SELF- ASSESSMENT OF ESP LEARNING

WRITING SKILLS: This semester I find successful for me in writing restatement and analytical summaries. Despite the fact tasks were really hard at first, when we were first time given these tasks, after training several times I performed well when I had to write my final summaries. So as for this task, I feel that not just I improved my skills, but actually learned something new- academic writing and also to evaluate given information more analytically. As for ESP vocabulary tests, I find them not difficult now and happily I don't need so much effort in order to write it well. I believe it is because of better understanding of definitions that we have to learn. There appeared one new thing in our lessons which I like a lot and find it beneficial- it is self-designed tests. These tests I find not difficult, but time-consuming and of course knowledge requiring. Plus I find them fun because it is not an individual job. While preparing self-designed tests, you discuss the things, possible questions, important or not so important aspects of module with your partner, which lets you to look at the module more objectively. This is one of the tasks which gives a feeling of joy while doing it. As for dictations, I find them not so difficult for me. However, there appear some mistakes, mostly ones of punctuation, to which I have to pay attention. The last thing to mention in this section is my contributions to weblog in which I could assess my performance in a term of good. I can't be very objective here as I don't know the evaluation of my teacher yet.

SPEAKING SKILLS: I think I perform well in all three speaking tasks that we are doing - participation in class discussions, presentations and speaking in pairs. However, I notice myself sometimes searching for a proper word to use which means I have to learn more words of professional vocabulary as well as various structures of sentences in order my speaking tasks to be more fluent.

LISTENING SKILLS: I think my level of listening activities in classes is satisfactory. Performance of listening tasks vary and sometimes the results are good, although sometimes the results are quite poor. In this aspect I think I need more practise in listening, especially advanced level listening and doing some comprehension tasks. As for home task, which was listening to podcasts, I personally think I performed good and comprehension was not a difficult task for me. Still I have some problems in understanding and trying to interpret new words, phrases.

READING SKILLS: I find my level of reading satisfactory as well which means I have a lot where to improve. Although I find home reading not so difficult, I face some problems in class reading as sometimes I don't separate the most imporatant information needed from the whole text. As for reading comprehension tasks, I don't feel I improved as results from these tasks are satisfactory and there appear that they are sometimes poor as well.

Artificial Intelligence

Artifcial Intelligence ( AI) refers to intelligence of machines and also names the field that strives to create AI. Functions that are believed to be gained by machines are reasoning, knowledge, perception, communication and other. Therefore the fields that explore this phenomenon include not just computer science or neuroscience, but also psychology, liguistics, philosophy, cognitive science.

I believe an important question related to AI is the usage of it. What is the benefit of AI? There is a wide range of things for which AI can be used. Firstly, I'd like to mention an example of entertaining part- programme Chinook became a world champion in chess. in 1994. However, there are more aspects that are more practical. These involve oil mining, commanding robots (e.g. in factories), automatical translation, objective sign recognition ,which let to read texts, and other systems working mostly for safety and convenience of people.

As for the future of AI, there is much to predict. Researchers work on improving their functions, but there is also a question about the other aspect of those machines. Many films suggest idea that there may be that robots can gain feelings and with this aspect to functionate as people. This sounds as from the series of fantastic tales, but just look back at the past. Unbelievable "prognoses" of Jule Verne came truth. It just shows that something thought to be unbelievable doesn't mean to be such. As for AI, we also don't know what surprise humans' intelligence can suggest.

Reference: http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/0333801369.02.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

Psychology of body language

There exist not just a verbal language. Communication is also possible using body language and understanding it can help understand others.

We use our body to send signals unconsciously but revealing true feelings. But now it is also used in different aspects of public life, such as politics or interviews. Body language includes facial expressions, body posture, eye contact and other and is claimed to be influenced by both heredity and environment.

Here are some keys revealing the emotions of people showing specific signals. If a person crosses his/her arms, this means he puts a barrier between you and him/her. On the other hand, if a person is in a friendly mood, this may mean he is contemplative. If person looks at your eyes consistently, it may also have two different meanings. One is a positive attitude and another - a person simply doesn't trust you. In opposite situation, when there is no eye contact, a person may have a negative attitude towards you. If you notice a person gazing to somewhere else while you are speaking and doing such actions as touching ear or scratching chin, you have to know that person shows disbelief. To notice boredom is not a difficult task as well- head tilting or just unfocussed look at a speaker show that. But of course there are exceptions in understanding body language of people- you have to be aware of the fact that people with some certain diseases act in a different way as well as there exist differences among cultures.

People are not always tend to express their feelings, states in words or sometimes just are not capable of doing it. Therefore understanding body language is really beneficial.



References: http://www.lifepositive.com/mind/psychology/body-language/body-language.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_language

Restatement summary of article "Babies 'show social intelligence' "

Babies are able to make social evaluations in the first months of their life.

There was made an experiment at Yeil university by proffesors. The experiment's purpose was to see if 6-month-year old babies and 10-month-year old babies distinguish behavior of others. The participants of experiment were 12 six-month-year old babies and 16 ten-month-year old babies. There were used techniques of social psychology in this experiment and as for conditions babies were held by their parents. 100% of six-month-year old babies and 87,5% of ten-month-year old babies showed distinguishing bad and good characters by choosing a good one.

The outcome, stated by these researchers, is that the basis of babies' sociality is universal.

The person that have influenced me

As we live in society, it is natural that other people have an influence on us. And I'm not an exception as well. So in this article I'm going to talk about one person who influences me.

