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Delaying gratification is hard, yet predictive of important life outcomes, such as academic achievement and physical health. Prominent theories focus on the role of self-control, hypersensitivity to immediate rewards, and the cost of time spent waiting. However, delaying gratification may also require trust in people delivering future rewards as promised. To test the role of social trust, participants were presented with character vignettes and faces that varied in trustworthiness, and then chose between hypothetical smaller immediate or larger delayed rewards from those characters. Across two experiments, participants were less willing to wait for delayed rewards from less trustworthy characters, and perceived trustworthiness predicted willingness to delay gratification. These findings provide the first demonstration of a causal role for social trust in willingness to delay gratification, independent of other relevant factors, such as self-control or reward history. Thus, delaying gratification requires choosing not only a later reward, but a reward that is potentially less likely to be delivered, when there is doubt about the person promising it. Implications of this work include the need to revise prominent theories of delay of gratification, and new directions for interventions with populations characterized by impulsivity.

How to use the site for EFL /ESL
The game itself doesn't really involve any language input or output, but you can easily add that.

If you are using it in a single computer classroom you can show students the image and ask them to guess where it is. Ask them to justify their answers by describing what they can see. This way you can also practice modal verbs such as 'it may be', 'it might be' 'it could be', 'it must be' etc.If students are working on computers you can put them in pairs and get one student to describe what they can see and the other student to listen and try to guess where the place is.You could get students to make some notes and brainstorm words related to each of the places and then write a short description of each of the five places as though they visited them during a round the world journey.For lower levels you could just play the game and get the students to call out the names of the places.

What I like about the site

This a is a great way to bring the world into the classroom.Students can really explore inside the images and pan around to look for clues.It's fun and a little bit addictive.It's an engaging and unpredictable way to get students interacting with content.

I hope you and your students enjoy playing with GeoGuessr

In a multi-tasking world, it’s hard to do just one thing. I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to juggling several things at once. My brutally honest children are quick to point it out when I answer, ‘Uh,huh” but continue with what I’m doing when they are telling me something. For years C has said, “Mom, look at me and listen with your eyes!” I can’t begin to explain how humbling those words are. In fact, that was part of my motivation when I chose present as my one word for 2013 (http://teachfromtheheart.wordpress.com//?s=one+word&search=Go).

I was reminded of this last week as I walked in the high school with one of my former fifth graders. We exchanged pleasant hellos, and then I said, “How are things going?” Rather than responding with the expected, “Fine, how are you?” She replied, “Do you really want to know or are you just being nice?” I stopped in my tracks. We looked at each other, and both of us laughed.  I told her that as her fifth grade teacher I REALLY did want to know. With that she smiled and rattled off that things were fine, she was a little stressed about exams, but couldn’t wait for graduation. I asked about her plans, and we talked a few more minutes about her college choice (small school out-of-state) and her chosen major (yes, she knows what she wants to do).  The bell rang, and I watched her head to class, marveling at how the shy fifth grader had grown into a confident senior.

As I headed upstairs to my office, I just shook my head and wondered how many conversations I had missed because I did say, “How are things going?” but didn’t stop to listen. I made a mental note to do better, especially here at the end of the school year when things tend to move at warp speed.

I’ve spoken about Action Research at various workshops this year and it has been a wonderful experience seeing some people take the idea and run with it.

The great thing about people taking ideas and running with them speaks a little about the power of the idea and a lot more about how much the idea resonates at the right time. Good ideas are abundant but when they reach inside you and make you want to get into action, you become what shapes the ideas further, and so the abundance flows…

I wonder if there isn’t a wave of wanting to re-engage with our practice through the lens of research in ELT, regardless of academic affiliations, without fretting about getting published, or presenting it in an ‘appropriately’ formal context. I see this as a timely healing of the ‘publish or perish’ plague that I see so many academic colleagues wear their hearts out over.

So here is some of the juice from my workshops:

-I believe Action Research is better represented through the metaphor a spiral of steps (Lewin, 1946) compared to its well-known cycle of Plan-Act-Observe-Reflect. Our understanding of our practice doesn’t go round and round, it gets bigger and bigger. After the first round of Action Research we don’t go back to planning again we move onto planning again.

-There’s an important difference between the notions of “a problem” and “to problematize”. Action Research isn’t a problem solving mode of practice. You don’t look for things that are going wrong and try to set them right through research. You can look at something that’s going really well and see how to build on it. You can look at something non-descript that exists and try to make it come alive.

