Language learning: what motivates us? (Lauren Razavi, The Guardian)

What happens in the brain when we try to learn a language can tell us a lot about what drives us to learn it in the first place. Lauren Razavi unpacks the science.

What does science tell us about language learning motivation? Photograph: Ben Edwards/Getty Images.

 “Where’s your name from?”

I wasn’t expecting to be the subject of my interview with John Schumann, but the linguistics professor had picked up on my Persian surname. Talking to me from California, where he is one of the world’s leading academic voices on language learning, he effortlessly puts my own Farsi to shame.

Why Save a Language? (John McWhorter, The New York Times)

Olimpia Zagnoli

“TELL me, why should we care?” he asks.

It’s a question I can expect whenever I do a lecture about the looming extinction of most of the world’s 6,000 languages, a great many of which are spoken by small groups of indigenous people. For some reason the question is almost always posed by a man seated in a row somewhere near the back.

Asked to elaborate, he says that if indigenous people want to give up their ancestral language to join the modern world, why should we consider it a tragedy? Languages have always died as time has passed. What’s so special about a language?

Learning to learn online (Jasmine Gallup, The Observer)

Massive open online courses, yield mixed reviews, mixed result

 Arianna Wage / Observer

Case Western Reserve University isn’t the first higher education institution to jump on the free online course bandwagon, and it won’t be the last. The concept, in theory, seems both infallible and incredibly appealing, especially to the growing university. What could be better than creating a comprehensive form of education that anyone can access? What could be better than making intensive, high-level academic courses available to people unable to afford Case Western Reserve University’s tuition?