PARAPHRASING & SUMMARISING

A3

1.  In this short excerpt from David Crystal’s English as a Global Language, take note of the way that power relationships rather than the number of speakers influenced Latin   language use.

 

“Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply more powerful.”

 

Your paraphrase

 

Latin was widely used in the Roman Empire due to the supremacy of the Romans instead of their numbers.

B3

2. “Why a language becomes a global language has little to do with the number of people who speak it. It is much more to do with who those speakers are. Latin became an international language throughout the Roman Empire, but this was not because the Romans were more numerous than the peoples they subjugated. They were simply more powerful. And later, when Roman military power declined, Latin remained for a millennium as the international language of education, thanks to a different sort of power – the ecclesiastical power of Roman Catholicism.”

 

Source: Crystal, D. (1997). English as a global language. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

 

Your Summary

 

The usage of a language is determined by who the speakers are instead of how many there are.

D1  Summarising Information Selectively Practice

 Read the passage below. Summarise the effect of spending too much time on Facebook in one or two sentences, using the underlined information, which needs to be expressed in your own words.                             

Your summary

 The usage of Facebook is correlated to the decline of one’s academic grades.