The good guy Greg guide to motivating language learners

Why isn’t he coming to class? Why does she come to class and not do anything? Why is he so confident of passing when he’s done so little work? Why does she think she’ll fail when she’s working so hard? Why do they spend so much time talking about IELTS when this is a TOEFL preparation course? Does he even want to be in this room? It feels like she’s deliberately trying to fail this course… why would that be? Do any of the above questions look familiar to you? How many of them have you uttered yourself? Do you find from time to time that you are utterly perplexed by a student’s complete lack of interest in your marvelously prepared classes? Well, it’s time for you to take a chill pill and understand that there is always a good reason why a given student is not motivated to perform to their peak in your class. It might not always be an obvious reason, but it is invariably a good one. Occasionally in life, you get to kill two birds with one stone. When that happens with an e-book like this, it’s an absolute joy, I can tell you. In this instance, I’m part of a task group looking into what motivates our learners, and I’m doubling up on the use of some of my initial findings in this here collection of chapters. As you read through the theories I discuss, I’d like you to consider the cases of demotivated students you’ve encountered in the past and think if their situation is more understandable when you put it in the context of what the research says. This book is ostensibly split down the middle. In part one I look at many of the contemporary theories of motivation, with questions to help reflect on instances when you’ve encountered students who exhibited related motivational problems. In part two I present a series of scenarios that revolve around our unlikely teacher hero: Good Guy Greg. Greg helps us work through issues and leads us towards practical techniques for solving the motivational issues we may encounter

Politeness and Alignment in Dialogues with a Virtual Guide

Language alignment is something that happens automatically in dialogues between human speakers. The ability to align is expected to increase the believability of virtual dialogue agents. In this paper we extend the notion of alignment to affective language use, describing a model for dynamically adapting the linguistic style of a virtual agent to the level of politeness and formality detected in the user’s utterances. The model has been implemented in the Virtual Guide, an embodied conversational agent giving directions in a virtual environment. Evaluation shows that our formality model needs improvement, but that the politeness tactics used by the Guide are mostly interpreted as intended, and that the alignment to the user’s language is noticeable

Ada style guide (version 1.1)

Ada is a programming language of considerable expressive power. The Ada Language Reference Manual provides a thorough definition of the language. However, it does not offer sufficient guidance on the appropriate use of Ada's powerful features. For this reason, the Goddard Space Flight Center Ada User's Group has produced this style guide which addresses such program style issues. The guide covers three areas of Ada program style: the structural decomposition of a program; the coding and the use of specific Ada features; and the textural formatting of a program

POETIC LANGUAGE IN NAZARETH’S “LOVE HURTS”

This study is concerned with how language is poetically used in one of Nazareth’s song lyrics, “Love Hurts”. The language encompasses a series of figures of speech. This study was performed as an alternative practice in teaching English poetry. Figures of speech intrinsically compose English poetry. Because the figures of speech contain implied meaning, they might not be easily meaningful to a reader of the lyric. This study is intended to describe the figures of speech so that the language becomes more understandable to the reader. This study applies a textual analysis, and it adopts Leech’s linguistic guide to English poetry. The linguistic guide includes absurdity in the language of poetry; transference of meaning; and over and counter statement. The discussion works on each of the lyric’s lines, and it results in the series of figures of speech, comprising oxymoron, paradox, synecdoche, metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, litotes, and irony. The figures of speech indicate that the language is arranged to sweetly sound a melody. Besides that, the figures of speech indicate that the language is also used figuratively to contain the meaning. In other words, in the lyric, the language was used not only to be sung melodically, but it was also used to be written poetically

A Road Description Language for the Leeds Driving Simulator Guide (V1.0)

A driving simulator has recently been developed at the University of Leeds. Part of this work has been to provide a method of creating a wide variety of road networks to meet the demands of different experiments. This paper describes a simple language that specifies road networks and their appearance, including the definition of road markings, sign posts and roadside objects. It is intended for use by prospective users of the simulator facility in order that they could either build networks themselves or know what information is required for simulator staff to build a network for them

Materials science: Breaking the neural code

The precise information that is conveyed between nerve cells remains unknown. Networks of nerve cells grown on silicon chips, using a polyester as a guide, may bring us closer to translating the elusive neural language

HAL/S programmer's guide

HAL/S is a programming language developed to satisfy the flight software requirements for the space shuttle program. The user's guide explains pertinent language operating procedures and described the various HAL/S facilities for manipulating integer, scalar, vector, and matrix data types

The Behavior Language; User's Guide

The Behavior Language is a rule-based real-time parallel robot programming language originally based on ideas from [Brooks 86], [Connell 89], and [Maes 89]. It compiles into a modified and extended version of the subsumption architecture [Brooks 86] and thus has backends for a number of processors including the Motorola 68000 and 68HCll, the Hitachi 6301, and Common Lisp. Behaviors are groups of rules which are activatable by a number of different schemes. There are no shared data structures across behaviors, but instead all communication is by explicit message passing. All rules are assumed to run in parallel and asynchronously. It includes the earlier notions of inhibition and suppression, along with a number of mechanisms for spreading of activation