|Applied and experimental|
- 1 Need for language education
- 2 History of foreign language education
- 3 Teaching foreign language in classrooms
- 4 Online and self-study courses
- 5 Learning strategies
- 6 Teaching strategies
- 7 Language education by region
- 8 Language study holidays
- 9 Minority language education
- 10 Acronyms and abbreviations
- 11 See also
- 12 Notes
- 13 References
- 14 Further reading
- 15 External links
Need for language education
Increasing globalization has created a large need for people in the workforce who can communicate in multiple languages. The uses of common languages are in areas such as trade, tourism, international relations, technology, media, and science. Many countries such as Korea (Kim Yeong-seo, 2009), Japan (Kubota, 1998) and China (Kirkpatrick & Zhichang, 2002) frame education policies to teach at least one foreign language at the primary and secondary school levels. However, some countries such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines use a second official language in their governments. According to GAO (2010), China has recently been putting enormous importance on foreign language learning, especially the English language.
History of foreign language education
Ancient to medieval period
Although the need to learn foreign languages is older than human history itself, the origins of modern language education are in the study and teaching of Latin in the 17th century. Latin had for many centuries been the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world, but it was displaced by French, Italian, and English by the end of the 16th century. John Amos Comenius was one of many people who tried to reverse this trend. He composed a complete course for learning Latin, covering the entire school curriculum, culminating in his Opera Didactica Omnia, 1657.
In this work, Comenius also outlined his theory of language acquisition. He is one of the first theorists to write systematically about how languages are learned and about pedagogical methodology for language acquisition. He held that language acquisition must be allied with sensation and experience. Teaching must be oral. The schoolroom should have models of things, and failing that, pictures of them. As a result, he also published the world's first illustrated children's book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus. The study of Latin diminished from the study of a living language to be used in the real world to a subject in the school curriculum. Such decline brought about a new justification for its study. It was then claimed that its study developed intellectual abilities, and the study of Latin grammar became an end in and of itself.
"Grammar schools" from the 16th to 18th centuries focused on teaching the grammatical aspects of Classical Latin. Advanced students continued grammar study with the addition of rhetoric.
The study of modern languages did not become part of the curriculum of European schools until the 18th century. Based on the purely academic study of Latin, students of modern languages did much of the same exercises, studying grammatical rules and translating abstract sentences. Oral work was minimal, and students were instead required to memorize grammatical rules and apply these to decode written texts in the target language. This tradition-inspired method became known as the grammar-translation method.
Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became very rapid in the 20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting methods, each trying to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary methods. The earliest applied linguists included Jean Manesca, Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (1803–1865), Henry Sweet (1845–1912), Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), and Harold Palmer (1877–1949). They worked on setting language teaching principles and approaches based on linguistic and psychological theories, but they left many of the specific practical details for others to devise.
Those looking at the history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and the methods of teaching (such as those related below) might be tempted to think that it is a history of failure. Very few students in U.S. universities who have a foreign language as a major manage to reach something called "minimum professional proficiency". Even the "reading knowledge" required for a PhD degree is comparable only to what second-year language students read and only very few researchers who are native English speakers can read and assess information written in languages other than English. Even a number of famous linguists are monolingual.
However, anecdotal evidence for successful second or foreign language learning is easy to find, leading to a discrepancy between these cases and the failure of most language programs, which helps make the research of second language acquisition emotionally charged. Older methods and approaches such as the grammar translation method or the direct method are dismissed and even ridiculed as newer methods and approaches are invented and promoted as the only and complete solution to the problem of the high failure rates of foreign language students.
Most books on language teaching list the various methods that have been used in the past, often ending with the author's new method. These new methods are usually presented as coming only from the author's mind, as the authors generally give no credence to what was done before and do not explain how it relates to the new method. For example, descriptive linguists[who?] seem to claim unhesitatingly that there were no scientifically based language teaching methods before their work (which led to the audio-lingual method developed for the U.S. Army in World War II). However, there is significant evidence to the contrary. It is also often inferred or even stated that older methods were completely ineffective or have died out completely when even the oldest methods are still used (e.g. the Berlitz version of the direct method). One reason for this situation is that proponents of new methods have been so sure that their ideas are so new and so correct that they could not conceive that the older ones have enough validity to cause controversy. This was in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific advances, which has tended to blind researchers to precedents in older work.(p. 5)
There have been two major branches in the field of language learning, the empirical and theoretical, and these have almost completely separate histories, with each gaining ground over the other at one point in time or another. Examples of researchers on the empiricist side are Jesperson, Palmer, and Leonard Bloomfield, who promote mimicry and memorization with pattern drills. These methods follow from the basic empiricist position that language acquisition basically results from habits formed by conditioning and drilling. In its most extreme form, language learning is seen as basically the same as any other learning in any other species, human language being essentially the same as communication behaviors seen in other species.
On the theoretical side are, for example, Francois Gouin, M.D. Berlitz, and Elime de Sauzé, whose rationalist theories of language acquisition dovetail with linguistic work done by Noam Chomsky and others. These have led to a wider variety of teaching methods ranging from the grammar-translation method to Gouin's "series method" to the direct methods of Berlitz and de Sauzé. With these methods, students generate original and meaningful sentences to gain a functional knowledge of the rules of grammar. This follows from the rationalist position that man is born to think and that language use is a uniquely human trait impossible in other species. Given that human languages share many common traits, the idea is that humans share a universal grammar which is built into our brain structure. This allows us to create sentences that we have never heard before but that can still be immediately understood by anyone who understands the specific language being spoken. The rivalry of the two camps is intense, with little communication or cooperation between them.
Teaching foreign language in classrooms
Language education may take place as a general school subject or in a specialized language school. There are many methods of teaching languages. Some have fallen into relative obscurity and others are widely used; still others have a small following, but offer useful insights.
While sometimes confused, the terms "approach", "method" and "technique" are hierarchical concepts.
An approach is a set of assumptions about the nature of language and language learning, but does not involve procedure or provide any details about how such assumptions should be implemented into the classroom setting. Such can be related to second language acquisition theory.
There are three principal "approaches":
- The structural view treats language as a system of structurally related elements to code meaning (e.g. grammar).
- The functional view sees language as a vehicle to express or accomplish a certain function, such as requesting something.
- The interactive view sees language as a vehicle for the creation and maintenance of social relations, focusing on patterns of moves, acts, negotiation and interaction found in conversational exchanges. This approach has been fairly dominant since the 1980s.
A method is a plan for presenting the language material to be learned, and should be based upon a selected approach. In order for an approach to be translated into a method, an instructional system must be designed considering the objectives of the teaching/learning, how the content is to be selected and organized, the types of tasks to be performed, the roles of students, and the roles of teachers.
- Examples of structural methods are grammar translation and the audio-lingual method.
- Examples of functional methods include the oral approach / situational language teaching.
- Examples of interactive methods include the direct method, the series method, communicative language teaching, language immersion, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, the Natural Approach, Total Physical Response, Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling and Dogme language teaching.
A technique (or strategy) is a very specific, concrete stratagem or trick designed to accomplish an immediate objective. Such are derived from the controlling method, and less directly, from the approach.
Online and self-study courses
Hundreds of languages are available for self-study, from scores of publishers, for a range of costs, using a variety of methods. The course itself acts as a teacher and has to choose a methodology, just as classroom teachers do.
Audio recordings and books
Audio recordings use native speakers, and one strength is helping learners improve their accent. Some recordings have pauses for the learner to speak. Others are continuous so the learner speaks along with the recorded voice, similar to learning a song.
Audio recordings for self-study use many of the methods used in classroom teaching, and have been produced on records, tapes, CDs, DVDs and websites.
Most audio recordings teach words in the target language by using explanations in the learner's own language. An alternative is to use sound effects to show meaning of words in the target language. The only language in such recordings is the target language, and they are comprehensible regardless of the learner's native language.
Language books have been published for centuries, teaching vocabulary and grammar. The simplest books are phrasebooks to give useful short phrases for travelers, cooks, receptionists, or others who need specific vocabulary. More complete books include more vocabulary, grammar, exercises, translation, and writing practice.