That person is my friend Ruta who I met about 4 years ago at school. She's a person that I'm proud of. She's true, sincere, sophisticated and 'deep'. She is the person who is out of superficial world- probably that is one of the main things that I like about her and what I got from her. She barely always tells what she thinks; has a gift to see in people special qualities- usually what others can't see; she looks at the life deeply. For me she is just special.

Personally, I think I've changed as a personality since I've met Ruta. More concret- my attitude to the world, people has changed. Not radically as still me and my friend are different personalities but slightly- for sure. The thing I've noticed that I changed my attitude to parents to better side, especially to my father- Ruta in some way showed me the special part of my father. I'm grateful for it. And just for herself being the person I can rely on and who can tell me the truth even if it may be hurting me.

Despite the fact that she is in the other part of Europe now, I feel this relationship being important to me. As well as her influence, which is not as it was, but still exists

and I want it to continue. Because that influence shows me secret parts of ourselves and the transcendental world.

References: http://www.hickerphoto.com/data/media/146/northern_light_T1481.jpg

Dreaming- does it touch everybody?

A word dream describes a subconscious experience of various sensations that include sounds, images, emotions etc. that appear during sleep, especially REM sleep. I would like to mention a few questions related to dreaming in this article- who dreams and what does affectthe amount of dreams we remember.

Firstly, the question :" Does everyone dream?" occurs. The answer to it is :"Yes". We even dream in the womb. Besides, the length of dreaming varies over our lifetime. As a newborn infant we dream about 80% of our sleep time ( 80% of sleep in the REM state ), later this number shifts- as adults we have 20-25 % of our sleep in REM state and lastly, the amount of REM sleep to old people is 20%. In order to understand it better I will give you an example- if we ( adults ) sleep 8 hours , we dream for an hour and a half each night. For older people, if they sleep 8 hours, dreams take a bit more than an hour. So everybody dreams, just different amount of time. But actually there exist some very rare exceptions - people can loose ability to dream if the area of the brain that controls dreaming is injured.

So as we know that everybody dreams ( without rare exceptions ) , another question emerges to the surface - why do we remember so few of our dreams ? The answer is quite simple- we remember just what was very intense and powerful. Otherwise there isn't impact that makes us to pay attention. Much of our dreams consist of simple daily experience, for example- what we have been doing at work, which is not very terrible nor very great and we don't pay attention to it which leads to the fact that we don't remember our dream. Another factor for remembering dreams is how we wake up. If we wake up from dream naturally, this dream is usually very fresh and recent, usually more dramatic than other dreams ( we dream few times during night ) so we remember it. But as for nowaday society, we tend not to listen to our natural body rythms and we wake up from either the noise of alarm clock, or screaming baby or other factors. In this case we disturb natural rythms and disturb dream, which means we don't remember it.

To sum up, dreams are known to everyone. But some of us remember more of them, some less. That is connected not just with intensity of our dreams ( whether dreams are captivating or not ), but also the quality of our sleep. By listening to natural rythms of our body, we will have a better sleep and will remember the subconscious experience of our sleep time.


References:

http://www.balancedlivingmag.com/images/2005/July-August%2005/dreaming_TOC.jpg

About phobias

Firstly, what is a phobia? It isn't just a simple fear as you may think. A phobia is an excessive and persistent fear of : a situation or an object. The fear is considered excessive because it is out of proportion to the actual level of danger associated with the situation. When an individual with a phobia is exposed to the feared situation, an immediate anxiety response is triggered that can sometimes grow into a great panic attack. So people with phobias avoid the feared situations or objects. Otherwise, they endure a lot of distress.

Phobias vary a lot, but it is distinguished 10 most common phobias.
The first place in this list is taken by arachnophobia, which is a fear of spiders- half of women and 10% of men suffer from it. Though this phobia may look quite funny, the symptoms of it are not funny at all. They are breathlessness, dizziness, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, feeling sick, shaking heart palpitations, inability to speak, to think clearly, a fear of dying, loosing psychological control, an enormous detachment from reality, frequent panic attacks.
Social phobia ( a fear of being evaluated negatively in social situations) is frequent as well. Victims of this phobia are afraid to open criticisms, humiliation and they are tend to be unable to speak , sweat and blush in front of others. One more phobia, which is called agoraphobia, has similarities with social phobia. Those who suffer from agoraphobia are generally afraid of being in the centre of attention and usually avoid going to public places and social gatherings. It may sound as a joke, but a famous American actress Kim Basinger, who won an Oscar, suffers from both - social phobia and agoraphobia. When she accepted her Oscar , the words from her didn't come, though she had been practising a response for days.
Aerophobia, a fear that tortures Whoopi Goldberg, is a fear of flying. Acrophobia- a fear of height. Those who suffer from panic attacks in elevators, trains or other confined spaces ( Adolf Hitler was one of them ) are called claustrophobics.
Some strange phobias, such as emetophobia ( a fear of vomit ) or carcinophobia ( a fear of cancer ) also are in the list of 10 most common phobias.
And the last two that go into this list are brontophobia- a fear of lightning and thunder ( logically- these people hate summer ) and necrophobia- a fear of dead and death.

The last point I would like to mention is a way of treating phobias. A superior way is considered to be cognitive behavior therapy ( CBT ) which focusses on slowly and safely exposing a person to a feared situation or stimulus. It involves repeated approaching of fear- provoking situation or object until it no longer produces a strong fear reaction. As for medications, they should be used just in phobic situations in order to allow the person to function in that situation, but not for treating phobias.

This is just a liitle information to get to know deeper what phobias are. As it is seen, phobias are widespread and they have serious effect on our mental health and for this reason they have to be eliminated.


References: http://www.visioncoachingservices.com/pictures/phobia%20woman.jpg