Teaching in Lebanon - May Mikati's Blog

Arabic in Unofficial English I recently came across an interesting slang dictionary by the American lexicographer Grant Barrett: The O...

Nouns that Were Verbed in the Olympics Now that both the Olympics and Paralympics are over, reflecting on language used at the events is...

Metaphors for Teaching At the start of a new academic year, what better metaphors to explore than metaphors for teaching? The Annenberg ...

Blogging as Lifelong Learning While reading blogs may certainly contribute to one’s education, blogging itself is also a form of life-lo...

Citius, Altius, Fortius Social media can provide faster, higher, stronger platforms for expression. They are clearly faster than more tr...

A Waste of Time or Digital Social Capital? The term civic engagement has been used to reflect many different approaches to citizenship, ...

Online Civic Engagement Over a year has passed since I started blogging. What keeps this blog going when many academics fear blogs as un...

Why We Quote Having recently blogged on the subject of originality, quoting appears as an antithesis. Still, if you are interested in th...

Linguistic Inflation The Macmillan dictionary blog recently hosted two attention-catching articles on hyperbole by Stan Carey: “ Is Ling...

Gender Neutral Language First in France this year - now in Sweden: the feminists are changing the language. The Swedes, known as the mos...

What Is Originality? Educators like to promote original thought and creative expression, but what exactly is originality? If you go to t...

Banned Words Words can be banned for various reasons. Let’s examine examples from France, the U.K. and the U.S. Among various efforts ...

How Natural Language Processing is Changing Our World From speech recognition to speech synthesis, and from machine translation to data ...

The Origin and Progress of the Academic Spring In case you were wondering how this current “Academic Spring” started, well, apparently i...

Open Access: An “Academic Spring” One of the many academic databases we have access to at the American University of Beirut is the well-...

Softening Up the Language Language teachers often find themselves teaching about euphemisms, whether intentionally or not. A euphemism i...

A "New Word Order" My previous blog post was about lexicography in the Internet age: how dictionaries are coping with the spee...

How Dictionaries Cope With Language Change Can English language dictionaries cope with the current speed of language change? While such ...

April Fools? Have you ever been tricked on April Fools’ Day? Apparently, some of the best known April first pranks have taken place in h...

Fooling Around in the Classroom? Does humour detract from the quality of teaching and learning? I would say that joking in the classroom...

Bloggers' Block? For those who enjoy writing, the blogosphere beckons with magnetic force. Yet even experienced writers suffer from ...

No More Britannica in Print In January I blogged on the topic of print versus online publications, asking the question “Are Books Out of...

Language Purists versus Language Change Languages change whether the language prescriptivists like it or not. The purists out there are...

Student Perfectionism: A Two-Edged Sword Does perfectionism ail our students at the American University of Beirut? Besides worrying ab...

Encouraging Creativity Are you a creative individual? Researchers and policy makers have recently started stressing the need for prom...

Must We Still Travel? Has the internet relieved us of the need to travel? Partially perhaps. St. Augustine once said, "The world ...

Promoting Significant Learning In the days of our students’ parents and grandparents, learners thrived on memorization, mostly out of co...

Are Books Out of Fashion ? Are books out of fashion? Five years ago, Thomas Benton, a college English lecturer observed that “The librar...

In Defense of Cheating? One of my favourite essays on contemporary approaches to assessment is Donald Norman’s “In Defense of Cheating”....

The Psychology of Projection I recently came across this well-expressed observation on Dr. Wayne Dyer’s Facebook page and have been mull...