Also, various other "language learning tools" have been entering the market in recent years. There are as simple examples as Vocabulary Stickers, but also technologically complex augmented reality translation apps.
Internet and software
Software can interact with learners in ways that books and audio cannot:
- Some software records the learner, analyzes the pronunciation, and gives feedback.
- Software can present additional exercises in areas where a particular learner has difficulty, until the concepts are mastered.
- Software can pronounce words in the target language and show their meaning by using pictures instead of oral explanations. The only language in such software is the target language. It is comprehensible regardless of the learner's native language.
Websites provide various services geared toward language education. Some sites are designed specifically for learning languages:
- Some software runs on the web itself, with the advantage of avoiding downloads, and the disadvantage of requiring an internet connection.
- Some publishers use the web to distribute audio, texts and software, for use offline.
- Some websites offer learning activities such as quizzes or puzzles to practice language concepts.
- Language exchange sites connect users with complementary language skills, such as a native Spanish speaker who wants to learn English with a native English speaker who wants to learn Spanish. Language exchange websites essentially treat knowledge of a language as a commodity, and provide a marketlike environment for the commodity to be exchanged. Users typically contact each other via chat, VoIP, or email. Language exchanges have also been viewed as a helpful tool to aid language learning at language schools. Language exchanges tend to benefit oral proficiency, fluency, colloquial vocabulary acquisition, and vernacular usage, rather than formal grammar or writing skills.
Many other websites are helpful for learning languages, even though they are designed, maintained and marketed for other purposes:
- All countries have websites in their own languages, which learners elsewhere can use as primary material for study: news, fiction, videos, songs, etc. In a study conducted by the Center for Applied Linguistics, it was noted that the use of technology and media has begun to play a heavy role in facilitating language learning in the classroom. With the help of the internet, students are readily exposed to foreign media (music videos, television shows, films) and as a result, teachers are taking heed of the internet's influence and are searching for ways to combine this exposure into their classroom teaching.
- Translation sites let learners find the meaning of foreign text or create foreign translations of text from their native language.
- Speech synthesis or text to speech (TTS) sites and software let learners hear pronunciation of arbitrary written text, with pronunciation similar to a native speaker.
- Course development and learning management systems such as Moodle are used by teachers, including language teachers.
- Web conferencing tools can bring remote learners together; e.g. Elluminate Live.
- Players of computer games can practice a target language when interacting in massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. In 2005, the virtual world Second Life started to be used for foreign language tuition, sometimes with entire businesses being developed. In addition, Spain’s language and cultural institute Instituto Cervantes has an "island" on Second Life.
Some Internet content is free, often from government and nonprofit sites such as BBC Online, Book2, Foreign Service Institute, with no or minimal ads. Some is ad-supported, such as newspapers and YouTube. Some requires a payment.
Language learning strategies have attracted increasing focus as a way of understanding the process of language acquisition.
Listening as a way of learning
Clearly listening is used to learn, but not all language learners employ it consciously. Listening to understand is one level of listening but focused listening is not something that most learners employ as a strategy.
Reading as a way to learn
Many people read to understand but the strategy of reading text to learn grammar and discourse styles can also be employed.
Translation and rote memorization have been the two strategies that have been employed traditionally. There are other strategies that also can be used such as guessing, based on looking for contextual clues, spaced repetition with a use of various apps, games and tools (e.g. DuoLingo, LingoMonkey and Vocabulary Stickers). Knowledge about how the brain works can be utilized in creating strategies for how to remember words.
Code switching, that is, changing between languages at some point in a sentence or utterance, is a commonly used communication strategy among language learners and bilinguals. While traditional methods of formal instruction often discourage code switching, students, especially those placed in a language immersion situation, often use it. If viewed as a learning strategy, wherein the student uses the target language as much as possible but reverts to their native language for any element of an utterance that they are unable to produce in the target language (as, e.g., in Wolfgang Butzkamm's concept of enlightened monolingualism), then it has the advantages that it encourages fluency development and motivation and a sense of accomplishment by enabling the student to discuss topics of interest to him or her early in the learning process—before requisite vocabulary has been memorized. It is particularly effective for students whose native language is English, due to the high probability of a simple English word or short phrase being understood by the conversational partner.
Blended learning combines face-to-face teaching with distance education, frequently electronic, either computer-based or web-based. It has been a major growth point in the ELT (English Language Teaching) industry over the last ten years.
Some people, though, use the phrase 'Blended Learning' to refer to learning taking place while the focus is on other activities. For example, playing a card game that requires calling for cards may allow blended learning of numbers (1 to 10).
When talking about language skills, the four basic ones are: listening, speaking, reading and writing. However, other, more socially based skills have been identified more recently such as summarizing, describing, narrating etc. In addition, more general learning skills such as study skills and knowing how one learns have been applied to language classrooms.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the four basic skills were generally taught in isolation in a very rigid order, such as listening before speaking. However, since then, it has been recognized that we generally use more than one skill at a time, leading to more integrated exercises. Speaking is a skill that often is underrepresented in the traditional classroom. This is due to the fact that it is considered harder to teach and test. There are numerous texts on teaching and testing writing but relatively few on speaking.
More recent textbooks stress the importance of students working with other students in pairs and groups, sometimes the entire class. Pair and group work give opportunities for more students to participate more actively. However, supervision of pairs and groups is important to make sure everyone participates as equally as possible. Such activities also provide opportunities for peer teaching, where weaker learners can find support from stronger classmates.
In foreign language teaching, the sandwich technique is the oral insertion of an idiomatic translation in the mother tongue between an unknown phrase in the learned language and its repetition, in order to convey meaning as rapidly and completely as possible. The mother tongue equivalent can be given almost as an aside, with a slight break in the flow of speech to mark it as an intruder.
When modeling a dialogue sentence for students to repeat, the teacher not only gives an oral mother tongue equivalent for unknown words or phrases, but repeats the foreign language phrase before students imitate it: L2 => L1 => L2. For example, a German teacher of English might engage in the following exchange with the students:
- Teacher: "Let me try - lass mich versuchen - let me try."
- Students: "Let me try."
Mother tongue mirroring
Mother tongue mirroring is the adaptation of the time-honoured technique of literal translation or word-for word translation for pedagogical purposes. The aim is to make foreign constructions salient and transparent to learners and, in many cases, spare them the technical jargon of grammatical analysis. It differs from literal translation and interlinear text as used in the past since it takes the progress learners have made into account and only focuses upon a specific structure at a time. As a didactic device, it can only be used to the extent that it remains intelligible to the learner, unless it is combined with a normal idiomatic translation. This technique is seldom referred to or used these days.
Back-chaining is a technique used in teaching oral language skills, especially with polysyllabic or difficult words. The teacher pronounces the last syllable, the student repeats, and then the teacher continues, working backwards from the end of the word to the beginning.
For example, to teach the name ‘Mussorgsky' a teacher will pronounce the last syllable: -sky, and have the student repeat it. Then the teacher will repeat it with -sorg- attached before: -sorg-sky, and all that remains is the first syllable: Mus-sorg-sky.
Language education by region
Practices in language education may vary by region however the underlying understandings which drive it are fundamentally similar. Rote repetition, drilling, memorisation and grammar conjugating are used the world over. Sometimes there are different preferences teaching methods by region. Language immersion is popular in some European countries, but is not used very much in the United States, in Asia or in Australia.
The languages being learned differ; in the United States, Spanish is the most popular language to be learned, whereas the most popular languages to be learned in Australia are Italian and Mandarin Chinese.
Language study holidays
An increasing number of people are now combining holidays with language study in the native country. This enables the student to experience the target culture by meeting local people. Such a holiday often combines formal lessons, cultural excursions, leisure activities, and a homestay, perhaps with time to travel in the country afterwards. Language study holidays are popular across Europe (Malta & UK being the most popular because almost everyone speaks English as a first language) and Asia due to the ease of transportation and variety of nearby countries. These holidays have become increasingly more popular in Central and South America in such countries as Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru. As a consequence of this increasing popularity, several international language education agencies have flourished in recent years.
