Teaching Vocabulary Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Teaching Vocabulary - Essay Example Teaching Vocabulary demands the use of various strategies as not all the students have the same capabilities to understand and comprehend the foreign as well as local languages. The issue of teaching vocabulary of a foreign language becomes more complicated due to the common lack of understanding of the foreign language of the children. (Council) It also further depends as to how the children are willing to learn and what methods can effectively be used to teach the children in most optimum way so that the capabilities of the children are maximized. However large part of this learning depends upon the curriculum and various ideologies of curriculum adopted by the schooling systems to impart knowledge into the students. This further trickles down to the goals and objectives set by the teacher in teaching the class. Therefore the issue of teaching vocabulary and various methods of teaching it largely depend upon the way a teacher intends to follow the overall plan of teaching the students. This essay will look into the various strategies for teaching the vocabulary to the students however, before doing so we will be discussing various curriculum methodologies which are being followed in order to set stage for our final analysis of the situation. Curriculum Ideologies Curriculum ideologies are defined as beliefs about what schools should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons. (Lu). All schools have at least one ideology - and usually more than one - that provides direction to their functions. An ideology can be tacit rather than explicit. Curriculum is the way through which these different ideologies can be implemented. The curriculum refers to the content and purpose of an educational program together with their organization. Curriculum is one of developing knowledge through which it can be organized into subjects and fields for educational purposes. Curriculum is also a way to ask questions as to how the knowledge and learning are linked to particular educational purposes. It is because of this reason that curriculum is considered as a best tool for learning. As many pedagogues have noted in their work, both radical pedagogy and critical theory have struggled Sisyphus-like against the forces of vocationalization, corporatization, the instit utionalized Romantic Humanist educational curriculum, and the commodification of knowledge that currently plague institutes of learning today. Apart from that there was also an attempt to institutionalize the critical theory. In this issue, theorists and teachers discuss the practical difficulties in "transforming thinking and revising habitual ways of reading texts and reading the world in their students." (Spurlin) Ideological positions pertaining to curriculum and to other aspects of education exist in a state of tension or conflict. They are competing on what schools should teach and for what ends in a political marketplace. Regardless of how powerful an ideological view may be in an individual's or even group's orientation to the world, it is seldom adequate to determine what the school curriculum shall be. There is a political process that inevitably must be employed to move from ideological commitment to practical

Objective Thinking Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Objective Thinking - Research Paper Example As a result of adopting this approach you live in a childlike bubble with the world outside oneself and you are only concerned with the effects you have on the outside world and vice versa. This paper aims to: 1. Define objective experience, as opposed to subjective experience; 2. Describe the experience of an objective thinker; 3. Explore the possibility of training adolescents to think objectively; and 4. Explore the connection between thinking objectively and language. Isolating Objective Experience Bothereau (2009), in explaining atomism and atelic conceptualization, subscribed to the theorization of experience, in which experience can be analyzed and understood as a theoretical entity. At the same time, it is everything and everywhere, observable as well as unobservable. Bothereau goes on to compare the theories in question to Whitehead’s (1920) sense-awareness continuum, in which sense-perception is possible only with a division of the continuum, of a part objectified ex perience. Many theorists, as well as those in the practical sciences like medicine, take into account two components of experience: the objective and the subjective. While the patient’s blood pressure is objective and can be validated using a sphygmomanometer, his experience of pain is subjective and cannot be perfectly transferred through Nagel’s observer empathy (1974, in Baars, 2996). Baars (1996) advocated for such practical criteria to understand subjectivity. Indeed, the common argument against physicalism is that an ideal, complete physical description of a living human being still leaves out that person’s subjective conscious experience, or what it was like to be that person (Rudd, 1997). Is it possible to eliminate subjective experience? Watt (2004) argued against the view that cognition and emotion are counter-posed to each other. Instead, cognition is an extension of emotion, which is an extension of homeostasis. The brain’s functions are made possible through integration of systems from top to bottom of the neuroaxis. Biologic proof is in the neural connections between thalamocortical brain systems and many subcortical (basal forebrain, diencephalic, and midbrain-reticular) systems. He goes on to explain that, past early infancy, much of human consciousness consists of emotion-and-cognition amalgams, citing music and art as examples of activating emotion by cognition. Sutherland (2001) also commented on the indispensability of emotion in decision-making, as concluded by many theories from stimulus-response and behavioralism, symbolic logic and representation in any medium, to naturalism. He recounted Damasio’s (1994) findings that patients with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain that deals with social emotions, were completely unable to make decisions. If emotions, as judgments on what is perceived, are classified as subjective experience, and much of human consciousness consists of emotion- and-cognition amalgams, then it is not possible to completely disassociate subjective from objective experience. However, there are stoic individuals, or those who have mastered affective self-regulation (not affective elimination), at least for a time. The next question would then be whether it is possible to hardwire the brain to think primarily â€Å"objectively†, which will be explored in the latter part of the paper.