2 . Phonics, which involves sounding out words syllable (音节) by syllable, is the best way to teach children to read. But in many classrooms, this can be a dirty word. So much so that some teachers have had to take phonics teaching materials secretly into the classroom. Most American children are taught to read in a way that study after study has found to be wrong.

The consequences of this are striking. Less than half of all American adults were efficient readers in 2017. American fourth graders rank 15th on the Progress in International Literacy Study, an international exam.

America is stuck in a debate about teaching children to read that has been going on for decades. Some advocate teaching symbol sound relationships (the sound k can be spelled as c, k, ck, or ch) known as phonics Others support an immersive approach (using pictures of cat to learn the word cat), known as “whole language”. Most teachers today, almost three out of four according to a survey by EdWeek Research Centre in 2019, use a mix of the two methods called “balanced literacy”.

“A little phonics is far from enough.” says Tenette Smith, executive director of elementary education and reding at Mississippi’s education department. “It has to be systematic and explicitly taught.”

Mississippi, often behind in social policy, has set an example here. In a state once blamed for its low reading scores, the Mississippi state legislature passed new literacy standards in 2013.Since then Mississippi has seen remarkable gains., Its fourth graders have moved from 49th (out of 50 states) to 20th on the National assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide exam.

Mississippi’s success is attributed to application of reading methods supported by a body of research known as the science of reading. In 1997 experts from the Department of Education ended the “reading war” and summed up the evidence. They found that phonics, along with explicit instruction in phonemic (音位的) awareness, fluency and comprehension, worked best.

Yet over two decades on, “balanced literacy” is still being taught in classrooms. But advances in statistics and brain imaging have disproved the whole-language method. To the teacher who is an efficient reader, literacy seem like a natural process that requires educated guessing, rather than the deliberate process emphasized by phonics. Teachers can imagine that they learned to read through osmosis(潜移默化) when they were children. Without proper training, they bring this to classrooms.

3 . Ramirez Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. With Spanish as her mother tongue, her research had to be translated into English to be published. That wasn’t always possible because of budget or time-and it means that some of her findings were never published.

“It’s not that I’m a bad scientist,” she says. “It’s just because of the language.”

Castañeda is not alone. There is plenty of research in non-English-language papers that gets lost in translation, or is never translated. A research looked through more than 400, 000 peer-reviewed papers in 16 different languages and found 1, 234 studies providing evidence on biodiversity conservation which, because they weren’t in English, may have been overlooked. These included Japanese-language findings on the effectiveness of relocating the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl, the largest owl species.

Some experts argue that for the sake of the bigger picture, scientific knowledge should converge (转换) into one common language. Science is very globalised and becoming more so, so the use of a global language is enormous for that.

Of course, scientists can work with an English partner, or use a translator-but this ultimately strengthens the cycle of dependency on the global north, leading to inequality in international influence. The specific meanings of words can also pose a problem in translation. For example, it is difficult to find in English one single word to describe forest snakes and frogs in the work Castafieda does with indigenous (土著的) communities in the Amazon.

“So we’re losing observations for science, too, ” says Castañeda. “For me, it’s not possible to just have everything translated into English. We need multilingual (多语种的) science, and we need people that feel comfortable doing science in their own languages. It could be possible to switch to a world where, say, Chinese, English and Spanish are the three languages of science, just as English, French and German were the languages of science in the 19th century.”

5 . Tonal languages use pitch (音调) to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mã means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning.

As a Mandarin speaker and musician, Jingxuan Liu wondered about the crossover (融合) between language and music. While studying at Duke University, Liu helped analyze the musical abilities of nearly half a million people from 203 countries. Her colleagues had launched an online game in which participants completed several musical tasks, including identifying matching melodies at different pitches and finding beat tracks that fit songs’ rhythms.

On average, native speakers of the 19 represented tonal languages were better at the melody task compared with speakers of 29 nontonal languages. And the effect wasn’t small a tonal first language strengthened melodic understanding by about half the amount that music lessons did, which was also surveyed. But tonal languages speakers tended to be worse at the rhythm task.

Humans must be choosy about what they pay attention to. Pitch patterns are quite important in tonal languages, which might explain the balancing act in music. “You’ve got a finite resource of attention, and you’ve got to divide up that somehow,” says study coauthor Courtney Hilton, a scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Prior research on language and music often compared just two tongues, usually English and Mandarin. But other cultural influences, such as Eastern and Western music styles, could have affected results. By examining a wide range of people, the new study included languages never estimated in this way and reached more generalizable conclusion.

“Our result here is showing that the language someone speaks which is an important part of culture — also shapes cognition,” Hilton says.

9 . Juliette and I knew each other seven years ago through the foreign exchange organised by our schools. We started as pen friends — the _________ ink and paper kind. The letters introduced us to each other and a new _________.

When we eventually met _________ I felt like we were already friends. I wanted to be able to speak to her in her native language as _________ as I do in English. It gives me a _________ for learning French.

I stayed with her family in Laval. _________ her school helped me grasp French. I remember how _________ I felt on the few occasions I knew the answers to questions during classes. I also remember _________ a police officer in French after my passport had been stolen. The passport was found, and so was a new _________ in my ability to solve problems in French.

Although we speak __________ on Facebook or Skype now, I’ve kept all of our letters. They are the __________ representation of our friendship and language learning.

I was pleased to hear that the French exchange at my old school is still __________and now has 100 students involved. Apps and online courses are the latest __________, making pen pals and post __________. But we shouldn’t ignore this unique method of __________ languages.

Spoken Chinese consisted of a number of Chinese dialects(方言) throughout history. In the Ming Dynasty, standard Mandarin was nationalized. Even so,     1    was not until the Republic of China era in the 1910s that there were some noticeable results in     2    (promote) a common unified language in China.

The ancient written standard was Classical Chinese and it was used for thousands of years. However, it     3    (reserve) mostly for scholars and intellectuals. Only after the May 4th Movement did the push for Vernacular Chinese begin. This allowed common     4     (citizen) to read since it was modeled after the linguistics and phonology of a spoken language.

Despite the difficulty in mastering it, Classical Chinese remains     5    (extreme) important in the world heritage of languages. Classical Chinese’s birth is related     6    the beginning of astronomy(天文学), the connection with higher spirits through divination(占卜) and the formation of several Books of Changes,     7    most famous being the one of the Zhou Dynasty. Therefore, Chinese is packed with great meaning and     8     (wise). It is not only a code or a tool, but a language     9    gives light and guidance when     10    (receive) in a proper way. Classical Chinese has been the cultural backbone of all the great philosophies, spiritualities, and even arts not just in China but all over Asia.