With the increasing prevalence of international business transactions, it is now important to have multiple languages at one's disposal. This is also evident in businesses outsourcing their departments to Eastern Europe.
Minority language education
Minority language education policy
The principal policy arguments in favor of promoting minority language education are the need for multilingual workforces, intellectual and cultural benefits and greater inclusion in global information society. Access to education in a minority language is also seen as a human right as granted by the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and the UN Human Rights Committee. Bilingual Education has been implemented in many countries including the United States, in order to promote both the use and appreciation of the minority language, as well as the majority language concerned.
Materials and e-learning for minority language education
Suitable resources for teaching and learning minority languages can be difficult to find and access, which has led to calls for the increased development of materials for minority language teaching. The internet offers opportunities to access a wider range of texts, audios and videos. Language learning 2.0 (the use of web 2.0 tools for language education) offers opportunities for material development for lesser-taught languages and to bring together geographically dispersed teachers and learners.
Acronyms and abbreviations
See also: English language learning and teaching for information on language teaching acronyms and abbreviations which are specific to English.
- ALL: Apprenticeship Language Learning
- CALL: computer-assisted language learning
- CLIL: content and language integrated learning
- CELI: Certificato di Conoscenza della Lingua Italiana
- CLL: community language learning
- DELE: Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera
- DELF: diplôme d'études en langue française
- EFL: English as a foreign language
- ELL: English language learning
- ELT: English language teaching
- FLL: foreign language learning
- FLT: foreign language teaching
- HLL: heritage language learning
- L1: first language, native language, mother tongue
- L2: second language (or any additional language)
- LDL: Lernen durch Lehren (German for learning by teaching)
- LOTE: Languages Other Than English
- SLA: second language acquisition
- TELL: technology-enhanced language learning
- TEFL: teaching English as a foreign language N.B. This article is about travel-teaching.
- TEFLA: teaching English as a foreign language to adults
- TESOL: teaching English to speakers of other languages
- TPR: Total Physical Response
- TPRS: Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling
- UNIcert is a European language education system of many universities based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
- American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
- Eikaiwa school
- Error analysis (linguistics)
- Foreign language anxiety
- Foreign language writing aid
- Foreign language reading aid
- Glossary of language teaching terms and ideas
- Language festival
- Linguistic rights
- List of language acquisition researchers
- Monolingual learner's dictionary
- Self access language learning centers
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- The REALIA Project
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A mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body (sporocarp or reproductive structure) of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. The term "mushroom" also is used to designate the entire fungus with a fruiting body.
While the term mushroom is often associated with fungi that have a stem (stipe or stalk), a cap (pileus), and gills (lamella, the papery ribs under the cap of a mushroom), the term can refer to a wide variety of gilled fungi with or without stems and more generally any fruiting body.
Mushrooms provide culinary, commercial, aesthetic, and ecological values. Since prehistoric times, people have consumed them. Edible varieties can be flavorful and provide B vitamins and minerals such as potassium, phosphorus, selenium, and iron; but mushrooms do not have many calories. Mushroom growing and sales have been an important industry, and the diverse forms and colors of mushrooms add to the wondrous nature for humans. Ecologically, various animals, such as rodents and birds, eat mushrooms, this makes mushrooms an important source of nutrition and energy in terrestrial food chains.
On the other hand, many species of mushrooms contain toxins that can cause human sickness or even death. Among the most deadly mushrooms are the destroying angel and the deathcap, members of the genus Amanita, which have killed many mushroom hunters.
A fungus is a eukaryotic organism that digests its food externally and absorbs nutrient molecules into its cells. Fungi make up one of the kingdoms into which living things are classified by biologists. Mushrooms are unique because they differ from bacteria, which do not have a cell nucleus; they are not a plant because mushrooms do not make their own food through photosynthesis; and they differ from animals because they are not mobile and do not absorb nutrition externally. Mushrooms are, however, related to other fungi organisms such as, yeasts, molds, and mildews.
Fungi may be single-celled or multi-cellular. Multi-cellular fungi are composed of networks of long hollow tubes called hyphae. The hyphae often gather in dense networks known as mycelium. The mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus, and consists of the mass branching, thread-like hyphae. The mycelium grows through the medium on which the fungus feeds. Because most fungi are embedded in the medium in which they grow, most often soil, they are often not visible.
Although fungi lack true organs, the mycelia can become organized into more complex reproductive structures called fruiting bodies, or sporocarps, under the right conditions. The sporocarp or fruiting body is a multi-cellular structure in which spore-producing structures, such as basidia or asci, are borne. The fruiting body is part of the sexual phase of a fungal life cycle, the rest of the life cycle is characterized by its vegetative mycelial growth. The sporocarp of a basidiomycete (club fungi, one of the major divisions of fungi) is known as a basidiocarp, while the fruiting body of an ascomycete (sac fungi) is known as an ascocarp.
Mushroom is the common name given to the fruiting bodies of many fungal species. Although these typically above-ground structures are the most conspicuous to humans, they make up only a small portion of the entire fungal body.
The standard for the name "mushroom" is the cultivated white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, hence the word mushroom is most often applied to fungi (Basidiomycota, Agaricomycetes) that have a stem (stipe), a cap (pileus), and gills (lamellae, sing. lamella) on the underside of the cap just as do store-bought white mushrooms. Stipe refers to the stem or stalk-like feature supporting the cap of a mushroom. The pileus is the technical name for what is commonly known as the cap of a fungal fruiting body, which is often umbrella shaped, but may take many forms. A gill or lamella is one of the papery ribs under the cap of a mushroom.
However, "mushroom" can also refer to a wide variety of gilled fungi, with or without stems, and the term is used even more generally to describe both the fleshy fruiting bodies of some Ascomycota and the woody or leathery fruiting bodies of some Basidiomycota, depending upon the context of the word. Forms deviating from the standard form usually have more specific names, such as "puffball," "stinkhorn," and "morel," and gilled mushrooms themselves are often called "agarics" in reference to their similarity to Agaricus or their placement in the order Agaricales.
By extension, "mushroom" can also designate the entire fungus when in culture or the thallus (called a mycelium) of species that form the fruiting bodies called mushrooms.
The terms "mushroom" and "toadstool" date back centuries and were never precisely defined, nor was there consensus on its application. There is no scientific distinction between these terms. The term "toadstool" has often but not exclusively been applied to poisonous or inedible mushrooms, but has also been applied to those mushrooms that are edible and have the classic umbrella-like cap-and-stem form.
Between 1400 and 1600 C.E., the terms tadstoles, frogstooles, frogge stoles, tadstooles, tode stoles, toodys hatte, paddockstool, puddockstool, paddocstol, toadstoole, and paddockstooles were sometimes used synonymously with mushrom, mushrum, muscheron, mousheroms, mussheron, or musserouns (Ramsbottom 1954). The term "mushroom" and its variations may have been derived from the French word mousseron in reference to moss (mousse). There may have been a direct connection to toads (in reference to poisonous properties) for toadstools.
However, there is no clear-cut delineation between edible and poisonous fungi, so that a "mushroom" technically may be edible, poisonous, or unpalatable. The term "toadstool" is currently used in storytelling when referring to poisonous or suspect mushrooms. The classic example of a toadstool is Amanita muscaria.
Many species of mushrooms seemingly appear overnight, growing or expanding rapidly. This phenomenon is the source of several common expressions in the English language, including "to mushroom" or "mushrooming" (expanding rapidly in size or scope) and "to pop up like a mushroom" (to appear unexpectedly and quickly). In actuality, all species of mushrooms take several days to form primordial mushroom fruiting bodies, though they do expand rapidly by the absorption of fluids.
The cultivated mushroom as well as the common field mushroom initially form a minute fruiting body, referred to as the pin stage because of their small size. Slightly expanded, they are called buttons, once again because of the relative size and shape. Once such stages are formed, the mushroom can rapidly pull in water from its mycelium and expand, mainly by inflating preformed cells that took several days to form in the primordia.
