̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - language

AI-deas: Using AI to tackle society's biggest challenges

lw355 — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Aspirations for the ability of AI to transform society couldn’t be higher. Realising this potential will require bridging the gap between AI development and public value. Cambridge's AI-deas initiative aims to do just that.

‘Manifest’ is Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:03:53 +0000

‘Manifest’ was looked up almost 130,000 times on the Cambridge Dictionary website, making it one of the most-viewed words of 2024.

̽��ֱ��word jumped from use in the self-help community and on social media to being widely used across mainstream media and beyond, as celebrities such as singer Dua Lipa, Olympic sprinter Gabby Thomas and England striker Ollie Watkins spoke of manifesting their success in 2024.

Mentions of it gained traction during the pandemic and have grown in the years since, especially on TikTok and other social media, where millions of posts and videos used the hashtag #manifest.

They use ‘to manifest’ in the sense of: ‘to imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen’. Yet, manifesting is an unproven idea that grew out of a 100-year-old spiritual philosophy movement.

Wendalyn Nichols, Publishing Manager of the Cambridge Dictionary, said: “When we choose a Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year, we have three considerations: What word was looked up the most, or spiked? Which one really captures what was happening in that year? And what is interesting about this word from a language point of view?

“‘Manifest’ won this year because it increased notably in lookups, its use widened greatly across all types of media due to events in 2024, and it shows how the meanings of a word can change over time.”

However experts warn that ‘manifesting’ has no scientific validity, despite its popularity. It can lead to risky behaviour or the promotion of false and dangerous beliefs, such as that diseases can be simply wished away.

“Manifesting is what psychologists call ‘magical thinking’ or the general illusion that specific mental rituals can change the world around us," said Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� social psychologist Professor Sander van der Linden, author of ̽��ֱ��Psychology of Misinformation.

“Manifesting gained tremendous popularity during the pandemic on TikTok with billions of views, including the popular 3-6-9 method which calls for writing down your wishes three times in the morning, six times in the afternoon and nine times before bed. This procedure promotes obsessive and compulsive behaviour with no discernible benefits. But can we really blame people for trying it, when prominent celebrities have been openly ‘manifesting’ their success?

‘Manifesting’ wealth, love, and power can lead to unrealistic expectations and disappointment. Think of the dangerous idea that you can cure serious diseases simply by wishing them away," said Van der Linden.

“There is good research on the value of positive thinking, self-affirmation, and goal-setting. Believing in yourself, bringing a positive attitude, setting realistic goals, and putting in the effort pays off because people are enacting change in the real world. However, it is crucial to understand the difference between the power of positive thinking and moving reality with your mind – the former is healthy, whereas the latter is pseudoscience.”

‘Manyfest’, manifest destiny, and manifestos

̽��ֱ��600-year history of the word ‘manifest’ shows how the meanings of a word can evolve.

̽��ֱ��oldest sense – which Geoffrey Chaucer spelled as ‘manyfest’ in the 14th century – is the adjective meaning ‘easily noticed or obvious’.

In the mid-1800s, this adjective sense was used in American politics in the context of “manifest destiny”, the belief that American settlers were clearly destined to expand across North America.

Chaucer also used the oldest sense of the verb ‘manifest’, ‘to show something clearly, through signs or actions’. Shakespeare used manifest as an adjective in ̽��ֱ��Merchant of Venice: ‘For it appears, by manifest proceeding, that...thou hast contrived against the very life of the defendant’.

̽��ֱ��verb is still used frequently in this way: for example, people can manifest their dissatisfaction, or symptoms of an illness can manifest themselves. Lack of confidence in a company can manifest itself through a fall in share price.

̽��ֱ��meaning of making something clear is reflected in the related noun 'manifesto': a ‘written statement of the beliefs, aims, and policies of an organisation, especially a political party’ – a word that also resonated in 2024 as scores of nations, including the United Kingdom and India, held elections where parties shared manifestos.

Other words of 2024

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Dictionary is the world’s most popular dictionary for learners of the English language. Increases and spikes in lookups reflect global events and trends. Beyond “manifest”, other popular terms in 2024 included:

brat: a child, especially one who behaves badly

“Brat” went viral in the summer of 2024 thanks to pop artist Charli XCX’s album of the same name about nonconformist women who reject a narrow and highly groomed female identity as portrayed on social media. (We weren’t the only dictionary publisher to notice this.)

demure: quiet and well behaved 

Influencer Jools Lebron’s satirical use of “demure” in a TikTok post mocking stereotypical femininity drove lookups in the Cambridge Dictionary.  After brat summer, we had a demure fall.

