Longman Dictionary of

PE2379 ch07.qxd 24/1/02 16:08 Page 576
variable
a inform the police
b ask the person to return the stolen property to the store
c talk to other family members about it
d nothing
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 STYLE or 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:
a the ng variable as in coming, working. In careful formal speech it often
occurs as /∂√/, e.g. /`kîm∂√/ coming, /`w§Nk∂√/ working, but in informal or
regional speech it often occurs as /`kîmn/ com’n, /`w§Nkn/ work’n
b the 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 DISPERSION of a
SAMPLE. The variance of a set of scores on a test, for example, would be
based on how much the scores obtained differ from the MEAN, and is the
square of the STANDARD DEVIATION.
576