Similarly, there are even more ephemeral mushrooms, like Parasola plicatilis (formerly Coprinus plicatlis), that literally appear overnight and may disappear by late afternoon on a hot day after rainfall. The primordia form at ground level in lawns in humid spaces under the thatch and after heavy rainfall or in dewy conditions balloon to full size in a few hours, release spores, and then collapse. They "mushroom" to full size.
The slang term "mushrooms" has served as a gang-related term for victims accidentally shot as collateral damage simply because they popped up suddenly, as do fungal mushrooms (Sherman et al. 1989).
Not all mushrooms expand overnight; some grow very slowly and add tissue to their fruiting bodies by growing from the edges of the colony or by inserting hyphae.
Identifying mushrooms requires a basic understanding of their macroscopic structure. Most are Basidiomycetes and gilled. Their spores, called basidiospores, are produced on the gills and fall in a fine rain of powder from under the caps as a result. At the microscopic level, the basidiospores are shot off of basidia and then fall between the gills in the dead air space. As a result, for most mushrooms, if the cap is cut off and placed gill-side-down overnight, a powdery impression reflecting the shape of the gills (or pores, or spines, etc.) is formed (when the fruiting body is sporulating). The color of the powdery print, called a spore print, is used to help classify mushrooms and can help to identify them. Spore print colors include white (most common), brown, black, purple-brown, pink, yellow, and cream, but almost never blue, green, or red.
While modern scientific identification of mushrooms is quickly becoming molecular, the standard methods for identification are still used by most and have developed into a fine art harking back to medieval times and the Victorian era. This ancient art is combined with microscopic examination. The presence of juices upon breaking, bruising reactions, odors, tastes, shades of color, habitat, habit, and season are all considered by mycologists, amateur and professional alike. Tasting and smelling mushrooms carries its own hazards because of poisons and allergens. Chemical spot tests are also used for some genera.
In general, identification to genus can often be accomplished in the field using a local mushroom guide. Identification to species, however, requires more effort; one must remember that a mushroom develops from a button stage into a mature structure, and only the latter can provide certain characteristics needed for the identification of the species. However, over-mature specimens lose features and cease producing spores. Many novices have mistaken humid water marks on paper for white spore prints, or discolored paper from oozing liquids on lamella edges for colored spore prints.
Two of the five major divisions (phyla) of fungi (Kingdom Fungi) are the Ascomycota and the Basidiomycota. The Ascomycota, commonly known as sac fungi or ascomycetes, form meiotic spores called ascospores, which are enclosed in a special sac-like structure called an ascus. This division includes morels, some mushrooms and truffles, as well as single-celled yeasts and many species that have only been observed undergoing asexual reproduction. Members of the Basidiomycota, commonly known as the club fungi or basidiomycetes, produce meiospores called basidiospores on club-like stalks called basidia. Most common mushrooms belong to this group, as well as rust and smut fungi, which are major pathogens of grains.
Typical mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of members of the order Agaricales, whose type genus is Agaricus and type species is the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris. The order Agaricales is placed in the class Agariomycetes of the phylum Basidiomycota. Agaricales is commonly known as the "gilled mushrooms."
However, in modern molecularly defined classifications, not all members of the order Agaricales have gills or produce mushroom fruiting bodies. Furthermore, many other gilled fungi, collectively called mushrooms, occur in other orders in the class Agaricomycetes. For example, chanterelles are in the Cantharellales, false chanterelles like Gomphus are in the Gomphales, milk mushrooms (Lactarius) and russulas (Russula) as well as Lentinellus are in the Russulales, while the tough leathery genera Lentinus and Panus are among the Polyporales, but Neolentinus is in the Gloeophyllales, and the little pin-mushroom genus, Rickenella, along with similar genera, are in the Hymenochaetales.
Within the main body of mushrooms, in the order Agaricales, are common fungi like the common fairy-ring mushroom (Marasmius oreades), shiitake, enoki, oyster mushrooms, fly agarics, and other amanitas, magic mushrooms like species of Psilocybe, paddy straw mushrooms, shaggy manes, and so forth.
An atypical mushroom is the lobster mushroom (Hypomyces lactifluorum), which is an ascomycete that parasitizes other mushrooms, such as the Russula or Lactarius. This may result in a deformed, cooked-lobster-colored outside from the lobster mushroom and the white flesh of the parasitized basidiomycete muchroom on the inside (Volk 2001).
Other mushrooms (those with fruiting bodies) are non-gilled. Some have pores underneath (and are usually called boletes), others have spines, such as the hedgehog mushroom and other tooth fungi, and so on. "Mushroom" has been used for polypores, puffballs, jelly fungi, coral fungi, bracket fungi, stinkhorns, and cup fungi.
Thus the term mushroom has more than one common application to macroscopic fungal fruiting bodies and associated organisms than one having precise taxonomic meaning. According to Chang and Miles (2004), there are approximately fourteen thousand described species of mushrooms.
Edible mushrooms are used extensively in cooking, in many cuisines (notably Chinese, European, and Japanese). Though mushrooms are commonly thought to have little nutritional value, many species are high in fiber and provide vitamins such as thiamine (B1), riboflavin (B2), niacin (B3), biotin (B7), cobalamins (B12), and ascorbic acid (C), as well as minerals, including iron, selenium, potassium, and phosphorus. Mushrooms have been gaining a higher profile for containing the antioxidants ergothioneine and selenium.
Most mushrooms that are sold in supermarkets have been commercially grown on mushroom farms. The most popular of these, Agaricus bisporus, is safe for most people to eat because it is grown in controlled, sterilized environments, though some individuals do not tolerate it well. Several varieties of A. bisporus are grown commercially, including whites, crimini, and portabello. Other cultivated species now available at many grocers include shiitake, maitake or hen-of-the-woods, oyster, and enoki.
People who collect mushrooms for consumption are known as mycophagists, and the act of collecting them for such is known as mushroom hunting, or simply "mushrooming."
Of central interest is the chemical properties of mushrooms and the fact that many species produce secondary metabolites that render them toxic, mind-altering, or even bioluminescent.
There are a number of species of mushroom that are poisonous, and although some resemble certain edible species, eating them could be fatal. Eating mushrooms gathered in the wild is risky and should not be undertaken by individuals unknowledgeable in mushroom identification, unless the individuals limit themselves to a small number of good edible species that are visually distinctive. More generally, and particularly with gilled mushrooms, separating edible from poisonous species requires meticulous attention to detail; there is no single trait by which all toxic mushrooms can be identified, nor one by which all edible mushrooms can be identified.
Though there are only a small number of deadly species, several have particularly severe and unpleasant symptoms. Toxicity likely plays a role in protecting the function of the basidiocarp: The mycelium has expended considerable energy and protoplasmic material to develop a structure to efficiently distribute its spores. One defense against consumption and premature destruction is the evolution of chemicals that render the mushroom inedible, either causing the consumer to vomit (see emetics) the meal or avoid consumption altogether.
Psilocybin mushrooms possess psychedelic properties. They are commonly known as "magic mushrooms" or "shrooms" and are available in many parts of the world, though a number of countries have outlawed their sale. Some mushrooms are eaten for their psychoactive effects, such as fly agaric, which is used for shamanic purposes by tribes in northeast Siberia. They have also been used in the West to enhance religious experiences. Because of their psychoactive properties, some mushrooms have played a role in native medicine, where they have been used to effect mental and physical healing, and to facilitate visionary states. One such ritual is the Velada ceremony. A representative figure of traditional mushroom use is the shaman and curandera (priest-healer) María Sabina.
As with many psychoactive substances, the effects of psychedelic mushrooms are subjective and unpredictable, with the effect ranging from exhilarating to distressing.
Currently, many species of mushrooms and fungi used in thousand-year-old folk medicine practices are under intense study by ethnobotanists and medical researchers. Maitake, shiitake, chaga, and reishi are prominent among those being researched for their potential anti-cancer, anti-viral, or immunity-enhancing properties. Psilocybin, originally an extract of certain psychedelic mushrooms, is being studied for its ability to help people suffering from mental disease, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Minute amounts have been reported to stop cluster and migraine headaches (Sewell et al. 2006).
