Monday, September 19, 2011

This is an excellent site that includes listening strategies, improving bad listening habits, academic listening skills, and links to some of the best listening resources such as CBC and Swiss Radio International.

Randall’s ESL Cyber Listening Lab

http://www.esl-lab.com

A great web-site for listening practice at easy, medium, and difficult levels. Choose among general listening activities, listening for academic purposes, or long conversations with real video. Each of the exercises also includes a quiz so that you can monitor your improvement.

BBC World Service

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml

This site is designed to help English students listen to the news. It includes real audio as well as transcripts. Learn about news events, jobs, sports, and music.

The English Listening Lounge

http://www.englishlistening.com

Practice at three different levels, complete question & answer sections, and follow along with listening transcripts. Exercises include authentic English language situations.

ESL Wonderland – Activities for ESL Students

http://www.eslwonderland.com/activites/index.htm

A wide rang of listening comprehension activities accompanied by readings and transcripts.

Daily Yoimuri – News Voice (Chose English version)

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/newsvoice/main.htm

This site reports a selection of international news events with full text. Read along while you listen to the news in real audio.

Other Great Listening Web-sites:

CBC – Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

http://www.cbc.ca This site keeps you up-to-date with headline news and live radio. You can read the stories while you listen to real audio. Check out the large collection of podcasts on science (Quirks and Quarks.)

NPR –NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO

This site has a vast collection of commercial-free podcasts from their radio broadcasts.http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_directory.php

TED

A fabulous collection of short videos of short speeches by famous intellectuals and designers.http://www.ted.com/index.php/pages/view/id/5

CNN

http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/index.html

Breaking news transcripts and real audio.

CNN Newsroom

http://turnerlearning.com/newsroom/index.html

This site features a half- hour radio program designed for North-American high-school students.

Great Speeches

http://www.chicago-law.net/speeches/speech.html

Includes famous speeches and transcripts by Pres.John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Pres. Richard Nixon, Malcom X, etc.

Internet Talk Radio Archives

http://museum.media.org/radio

Archives of early internet radio broadcasts. Includes talk shows on telecommunication and history, live discussions, and other programs for English speakers.

Spotlight Radio – Listen and Read

http://www.spotlightradio.org/visitors/scraudio.asp

Includes a great variety of radio programs and transcripts.

VOA – Voice of America

http://www.manythings.org/ra//voa-all.html

This site features audio and video clips of shows such as Dateline, News Now, and Women in Business.

Audio for ESL/EFL (a great website)

http://www.manythings.org/listen/

Pronunciation for ESL Students:

Literacy Net: a site that offers authentic materials for current events

http://literacynet.org/cnnsf/archives.html

Adult learning activity-California Distance Learning Project

Useful for beginning to low-intermediate -- good for listening skills, reading comprehension and language acquisition; speakers (American) read from newspaper articles.http://www.cdlponline.org/

English as a 2nd Language

http://www.esl.about.com/cs/pronunication

Basic pronunciation guidelines, including practice on the International Phonetic Alphabet. Learn how to pronounce consonants / vowels and practice transcribing sounds.

Sounds of English

http://www.soundsofenglish.org

Practice specific sounds and word stress. Includes interesting pronunciation exercises and fun game activities.

English Pronunciation for ESL Students

http://www.englishclub.com/pronunciation/index.htm

Pronunciation tips on word stress and linking as well as exercises and tongue twisters.

Phonetics—The Sounds of American English—from the University of Iowa

This is a great site for showing how the mouth forms various sounds in English. A moving diagram demonstrates the position of the mouth, tongue and lips. In addition, you can hear and see a real person saying that sound.

http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/english/frameset.html

On-line Dictionary

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/options.html This new online dictionary from MacMillan has a choice of American or British pronunciations.