Goldilocks: used to describe a situation in which something is or has to be exactly right 

Financial reporters characterized India’s strong growth and moderate inflation as a Goldilocks economy in early 2024.

ecotarian: a person who only eats food produced or prepared in a way that does not harm the environment 

This term rose in overall lookups in 2024, reflecting growing interest in environmentally conscious living. 

New words, future entries?

All year round, Cambridge Dictionary editors track the English language as it changes. Newly emerging words that are being considered for entry are shared every Monday on the Cambridge Dictionary blog, About Words.

Words Cambridge began tracking in 2024 include:

quishing: the scam of phishing via QR code.

resenteeism: to continue doing your job but resent it. This blend of “resent” and “absenteeism” is appearing in business journalism.

gymfluencer: a social media influencer whose content is focused on fitness or bodybuilding.

cocktail party problem (also cocktail party effect): the difficulty of focusing on one voice when there are multiple speakers in the room. This term from audiology is now being used with reference to AI.

vampire: a vampire device or vampire appliance is one which uses energy even when not in use. This is a new, adjective sense of an existing word.

Adapted from the Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press & Assessment website.

̽��ֱ��controversial global trend of manifesting has driven Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2024.

Why psychologists warn against manifesting - Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cancer isn’t fair – but care should be

lw355 — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 07:50:57 +0000

Listening to people's lived experiences is helping to improve the awareness and uptake of cancer care. On World Cancer Day, we take a look at some of the ways researchers are working with communities to ‘close the cancer care gap’.

Students who self-identify as multilingual perform better at GCSE

tdk25 — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:26:41 +0000

̽��ֱ��study, of just over 800 pupils in England, found a positive relationship between GCSE scores and ‘multilingual identity’: a reference to whether pupils felt a personal connection with other languages through knowledge and use. Those who self-identified as multilingual typically outperformed their peers not just in subjects such as French and Spanish, but in non-language subjects including maths, geography and science. This applied whether or not they actually spoke a second language fluently.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, not all pupils who were officially described by their schools as having ‘English as a Second Language’ (EAL) thought of themselves as multilingual, even though the term is used by schools and Government as a proxy for multilingualism. Correspondingly, these pupils did not necessarily perform better (or worse) as a group at GCSE than their non-EAL peers.

̽��ֱ��results indicate that encouraging pupils to identify with languages and to value different styles of communication could help them to develop a mindset that supports academic progress overall.

Other recent research has argued for broadening the scope of language lessons so that, as well as studying vocabulary and grammar, pupils explore the importance of languages and their significance for their own lives. This new study was the first, however, to examine the relationship between multilingual identity and attainment. It was led by academics at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the findings are published in the Journal of Language, Identity and Education.

Dr Dee Rutgers, a Research Associate at the Faculty of Education, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��evidence suggests that the more multilingual you consider yourself to be, the higher your GCSE scores. While we need to understand more about why that relationship exists, it may be that children who see themselves as multilingual have a sort of ‘growth mindset’ which impacts on wider attainment.”

Dr Linda Fisher, Reader in Languages Education at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “There could be a strong case for helping children who think that they can’t ‘do’ languages to recognise that we all use a range of communication tools, and that learning a language is simply adding to that range. This may influence attitude and self-belief, which is directly relevant to learning at school. In other words, what you think you are may be more important than what others say you are.”

̽��ֱ��study’s authors argue that being multilingual means far more than the official EAL definition of being ‘exposed to a language at home that is known or believed to be other than English’. They suggest that even young people who see themselves as monolingual possess a ‘repertoire’ of communication. For example, they may use different dialects, pick up words and phrases on holiday, know sign language, or understand other types of ‘language’ such as computer code.

̽��ֱ��study involved 818 Year-11 pupils at five secondary schools in South East England. As well as establishing whether pupils were officially registered as EAL or non-EAL, the researchers asked each pupil if they personally identified as such. Separately, each pupil was asked to plot where they saw themselves on a 0-100 scale, where 0 represented ‘monolingual’ and 100 ‘multilingual’. This data was compared with their GCSE results in nine subjects.

Students who spoke a second language at home did not always personally identify either as EAL or multilingual. Conversely, pupils who saw themselves as multilingual were not always those earmarked by the school as having English as an additional language.

“ ̽��ֱ��fact that these terms didn’t correlate more closely is surprising considering that they are all supposedly measuring the same thing,” Rutgers said. “Just having experience of other languages clearly doesn’t necessarily translate into a multilingual identity because the experience may not be valued by the student.”

School-reported EAL status had no impact on GCSE results, although pupils who self-identified as EAL generally did better than their peers in modern languages. Those who considered themselves ‘multilingual’ on the 0-100 scale, however, performed better academically across the board.

̽��ֱ��strength of this relationship varied between subjects and was, again, particularly pronounced in modern languages. In all nine GCSE subjects assessed, however, each point increase on the monolingual-to-multilingual scale was associated with a fractional rise in pupils’ exam scores.

