How to Improve Students’ English Listening Ability

Listening plays a fundamental role in foreign language acquisition. Though most schools have offered listening class, the effect is rather poor. This thesis will analyse some reasons that cause students weak ability in listening and explore some effective strategies to solve some issues.     

How to Improve Students＇ Reading Ability

Reading ability is very important in our daily life and studies. As most people know, reading ability refers to the reading skills that a reader brings to the text. It is a basic skill for college students including foreign language learners. Reading ability generates learning power that helps students know themselves and others better as well. It is necessary to improve their reading abilities. So the first thing we meet when we are reading is the vocabulary, that is, how to deal with the unfamiliar words will be a very important aspect in our discussion. Next, we must eradicate bad habits and form good ones. Only after this can we go further on critical reading with a higher speed. Finally, there is some advice for teachers, for proper ways of teaching will give great help to students for their improvement of reading abilities.     

An Analysis of Cultivation of College Students’Interpersonal Ability

In modern society,good communicative ability is very important;it plays an important part in communication.But as college students,who enter into the society newly,their interpersonal range is expanded constantly;to a certain extent,there are some communication disorders which many students’worries in life and study are relevant to.So this text will analyze the poor communicative ability from internal and external factors.And then give several suggestions about how to cultivate the college students’communicative ability.     

On the Cultivation of College Students’ Ability of Translating

Translation is a kind of communicative function of language behavior.In English teaching,translation capabilities must be one of the purposes of our teaching.As a teaching activity it aims to lay a good foundation in English for students and effective teaching methods,but also comprehensive language skills,students study the benchmark one.     

On Developing College Students’ Ability of Reading Comprehension

Reading has become one of the four essential skills in English study,without reading,it is difficult for the students to support independent and self-directed learning.With the arrival of the Information Age,our reading materials gradually change from paper materials to electronic ones.So it becomes more and more important for college students to speed up their reading and develop a good reading habit in order to acquire as much information as possible.     

Sensorimotor Control of Speech and Children’s Reading Ability

Studies of the role of phonological representations in learning to read have almost exclusively focused on speech perception. In the current study, we examined links between sensorimotor control of speech, reading, and reading-related abilities. We studied two languages, English and Dutch, which vary in the regularity of their spelling-to-sound mappings. There were 236 American and Dutch children, 4 to 8 years old, who performed an altered auditory feedback task in which the first formant of the /?/ vowel was altered. A stronger response to altered feedback for literate relative to preliterate children was observed, and this was particularly the case for the Dutch children. Moreover, the magnitude of the responses was related to precursors of reading in preliterate children and to reading skill in literate children. We propose that these findings could be related to changes in children’s speech production skills that facilitate the integration of orthographic and phonemic information.     

Secondary School Students’ Understanding of Science and Their Socioscientific Reasoning

Research in socioscientific issue (SSI)-based interventions is relatively new (Sadler in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 41:513–536, 2004; Zeidler et al. in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 46:74–101, 2009), and there is a need for understanding more about the effects of SSI-based learning environments (Sadler in Journal of Research in Science Teaching 41:513–536, 2004). Lee and Witz (International Journal of Science Education 31:931–960, 2009) highlighted the need for detailed case studies that would focus on how students respond to teachers’ practices of teaching SSI. This study presents case studies that investigated the development of secondary school students’ science understanding and their socioscientific reasoning within SSI-based learning environments. A multiple case study with embedded units of analysis was implemented for this research because of the contextual differences for each case. The findings of the study revealed that students’ understanding of science, including scientific method, social and cultural influences on science, and scientific bias, was strongly influenced by their experiences in SSI-based learning environments. Furthermore, multidimensional SSI-based science classes resulted in students having multiple reasoning modes, such as ethical and economic reasoning, compared to data-driven SSI-based science classes. In addition to portraying how participants presented complexity, perspectives, inquiry, and skepticism as aspects of socioscientific reasoning (Sadler et al. in Research in Science Education 37:371–391, 2007), this study proposes the inclusion of three additional aspects for the socioscientific reasoning theoretical construct: (1) identification of social domains affecting the SSI, (2) using cost and benefit analysis for evaluation of claims, and (3) understanding that SSIs and scientific studies around them are context-bound.     

Using Technology to Improve Students’ Literacy

Rapid evolution of communication technologies has changed language pedagogy and language use,and they enable new forms of discourse and new ways to create and participate in communities.Using the modern technology can reinforce and expand the ESL stu dents’ s language and literacy instruction.It mainly discusses the effects of television on literacy development,and using video to enhance reading outcomes.A great number of studies provide evidence that learners can develop their language and literacy skills from technology.     

An Explorative Analysis of the Ways to Train the College Students＇ Ability of Emotion Control

近年来,高校中的心理危机事件逐年增多,这些心理危机事件的出现多与大学生的抑郁、焦虑、冲动等不良情绪有关。情绪为行为提供动力,直接影响到大学生的认知、行为选择、社会交往和身心健康。受不良情绪的影响,大学生常常表现出缺乏自信、紧张、对学习没有热情、对同学冷漠无情甚至失去理智、毁物伤人。引导大学生在现实生活中用正确的态度认识问题,用积极的心态面对问题,用有效的方式解决问题是至关重要的。优化教育环境是大学生情绪管理能力培养途径中最为重要的,教育环境主要包括教师的人格魅力与榜样作用,管理与服务部门的人文关怀与育人理念,校园文化的教育功能,校园自然环境的情绪修复功能等。     

Insights into Students’ Geometric Reasoning Relating to Prisms

Whilst spatial reasoning skills have been found to predict mathematical achievement, little is known about how primary (elementary) students’ conceptual understanding of three-dimensional objects develops. In this article, we report a qualitative study and the impact of rich learning experiences on 48 Years 3–6 students’ geometric reasoning relating to prisms. A one-to-one task-based interview, refined by the researchers, was used to assess student learning. Coding and data analysis were informed by our previous research. The findings reveal noticeable shifts in students’ knowledge of and reasoning about prisms, their ability to construct and describe prisms with geometric language, and their visualisation and spatial structuring skills. The implications of these findings highlight the importance of teachers’ choice of tasks that require students to compose and decompose three-dimensional (3D) objects; compare 3D objects through physical and mental transformations; take different perspectives; and visualise and reason geometrically.

