All SIX exercises are individual tasks. Once you have completed all tasks, discuss your experiences and findings with your group-mates and present keys points from your discussion during the ‘live’ seminar on Tuesday, 13th October.
- Please take note that you only need to summarise your discussions.
Exercise 1: Introspection.
Aims of this exercise:
- To sharpen the mental faculties of introspection, attention and visualisation.
- To increase awareness of mental and emotional states that may help or hinder concentration.
• Take a moment to pause and reflect.
• You may close your eyes or keep them open, whichever is most effective for you.
• Bring to mind situations in the recent past where your concentration has been affected. This can be when you were trying to read, to write, to understand a complex text, or when you were trying to complete some kind of task.
• Take note of what interfered with your focus. What thoughts and emotions arose to distract you from the task at hand? Make a list of these for your own personal reference.
very different thoughts, food, tasks, itches.
• Now do the reverse: bring to mind a situation when your focus was good and you were enjoying the task you were engaged with. Take note of why and how you were able to focus. Make a list of the qualities and conditions that helped you to focus.
I was able to find a clarity of mind like a fog had lifted inside. It could be the healthy pressure or stress to finish a particular task in an allotted amount of time.
Exercise 2: Gratitude Work
Aim of this exercise:
- To help generate a more stable and calm inner state in order the facilitate a more effective use of the mind.
• Take a moment to pause and reflect.
• Take a few good deep breaths and see if you can allow yourself to relax and ‘dream’ a little.
• Consider anything at all in your life that you feel you can be genuinely grateful for– your health, intelligence, parents, oxygen, trees, dogs, opportunity to be educated, your breath, your ability to see, think, hear, eat, laugh, your hair, your nose, anything at all.
• Take note of whatever comes to you, and feel it as genuinely as you can.
• If you find it difficult to find something to be grateful for, consider the last time you enjoyed something (a conversation with a friend/a meal/a TV show/ a book, anything at all) and see if you can extend gratitude to that situation/object for providing you with joy/satisfaction.
Exercise 3: Beholding
Aims of this exercise:
- To sharpen the powers of attention.
- To sharpen the power of observation.
- To hone descriptive writing skills.
• Select an object and pay deep attention to it. We can be generous in our definition of ‘object’—it can be a fruit, a piece of furniture, a person’s face, a duck, a sunset, a lamp etc.
• Paying attention for 5 minutes will suffice, but you can extend the time if you wish. Use your senses to behold and explore this object. Take note of colours, textures, sounds, tastes, sensations etc. (whatever is relevant to your object). Avoid interpreting/analysing what you are beholding. Engage with your object in a purely sensuous way.
• After you have paid attention to the object, write a brief description of it. A few lines will be enough, but you can extend it if you wish.
It is smooth, Black and reflective, a cracked mirror. It clearly looks dirty, though I don't feel it much. I can feel the muted corners surrounded by yellowing plastic. It is warm and slightly uncomfortable to the touch, now it is not.
• For those of you studying creative writing, this exercise will help you immensely in creating vivid and believable prose and poetry.
Exercise 4: Annotated Reading
Aims of this exercise:
- To become more engaged in the process of reading.
- To develop critical thinking and textual interpretive skills.
• As you read, identify key points that are being made, and include them in the margins of the text.
• Become curious as you read. Ask questions. What is being said? Do I understand this? Do I agree with what is being said? Do I disagree? Why?
• This is an important part of the process of forming arguments.
• Finally, based on the different perspectives offered by the various module conveners in their brief essays, what similarities and/or differences do you notice across these various voices? What influences their text-selection?
Exercise 5: Argumentative Writing
Aims of this exercise:
- To develop critical thinking skills.
- To develop argumentative writing skills.
The introductory piece ‘What is a Canon?’ introduces you to some key issues regarding the notion of canonicity, as well as outlining some of the controversies that have attended debates touching on which texts should be studied in preference over others.
This contextualising preface is followed by four seven short essays written by the convenors of seven core modules in the UK and Malaysian campuses – Studying Literature, Introduction to Drama, The Survey of English Literature and Drama, Beginnings of English, The Influence of English, Introduction to Linguistics, and Language and Context. The convenors reflect on their reasons for selecting particular literary texts and the text types that make up reference corpora such as the BNC (British National Corpus). Their arguments are designed to encourage you to begin to challenge, question and reflect upon those choices for yourself. Read the pieces now.
Once you have read the essays, it is your turn to contribute to these debates: before your next Academic Community seminar, please write a 300 word manifesto, proposing either a new text or a new area of language which you think should be studied on the first year syllabus. You can make it as polemical as you like, but you will need to be able to justify your choice: you should be prepared to come and persuade your tutor and your fellow students that your chosen text or text type is essential to their study of English.
Once you have taken part in your Academic Community seminar and received feedback from your peers and tutor, you should aim to write an additional 450 words further justifying and consolidating your choice of text. The finished piece should thus be 750 words in total. Please note that your manifesto is one of the written assignments that you will be including in your portfolio next year. It is therefore important to start writing up this piece of work as soon as you can, rather than leaving it until the very end of the module.
Dissecting the influence of the English language. solid reasons why it is important
Linguistic relativity is a hypothesis that one's language has subtle but direct influences one's view of the world. Here we can explore a pool of legitimate questions that make us ponder of what we think and how we think them. Does language shape thought? Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? How does the English language influence the culture we live in and vice versa?