Mushrooms can be used for dyeing wool and other natural fibers. The chromophores of mushrooms are organic compounds that produce strong and vivid colors, and all colors of the spectrum can be achieved with mushroom dyes. Before the invention of synthetic dyes, mushrooms were the primary source of textile dyes. This technique has survived in Finland, and many Middle Ages re-enactors have revived the skill.
Some fungi, types of polypores loosely called mushrooms, have been used as fire starters (known as tinder fungi). Ötzi the Iceman (a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 B.C.E.) was found carrying such fungi. Mushrooms and other fungi will likely play an increasingly important role in the development of effective biological remediation and filtration technologies.
All links retrieved October 31, 2018.
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Sherry Norfolk describes herself as a “teaching artist.” In her own words, “someone who uses their art form to teach the curriculum.” Putting stories to work in classrooms is her creative passion, and she is committed to helping educators discover the myriad resources available to them in this endeavor. Discover how to integrate folktales and the oral tradition into the curricula and why they are the foundation for human communication.
Raven: In your writing, you’ve stated that there is no way to effectively tell a story in a classroom without addressing multiple aspects of the Common Core Standards. How can teachers easily use stories to address these standards?
Sherry: Okay, I’ll give you an example of a typical lesson plan that I use. First, I talk with the teachers about what standards are the highest priority to address. Then I choose a folktale that addresses those themes or those standards. On the first day, I tell that story to the children. Now we’re addressing listening skills, right off the bat. Then we discuss the pattern of that story. Folktales have wonderful, clear patterns that we can define and follow. Patterning is in the Math standards, as well as the Language Arts standards.
Next, we work together to create a story based on that pattern—we generate new ideas. Those new ideas are generated collaboratively. In every single grade level, the ELA standards require children to collaborate. The kids are generating those stories collaboratively, and they are building off of prior knowledge – that’s another ELA Standard: generating ideas based on prior knowledge. It might be prior knowledge based on their own experiences, it might be based on events that are happening in the world, or something from another story they just read. The important point for students in aligning their learning with the ELA Standards is that they’re making connections to themselves, to literature, and to the world. I tell them the story that we’ve generated; then, each student creates his/her own story and they then tell their new story to a partner so we’re back to collaborating, listening, and evaluating.
R: With folktales and the oral tradition, teachers are able to implement more interactive classroom assignments?
Sherry: Exactly, and that leads to asking the children to start writing so we’re incorporating the writing standards, as well. As they begin writing, they start to revise, and they’re revising for word choice, for vocabulary, for clarity. In addition, they are working with others to evaluate and revise their work together so they’re working collaboratively again.
Eventually they publish their work and that can be done very easily using technology. It depends on the teacher, the amount of time we have, and the support resources that are available, but often the kids will do their final drafts on a computer so that we can also include a technology component.
Then, having published the story, we start rehearsing and learning about a good audience. That component transitions into civic lessons and the Social Studies Standards. The children actually perform the stories, so now we’re back to listening, evaluating, and being a good audience. The children are required to provide positive peer feedback for every story. That requires each child to evaluate, assess and also reflect on specific elements that work well in a story. In this lesson plan, we’ve easily addressed well over a dozen Common Core Standards.
R: It sounds like the students, and the teachers, are really getting a lot out of this method of teaching.
Sherry: The Common Core State Standards really, really emphasize the integration of the curricula. It’s fun to see how you can look at all these different standards and integrate them, making the class more interesting and more creative for the students. It’s absolutely possible with the way that the Common Core Standards are organized.
Now, whether or not teachers are allowed to do that in their school system is another issue. Sometimes, administrators don’t recognize these opportunities and that learning can actually be more effective this way, even though all the research says it is. They’ll come into the classroom and see the students are actually having fun, and then things clamp down. But the truth is that the standards can contribute to an environment that is better and more conducive to learning. If you read the introduction to the Common Core state standards, it actually encourages integrated learning.
R: How would you convince administrators that using the oral tradition and folktales is extremely beneficial in learning these different skills?
Sherry: There’s a growing body of research that says when children are interested, when their curiosity is piqued, they will pay more attention, comprehend more and retain more knowledge.... When we are interested, when we are curious, we simply learn more—it’s intuitive.
In order to engage listeners, to engage our audience, our kids, our learners... we need to apply the principles of play. All types of play have some kind of underlying learning going on. But it doesn’t have to be just frivolous. The lesson plan and sequence of assignments sounds like fun to kids. They think they are simply having fun, and they’re also actively involved in the process of learning new skills. Even the kids who refuse to write a sentence, end up writing a story, an entire story. During the revision, even though they hate making revisions, they do it because it feels like a game and they see their progress.
R: What do you do when a child feels frustrated and they’re having difficulty engaging in the creative process? How do you help them through that phase?
Sherry: Brainstorm with them. We all process information at different rates of speed, so yeah, every once in a while, there’s a kid who just kind of stalls out. They sit there, stare at the wall, chew on things. Part of what I do in the classroom is constant, constant moving around the room, checking on kids, making sure they’re progressing, helping them get through that stall.
When I encounter a kid who is stuck, I brainstorm with him. I’ll give him, like, forty-two different ideas. Usually he won’t take one of mine, but it helps him move out of that stalled place, keeps him off the wall. Then he comes up with an idea he likes and he starts to move forward. It’s very rare that I encounter a kid who can’t come up with a story. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.
Recently, I’ve been doing more work in special education with self-contained classrooms that serve children with fairly profound disabilities. About nine of the classrooms I worked with last year were middle school kids with severe behavioral and emotional disorders. The teachers don’t believe we’ll be able to help these kids write. Yet in every single one of those classrooms, every single kid wrote and told a story. The teachers were amazed. There was a comment that I got back, and I love this comment: “Kids who passionately hate to write are now passionate writers.” And that was so exciting because it was from the teacher’s perspective! It wasn’t me saying that’s what I observed. It was the teachers who were seeing a profound change in their kids. That’s the impact storytelling can make in the classroom. Storytelling changes the whole learning paradigm in the classroom.
R: That’s amazing. What do you think made the difference?
Sherry: We came at the writing assignments from a different perspective. One of the key points that I encourage teachers to do is not immediately say, “Okay, come up with an idea and start writing.” Instead, I’ve found that it works much better when a teacher asks the students to start telling a story. Talk about the story with the other children before they try to put it into writing. For most of us, it’s so much easier to be creative out loud. You’re not worried about forming the letters on the page, not worried about spelling, not worried about grammar. You’re just telling a story.
Once you’ve shared the story out loud, you have a chance to assess, “Well, let’s see what worked?” They’re actually doing the first revision before they ever put pencil to page. This fundamental shift makes a huge difference, especially for kids who’ve had a lot of negative experiences in writing. That’s one of the real benefits, I find, that storytelling brings to the classroom: the oral creative process.
R: It makes perfect sense. I find that I need to share my thoughts out loud because I have these ideas buzzing in my head, but I can’t formulate them into a coherent message until I can speak to someone and get feedback.
Sherry: In the arts they call it the “authentic audience.” There’s got to be a real reason for doing this work: you get to tell it to somebody. You’re going to get feedback from that audience. Unfortunately, kids often perceive the work they do at school as “busy work”. We know they’re “practicing the skills” and they’re learning and making progress as they “practice the skills” but it just feels like busy work to them. Typically, the feedback they receive is maybe just a grade. But if they know their work is going to get published, it’s going to get listened to, their story is going to be shared with other people, then there’s an authentic purpose for doing the work. It makes it all real and it’s exciting to them.
R: When I’m working with the student that I mentor for the writing program, there are times when he is trying to come up with an idea for his story and he has to process his ideas verbally with a partner. It really helps him to problem-solve, and he’ll take those skills with him.
Sherry: Yes, but if you’ve already written all of the story down, especially by hand – which is what most kids have to do in school, right? – if you’ve written all that down and then people begin asking you questions, you don’t want to go back and change all that work. No one does. The kids can get all stubborn and uncooperative. When it’s on a computer, you can go in and add sentences or move passages around, but it is a pain if it’s all been done by hand. I have horrid memories of doing everything by hand and trying to revise things and hating the process really badly. I completely understand why kids feel that way, but teachers have been basically told, “Keep the classroom quiet.”