For example: a one-point increase was found to correspond to 0.012 of a grade in Science, and 0.011 of a grade in Geography. Students who consider themselves very multilingual would, by this measure, typically score a full grade higher than those who consider themselves monolingual. Positively identifying as multilingual could often therefore be enough to push students who would otherwise fall slightly short of a certain grade up to the next level.

̽��ֱ��findings appear to indicate that the positive mentality and self-belief which typically develops among pupils with a multilingual identity has spill-over benefits for their wider education. ̽��ֱ��authors add that this could be cultivated in languages classrooms: for example, by exposing young people to learning programmes that explore different types of language and dialect, or encouraging them to think about how languages shape their lives both inside and outside school.

“Too often we think about other languages as something that we don’t need to know, or as difficult to learn,” Fisher said. “These findings suggest that if pupils were encouraged to see themselves as active and capable language learners, it could have a really positive impact on their wider progress at school.”

Young people who consider themselves ‘multilingual’ tend to perform better across a wide range of subjects at school, regardless of whether they are actually fluent in another language, new research shows.

If pupils were encouraged to see themselves as active and capable language learners, it could have a really positive impact on their wider progress at school.

Linda Fisher

Jacqueline Brandwyn via Unsplash

Saying goodbye

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Mind Over Chatter: What is the future?

ns480 — Thu, 27 May 2021 13:22:48 +0000

Season 2, episode 1

This second series of Mind Over Chatter is all about the future - and in this first episode we’re going to be considering what the future even is… Have you ever wondered how time works? It turns out, the answer is a lot more complicated than we thought.

Join our wondering and wonderful conversation with philosopher of science Dr Matt Farr, whose work focuses particularly on what it means for time to have a direction, professor of psychology Nicky Clayton, who looks at the evolution and development of intelligence in non-verbal animals and pre-verbal children, and professor of linguistics and philosophy, Kasia Jaszczolt whose research interests combine semantics, pragmatics, and the metaphysics of time

We’ll be talking about everything from physics to linguistics… and from broken eggs to Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Subscribe to Mind Over Chatter

Key points

[04:28] - Does time actually go from past to present to future? And does time really ‘flow’?

[09:53] - How do B-theorists deal with entropy? Can you un-break an egg?

[14:12] - Recap of the first portion of the episode, reviewing A-theory, B-theory and C-theory of time

[18:58] - How the mind understands the subjective concept of time

[27:11] - ̽��ֱ��Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how the way you talk about language affects the way you perceive and think about things

[30:21] - Recap of the second portion of the episode

[34:02] - How do the mental and linguistic concepts around time fit with philosophical concepts and physics of time?

[45:46] - Is there a conflict between the psychological and linguistic models of time and the way physics handles time?

[48:20] - Recap of the last portion of the episode

Mind Over Chatter: ̽��ֱ��Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Podcast

Found in translation

lw355 — Wed, 03 Jun 2020 10:32:52 +0000

How Cambridge researcher Dr Ebele Mogo helped tackle a coronavirus public health language gap across Africa in four weeks and 18 languages with 30 crowdsourced volunteers.

Discovering a world of languages

cjb250 — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 08:23:48 +0000

A Cambridge-led team seeks to revitalise languages in the UK with a series of interactive pop-up exhibitions and an online game designed to set tongues wagging.

Research at the chalk face: connecting academia and schools

lw528 — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 10:00:50 +0000

Twenty years ago, two head teachers walked into the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Education with a proposal. We want to work with you, they told academics, but don’t just come and “do research on us”. We want to work in partnership.

̽��ֱ��approach might have met short shrift in more traditional institutions, but the outward-looking Education Department, now the Faculty of Education, was different. Already working closely with over 30 schools on a school-based teacher education programme, and welcoming many teachers onto its Masterʼs and PhD programmes, it saw the chance to forge new bonds.

Two decades on, School– ̽��ֱ�� Partnership for Educational Research (SUPER) continues to flourish, bringing together academics and teachers from 12 schools around the eastern region. ̽��ֱ��partners devise and run collective research projects – on topics from pupil engagement to teacher learning – and share findings within and beyond the group.

̽��ֱ��latest project has focused on the increasingly critical area of pupil resilience, as Dr Ros McLellan, coordinator of the SUPER network, explains: “Across the UK, mental health issues in children are increasing while wellbeing is deteriorating. Evidence shows that wellbeing programmes in schools can lead to significant improvements in children’s mental health, and social and emotional skills. But we know that funding constraints and lack of prominence given to wellbeing in the inspection framework create real challenges for schools. Our research is asking how resilience and wellbeing can be promoted in a results-driven educational climate.”

