A study from researchers at Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University comparing spoken English today with recordings from 1990 has revealed that education is twice as likely to be discussed now than it was then.

"They found that the topic of education is far more salient in conversations now, with the word cropping up 42 times per million words, compared with only 26 times per million in the 1990s dataset," said Phys.org.

The researchers also found that not only is education discussed more frequently, the quality is discussed more often as well. This could have a lot to do with the increase of standardized testing to determine education quality.

Another word found to be closely associated with education and the teaching profession that will likely not surprise many teachers? Underpaid.

The study also analyzed higher education, finding that the word university tripled in conversation over the past two decades-also not surprising because student enrollment in university doubled.

Though the linguistic study's findings are undoubtedly interesting,"[t]hese are only the initial findings from the first two million words of the project, named the 'Spoken British National Corpus 2014,' which is still seeking recorded submissions," the article said.

Researchers are asking the British public to send "MP3 files of their everyday, informal conversations in exchange for a small payment to help me and my team to delve deeper into spoken language and to shed more light on the way our spoken language changes over time," researcher and professor Tony McEnery said to Phys.org.

Read the full story here and comment with your thoughts below.

Article by Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

09/18/2015