AGE AND YOUTH by Pablo Casals

1, What attitude toward life does Casals have?

Age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

2, What does retirement mean to Casals?

The word is alien and the idea inconceivable to him. He doesn't believe in retirement for anyone in his type of one without the other. To "retire" means to me to begin to die. The man who works and is never bored is never old. Work and interest in worthwhile things are the best remedy for age. Each day he is reborn. Each day he must begin again.

3,Why does Casals live by the sea? What effect does the sea have on him?
Casals lives by the sea because he has always especially loved the sea.
It has long been a custom of his to walk along the beach each morning before he start work.It is never the same, never, not from one moment to the next, always in the process of change, always becoming something different and new.

American Values and Assumptions

SUMMARY

This passage talk about:
Privacy is very important for Americans' individualism. They have great difficult to understand people who is not independent.
Americans' attitude of privacy is very difficult for foreigners to understand. they open their houses, yards, and even their offices. But don't cross those boundaries, even you think they seems open and inviting.

Sunday in the park

Author is telling us a story about a couple in front of two choice, one is protect their own child, for their own benefit, the other one is violence, someone rood but stronger. The man chosen to walk away, but he didn’t feel happy about that. The child is crying all the time which drive him crazy. Then they move the fight to themselves.
Author is telling us through the story to make people think about in front of this kind of decision, what’s your reflection, you will stay in peace and walk away, or you will fight back just because the situation is unfair or wrong???

L2 learning

Summary: Summary of the text(All four pages). Give brief summary of each major points!
According to Mitchell&Myles ' point of view about the second language learner:
The second language learners can be children, or they can be adults; they maybe learning the target language formally in school or college, or they learning in the social environment. English becomes highly target language in the late twentieth century. Researchers have been concerned primarily with analysing and modelling the inner mental mechanisms available to the individual learner, for provessing, learning, and storing new language knowledge. Their aim is to ducument universal mental provesses available to all normal human beings. There is some controversy among researchers in this pyscholinguistic tradition on the question of age and many other researchers agree with some version of a view that "younger=better in the long run". Social psychologists have argued consistently that these differences in learning outcomes must be due to individual differences between learners and many proposals have been made converning the characteristic which supposedly cause these differences. There are three cognitive factors: intelligence, language aptitude and language learning strategies. And three affective factors: language attitudes, motivation and language anxiety. Two perspectives on the learner which we have highlighted so far have concentrated first, on universal characteristics, and second, on individual characteristics. Interest in the learner as a social being will lead to concern with their relationship with the social context, and the structuring of the learning opportunities which it makes available.





Personal Response:Your perspective on the theories. To what extent to do agree or disagree with the scholars' views about learning language and a language learner. You can incorporate your own experience of learning language!!