DVD Review: Classic Peanuts Holiday Videos

Are you looking for a couple of fabulous videos to show to English language learners and to native speakers of English for Halloween and Christmas? There are plenty available, but few withstand the test of time better than the all-time classic Peanuts holiday shows! Use these to introduce your learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to both new vocabulary words, parts of speech, intonation, and American holiday celebrations. Show these videos to classes of mixed English as a Second Language (ESL) and native speakers of English classes in the United States or elsewhere. Show these classic made for TV specials at parties and social gatherings when you want your guests to feel nostalgic. Whether you are a teacher or not, whether you have ESL/EFL students in your class or not, these are two of the most timeless and versatile shows available. Those of us here in the Language Village highly recommends adding them to your collection! The videos are in English and are each about 25 minutes long--a perfect length for using in class. Click the link below for a low Amazon price. 6% of each sale made through this website benefits the Language Village, and helps to keep this site free to the public. Thanks for your support!



Contact the Language Village editors at citizensofplanetearth@gmail.com, attention Language Village Editors if you need free and easy activity ideas to use with these holiday videos!

ASL Comedy Night Kicks Off Language Campaign

Over 400 people lined up at Portland State University last Friday while waiting to attend the American Sign Language Comedy Night. When guests went inside, it was to find a standing-room-only scene. The event kicked off a campaign run by Portland State’s American Sign Language (ASL) Club and ASPSU that aims to relocate ASL studies from the speech and hearing sciences department to the foreign languages department.

American Sign Language is not the same language as [American] English, so the deaf community wants ASL recognized as a language in the same way that Spanish is recognized as a foreign language, said Steven “PV” Jantz, co-president of the ASL Club and member of the ASPSU student senate.

Currently, students can receive foreign language credit for studying ASL at many universities, but students of the deaf community and their supporters feel that there is a much deeper issue, Jantz said. “As of right now, deaf culture is not viewed as a multicultural group,” he said. “It is also not treated as an actual community. I’m not saying that it is intentional and I don’t believe it is, but the fact of the matter remains, it is oppression.”

Through the collaboration of ASPSU and the ASL Club, the night doubled as the kickoff for the ASPSU food cupboard for hungry students. “At the comedy night, we pulled in over 1,000 pounds of food for Tsunami victims in the American islands of Samoa and the free food cupboard for students,” said ASPSU President Jonathon Sanford.

Autism Strikes 1 in 100 Children, According to Parent Survey

(From NPR Health)  How many kids have autism or related disorders? Ask parents, as federal researchers did recently, and you come up an estimate of about 1 in 100, a figure quite a bit higher than the 1-in-150 estimate from just a few years back. What do parents know? Well, the results from the telephone survey, published in the academic journal Pediatrics, are in line with some unpublished work by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders, comprising autism, Asperger disorder and other less specific diagnoses may be on the rise. The Pediatrics study's estimate of the raw data boiled down to 1 in 91 kids between 3 and 17 years old and 1 in 110 when adjusted for survey technicalities like cellphone vs. land-line use.
Some specifics: odds of autism spectrum disorder were four times greater for boys than girls. Non-Hispanic black and multiracial children had lower odds of ASD than non-Hispanic white kids. On the bright side, nearly 40% of children ever diagnosed with ASD didn't have trouble with it anymore, though it's not clear what that means exactly.

Overall, it's settled whether the apparent increase in ASD is a result of more diagnosis and reporting of problems or reflects a genuine rise in the disorders. "The concern here is that buried in these numbers is a true increase," Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said Friday, according to USA Today. "We're not sure how big it is."

Walking English

(The Language Village)  David Crystal, author of my all-time favorite Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, has written yet another book. This one is called Walking English: A Journey in Search of Language. Whether near his home in Wales or abroad, linguist David Crystal always travels with an insatiable curiosity about the English language. For his book, Walking English, he hit the road in search of new linguistic experiences.

Click to Listen to an Interview With David Crystal on NPR (30 Minutes)