 

While watching Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby the other day, I was struck by the climactic scene in which Tom Buchanan barks, “What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?” The uninitiated might assume this to be the result of Australian screenwriters “slipping up” and using the rather un-American-sounding “row” to mean “argument.”

Being a Gatsby afficianado, however, I immediately recognized this line as being lifted from the novel. Furthermore, a quick Google Books search reveals many examples of “row” being used this way in older American literature. So when did “row” become something that Americans don’t say? 

I’ve known that “row” can be used to mean “argument” since an early age, but probably only learned this word through literature, having only realized that this type of “row” rhymed with “cow” (i.e. ɹaʊ) as an adolescent. I can’t say I’ve encountered many Americans seriously using the term in spoken conversation since then.

This is a very quick lesson idea that I recently did with my FCE teenagers, who are turning out to be my guinea pig class.

I have been meaning to use Fotobabble (http://www.fotobabble.com/) for a while now and after experimenting with it briefly last year, I really wanted to do something useful with it this year. Very briefly, Fotobabble is a site that allows you to upload a photo from anywhere and then record a minute of audio over the top of that image. Russel Stannard provides a very thorough training video of how to use it here - http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/fotobabble/

I wanted to help the students with part 2 of the FCE exam, which requires them to speak for one minute about two photos. While the speaking wasn’t a huge problem, getting them to fit everything in to a full minute was proving to be slightly more difficult. This was where Fotobabble came in.

Instead of just asking the students to talk about any old photo, or linking the speaking to one of the out of touch topics from the book, I opted for a more unusual approach which was at first inspired by one video and then reinforced by another.

I was introduced to the video below by Matt Ellman (@mattellman), who suggested it might be good for class room use. The video is called ‘a conversation with my twelve-year-old self’ and involves the protagonist, Jeremiah Mcdonald, interviewing himself at both 12 and 32 years old, cleverly using video editing technology and some sharp humour. Check out the video below.

Those of us who work at schools are most definitely familiar with placement tests – used when a student first comes to a school and needs to be placed at the right level. This is often done by a discrete item test that might include multiple choice questions, gap-fills, sentence transformations and/or error analysis (more on discrete item testing later).  In some schools, a spoken interview or a freer writing task is given to help ascertain the student’s level.

Diagnostic tests are used to find out what students of a class already know so as to help define what should go into a lesson or course plan. Diagnostic tests can be formal tests with a formal marking system, or an informal test whereby a teacher uses his/her observation of the learner’s task performance and homework to determine what they are able or not able to do in the foreign language, and what they might need.

While diagnostic tests are forward-looking and involve future course planning, progress tests are retrospective, and are set to assess how much the student has learnt and how much progress they have made. In some schools, teachers are required to carry out such tests at the end of each course, and sometimes every month or even every week, so as to demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching/learning and to help determine if the student is ready to move to the next level.

Many students apply and pay for achievement tests in order to have a more formal paper qualification that would give credibility to their claimed level of English. Achievement tests are often administered by an external examining body like Cambridge or Oxford, and the growing popularity of tests like the Cambridge First Certificate and IELTS suggests that a high percentage of students expect and want to be tested in their language ability.

While some students take these tests because of the necessary qualifications needed for job applications, securing a place at university, or immigration purposes, other students take tests because they find tests motivating. Tests can give them a sense of progress, a sense of achievement, a sense of having reached a certain level in their language study.

Tests can show teachers and learners what has been learnt and ‘absorbed’. Tests can create a comforting sense that language learning is indeed linear – that there is a learning continuum whereby every step would lead them to towards their goal of being an advanced, proficient, ‘native-like’ user of the language.

But is language learning really such a neat process?

Successful speaking and understanding requires mechanisms for reliably encoding structured linguistic representations in memory and for effectively accessing information in those representations later. Studying the time-course of real-time linguistic dependency formation provides a valuable tool for uncovering the cognitive and neural basis of these mechanisms: linguistic dependencies are subject to diverse syntactic, semantic, and discourse constraints, and the timing and accuracy of their deployment offers insights into the nature of the memory encoding and retrieval mechanisms. Research in this area has made important recent advances due to (i) the testing of explicit memory models, often aided by computational simulations, (ii) the use of diverse time course measures (such as eye-movement monitoring or event-related brain potentials) that in some cases allow investigation at the millisecond level, (iii) investigation of increasingly rich linguistic phenomena and constraints, which allow the probing of specific encoding and retrieval mechanisms, (iv) the use of evidence from languages other than English, taking better advantage of the diversity of linguistic structures in the world's languages, and (v) the extension of this work to diverse populations, such as children, bilinguals, and individuals with neurocognitive disorders.