     

Students’ Emotive Reasoning Through Place-Based Environmental Socioscientific Issues

Research in Science Education - Engaging environmental socioscientific issues (SSI) requires navigating diverse positions regarding people and nature. This qualitative investigation determined how...     

Secondary School Students’ Reasoning About Science and Personhood

Science & Education - Scientific advances, particularly in evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of...     

Facilitating Students’ Conceptual Change and Scientific Reasoning Involving the Unit of Combustion

This article reports research from a 3 year digital learning project to unite conceptual change and scientific reasoning in the learning unit of combustion. One group of students had completed the course combining conceptual change and scientific reasoning. The other group of students received conventional instruction. In addition to the quantitative data, six students from each group were interviewed to evaluate their conceptual change, correct concepts and scientific reasoning. Results indicate that the experimental group’s students significantly outperformed the conventional group on the Combustion Achievement Test (CAT), Scientific Reasoning Test (SRT) and Combustion Dependent Reasoning Test (CDRT). Moreover, the experimental group’s students use higher levels of scientific reasoning more frequently and changed their alternative concepts more successfully than did the conventional group. Furthermore, once the experimental group’s students’ successfully changed their conceptions, their concepts tended to be more stable than the conventional group’s students, even after the 6th week of learning. These results demonstrate that combining conceptual change and scientific reasoning indeed improves students’ conceptual change and scientific reasoning ability more effectively than conventional instruction.     

Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past

This article explores historical reasoning, an important activity in history learning. Based upon an extensive review of empirical literature on students’ thinking and reasoning about history, a theoretical framework of historical reasoning is proposed. The framework consists of six components: asking historical questions, using sources, contextualization, argumentation, using substantive concepts, and using meta-concepts. Each component is discussed and illustrated by examples from our own research. The article concludes with suggestions on how to use the framework both in future research and in educational practice.     

Challenging Students’ Intuitions—the Influence of a Tangible Model of Virus Assembly on Students’ Conceptual Reasoning About the Process of Self-Assembly

A well-ordered biological complex can be formed by the random motion of its components, i.e. self-assemble. This is a concept that incorporates issues that may contradict students’ everyday experiences and intuitions. In previous studies, we have shown that a tangible model of virus self-assembly, used in a group exercise, helps students to grasp the process of self-assembly and in particular the facet “random molecular collision”. The present study investigates how and why the model and the group exercise facilitate students’ learning of this particular facet. The data analysed consist of audio recordings of six group exercises (n?=?35 university students) and individual semi-structured interviews (n?=?5 university students). The analysis is based on constructivist perspectives of learning, a combination of conceptual change theory and learning with external representations. Qualitative analysis indicates that perceived counterintuitive aspects of the process created a cognitive conflict within learners. The tangible model used in the group exercises facilitated a conceptual change in their understanding of the process. In particular, the tangible model appeared to provide cues and possible explanations and functioned as an “eye-opener” and a “thinking tool”. Lastly, the results show signs of emotions also being important elements for successful accommodation.     

The Effectiveness of Interacting with Scientific Animations in Chemistry Using Mobile Devices on Grade 12 Students’ Spatial Ability and Scientific Reasoning Skills

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of interacting with animations using mobile devices on grade 12 students’ spatial and reasoning abilities. The study took place in a grade 12 context in Oman. A quasi-experimental design was used with an experimental group of 32 students and a control group of 28 students. The experimental group studied chemistry using mobile tablets that had a digital instructional package with different animation and simulations. There was one tablet per student. A spatial ability test and a scientific reasoning test were administered to both groups prior and after the study, which lasted for 9 weeks. The findings showed that there were significant statistical differences between the two groups in terms of spatial ability in favour of the experimental group. However, there were no differences between the two groups in terms of reasoning ability. The authors reasoned that the types of animations and simulations used in the current study featured a wide range of three-dimensional animated illustrations at the particulate level of matter. Most probably, this decreased the level of abstractness that usually accompanies chemical entities and phenomena and helped the students to visualize the interactions between submicroscopic entities spatially. Further research is needed to decide on types of scientific animations that could help students improve their scientific reasoning.     

A Teaching Strategy with a Focus on Argumentation to Improve Undergraduate Students’ Ability to Read Research Articles

The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach—based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory—means that we teach students to read research articles by teaching them which rhetorical moves occur in research articles and how they can identify these. Because research articles are persuasive by their very nature, we focused on the rhetorical moves that play an important role in authors’ arguments. We designed a teaching strategy using cognitive apprenticeship as the pedagogical approach. It was implemented in a first-year compulsory course in the life sciences undergraduate program. Comparison of the results of a pretest with those of the posttest showed that students’ ability to identify these moves had improved. Moreover, students themselves had also perceived that their ability to read and understand a research article had increased. The students’ evaluations demonstrated that they appreciated the pedagogical approach used and experienced the assignments as useful. On the basis of our results, we concluded that students had taken a first step toward becoming expert readers.     

A Discussion on Reading Ability of College Students

This article starts with the analysis of the essential factors that restrict the students' reading comprehension and talks about the causes of the problems in reading. Many students feel it difficult to improve their reading ability and don't know how to cope with thses problems. Ways are suggested in the artiue.