Newsademic nr 239 – British and American English edition (with activities) 25 December 2014

Newsademic is an easy-to-understand international newspaper, written and edited in a style that assists English Language teaching and learning. Newsademic is a fortnightly publication (20 articles) and associated website. Both British and American English versions of the newspaper are available. The easy-to-read newspaper features the top world news stories that have made headlines during the previous two weeks.

The general stereotype regarding interaction between American Sign Language and English is a model of oversimplification: ASL signers are direct and English speakers are indirect. Jack Hoza’s study It’s Not What You Sign, It’s How You Sign It: Politeness in American Sign Language upends this common impression through an in-depth comparison of the communication styles between these two language communities.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was faced with a new and radically mixed population, one that included freed African Americans, former reservation Indians, and a burgeoning immigrant population. In The Autobiography of Citizenship, Tova Cooper looks at how educators tried to impose unity on this divergent population, and how the new citizens in turn often resisted these efforts, reshaping mainstream U.S. culture and embracing their own view of what it means to be an American.

For 250 years, slavery was part of the fabric of American life. The institution had an enormous economic impact and was central to the wealth of the agrarian South. It had as great an impact on American culture, cementing racism and other attitudes that echo into the present. This encyclopedia is an ambitious examination of all the issues surrounding slavery: the origins, the justifications, the controversies, and the human drama.

Native American loanwords are a crucial, though little acknowledged, part of the English language. This book shows how the more than one-thousand current loanwords were adopted and demonstrates how the changing relationships between Indians and European settlers can be traced in the rate of loanword borrowing and the kinds of words adopted.