 

 

"Strong opinion's aren't free. You'll turn some people off. They'll accuse you of being arrogant and aloof. That's life. For everyone who loves you, there will be others who hate you.

“If you stare at your computer screen long enough, eventually you’ll get bored and write something.” “Sometimes I think writing is the hardest thing in the world, and then I remember about rewriting.” “Inspiration is that little light bulb that goes off in your head after you’ve submitted your story.” “Adverbs are the building blocks to bad writing.” “A novel of a hundred thousand words begins with a single keystroke, followed by five hundred thousand more.” “A bad writer never goes hungry. He’s always eating his words.” “A trillion chimpanzees typing for a trillion years still couldn’t create the garbage in the slush pile.” “The more bad stuff you write, the more good stuff there is hidden in it.” “If you’re not famous, then the only way to get people to notice your writing is to write well.” “Typos and bad grammar are like shabby clothes. The story may be great, but few notice.” “Collaboration: a writer writes her story, and the editor rights her story.” “A page every day makes a novel someday.” “Writers never quit and quitters never write.” “Five steps to writing a novel: 1) Get 500 sheets of paper; 2) On page 1, write the title of your novel; 3) Just under the title write ‘by [your name]‘; 4) On the last page write, ‘The End’; 5) Fill the pages in between with words.” “If you aren’t sure what to write about, just write; there’ll be plenty of time later on to read it and see what you wrote about.”

Frontiers | Metaphor in embodied cognition is more than just combining two related concepts: a comment on Wilson and Golonka (2013) | Frontiers in Cognitive Science publishes articles on the most outstanding discoveries across the research...

In their recent article on embodied cognition, Wilson and Golonka (2013) also discuss research on conceptual metaphors like “power is up” or “the future is forward” to exemplify common approaches to embodied cognition. Metaphors are particularly interesting for embodied cognition research because they can map concrete, bodily experiences onto abstract concepts (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). To be sure, one could take issue with the selection of the two specific studies (Miles et al., 2010; Eerland et al., 2011). Only the latter study (Miles et al., 2010), which examined the relation between mental time travel and bodily posture, involves a conceptual metaphor, whereas the former study (Eerland et al., 2011) invokes the notion of a mental number line rather than any conceptual metaphor and indeed demonstrates that sometimes cognitions and bodily postures go together. There are many other interesting demonstrations that are consistent with the notion that conceptual metaphors inform and shape thinking (for a review, see Landau et al., 2010).

“That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

With Father’s Day around the corner, here comes a fine addition to history’s greatest letters of fatherly advice from none other than Albert Einstein — brilliant physicist, proponent of peace, debater of science and spirituality, champion of kindness — who was no stranger to dispensing epistolary empowerment to young minds.

In 1915, aged thirty-six, Einstein was living in wartorn Berlin, while his estranged wife, Mileva, and their two sons, Hans Albert Einstein and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, lived in comparatively safe Vienna. On November 4 of that year, having just completed the two-page masterpiece that would catapult him into international celebrity and historical glory, his theory of general relativity, Einstein sent 11-year-old Hans Albert the following letter, found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (public library) — the same wonderful anthology that gave us some of history’s greatest motherly advice, Benjamin Rush’s wisdom on travel and life, and Sherwood Anderson’s counsel on the creative life. Einstein, who takes palpable pride in his intellectual accomplishments, speaks to the rhythms of creative absorption as the fuel for the internal engine of learning:

Where does the word mesmerise come from? 

mes·mer·ize  (mzm-rz, ms-)

tr.v. mes·mer·ized, mes·mer·iz·ing, mes·mer·iz·es
1. To spellbind; enthrall: "He could mesmerize an audience by the sheer force of his presence" (Justin Kaplan).2. To hypnotize. The connection to hypnosis is fascinating - mesmerize is named after  Franz or Friedrich Anton Mesmer 1734-1815. Mesmer had an exotic and unconvincing theory about animal spirits/animal magnetism being the key to medical treatment. source

In 1774 during a magnetic treatment with a female patient, Mesmer felt that he perceived a fluid flowing through the woman’s body whose flow was affected by his own will.

He eventually named this fluid and its manipulation “Animal Magnetism” and developed an elaborate theory regarding its affect on health.

Animal Magnetism is not a recognised branch use of hypnosis for theraputic purposes was pioneering.