Takako's Great Adventures

Join this interactive adventure with Takako by reading text while listening to streamed audio.http://www.faceweb.okanagan.bc.ca/takako/index.htm

Interesting things for ESL students (pronunciation site)

http://www.manythings.org/e/pronunciation.html

Learn English is a free, on-line, educational resource helping ESL and EFL students to learn English words. The flash site incorporates 40 topics, along with over 1,500 English words and phrases. When you click on a word or phrase you can hear it spoken. The high quality audio was created in a sound studio. http://www.learn-english.co.il/

Joe’s Café http://eslblogs.englishclub.com/english/category/listening/

Local radio station in St. John’s http://www.ozfm.com/

Wings Electronic Magazine Published for and by students involved in Latrobe University's International Student Lists project. http://weber.u.washington.edu/~wings/wings.html

Vocabulary websites!

Dictionary sites

GRAMMAR SITES

ESSAY WRITING - COMPOSITION, PUNCUTATION, AND GRAMMARM

MISCELLANEOUS

http://iteslj.org/ESL.html

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Scientists Hint at Why Laughter Feels So Good By JAMES GORMAN Published: September 13, 2011

Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good.

The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.

His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said. “That’s why we got interested in it.” And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans.

Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts.

In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dr. Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter. The pain came from a freezing wine sleeve slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, eliminated the possibility that the pain resistance measured was the result of a general sense of well being rather than actual laughter. And, Dr. Dunbar said, they also provided a partial answer to the ageless conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy or feel giddy because we laugh.

“The causal sequence is laughter triggers endorphin activation,” he said. What triggers laughter is a question that leads into a different labyrinth.

Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,” said he thought the study was “a significant contribution” to a field of study that dates back 2,000 years or so.

It has not always focused on the benefits of laughter. Both Plato and Aristotle, Dr. Provine said, were concerned with the power of laughter to undermine authority. And he noted that the ancients were very aware that laughter could accompany raping and pillaging as well as a comic tale told by the hearth.

Dr. Dunbar, however, was concerned with relaxed, contagious social laughter, not the tyrant’s cackle or the “polite titter” of awkward conversation. He said a classic example would be the dinner at which everyone else speaks a different language and someone makes an apparently hilarious but incomprehensible comment. “Everybody falls about laughing, and you look a little puzzled for about three seconds, but really you just can’t help falling about laughing yourself.”

To test the relationship of laughter of this sort to pain resistance, Dr. Dunbar did a series of six experiments. In five, participants watched excerpts of comedy videos, neutral videos or videos meant to promote good feeling but not laughter.

Among the comedy videos were excerpts from “The Simpsons,” “Friends” and “South Park,” as well as from performances by standup comedians like Eddie Izzard. The neutral videos included “Barking Mad,” a documentary on pet training, and a golfing program. The positive but unfunny videos included excerpts from shows about nature, like the “Jungles” episode of “Planet Earth.”

In the lab experiments, the participants were tested before and after seeing different combinations of videos. They suffered the frozen wine sleeve or the blood pressure cuff in different experiments and were asked to say when the pain reached a point they could not stand. They wore recorders during the videos so that the time they spent laughing could be established. In the one real-world experiment, similar tests were conducted at performances of an improvisational comedy group, the Oxford Imps.

The results, when analyzed, showed that laughing increased pain resistance, whereas simple good feeling in a group setting did not. Pain resistance is used as an indicator of endorphin levels because their presence in the brain is difficult to test; the molecules would not appear in blood samples because they are among the brain chemicals that are prevented from entering circulating blood by the so-called blood brain barrier.

Dr. Dunbar thinks laughter may have been favored by evolution because it helped bring human groups together, the way other activities like dancing and singing do. Those activities also produce endorphins, he said, and physical activity is important in them as well. “Laughter is an early mechanism to bond social groups,” he said. “Primates use it.”

Indeed, apes are known to laugh, although in a different way than humans. They pant. “Panting is the sound of rough-and-tumble play,” Dr. Provine said. It becomes a “ritualization” of the sound of play. And in the course of the evolution of human beings, he suggests, “Pant, pant becomes ha, ha.”