No, me neither.

Five year olds will under the new national curriculum for English.

Another triumph for Gove, no doubt.

Oh, and my wife’s school have to get 10 year olds with the development level of 14 month old children to understand the significance of Edward the Confessor in English history (along with all the dates) as it appears that there is no distinction allowed for special needs education. Genius.

Don’t they make nobby nic tyres. 😳

Without googling it’s some form of punctuation, I think?

Don’t ever need to know that, though.

[edit] Wrong! It’s a vowel sound. Knew it rang a bell – briefly studied the IPA whilst a drunken Typography student.

as it appears that there is no distinction allowed for special needs education.

Typical of you lefties no aspirations

Gove really is an utter tit

It is hard to think of a minister wh has come up with hair brained schemes, had to back down and yet he still gets to carry on with his brief.

He has political philosophy that reality cannot alter and he is shit at this job

It’s no accident that at the height of the British Empire schoolboys had Latin thrashed into them.

Gove is simply attempting to return to those halcyon glory days by getting back to basics.

It’s no accident that at the height of the British Empire schoolboys had Latin thrashed into them.

Gove is simply attempting to return to those halcyon glory days by getting back to basics.

With a schwa??? That’s English pronunciation, not Latin. Such ignorance, it’ll be the cane for you, lad.

Yes I’m aware it’s not Latin but it is an example of getting back to basics.

But you’re probably right – I deserve a damn good thrashing for not making myself clear in the first place.

Is it bad that I had to look it up, but am no wiser for reading the wiki page 😳
Unsurprisingly it does seem to have held me back up to now

KS1 and KS2 for music now fit on a single sheet of A4 paper (with lots of white space).

English language for KS1 looked to be about 40 pages.

Is it bad that I had to look it up, but am no wiser for reading the wiki page
Unsurprisingly it does seem to have held me back up to now

When you emphasise a word the sound often changes, for example:

“Not A dog, THE dog” – the “A” here is “Ay” (at least in the south-east, and rhymes with “hay” not “eye”).

“I saw a dog” – here the “a” is a schwa, a very short sound that almost disappears when you say it.

It’s something a lot of foreigners have problems with, they use the emphasised sound when a shortened form would be more natural.

I know the roflcopter goes schwa schwa schwa. But it’s spelt soi.

Not sure about this one tbh, I know it’s considered a useful thing when teaching english as a second language, and it’s also something that fluent non-native english speakers still often get wrong (my polish colleague has almost native english, apart from some mangled vowel sounds, oh-ffice for office etc which IIRC is a schwa). But that’s mostly because it’s replacing one punctuation form with another…

But is it that beneficial for a native speaker? The shape of words is something we tend to get just from listening. We don’t do any first-language teaching so I don’t know.

It’s the flat vowel sound, pronounced a bit like “uh”. Next question?

But is it that beneficial for a native speaker? The shape of words is something we tend to get just from listening. We don’t do any first-language teaching so I don’t know.

I can’t see any benefit to it, certainly not with 5 year olds, but then there are a whole load of ways to teach language and I have no idea what current research says is best.

Spanish kids do a whole load of formal grammar stuff, sentence parsing and the like, which I don’t remember doing at school. Does that help? No idea.

Its a corporation

http://www.schwazone.com/

A very short Lebanese schwarma sandwich?

What tyres for Schwa?

Hans Dampf?

I did know it, yes, without googling 🙂

Huh.

Am I the only one who though of an Alien face when they read ‘Schwa’ ?