On June 1st, BELTA (the teaching association of which I am president) held its first ever national conference. We were delighted with how it went, the speakers were fantastic and the delegates were enthusiastic participants. I’m already looking forward to next year.

On the day, I hosted a workshop based on the Silent Movies series of posts on my website. I showed four movies to the participants and asked them to share their ideas in groups for how they would use each of the films. I didn’t set any parameters, they were free to think of any idea they thought was interesting or useful.

After each film they discussed their ideas and made some notes. They then nominated their favourite idea from the discussion and shared it with everyone. I collected their notes in order to share some of their ideas here on the blog.

Note: All of these films have been featured in Silent Movies posts here on the blog before, but never with these ideas. - See more at: http://www.theteacherjames.com/2013/06/silent-movies-belta-day-special-edition.html#sthash.NisPkhXM.dpuf

The Common Errors in English Usage entry for May 9 was this:

one of the (singular)
In phrases like “pistachio is one of the few flavors that appeals to me,” I think you should use the singular form for the verb “appeals” because its subject is “one,” not “flavors.” However, note that usage experts are all over the place on this subject and you’re not likely to get into much trouble by using the plural, and some authorities absolutely prefer it.

 . . . which elicited a well-founded rebuttal from a commenter explaining the reasoning of usage experts alluded to in the entry itself:

Tom, I have to disagree. Here the subject "flavors," though a genitive in the main clause, governs the verb "to appeal" in the relative clause as subject. The singular formulation is rare in literature before the later twentieth century, for example, and for good reason. It's also nonstandard in other Indo-European languages, to the best of my knowledge. This is essentially a mass malapropism caused by attraction between the end of the main clause and the verb in the relative clause. It's now dominant, but it's just as wrong as "between you and I" (also arguably dominant and endlessly parroted).

I put up a clarification reply, pointing out—as I'm wont to do—that I am not the author of the entries but rather the editor of the book based on the Web site that supplies the entries for this blog, but that I agreed that the original advice was solid: Using the singular verb "appeals" should not cause any problems with a sophisticated audience of native speakers of English. I don't mean to insult anyone who thinks otherwise, but modern popular usage in edited sources does back me up on that. The commenter asserts that using the singular verb in this sort of construction is "dominant." I don't have enough access to a reliable corpus to know whether this is true, but it is certainly not uncommon.

There’s lots of people outside. There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you. There’s too many sentences in this paragraph. Those are all sentences you might hear native English speakers say. You might hear me say them.

There’s followed by a plural noun phrase is found in non-standard dialects, as in this OED citation from 1888: There’s a good many chores I ‘ant a put down at all. The gutter’s a-stapped again. Is it a feature of Standard English? It is if we recognise, as John Ayto does, that ‘there is both written and spoken Standard English’ (‘The Oxford School A–Z of English’ in Paul Kerswill’s ‘RP, Standard English and the standard/non-standard relationship’   (and, in passing, we might note his there is followed by a compound noun phrase). Ayto cites the use of bust for broken as appropriate in speech but probably not in writing. He also accepts I didn’t use to like eggs as the spoken alternative to I used not to like egg’, which he recommends for written usage. Similarly, Peter Trudgill describes a sentence such as The old man was bloody knackered after his long trip, while colloquial and informal, as being ‘clearly and unambiguously Standard English’. He contrasts it with Father were very tired after his lengthy journey, which is nonstandard but formal.

I think we can take a similar approach to ‘there (i)’s’ + plural noun phrase. There’s probably good reasons for that (an authentic example) is informal Standard English in a way that There probably be good reasons for that, grammatical in some nonstandard dialects, would not be. If you don’t like informality, you’re entitled not to do so, but the right to be informal should not be denied to others.

There are only a few such game-changing interventions available to educators, but they do more to determine how many students we can educate than all else. One of them is a well-structured lesson, built around certain primary elements. These familiar elements (which I’ll describe shortly) are at or near the top of the list of the most effective known instructional practices. They have an impeccable pedigree, going back nearly half a century. They are critical, moreover, to the success of the most quintessential factors that promote college and career preparedness: coherent, content-rich curriculum, and authentic literacy (all of which the Common Core State Standards are happily, if imperfectly, attempting to clarify for us).

Unfortunately, for decades, the elements of a well-structured lesson have been marginalized or ignored in most schools, forced to compete for time and attention with unending, successive waves of (mostly) unproven innovations and policy requirements. This prevents the kind of sustained practice educators need to master these elements well enough to enjoy the profound impact they would have on student learning.