̽��ֱ��group devised a wellbeing survey that was conducted across the partner schools, backed up by detailed pupil interviews. ̽��ֱ��findings showed that girls and Year 10 students are more vulnerable at secondary school – and that students from low-income backgrounds are vulnerable at all ages.

“ ̽��ֱ��individual schools are now introducing their own wellbeing interventions tailored to the needs revealed by the study, and we’ll be working with them as they assess and share the impact of the interventions,” says McLellan.

A ‘toolkit’ to help schools

SUPER is one of a range of projects forging direct connections between the Faculty – part of a world-leading university that is often viewed primarily in an international context – and the living, breathing community of pupils, parents and teachers on its doorstep.

Dr Riikka Hofmann, for instance, has been working with local schools on understanding how best to improve students’ learning – finding that approaches that draw on interaction and students’ ideas can achieve better outcomes. But she has also found that it’s not always easy for schools – especially those in deprived areas that are tackling a wide range of pupil needs – to translate research findings into teaching practice.

“We know that teachers find it difficult to take up new forms of learning, no matter how effective research shows them to be,” she explains. “Schools may be concerned about the short-term risks for performance outcomes and inspections involved in trialling new practices. Also, teachers in schools serving disadvantaged populations can hold limiting views of their students’ capabilities and be less likely to introduce change.”

Hofmann’s latest project, backed by an Economic and Social Research Council-funded Impact Acceleration grant, is creating a ‘toolkit’ to help schools introduce and evaluate effective educational techniques to boost teaching and learning. Her team is working with four eastern region partnership schools in which a high proportion of students face multiple disadvantages, such as financial or language difficulties.

She aims to make the toolkit available to all schools, nationally and ultimately globally. Tried and tested Faculty research, she argues, should benefit all schools, not only those with fewer challenges to divert them, and ensuring this happens is as much part of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s widening participation agenda as diversifying admissions. “It is well known that some of the core barriers to raising aspirations among disadvantaged children happen not only at widening participation in terms of university admissions, but also much earlier, in learning opportunities that disadvantaged children have in school.

“We are a university with a global mission and that includes focusing on disadvantaged communities everywhere, including those near us. ̽��ֱ��East of England has some of the most deprived areas in the whole country. Our work aims to have a positive impact on the people in those communities, and also helps us to understand the ways change can happen in disadvantaged settings.”

Language learning

̽��ֱ��busy two-way pipeline linking the Faculty of Education and schools in the region also lies at the heart of a partnership that focuses on exploring the influence of multilingual identity on foreign language learning among teenagers and its relationship with attainment. ̽��ֱ��education strand of the project, led by Dr Linda Fisher, is part of a large-scale and far-reaching language sciences research programme, Multilingualism: Empowering Individuals, Transforming Societies (MEITS) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Working with six secondary schools in the eastern region and another in London, Fisher’s team is tracking the academic performance of 2,000 pupils over two years, including monolingual learners studying a second language and multilingual learners adding a further language in the classroom.

Together with teachers, Fisher and colleagues have devised and trialled a package of teaching materials, which begin by encouraging students to recognise that their understanding of dialects, slang, emojis and even the most basic foreign language ability all represent a form of multilingualism.

“ ̽��ֱ��main idea is to see whether we can we offer young people the agency to develop a multilingual identity if they so wish and to see what the impacts of that are,” Fisher says. ̽��ֱ��results have been positive. “Reflecting on language learning was not only enjoyable for students but also made them more open minded, more aware of the place of language in the world and more inclined to be engaged with language learning in the classroom.”

Many students involved in the project reported a change in attitude, seeing languages more as a vital life skill than just another subject to struggle with at school. “I used to think languages only help on holiday,” said one. “Now I think languages adapt your brain and help you understand different cultures.”

“Practical, and real, and of use to schools”

For the academics, meanwhile, all of these projects are creating a model for boosting the chances of research findings making the journey from concept to coalface and having a real impact on school practice.

This level of collaboration between academics and schools is fundamental to the success of the projects, and yet is surprisingly unusual and should not be taken for granted says McLellan: “Whenever I talk about SUPER in other contexts, people are always interested in how we manage to do it because schools and universities often have different agendas, timescales and ideas over what constitutes research.

“ ̽��ֱ��projects work because schools in our region, which is very diverse, want to work with us. This is not just pie in the sky, ivory tower stuff: it is practical, and real, and of use to schools. We’ve broken down the artificial walls: we’re out there.”

Researchers in Cambridge’s Faculty of Education are working with teachers to improve the experience of learning in the East of England – and boost pupils’ life chances.

̽��ֱ��projects work because schools in our region, which is very diverse, want to work with us. This is not just pie in the sky, ivory tower stuff: it is practical, and real, and of use to schools. We’ve broken down the artificial walls: we’re out there

Ros McLellan

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