aspects of their own value systems as well as learn about the values of
others. For example, questions such as the following might be posed:
What would you do if you discovered a family member was shoplifting?
ainform the police
bask the person to return the stolen property to the store
c talk to other family members about it
dnothing.
Values clarification activities are often used as a communicative activity in
collaborative learning and communicative language teaching (see
communicative approach).variable^1 n
a linguistic item which has various forms (variants). The different forms of
the variable may be related to differences in styleor to differences in the
socio-economic background, education, age, or sex of the speakers (see
sociolect). There are variables in the phonology, morphology, syntax,
and lexicon^1 of a language.
Examples in English include:
athe ng variable as in coming,working. In careful formal speech it often
occurs as /iº/, e.g. /ckÎmiº/coming, /cw¥pkiº/ working, but in informal
or regional speech it often occurs as /ckÎmn/ com’n, /cw¥pkn/work’n
bthe marker on verb forms for 3rd-person singular present tense (as in He
works here), which is a variable because in some non-standard and
some new varieties of English a variant without the ending (as in He
work here) may occur.
Linguistic rules which try to account for these variables in language are
referred to as variable rules.
variable^2 n
(in statistics and testing) a property whereby the members of a set or group
differ from one another. In comparing teaching methods, for example,
different variables may be (a) the level of interest each creates (b) the
amount of teaching time each method is used for and (c) how difficult each
method is to use.
see also dependent variable
variable rule n
see variable^1
variance n
(in statistics and testing) a statistical measure of the dispersionof a sample.
The variance of a set of scores on a test, for example, would be based on
variance