So, what are the widely agreed-upon elements of an effective lesson that are so powerful that researcher and author Robert Marzano insists they should be “routine components” of virtually any lesson in every subject area (including so-called “inquiry” or “project-based” lessons)?

Researchers have long avoided neurophysiological experiments of overt speech production due to the suspicion that artifacts caused by muscle activity may lead to a bad signal-to-noise ratio in the measurements. However, the need to actually produce speech may influence earlier processing and qualitatively change speech production processes and what we can infer from neurophysiological measures thereof. Recently, however, overt speech has been successfully investigated using EEG, MEG, and fMRI. The aim of this Research Topic is to draw together recent research on the neurophysiological basis of language production, with the aim of developing and extending theoretical accounts of the language production process.
In this Research Topic of Frontiers in Language Sciences, we invite both experimental and review papers, as well as those about the latest methods in acquisition and analysis of overt language production data. All aspects of language production are welcome: i.e., from conceptualization to articulation during native as well as multilingual language production. Focus should be placed on using the neurophysiological data to inform questions about the processing stages of language production. In addition, emphasis should be placed on the extent to which the identified components of the electrophysiological signal (e.g., ERP/ERF, neuronal oscillations, etc.), brain areas or networks are related to language comprehension and other cognitive domains. By bringing together electrophysiological and neuroimaging evidence on language production mechanisms, a more complete picture of the locus of language production processes and their temporal and neurophysiological signatures will emerge.

How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete.

 

This tawdry tableau, which I’m not proud to commit to the page, goes a long way toward explaining the unexpected spot in which I found myself in the spring of 2006. Sitting to my left was Ram Kolli, an unshaven 25-year-old business consultant from Richmond, Va., who was also the defending United States memory champion. To my right was the lens of a television camera from a national cable network. Spread out behind me, where I couldn’t see them and they couldn’t disturb me, were about 100 spectators and a pair of TV commentators offering play-by-play analysis. One was a blow-dried mixed martial arts announcer named Kenny Rice, whose gravelly, bedtime voice couldn’t conceal the fact that he seemed bewildered by this jamboree of nerds. The other was the Pelé of U.S. memory sport, a bearded 43-year-old chemical engineer and four-time national champion from Fayetteville, N.C., named Scott Hagwood. In the corner of the room sat the object of my affection: a kitschy, two-tiered trophy of a silver hand with gold nail polish brandishing a royal flush. It was almost as tall as my 2-year-old niece (if lighter than most of her stuffed animals).

Abstract

We studied how gesture use changes with culture, age and increased spoken language competence. A picture-naming task was presented to British (N = 80) and Finnish (N = 41) typically developing children aged 2–5 years. British children were found to gesture more than Finnish children and, in both cultures, gesture production decreased after the age of two. Two-year-olds used more deictic than iconic gestures than older children, and gestured more before the onset of speech, rather than simultaneously or after speech. The British 3- and 5-year-olds gestured significantly more when naming praxic (manipulable) items than non-praxic items. Our results support the view that gesture serves a communicative and intrapersonal function, and the relative function may change with age. Speech and language therapists and psychologists observe the development of children’s gestures and make predictions on the basis of their frequency and type. To prevent drawing erroneous conclusions about children’s linguistic development, it is important to understand developmental and cultural variations in gesture use.

How can you remember words? How can you acquire vocabulary quickly? Here are 4 methods that will answers these questions!

 

“How can I remember words?” “How can I memorize new vocabulary and make it stick in my long-term memory?” These are questions that nearly every language learner has asked him/herself at one time or another. Given that learning and remembering new words is such a huge and important part of foreign language acquisition, it would make sense to learn about how to become better at it. It might be boring, but learning new words is simply unavoidable.

You might remember my 12 tips on how to improve your memory that I wrote a few months ago. In these posts I basically gave a bunch of useful tips to help dramatically improve your memory in the more general sense. I gave tips, among others, on how to focus better, use mnemonics, use visualization techniques, eat healthily, and so on. I would strongly encourage you to go through the 12 tips (even if you’ve gone through them in the past, re-reading them is a good idea!), but today I’d like to provide you with some easy ready-made techniques used by many experienced language learners to remember words.

So today I’ll provide you with four techniques that you can use right from today to jumpstart your vocabulary acquisition ability. The four techniques are as follow: Using a Spaced Repetition Software (SRS), the Goldlist Method, the Luca Lampariello Method, and the GoBillyKorean Method. Ready to dive in?