si hoc legere scis, nimis eruditionis habes

Fright Night (2011)

2011-12-20T21:29:00.004-06:00

I just saw Fright Night (2011) starring Colin Farrell. I was a fan of Fright Night (1985) when the lead villain/vampire was played by Chris Sarandon. If somebody took a pit bull, defanged it, neutered it, and crippled it, it would look something like Fright Night (2011). The original story was scary and compelling, the music and Sarandon as the vampire were eery, but there wasn't a scary, compelling, or eery moment in the remake. Yet this movie received a 75% on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics and 67% from the audience/movie fans. I can't understand what is possibly interesting about this film. If anybody were to watch the original and then watch this film, they would see that the remake is such a diluted, dumb version of the original.

I think I understand what some of the problem is, and it has to do with what audiences want. Fright Night (2011) is a movie a person could watch while doing the dishes or playing with his iPhone. The original, on the other hand, demands an attention span. A large proportion of people probably do not have the attention span, though, for most film and TV. Even a show like Dexter, which I like, can be watched without much of an attention span since so much of the show's scenes use a plot device called 'laying pipe,' an industry term for moments of scenes or even whole scenes that are just recaps for audience members regarding what is going on in the film or TV show. For instance, a scene where a character says, "But, John, you know since our mother had that brain tumor that she hasn't been the same," reminds audiences of previous episodes or seasons of a TV show about events that have taken place, or updates for new audience members so that they have a better contextual understanding.

If you have read all this post so far, I would be surprised: I don't think I'd have the attention span to read it. People having the ability to choose the media they consume is very liberating, but choosing media that are equivalent to brain sugar could be destructive, and might in fight change the way people process information if given long enough. In Kurt Vonnegut's novel Galapagos (1985), the last surviving humans evolve to have smaller brains because their big brains cause problems with their swimming abilities.* If people long enough prioritize a preference for simpler information processing, perhaps folks won't need their brain after all.

* I didn't actually read this book. I have just heard about it and then looked up the Wikipedia info about it to fact-check it.

My Adventures in Turkey

2010-12-24T20:54:00.001-06:00

My Adventures in Korea

2010-12-24T20:52:00.000-06:00

My Adventures in Japan

2010-12-24T20:51:00.001-06:00

My Adventures in America

2010-12-24T20:48:00.001-06:00

A Little Misunderstanding

2010-11-07T01:23:00.005-05:00

This is a video about English language learning designed for beginner, college-level Saudi students.

Computer Assisted Language Learning Lesson Plan

2010-10-26T09:15:00.003-05:00

One Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) lesson plan available on the internet is called "Country Comparison," created by Al Ryter. The link to the lesson plan is available here: http://www.ryter.com/call/lesson.html.

The goal of the lesson is for lower intermediate English as a Second Language (ESL) students to learn and share personal information about their countries as well as to understand some aspects of geography. The language objectives are for the students to be able to write a paragraph using comparative and superlative adjectives to demonstrate the further ability of comparing different countries represented by the different students in the classroom, and to do so with fewer than two (2) errors. The computer-related objectives are for the students to be able to surf the internet to find information related to the other students' countries and for the content presented to be completely accurate.

The procedure of the lesson is to go as follows: First, the teacher reviews the forms of comparative and superlative adjectives if it is necessary. Second, the teacher discusses the United States, asking key questions related to the size of the country, its population, its major religions, and so forth. Third, the teacher and the students go to a website called "ABC News Country Profiles," available at the following link: http://www.immigration-usa.com/wfb/abc_world_fact_book.html. If necessary, the teacher helps the students to navigate to this page. Fourth, the teacher instructs the students to find information about other classmates' countries on this website. If necessary, the teacher also helps the students how they can use the hyperlinks on the website, among other things. Fifth, the students think of ways to organize the information providing comparisons between the countries. Sixth, the students get into groups of three (3), optimally groups that have different languages represented in them, where the students decide how they will organize the comparative information for their respective countries on a preset spreadsheet. Seventh, all of the students will interview one another to complete their chart of information about the countries. Eighth, the students return to their original groups and decide how to write some sentences using comparative and superlative adjectives about the countries represented within those groups. Ninth, students from the group present the sentences they have created. Tenth, the teacher prompts a discussion about the geographical information the class has learned.

Since students are generally comfortable with using the internet to look up information, and given that the internet is an integrated aspect of most people's lives, this lesson would be able to combine students' abilities to look up target information with learning English. This is the strongest aspect of the kind of lesson plan presented above. The information should, given low intermediate college-aged students, get the students to understand the internet as a language-learning tool. Furthermore, the exercise is reinforced with an emphasis on using target English grammatical forms, in this case the comparative and superlative adjectives. The lesson, then, combines some components of traditional language learning with new ways to gain knowledge.