Since language is very much predicated on oral language, it’s actually counter-productive to keep classrooms quiet. It’s one of the practices that I really try to impress upon teachers when I’m in their classrooms. (The other thing is not to constantly badger the kids when they’re doing a rough draft. When they’re actively involved in the creative phase of their work, leave them alone.) If the processing is oral, then kids can take note of those ideas and change the story immediately. By the time they get around to actually writing the story down, most of the revisions are done, so the story is already in pretty good shape. The oral processing is essential, and it’s something that most classrooms preclude these days. When you bring storytelling into the classroom, all of a sudden it becomes recognizable as a strategy that works.
R: Let’s talk about your work with helping students retain factual information. Your website references Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage. It includes a brief dialogue on how to “weave a basket of storytelling to hold the grains of facts.” Could you explain this concept?
Sherry: Research tells us that we don’t retain factual information as well as we do the elements of a story. If you put the facts into story, we tend to retain it. For example: one time I was asked to teach about the differences between the Brazilian rainforest and the Madagascar rainforest (I have no idea why, it’s just what I was asked to do), so I did the research. Then I thought, okay, I’m a teaching artist, it needs to be taught through story.
I started by finding a folktale about a little girl walking through the rainforest and meeting up with a big monster. In my version of the story, she’s walking through the rain forest with her sister and as she notices things, she would say something like, “Look at that! There are butterflies everywhere and they’re all different colors of the rainbow.” And her sister would say, “Bimwili, there are over 300 kinds of butterflies in the rainforest. If we stop to look at every one, we’re never going to get where we’re going.” So they keep going. Then she says, “Ah, look at that great big lizard! It’s got eyes that are going in both directions and– hey! it just changed colors! And look at those toes!” “Yeah, that’s a chameleon. Chameleons can change colors because of their moods. Right now, he’s scared. That’s why he just changed colors. Let’s go!”
The sisters keep on going back and forth through the story and I’m describing the animals and plants that live in the rainforest. Then I would go back a week, sometimes two weeks later, and I ask the kids, “What were the things that Bimwili saw in the rainforest?” They would tell me the entire list. They retained it, and I swear that if I had given them a list of facts without Bimwili experiencing it through story, they wouldn’t have retained half of that information. That’s what I mean when I say weaving the facts into a basket of story.
R: Do you see that same phenomenon with other folktales? Is it applicable to other stories?
Sherry: I’ve seen this effect so many times. Another great example is a story Bobby tells of westward expansion, the Lewis and Clark Expedition through the eyes of York, the only African-American who was on that expedition. In the forty-five-minute story, the number of facts has to be somewhere up in the thousands. This is something he’s studied for over twenty years, and he knows this stuff backwards and forwards. He embeds all of these facts, weaves them into the basket of story.
After he performs the story in an auditorium, I follow the kids back into the classroom and I ask them to research and write a story from the perspective of some other explorer on the expedition. Remember, most of these kids have never heard of Lewis and Clark and it’s certainly the first time they’ve ever heard of York.
It’s really interesting to watch the kids who don’t write and read very well. They always choose York. Because they just heard his story, right? They can repeat back almost word for word the details that Bobby put into the story. All those facts, they will come right back out with them, almost as if they had a tape recorder and they had taped what Bobby was saying. However, if he had presented those points just as a list of facts they probably would not have remembered half of them.
R: You also noted how there are many different ways to tell a story orally. Could you discuss how teachers need to be able to perceive what is needed from their class?
Sherry: A good teacher is always very much aware of what their students need. They can do so by looking at body language and facial expressions. One of the interesting observations that teachers have shared with me over the years, is that when they watch their kids listening to a story, the teachers are able to observe things that they don’t normally see in the classroom. It’s probably because they are not actively engaged in the actual teaching at that point, so they can really focus on their kids. When I’m telling a story for the first time in a particular classroom, I can start to figure out the learning styles of every single kid.
R: Just in that one day?
Sherry: Just in that one story. If you’re really observant, you can figure out, very accurately, the learning styles of every child. For example: the kid who never looks at you is certainly not a visual learner. He’s probably auditory, so just looking and watching is a distraction to him and he’ll tend to look away. That doesn’t mean he’s not paying attention. It just means that’s the way he processes information.
The kid who is mimicking every single thing you do, she’s a kinesthetic learner. She needs to move around in order to learn. Children who are repeating every single sound effect and doing the kinesthetic stuff, they probably have a really good combination of all of the of the styles. They’re actively watching, listening, mimicking.
Then there are the kids who don’t ever look away, who don’t move a muscle and are carefully monitoring every move, every gesture - they’re typically visual learners. Over and over again, I see it. And I can even begin to figure out which child is ADHD and which one has different types of disabilities because the symptoms manifest during that one five-minute story. Storytelling allows you to observe them just as they are.
R: As children are getting to be more deeply immersed in digital media, what are some of the challenges in adapting a story or making it appealing for children who are used to more high-intensity stimulation?
Sherry: Nowadays when telling stories to kids, I find that I have to use more dramatic character voices, more sound effects, more action and movement to mimic, in some ways, what happens on television or on small screens. Because kids are not used to paying attention to just the words.
R: That’s a little discouraging.
Sherry: Well, it is. I’ve been doing this for, well, years, and over those years I’ve observed – and anybody who’s been working with the oral tradition for any length of time has observed – a significant change in children’s ability to sit still and listen. It’s not necessarily what the kids are listening to that is different, I can still tell the same story I told twenty or thirty years ago, but now I have to ramp up the production quality to keep the audience’s attentions.
It’s never been true that you could just tell a story passively, at least not in my experience. You couldn’t just read the words without dramatic interpretation and then expect kids to listen intently. You need to put your own energy into each story. You have to be engaged in the story yourself. I think that nowadays it requires a higher level of energy and engagement in order to keep the kids involved in the story or you’ll lose them very quickly.
R: I was wondering if you have any tips for educators who want to use folktales and the oral tradition in their classrooms, but they’re not yet comfortable with telling stories. What advice would you give them?
Sherry: A good way to start is to observe other people, especially professional storytellers who have been performing for years. You’ll pick up some tips from them, and then think about how you can apply those aspects to your particular curriculum, to the lessons that you need to teach. My biggest recommendation for anyone who is thinking about using the oral tradition in their classroom is to just do it. Just sit down and tell a story. Put down the book, look at the eyes of your children and tell them a story. Then all of a sudden you will realize you can do this.
R: Okay, but why should teachers use folktales to begin with? Why is it so important for children to grow up with oral traditions?
Sherry: I guess the best answer is to refer you to the foreword that Carmen Deedy wrote for our social studies book: “When a child grows up without hearing family stories, she enters adulthood with an incomplete sense of her personal history. This is loss enough. But when a child grows up without hearing folktales and fairytales, she enters adulthood with an imperfect sense of what it means to be a member of the human family.... These tales carry deep within them the wit and wisdom of ancient cultures. Most are hundreds—some thousands—of years old. And they are an essential part of a complete education.”
Really, it is all about – for her, for me, for all of us who work with children – the idea that any child who grows up without hearing family stories, has an incomplete childhood. She doesn’t really know her own history. A child who grows up without hearing folktales and fairy tales has no idea of the human family, not just her own family but the whole human family. Folktales carry the whole message about who and what we are as human beings.
R: It sounds like folktales show us how to interact with other people, especially as we live in an increasingly diverse world.
Sherry: Yes, and folktales, the ones that have survived through generations of being told and retold and reinterpreted, have survived because they carry universal messages. When we tell those stories, to the children and to each other as adults, they reinforce those values and help us to understand that children who don’t hear those stories not only don’t know their own heritage but don’t know, really, how the world thinks, what the world values.
R: How do you see this happening in your work with schools?
