English nowadays is not an added skill – it is a basic requirement. Whether you are a student, intern, professional, or just a regular person, you will realize how important fluent spoken...

Despite lower than average health spending, Italy has the fourth highest life expectancy across the OECD, at 83 years at birth. Italians generally have healthy lifestyles. Alcohol consumption is low. The share of adults overweight or obese is also relatively low (46% of adults, as compared with the OECD average of 56%). However, the share of children overweight is the second highest across OECD countries.

In 2012, 18% of students in Germany were low performers in mathematics (OECD average: 23%), 14% were low performers in reading (OECD average: 18%), 12% were low performers in science (OECD average: 18%), and 9% were low performers in all three of these subjects (OECD average: 12%).

Across the OECD, Germany is among the top five spenders on health care, both as a proportion of GDP (11.2%) and per person (USD 5,986). Health spending is projected to further increase to reach 12.3% of GDP by 2030. With such high level of spending, Germany guarantees good access to health care services.

PISA 2012 financial literacy results focusing on the performance of Italy amongst 17 other countries and economies who participated in the assessment: Australia, Belgium (Flemish Community), Shanghai-China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Israel, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain and the United States

PISA 2012 financial literacy results focusing on the performance of France amongst 17 other countries and economies who participated in the assessment: Australia, Belgium (Flemish Community), Shanghai-China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Israel, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain and the United States

PISA 2012 financial literacy results focusing on the performance of Spain amongst 17 other countries and economies who participated in the assessment: Australia, Belgium (Flemish Community), Shanghai-China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Israel, Italy, Latvia, New Zealand, Poland, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, and the United States

This report was prepared by the Educational Policy Institute, Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic, as an input to the OECD Review of Policies to Improve the Effectiveness of Resource Use in Schools (School Resources Review).

A meaningful and enduring bilingualism, embracing both English and the mother tongue, remains out of reach of the vast majority of citizens, writes Ramachandra Guha.

Despite their potential, many English learners (ELs) -- who account for more than 9 percent of K-12 enrollment in the U.S. -- lag behind their English-speaking monolingual peers in educational achievement, in part because schools do not provide adequate instruction and social-emotional support to acquire English proficiency or access to academic subjects at the appropriate grade level, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A shift is needed in how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are taught to students in grades K-12 who are learning English, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Climate change will have major consequences for transport networks, especially those located on coastlines. This study assessed the impact of projected sea-level rise on a vulnerable stretch of railway line on the coast of South West England. The authors say their semi-empirical modelling method could provide guidance to policymakers worldwide.

The English Channel (La Manche) is one of the world’s busiest sea areas, and management of it is a challenging task. This study reviews governance across the Channel, finding poor integration between countries, sectors, policies and research. The study also considers management in terms of the ecosystem approach and suggests that linking research between the UK and France could be key to improving marine governance.

A team of UK researchers has analysed interviews with a selection of farmers from across England in an effort to determine the sociocultural factors influencing their decisions to cooperate with each other on collaborative agri-environment schemes (cAES). Results from this study have significance for the success of AES in the region, as it may be that only by collaborating on such schemes can farmers adequately conserve crucial landscape-scale ecological processes. The study finds that cAES which provide greater flexibility, with opportunities for farmer involvement in scheme design and locally targeted and clearly defined aims, are more likely to gain support from farmers. Farmers might also be more receptive to environmental interventions if they could be partially involved in cAES.

The Bats and Churches Partnership aims to ease the sometimes fraught relationship between bats and the houses of worship they roost in.

The rural Cheshire community has slashed emissions by nearly a quarter over the past decade.

Manchester's City of Trees scheme will plant one leafy specimen for every resident.

In flood-prone Gloucestershire, England, dam-building semiaquatic Eurasian beavers make good neighbors.

The Finns have a word for drinking alone at home in your underwear. What other cool foreign food words don't we have?

The town of Ipswich has been haunted by a nursery rhyme playing over a loudspeaker for more than a year.

Third newspaper partner to join Japan Industry News Network

The dynamic voice first heard on Ted Nugent's "Penetrator" album, that led to Brian becoming the powerhouse vocalist and writer for the band Bad Company, before leaving to shape his solo career, died Wednesday. He was 66.

