ICAL NEWSLETTER 3rd June, 2009

Noam Chomsky came up with this to show that a sentence can be grammatically correct but make no sense.

In fact the sentence - meaningless as it may be to us - is grammatically correct and sounds almost true to our ears. Just compare it to “Sleep colorless ideas green furiously” which does not even sound like a sentence in English but rather an incoherent list of words.

The purpose of Chomsky's sentence was to support a new approach to human language acquisition: Innatism.

Before Chomsky, behaviorist theory argued that language was a purely learned ability.

By developing groundbreaking theories in the field of psycholinguistics Chomsky demonstrated that there was something innate in humans, a language faculty, that enabled people to acquire language. Read on here.

Classroom Techniques Secret Words - a versatile game that will engage your students, regardless of their age and level.

Country Files Uganda - double standards in the Country's teaching policy for English.

Glossary Lemma - the basic form of an inflected word, and a staple for any dictionary!