Sherry: I just returned from Taiwan. I was working with children, using folktales to help them learn conversational English and to become more confident in their abilities to communicate in English. We were using universal folktales. That’s all we used, the entire time. It was amazing to see those children absolutely came alive to Western stories that they had never heard. It happens because these stories still carry those universal truths. The concept that we’re wired for stories as human beings is not just an abstract idea, it’s not just a metaphor - it’s absolutely true. Research has proven that. We have to, as human beings, share those stories. We simply have to.
R: So telling stories is not just a moral obligation to preserve a family history. Sharing stories also helps us maintain and sustain our values as human beings?
Sherry: Yes, it’s to maintain our humanity.


Can you tell the difference between text written by a human versus a robot?
Take a look at this example text in response to a prompt:
“Why should I buy your pair of sneakers? What makes them amazing?”
Can you tell if a human or robot wrote A or B?
The answer is GPT-3 wrote them both.
How about this example, in response to another prompt:
“What is the future of writing for humans?”
Who wrote what?
The answer is a human wrote A and a GPT-3 wrote B.
Could you honestly tell the difference between them? Most can’t tell.
In one study, researchers gave test subjects 200-word news articles written by either humans or GPT-3 and asked them to state which one had written them.
On average, they chose right only 52% of the time, which is basically by chance.
And if you ask GPT-3 itself what it thinks about the difference between a human vs. robot author, it’ll tell you:
Researchers at the University of Miami have developed an algorithm to detect whether a piece of writing is from a human or a machine. The team, made up of computer scientists and psychologists, used a dataset that contained more than 2.5 million articles, collected from more than 150,000 distinct websites. From that data, they were able to determine how humans and machines write differently in terms of word choice and structure.
To test their system, the team asked the public to complete nearly 48,000 sentences written by robots and humans without knowing what was written. Humans were able to correctly identify texts written by humans and text written by robots more than 95% of the time. The research was published in Science Advances earlier this month.
While it’s not entirely clear why the team decided to put this algorithm together or what they plan to do with it going forward, it’s still an interesting development when it comes to machine learning capabilities. It could potentially be helpful for identifying fake news online (an increasingly relevant issue) or in other scenarios where AI is being used—but not as transparently as we think.
It’s all coherent. It sounds like an interesting study. But it never happened.
Other studies like it may have taken place, or will take place in the future.
But this particular study that GPT-3 is referencing? Nope, not real.
Setting aside a penchant for creative license with reality…
GPT-3 can write text that reads as well as what a human could write.
The sheer volume and variety of what it can produce is staggering.
GPT-3 analyzed billions upon billions of lines of text, figured out how language works, and can now produce text of its own, practically on command.
While the quality of the output breaks down once you get past some 300-500 words (if you don’t provide any more prompts), GPT-3 is better at creating content than anything else that has come before it.
Which leads us to an interesting question:
If a computer can write text that’s indistinguishable from humans, where does that leave writers?
We’re already seeing a glimpse of the future in journalism.
Instead of writing short news reports of 200-500 words at a time, a journalist can just write a title, a subtitle, and let a computer fill out the rest.
AI and GPT-3 is taking up more space in newsrooms and media companies
There are several automated journalism applications being used in newsrooms around the globe from speeding up research to fact-checking, comment monitoring, streamlining workflow, eliminating fake news and even writing content.
Several media organizations including The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, Washington Post, and Yahoo! Sports already use AI to generate content.
The Press Association, for example, can now produce 30,000 local news stories a month using AI.
The software can scan the data and determine insights from, for example, a game, that are important for the reader to know.
The Washington Post uses its in-house NLG tool to create news articles and social media posts.
What will this do to the news and media over the next few years?
How will this change production and consumption?
It’s not just newsrooms – AI text software is used in finance, too
To cut research time and costs, German bank Commerzbank is using artificial intelligence to create equity research reports. This process is not yet completely automated, but the technology is already able to perform about 75% of what a human equity analyst would have done.
Many financial institutions are churning out 10- to 15-page financial reports in an instant by using Narrative Science’s NLG platform Quill. It also creates content for Groupon, Forbes, USAA and more.
Artificial intelligence helps create text summarizations, short and coherent versions of longer documents.
Text or content that is written, produced, or manipulated by AI is becoming more ubiquitous.
And it’s already available to anyone for the most mundane of tasks.
Take email, for example. Don’t want to write them? Give GPT-3 some instruction, and it’ll take care of the rest:
GPT-3 is going to change the way you work.— OthersideAI (@OthersideAI) July 22, 2020
Introducing Quick Response by OthersideAI
Automatically write emails in your personal style by simply writing the key points you want to get across
The days of spending hours a day emailing are over!!!
Beta access link in bio! pic.twitter.com/HFjZOgJvR8
It goes beyond just writing emails.
By day, GPT-3 is a coder.
For example, by tweaking GPT-3 so that it produced HTML rather than natural language, web developer Sharif Shameem showed that he could make it create web-page layouts just by giving it prompts:
This is mind blowing.— Sharif Shameem (@sharifshameem) July 13, 2020
With GPT-3, I built a layout generator where you just describe any layout you want, and it generates the JSX code for you.
W H A T pic.twitter.com/w8JkrZO4lk
And by night, GPT-3 is a poet.
Are writers and creatives at risk of being replaced?
In fact, creative uses for GPT-3 and other AI text tools covers not just poetry but scriptwriting, impersonation, fiction, songs, guitar tabs, and more.
It can write Dr. Seuss poems about Elon Musk.
Want to chat with Shakespeare? He’ll chat with you.
Need a Seinfeld script? Done.
Unlike that OTHER guy who just wrote silly things and lied to pass them off as the work of an AI, I actually DID get the GPT-3 language model to generate new Seinfeld scripts. Behold: 4 New Puffy Shirt Episodes. (The first 5 lines are canon, the rest new) pic.twitter.com/pG3iy69J9b— Ryan North (@ryanqnorth) July 7, 2020
It’s excellent at pretending to be historical figures, so you can ask a fake Jane Austen how her characters would use social media.
Want to know how Alfred Hitchcock would compare Interstellar with 2001: A Space Odyssey? Just ask Alfred.
Curious where H.G. Wells got the inspiration for The Time Machine? He’ll tell you.
AI and GPT-3 are great for summarizing movies with emojis, writing songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, technical manuals – and a lot more.
It can also imagine Professor Richard Feynman explaining a quantum computer in great detail and improvise Sir Isaac Newton talking about gravity.
GPT-3 can also imitate particular writers.
Mario Klingemann, an artist who works with machine learning, shared a short story called “The importance of being on Twitter,” written in the style of Jerome K. Jerome.
Klingemann says all he gave the AI was the title, the author’s name and the initial “It.”
Another attempt at a longer piece. An imaginary Jerome K. Jerome writes about Twitter. All I seeded was the title, the author's name and the first "It", the rest is done by #gpt3— Mario Klingemann (@quasimondo) July 18, 2020
Here is the full-length version as a PDF:https://t.co/d2gpmlZ1T5 pic.twitter.com/1N0lNoC1eZ
AI-driven plot generators like Story Generator and DeepStory are readily available to anyone who needs a little inspiration to get their creative writing project going.
The creative uses of AI are never-ending.
All these examples (and I’m not even covering everything) make it seem like GPT-3 is a rival, and there’s little to no use for humans in the creative and writing process.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
GPT-3 is an excellent copywriter who’s beat my copy multiple times
In my own work as a copywriter, I’ve been using GPT-3 and other AI tools for a couple of years. And the impact has been profound.
It’s not about churning out a ton more copy or content.
It’s not about writing faster.
The true, and lasting, impact of GPT-3 is ideation: coming up with new angles, ideas, and themes for writing ads, emails, landing pages, sales pages and more.
Over the past few years, incorporating AI, and more recently GPT-3, with client work has paid off in spades.
We can quickly and easily generate raw copy that turns into control-beating, conversion-boosting copy–with only minor editing.
And sometimes GPT-3 spins up ads or emails that can be used as they are, with zero editing.
My clients have experienced conversion lifts on pages, emails or ads that were once considered “dead” or impossible to beat.
Normally, as a copywriter, you rely on hours, days or weeks of research and immersing yourself in a product or service, with qualitative and quantitative analysis, interviews and surveys.
