There's an old saying in real estate: the three most important things about a property are location, location, location. This month in the Language Lounge we discover that the same holds true for English syntax. We take a look at what happens when elements of a sentence get accidentally waylaid.  Continue reading...

People judge you by the words you use. This warning, once the slogan of a vocabulary building course, is now the mantra of the new science of culturomics.  Continue reading...

This weekend, the movie "The King's Speech" gets its nationwide release in the United States, and it's already getting talked about as a front-runner for the Oscars. It has also received a great deal of buzz in the speech therapy community for its sensitive and credible depiction of King George VI's speech impediment and the methods that his therapist Lionel Logue used to overcome it. I take a look at the movie and the real-life story in my latest On Language column, appearing in the Oscars issue of the New York Times Magazine.  Continue reading...

We recently spoke to British researcher Dan Clayton about the new educational project, "Teaching English Grammar in Schools." The project seeks to enliven the teaching of English by using real examples pulled from a corpus of texts. In part two of our interview, we asked Dan how this corpus-based approach allows both teachers and students to investigate the intricacies of the English language.  Continue reading...

How did Shakespeare's plays originally sound? Audiences at the University of Kansas will get to find out, with a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" entirely in the original pronunciation, the first time such a production has been staged in North America.  Continue reading...

This Sunday's New York Times Magazine was a special issue on education, with a focus on education technology. I used the opportunity to write an On Language column that explored new theoretical approaches to language learning that are having important practical applications in the English-language classroom.  Continue reading...