The largest fault with the plan is that it is projected to be three (3) hours. Therefore, the activity as part of the plan would be very time-consuming. The website suggests that the activity be spread out over the course of two (2) class periods, yet if an ESL program does not allow for this kind of time, iut would be very difficult to integrate such a lesson as part of a normal course schedule. Alternatively, the projected time it would take with students could vary according to students' adeptness with technology generally, and it might be the case that the students actually finish far sooner than expected, perhaps under the three(3) - hour time span projected. If this would occur, then the project could seriously interfere with the teachers' ability to integrate the lesson.

Taking the primary strength and weakness into account, the lesson plan could still be a viable option for English language learning, especially as it relates to call. This is because, provided students eager or willing to do the activity, the available resources to do the activity within the classroom or at the school, and the time to carry out the activity, the lesson could be integrated. Nevertheless, if the above are not availability (student willingness, resources, and time), then the lesson would not be well integrated. The teacher, therefore, would have to find out how to incorporate this lesson plan given those constraints.

Computer anxiety and its relevance to Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)

2010-10-12T21:47:00.005-05:00

Matsumura, Shoichi & Hann, George. (2004). Anxiety and students' preferred feedback methods in EFL writing. The modern language journal, 88 (3), 403-415, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3588786.

The research questions Matsumura and Hann (2004) ask are (1) “Are students' levels of computer anxiety related to the feedback methods that they select during the revision stage of an [EFL] essay writing assignment?” and (2) “Is the degree of improvement in the students' essay writing related to the feedback methods that they choose in the revision process?” (p. 405). Their hypothesis was that “there would be a difference between highly computer-anxious students and less computer-anxious students in terms of the learning strategy they would choose in order to accomplish a task” and that “high-anxiety students would seek more forms of assistance than their low-anxiety peers if multiple forms of assistance were available” (p. 405), leaving it an open question to what effect the feedback methods would have on the essay revisions. To collect data, Matsumura and Hann used a computer-anxiety questionnaire based on an established computer anxiety rating scale and a formal writing essay task where students had to write a five-paragraph essay, approximately two pages double-spaced, for a grade (pp. 405-406).

The results of the experiment with 207 university-level Japanese students yielded the conclusions that, regarding (1), “highly computer-anxious individuals report a greater tendency toward exhibiting behaviors associated with avoiding computers if circumstances permit” (p. 410), preferring for example one-on-one feedback with the teacher in real-time and that, regarding (2), “[t]he greatest degree of improvement in essay writing occurred among students who posted their drafts online and received both online and face-to-face feedback,” and “[t]he second greatest degree of improvement appeared among the students who posted their drafts in an attempt to receive the instructor's feedback online and who refrained from face-to-face feedback” (p. 411). However, Mastsumura and Hann acknowledge a number of problems with the results, namely that they collected no data with regard face-to-face anxiety to understand its relationship to the essay writing and as a possible confounding factor (p. 412). Also, the people who ultimately did post their essay for review on an online bulletin board were so few (13, in fact, of 207) that it is difficult to generalize about the efficacy of online review of essay writing (p. 412). Another problem was that the three-week span to conduct the research was too short to gauge long-term effects of this form of computer-assisted language learning (pp. 412-413).

The implications of the findings of this research are that multiple means of feedback increase the likelihood of success for an ESL/EFL student regarding particularly an essay writing assignment and that the student's likelihood of success increases when the feedback method permitted fits his or her feedback preference. The former is put in the following way by Matsumura and Hann (2004): “receiving feedback, whether in the form of online indirect feedback or face-to-face feedback, is important and beneficial for students who seek to improve their essay writing” (p. 412). As for the issue of feedback method fitting student feedback style, “the greatest improvement is seen when the feedback method applied in the classroom matches the preferred feedback style of the individual student, that is, when the feedback method used minimizes their levels of anxiety” (p. 412). Without much of an imaginative stretch and with continued results, it is likely that such results generalize or can be duplicated with regard other skills besides writing and other forms of student assessment besides a writing assignment. In such cases, a working hypothesis would be that, in those other and different instances involving different skill sets and tasks, multiple modes of feedback are more likely to generate from an ESL/EFL student a more optimal performance and the more likely the student is permitted to choose his or her feedback method, whether it be a CALL feedback method or not, the more optimal his or her performance will be.