These are all still useful.
But there’s nothing quite like getting ideas for 50 or 100 ads with a click.
And there’s nothing quite like getting that “first shitty draft” taken care of in mere seconds.
I’ll get back to the creative impact on not just copywriting but all writing in a minute.
What is GPT-3 and how does it work?
Generative means that the model’s goal is to generate text. It wants to predict what word comes next in any given sentence.
Pre-trained means that the weights of the algorithm are already set for you based on the massive piles of data it has consumed.
Transformer is the algorithm the model uses. It specializes in being able to process long pieces of text and understand how words are used in natural language.
(The “3” means it’s the third version of the tool to be released).
In short, GPT-3 has been fed with, and trained on, an enormous amount of data that it uses to predict and generate the next word in a sentence.
The training data acts as a “memory” it can use to carry out tasks.
What data, specifically, has GPT-3 been fed with?
Pretty much everything.
GPT-3 has read the entire internet.
It’s read all of Wikipedia.
It’s consumed popular Reddit posts, news articles, and fan fiction.
It’s gone through all of Google Books.
It’s read conspiracy theories, propaganda manuals, celebrity stories, gossip, politics, and the top 10 spots for your dream vacation.
It’s read every month of the Common Crawl dataset (which is an archive of the internet) from 2016 to October 2019, comprising every piece of writing on the web during that time.
GPT-3 devoured it all.
It has digested 45 terabytes of text, which equals a book about 3,375,000,000 pages long.
If the average length of a book is about 400 pages, then GPT-3 read 8,437,500 books.
That’s over 3 times the number of books you’ll find in the New York Public library.
And based on all this, it writes everything.
But one key thing to keep in mind is how it writes.
Simply put, GPT-3 spits out the next word that fits in with everything that came before it.
It produces different probabilities for different words, and then picks the one with the highest likelihood of “fitting in” with the text.
You give an input – any text, however much or little you want to give – and then it tries to predict what words would come after that, based on everything it has read and the rules it has learned.
In other words, it predicts and replicates human text.
That’s all and good, but how is this the future of writing?
The shape of writing to come (for humans)
For humans, our role in the creative process and writing is shifting–and we’re liberated in a new way.
Instead of shouldering the burden of “originality” or coming up with something on our own, we are more like editors, copy chiefs, or simply “creative directors”.
AI, and GPT-3, can be more like our “creative assistants”, handling much of the brunt work–or a trusted collaborator, with contributions of its own that can turn into ever more interesting works of art.
That doesn’t mean AI will automatically produce a new, perfectly formed work of art (or story or piece of music), ready for human consumption and appreciation.
There’s no reason to expect that level of work–yet.
But it does put us way ahead in terms of experimentation with existing language and formulas.
The real question is not if, or how, a tool like GPT-3 can replicate, write, produce and eventually replace human writing.
It will replace some forms of writing.
The question that matters is:
How AI, and GPT-3 specifically, augment our creativity and writing?
AI can help us improve our creative process by making it easier to discover new ideas, new directions and new concepts that were not previously obvious to us.
It can help us find more unusual and unexpected connections between ideas and concepts in a way that we could not do on our own.
The way it does this is by making possible a method of “trial and error” that “human style thinking” is not capable of.
AI can be used to generate new concepts and new ideas by stripping away all the details from an initial concept or idea. From there, AI can begin to generate new concepts by combining different aspects of the original concept into new ideas.
In this way, AI can be used to create a large number of new ideas from a single original concept or idea. And from these new ideas, we can then select the ones we want to focus on, and further develop.
Jus so you know, everything in the last five paragraphs was written by GPT-3. I made no edits.
But it still rings true to the creative process, and how GPT-3 can augment our creativity.
We think, write our thoughts, and end up thinking our thoughts as we write them, which in turn often leads to new thoughts and ideas.
If an algorithm can help in generating new thoughts, in the form of a string of words, this can help us think new thoughts–thoughts that we might’ve otherwise missed.
And this is where our writing and creative process can work well with GPT-3. It doesn’t care about the meaning of words. It cares about the patterns of language. If it can find the patterns, it can then rearrange them in new ways.
There are a few practical ways GPT-3 can shape writing and the creative process for us.
#1: Developing our “taste” and judgement
A common claim amongst copywriters, writers or creatives will chime in and make the claim that your best ideas come from getting your hands dirty with the muck of research and inputs.
This may be true to some extent.
But what do you need in order to turn that muck into gold?
Taste. A developed and refined judgement of what, precisely, in the muck is useful in an advertisement or work of fiction.
When you can get, say, raw copy for 100 different ads with just a few clicks, you need to make a decision (judgement) on what potential ads could actually work.
But don’t stop there. Make use of wildcards, ads that you’d never in a million years think could convert.
The biggest wins in conversions or impact of any piece of writing is often from the unexpected.
And the more exposure you get to surprising ideas, the sharper your judgement and taste will become.
#2: Faster, deeper synthesis that results in true innovation
A huge part of human creativity involves exploration and experimentation.
And this requires absorbing a lot of information, ideas, and models — and then putting it all together in new ways by synthesizing parts into a whole.
This new “whole” then becomes a new piece of writing or work of art.
GPT-3 (and other AI tools) can augment this whole process, leading to new ideas and innovation that we might’ve never seen before.
While there are still some glitches to work out before there will be full confidence that machines can actually write with the same creativity and ingenuity as humans, what’s possible, right now, is nothing short of amazing.
What GPT-3 can do for you, as a writer, thinker or “creative” person, is almost limitless.
Let GPT-3 supply an endless stream of new thoughts and ideas. And you synthesize it together.
#3: Writing breakthroughs on demand, curing “writer’s block”
At the very least, GPT-3 can “cure” writer’s block and expand your imagination.
For the record, I think writer’s block is largely a myth as it’s commonly understood (being stuck in the writing process).
But it’s common for writers to feel stuck
Imagine if your biggest challenge is simply starting a sentence or a paragraph.
Even if you’ve done research, have a stack of notes, or thought through a topic. Getting those first words out of your head and into a document is still hard.
But with GPT-3 at your disposal, input a few words or a couple of sentences, and watch it complete your thoughts before your eyes.
From there, you can curate, edit, organize, ideate, and repeat until you have something that works.
#4: Instant access to outsourced creativity
It’s a playground for creativity, thinking, reasoning and writing.
And it’s available instantaneously.
There’s no training. No massive data uploads. No complicated set format.
You can tune a few parameters. You can cause GPT-3 to be more creative in its answers, not to repeat earlier text, and to use particular tokens to start and end.
The possibilities here are endless, not least because these AI platforms don’t always generate the same output from the same input.
You can use the same three prompts in GPT-3 for “ideas to try out with GPT-3” (very meta) and get a different list every time.
If you have time to sift through a lot of AI-generated output, you just might see something that sparks your own creativity.
And using that as a jumping off point is no different from being inspired by something you’ve read or seen.
#5: AI is creative leverage
AI has an advantage. It can digest exponentially more data than any human ever could. They have more information and more models to play with.
So whatever the creative pursuit — visual arts, music, poetry, fiction writing, movie plots — AI can do some serious heavy-lifting to surface new combinations of existing forms and language, in ways that one human cannot.
Which brings me to my final point.
The GPT-3 writing tools of tomorrow
The writing tools of tomorrow are already very different, and more powerful, than the writing tools of today.
Instead of just grammar and spell checking, a new breed of editors can guide unstructured thought into structured thought.
Forget simple auto-completion. Think fresh idea generation, on demand.
As a writer–and as a human–you’ll spend less time fighting with a blank Google document and more time thinking, ideating, and exploring.
In other words, you’re a curator and editor of an idea and thought stream that you can shape into content.
Imagine using a text editor with not just predictive text, but predictive thoughts.
Instead of a limited amount of ideas your brain can expend energy to think of, there’s effortless creative amplification.
This will give rise to new roles and jobs, more so than any jobs the robots might steal.
That’s why you should think of AI as your “creative collaborator,” not as your rival. After all, it wrote 87% of this article for me.