A Puzzler\u27s Paradise

Listed below are 34 kinds of word puzzles, games and curiosities, each one in scrambled form. Your assignment is to rearrange the letters of each one into its correct order. Simple enough? Of course! Why 34 scrambles, instead of some number that shows a healthy respect for the decimal system? Because 34 happens to be the total of each row, column and main diagonal in a magic square of the fourth order - sufficient reason

Unscrambling jumbled sentences: An authentic task for English language assessment?

Jumbled sentence items in language assessment have been criticized by some authors as inauthentic. However, unscrambling jumbled sentences is a common occurrence in real-world communication in English as a lingua franca. Naturalistic inquiry identified 54 instances of jumbled sentence use in daily life in Dubai/Sharjah, where English is widely used as a lingua franca. Thus it is seen that jumbled sentence test items can reflect real-world language use. To evaluate scrambled sentence test items, eight test item types developed from one jumbled sentence instance (“Want taxi Dubai you?”) were analyzed in terms of interactivity and authenticity. Items ranged from being completely decontextualized, non-interactive, and inauthentic to being fully contextualized, interactive, and authentic. To determine appropriate assessment standards for English tests in schools in this region, the English language standards for schools and English language requirements for university admission in the UAE were analyzed. Schools in Dubai/Sharjah use Inner Circle English varieties of English (e.g., British or American English) as the standard for evaluation, as well as non-native-English-speaker varieties (e.g., Indian English(es)). Also, students applying to English-medium universities in the UAE must meet the required scores on standardized English tests including the IELTS and TOEFL. Standards for evaluation of communication in English involving tasks of jumbled sentences in classroom tests must reflect the language learning goals of the school and community. Thus standards for classroom assessment of English in Dubai/Sharjah are determined by local schools’ and universities’ policies

Does generation benefit learning for narrative and expository texts? A direct replication attempt

Generated information is better recognized and recalled than information that is read. This generation effect has been replicated several times for different types of material, including texts. Perhaps the most influential demonstration is by McDaniel, Einstein, Dunay, and Cobb (Journal of Memory and Language, 1986, 25(6), 645–656; henceforth MEDC). This group tested whether the generation effect occurs only if the generation task stimulates cognitive processes not already stimulated by the text. Numerous studies, however, report difficulties replicating this text by generation-task interaction, which suggests that the effect might only be found under conditions closer to the original method of MEDC. To test this assumption, the present study closely replicated MEDC's Experiment 2 in two separate German and English-speaking samples. The present study provided partial evidence in favor of the expected interaction, which ultimately depended on successful completion of the generation task (with near-to-perfect accuracy). Moreover, it indicates that sentence unscrambling might enhance learning across genres

Online Aggression : The Influences of Anonymity and Social Modeling

Behavioral temptation to aggress and participant blog responses following a group word unscrambling game were examined in situations of anonymity and positive or negative social modeling. Anonymous participants were more aggressive than non-anonymous participants. Also, social modeling seemed to moderate the effect of anonymity on behavioral temptation to aggress as well as verbal aggression via blog posts. Specifically, anonymous participants responded more aggressively when they viewed aggressive models following failure in a team word unscrambling game. These findings suggest that although anonymity may increase the likelihood that individuals will aggress, social modeling may influence aggressive outcomes

The effective use of grammar and vocabulary strategies in the process of teaching-learning english in students of 10th grade at Manuel Olivares Institute in the morning shift, II semester 2014

Learning the English language has a high importance everywhere in the world. That is why it is a matter of study at any level of education. It is the universal language. Due to this, in our country English has become a very important subject,which has been taught traditionally in secondary school. But now it is considered a very important subject in the study plan in secondary school, and therefore, more attention is being given by the government and school authorities. This study is focused on vocabulary and grammar teaching –learning strategies,not only because it has been observed that these are the sub skills teachers usually teach in English class, but also because through the years of experience as a student and now as a teacher I have noticed that most of the students do not even learn and use the grammar correctly. So, this paper is conducted to investigate the factors that are affecting the effective learning of English, mainly in the process of teaching and learning vocabulary and grammar in the 10th grade at Manuel Olivares Institute. Besides, it is intended to identify the strategies teachers and tudents are using during the process of learning English in the classroom

Robust semantic analysis for adaptive speech interfaces

The DUMAS project develops speech-based applications that are adaptable to different users and domains. The paper describes the project's robust semantic analysis strategy, used both in the generic framework for the development of multilingual speech-based dialogue systems which is the main project goal, and in the initial test application, a mobile phone-based e-mail interface

Temperatures of envy : associations between temperature perceptions and experiences of envy.

Envy is generally thought of as a negative emotional response involving a contrast between oneself and another. In its proper form, it can have detrimental effects upon relational interactions and attentional resources, but recent evidence indicates that two forms of envy exist. While malicious envy is characteristically hostile, benign envy is related to admiration and involves a motivational component. In light of research demonstrating associations between temperature and affect, the present research examines associations between temperature perception and envy. In study 1, participants primed with sentence-unscrambling tasks involving heat-associated words reported greater maliciousness in subsequent recalls of envy. In study 2, participants who recalled an experience of benign envy perceived ambient temperature as warmer than those who recalled an experience of malicious envy. In study 3, an admiration condition was added in order to better understand the influence of positive, upward evaluations of others on temperature perceptions in experiences of envy. Participants recalling benign envy again perceived warmer temperatures than in the malicious condition, and estimates in the admiration condition fell in between those of the benign and malicious conditions. Consistent with previous research, benign envy was found to involve more interpersonal overlap than admiration or malicious envy, and was demonstrated to be the least comfortable of the emotions to recall. Malicious envy, on the other hand, was seen to be a cooler, more comfortable experience. The differences between the benign and admiration conditions in particular highlight the frustrating, often motivational aspect of benign envy absent in experiences of admiration

The Effect of Segmented and Interrupting Recasts on EFL Learners' Acquisition of English Question Forms

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