?| A．The Ofsted sets a rule. |
| B．“and I” is the correct English. |
| C．The Queen makes a similar mistake. |
| D．People feel insecure about using “and me”. |
| A．Rules benefit children’s language learning. |
| B．Language learning is more complicated than maths. |
| C．Language is based on commonly accepted rules. |
| D．A primary school child is smarter than the Ofsted. |
| A．Influential. | B．Particular. |
| C．Conventional. | D．Ridiculous. |
| A．Critical. | B．Objective. |
| C．Favourable. | D．Indifferent. |
【推荐3】A crucial period for learning the rules and structure of a language lasts up to around age 17 or 18, say psychologist Joshua Hartshorne of MIT and his colleagues.
Previous research had suggested that grammar-learning ability developed in early childhood before hitting a dead end around age 5. However, Hartshorne’s team reports online in Cognition that people who started learning English as a second language in an English-speaking country by age 10 to 12 ultimately mastered the new tongue as well as folks who had learned English and another language at the same time from birth. Both groups, however, fell somewhat short of the grammatical fluency displayed by English-only speakers. After ages 10 to 12, new-to-English learners reached lower levels of fluency than those who started learning English at younger ages because time ran out when their grammar-absorbing ability fell starting around age 17.
Aiming for a sample of tens of thousands of volunteers, Hartshorne began by contacting friends on Facebook to take an online English grammar quiz, which used a person’s responses to guess his or her native language and dialect (方言) of English. Then volunteers filled out a questionnaire asking where they had lived, languages they had spoken from birth, the age at which they began learning English and the number of years they had lived in an English-speaking country.
In the end, the researchers analyzed responses of 669,498 native and nonnative English speakers. Statistical calculations focused on estimating at what ages people with varying amounts of experience peaking English reached peak grammar ability.
Researchers who study language learning regard the new study as fascinating, but exploratory. According to psycholinguist David Barner of the University of California, San Diego, Hartshorne’s team can’t yet say that language skill develops along a single timeline. Different elements of grammar, such as using correct word order or subjects and verbs that agree with one another, might be learned at different rates, Barner says. It’s also unclear whether the responses of volunteers to an online, 132-item grammar test reflect how well of poorly they actually speak English, he says.
What’s more, language learning involves more than a crucial period for acquiring grammar, cautions linguist David Birdsong of the University of Texas at Austin. For instance, growing up speaking two languages at once puts still poorly understood burdens on the ability to grasp grammar, he says.
In the new study, people who were bilinguals from birth fell short of peak English grammar scores achieved by English-only speakers. That’s consistent with evidence that bilinguals cannot easily turn off one language while speaking another, Birdsong says. Interactions between tongues spoken by one person may slightly depress how much can be learned about both languages, even if bilingual communication still reaches high levels, he suggests.
1. Hartshorne and his colleagues found that____ .| A．one reaches a higher level of fluency at age 10 |
| B．one learns a second language fastest at about age 12 |
| C．one gets a good grasp of English grammar before age 5 |
| D．one’s ability to master grammar declines at around age17 |
| A．social media |
| B．experiments in the lab |
| C．literature review |
| D．face-to-face interviews |
| A．language skill develops along a single timeline |
| B．online volunteers do not cover a wide enough range |
| C．different grammar items may be acquired at different paces |
| D．the quiz in the new study does not include enough questions |
| A．They can achieve a perfect grammar score. |
| B．Grammar learning is the biggest burden for them. |
| C．They are able to make a swift shift between languages. |
| D．Speaking two languages affects their language acquisition. |