For those professionals looking to share not only their projects but to connect with other creatives, learn from them, and even find employment in the creative field, a new option entering the English market is Domestika. With its expansive forums and thousands of projects being shared by creatives from all over the world, Domestika is an amazing resource to explore. One of their biggest features is their online courses to help you learn new skills and with that in mind, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the 10 Best English Courses on Domestika so you can jump right in and get started! So, if you’re ready, let’s get started! Bundle 3 Courses & Save 30% (Ends May 6) Domestika are offering a further 30% off if you bundle 3 courses. » Click here to start bundling.    Top 10 Best English Courses on Domestika Logo Design: From Concept to Presentation with Sagi Haviv – $19 Transforming your creative ideas into personal projects – $15 Creativity Face to Face: A Playful Collage Journey – $12 Digital Painting for Characters: Color and Light – $14 Creation of an Original Logo from Scratch – $14 The Art of Record Covers: Illustration Meets […]

A standard approach to evaluating language models analyzes how models assign probabilities to valid versus invalid syntactic constructions (i.e. is a grammatical sentence more probable than an ungrammatical sentence). Our work uses ambiguous relative clause attachment to extend such evaluations to cases of multiple simultaneous valid interpretations, where stark grammaticality differences are absent. We compare model performance in English and Spanish to show that non-linguistic biases in RNN LMs advantageously overlap with syntactic structure in English but not Spanish. Thus, English models may appear to acquire human-like syntactic preferences, while models trained on Spanish fail to acquire comparable human-like preferences. We conclude by relating these results to broader concerns about the relationship between comprehension (i.e. typical language model use cases) and production (which generates the training data for language models), suggesting that necessary linguistic biases are not present in the training signal at all.

We present the Perceptimatic English Benchmark, an open experimental benchmark for evaluating quantitative models of speech perception in English. The benchmark consists of ABX stimuli along with the responses of 91 American English-speaking listeners. The stimuli test discrimination of a large number of English and French phonemic contrasts. They are extracted directly from corpora of read speech, making them appropriate for evaluating statistical acoustic models (such as those used in automatic speech recognition) trained on typical speech data sets. We show that phone discrimination is correlated with several types of models, and give recommendations for researchers seeking easily calculated norms of acoustic distance on experimental stimuli. We show that DeepSpeech, a standard English speech recognizer, is more specialized on English phoneme discrimination than English listeners, and is poorly correlated with their behaviour, even though it yields a low error on the decision task given to humans.

Weddings and civil partnership ceremonies at Chewton Glen are something of a speciality.

COME on the Azzurri! That is the rallying cry from England fans across Hampshire.

HAMPSHIRE’S juniors will be setting out to emulate the men’s team by reaching the English Finals when the South East Boys Qualifier is held at Blackmoor tomorrow.

Richard Lutz takes the long route through another lost week.

IF your child uses English as an additional language, you might be worried about them not being at school just now and missing out on using and learning English.

An absolute tour de force of an album from an artist with nothing left to lose.

In a case echoing the Melbourne Storm's salary cap scandal that saw them stripped of two premierships, English club Saracens is being booted out of top-flight rugby union after rorting the salary cap for three seasons, during which they won two titles.

The English Premier League postpones the Manchester City-Arsenal blockbuster "as a precautionary measure" due to the coronavirus outbreak, as Gunners players go into a fortnight of self-isolation.

Meet the determined young women who are working to break down barriers in the community and workforce, refusing to be defined by a stereotype.

Have you ever wondered why everybody in the world doesn't speak the same language? Or at least why we don't all share a common second language? If we did, what language would it be? Listen to why Robert McCrum says that 'Globish', a version of English, is the world's second language. If you like this clip, listen to the full ABC RN documentary by clicking ‘Download Audio' at http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/broken-english/3042354 

The in-person events that were the heart of voter outreach efforts have been put on hold. But Multnomah County election officials are still holding office hours, as they also go virtual.

Continued from Day Four. (From the beginning.) On Friday we packed all of our stuff back up and headed out.  We were barely out of the resort when: This tire is flat. Apparently all that gravel out to Horne Lake Caves the day before also included a small screw.  We limped around the corner to … Continue reading Summer Horrification — Day Five — Englishman River and Rathtrevor

This has to be one of the best ways to learn English grammar: by being the cutest little grammar cops around!

Kerry English was a beloved "professional audience member," a fan who saw up to five shows a week and provided the support theaters so critically need.

French baker Apollonia Poilâne's latest cookbook, "Poilâne," teaches techniques and gives recipes for what to do with all that bread.

EXPRESS SPORT takes a look at some of the greatest players who have appeared in both the English and Scottish top flights in recent years.

Dan Ashworth has called for a major revolution of English football following the coronavirus pandemic.

English rugby faces a bleak future should the coronavirus crisis continue into next year.