Student Diary

Patricia talk about language loss and the globalization of English. She point out that today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. I was recruited by the British Council, to teach in the state schools there in Kuwait. We were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education. It’s true that everybody wants to have an English education, naturally. But there are an insist here that if you're not a native speaker, you have to pass a test. You have to satisfy theirs first that your English is good enough. Patricia said that she does’t agree with that system. She is not against teaching English, she loves it that they have a global language. But she is against using it as a barrier. And she wanted to remind us that the giants upon whose shoulders today's intelligentsia stand did not have to have English, they didn't have to pass an English test. The point is English...

As a health psychologist, Kelly has a mission to help people be happier and healthier. For years she has been telling people that stress make us sick. It increases the risk of everything from common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, she has turned stress into the enemy and she has changed her mind about stress. she did a study of stress and it shows that stress is bad for your health but now she wants to change peoples’ mind that stress can make you healthier. The science says when you change your mind about stress, we can change our body’s responses to stress. For instance, talk to yourself “this is my body” and make the body beliefs you that stress will response become healthier. Stress changes on how would you think and act on it. Another thing that make stress healthier is by released a hormone called Oxytocin which has benefit to our heart in reducing stress. This hormone influence our social. When we help people, we produce this hormone a lot and it’s good to...

Shaolan is a Chinese who grow up in Taiwan and daughter of a calligrapher. What she is remember when five was her mother showing her the form of Chinese characters. Then, she was fascinated to this incredible language , but to an outsider it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. She has been wondering how to break down this wall and anyone can understand Chinese language easily. She started thinking about fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, she started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. Finally, she found the fast and simpler method of learning Chinese. There are 8 character radicals that Shaolan showed us and they are the building blocks for us to create lots more characters. Hence, the fast method that Shaolan made was very useful and very easy to understand Chinese language. 

Cristine shared us a story of American Sign Language (ASL) and her life background. ASL is came from French sign language which was brought to America during the early 1800s. and as time went by, it mixed with local signs and evolved into the language we know today. ASL is part of Cristine’s life due to she was born as a deaf. She is living in a world of sound, as if she was living in a foreign country. She knows the sound from watching people, she watch how people behave and respond to sound. she learn it and mirror that behavior. At the same time, she has learned that she creates sound, and she has seen how people respond to her. In 2008, Cristine got an opportunity to travel to German and Berlin. At that time, sound was trending and that struck her. when she went to museum, there was no visual art there, everything was auditory. Based on that, she concludes that sound doesn't have to be something. It could be felt factually, experienced as a visual, or even as...

The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven. That is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language and how the sounds are learned. In other words, Patricia described babies all over the world are as "citizens of the world." They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using. They can do that while we are as adult cannot do that. Babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are totally different. English has a lot of R and L sound while japan doesn’t has it, and American babies can recognize those sound better than japanese babies. That result explained that babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners. Even we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. We are governed by the representations in memory ...

Ms. Diana is a teacher that has been teaching for a long time. She explained that, the way people get information about education was different from year and year. Her grandmother and father had to travel to school due to that is where the information lived. In contrast, when she was a kid, she has lots of encyclopedia books in her house and the information not only exist in school but also in library and else. In the time that passes, the Internet gets going as an educational tool. In Philadelphia, students have a one-to-one laptop program, the students are bringing in laptops with them everyday, taking them home, and getting access to information. So she used the tool to do a project and the project is one of artifacts. She asked the students to produce an info-graphics at the end of the year and try to find the example of info-graphics in lot of mass media. She admitted that the learners were a little uncomfortable with it because they would never done it before. What they le...

  Jamila Lyiscott is a girl which could speak English in three tongue and she decided to treat all three of her languages as equals because she is articulate. Who   controls the articulation ? English language is a multifaceted oration subject to indefinite transformation. She is a tri-lingual orator which used differently in home, school and friends. She could speak like “What’s good ?” “Whatagwan” and “Hello”. Sometimes she is consistent with the language which is used now then switch it up to reduce the boredom. Sometimes she fight back two tongues, while she uses the other one in the classroom and when she mistakenly mix them up and feel crazy like she is cooking in the bathroom. She do know that she had to borrow American language because hers was stolen. However, the western cannot expect her to speak their history wholly while hers is broken. These words are spoken by someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of season and the reason she speaks a compo...