The impact of physical environment on learning

The Devil is in the details

  In an article written in 2007 by Pamela Woolner, Elaine Hall et al, one can read a few practical suggestions regarding effective classroom environment. Below are the highlights of the things that positively influence student behaviour and attitude.

1) absence of environmental noise

2) adequate lighting

3) "horse shoe" arrangement of tables and chairs

4) colours

5) ventilation, air quality

   Here are some photos of  classrooms that, in my opinion, would be conducive to positive atmosphere in the classroom. 

 

Immersion programs

Language or Content?

    While teaching their subject to immigrant students, how should  teachers find a balance between the language instruction and the content? Moreover, to what degree can a teacher, not trained for language instruction, teach language along with his own subject? These are the main issues raised in the article called "Balancing Content and Language in Instruction: The Experience of Immersion Teachers" written by Laurent Cammarata and Diane J. Tedick in the Modern Language Journal in 2012.
  The study, discussed in the article, shows that most immersion teachers (with 5 years of experience) just take a stab in the dark in their attempts to balance language and content, often given the priority to the second. A sensible solution to this issue, proposed by the authors, is to create special programs and teaching materials that would guide immersion teachers in their attempt to arm their students both with content and necessary level of language.

Corpus-Based Language analyses

Language carries information

    "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world", Ludwig Wittgenstein says.
 Isn't he right? Language and brain have been interconnected for so long (since the times humans started to speak) that we have forgotten how it feels to live without thinking. To experience. To feel. To exist without the intermediary thought; to directly access and accept world. These are long gone for human beings.Our language, being the symbolic representation of our thoughts, carries a lot of information about who we are and our subconscious. It can thus be quite rewarding to analyze Linguistic corpora of various fields of human activity to find hidden patterns and meanings.
 This is what has been done by Li-Juan Li and Guang-Chun Ge in their research article called

Genre analysis: Structural and linguistic evolution of the English-medium medical research, published in 2009. One of the things discovered by the analyses is that modern Medical research writers mostly use past simple tense rather than  present simple or present perfect tenses. The implications are, as the authors say, that the research writers attempt to hedge their claims with the use of past simple, since present tenses are more certain and carry greater immediacy.