Analytically, linguistic relativity as an issue stands between two others: a semiotic-level concern with how speaking any natural language whatsoever might influence the general potential for human thinking (i.e., the general role of natural language in the evolution or development of human intellectual functioning), and a functional- or discourse-level concern with how using any given language code in a particular way might influence thinking (i.e., the impact of special discursive practices such as schooling and literacy on formal thought).
We should be mindful of the fact that our thoughts can be defined by language and it lends a medium to sort and compartmentalize abstract domains in a multitude of different ways. (academic ref, quote+scholarly def of linguistic relativity) The language that we use most often influences us in our daily routine in minor ways, and it plays an essential part in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Sapir-Whorfian sense.
"For Sapir, linguistic relativity was a way of articulating what he saw as the struggle between the individual and society (Mandelbaum 1949). In order to communicate their unique experiences, individuals need to rely on a public code over which they have little control. Linguistic rules are usually unconscious, and it is difficult for individual speakers to enter the logic of the linguistic system and alter it to their liking. In this perspective, linguistic relativity becomes a way of exploring the power that words have over individuals and groups. It is thus a precursor to more recent topics in linguistic anthropology, such as language ideologies (see Sect. 4.3)."
The grammatical structure of a language also holds influence over how a person understands their existence. For example, in Turkish, there are two past tenses. One is used for direct experience and the other is for things only known about through indirect means. If one were to describe the snow that fell while they were in school, they would either say “it snowed today” if they saw it directly but if they did not witness it, they would use the other past-tense that indicated they were not present to see the snow falling. Due to this, Turkish speakers rely on the use of past-tense to complete a story and to understand the perspective of those speaking. Their language influences their understanding.
While linguistic determinism is criticized, it is evident in situations where the primary means of drawing attention to an aspect of an experience is language. For example, in Spanish and French, there are two ways to address a person. The ways depend on the relationship between the two people, be it formal or informal. In this respect, the speaker is always thinking about the relationship when addressing another person and therefore unable to break out of this thought process. (Language and Thought, 2012)
The language of Media holds weight in defining bits and pieces of history and current data or research too. It keeps track of the portrayal of culture while finding the voice in a particular period of time. When we zero in to what makes words sell on the news, we can unlock the mindsets of readers and reflect on the hierarchy of priorities that are present in society.
The progressive qualities of language also proves how forward a civilisation is in terms of thinking. Following Plato, St. Augustine, for example, held the view that language was merely labels applied to already existing concepts. We can analyse words that define certain meanings that could not exist (yet) in other languages, because of its lack of growth in that particular region of thought, such as sex, emotions, abstract values etc.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010028501907480?via%3Dihub
https://sapirwhorfhypothesis.weebly.com/linguistic-determinism-vs-linguistic-relativism.html#:~:text=Most%20critics%20favor%20the%20theory,(Language%20Files%2C%20p696).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/linguistic-relativity
700
Exercise 6: Reflective Journaling
Aims of this exercise:
- To increase awareness of your learning process.
- To identify the relationship between emotional/psychological states and the ability to concentrate.
- To identify conditions necessary for effective concentration.
- To identify the specific skills you have used and developed.
- To identify what you have learned about canons and corpora.
• What was the effect of introspecting on impediments to your ability to concentrate? Was it helpful? If so, how? If not, why?
NOT REALLY. Maybe it is because I used the wrong way. Take this for example. There is no pink elephant in the room. I can't help but imagine a pink elephant, and I waste much of my time chasing it away and forget my initial goal.
• Did the gratitude practice help you to generate a more stable and calm inner climate? Did this help in enhancing your mood and help in using your mind more effectively?
Of course. Starting out with mental stability is awesome. Especially when I acknowledge the fact that it is such a blessing that I am able to read at all!
• What was the effect of beholding an object? Did this help you to increase your power of attention?
It allowed my mind to be occupied for a time, and that muscle of contained observation will eventually be trained to focus for longer intervals.
• How did you apply boundary work to your reading and writing?
• What were the benefits and/or difficulties of applying concentration techniques to your reading process, and to the process of thinking critically?
I sat down and kept my area clean of outer distractions. After that, it became a matter of keeping my mind focused on priority one, whilst stubbornly ignoring my urges to fidget and do other things. Eventually, I struck a rhythm. When I really could not take it anymore, I read the piece aloud and questioned myself in real-time in order to introduce some dynamics to capture my attention again.
It was hard to keep the brain stuck to digest solid bits of information one by one because the brain is so accustomed to instant gratification that any work that is marginally more taxing in time feels worthless, and this is a lie that has grown roots into me.
• How did annotating your reading material help you to form ideas and perspectives?
It allowed me to keep my brain trained on the material at hand, as I have to actively process and digest information fast enough to ask questions that make sense. Also, by engaging myself into the text, I get to really spark an interest/or at least an investment that keeps the brain happy/busy for the time being, with inquisitiveness as the incentive.
• What have you discovered about the formation of canons and corpora?
They are purely set on human ideals and perspectives of what is "best" for invoking thought and they represent language as a whole. This is evident in the roots of culture and it reflects the values that we set for the good of the community.
• What strengths and weaknesses do you notice in your writing and thinking skills?
My writing should encapsulate a wider range of sight. The goal is to be able to craft language that goes down like a smooth draft of beer, not too fast, not too slow, but it should quench the thirst to maximum effect.\
https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-language-we-translate-our-thoughts-into-words-but-words-also-affect-the-way-we-think-111801
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/literally-psyched/the-man-who-couldnt-speakand-how-he-revolutionized-psychology/
Comments
Post a Comment