Language of Media

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/studyguides/pdfs/langmedia.pdf

This link is for the language of media, it present the booklet prepared by BBC World Service. The booklet presents the various programmes and their features. Each page relates to a different type of broadcast. On each page you will find a short explanation of the type of broadcast, along with extracts taken from BBC World Service programmes. This will help to understand the language of media.

Bloom's Taxonomy

The Bloom’s Taxonomy was created in 1956 by Dr Benjamin Bloom. It is the classification of learning objectives Bloom’s three learning domain of education. There are cognitive domain which is related to knowledge, affective domain which is related to attitude and psychomotor domain which is related to skills. Cognitive domain consider as the skills like knowledge, comprehension and thinking etc. There are six categories of cognitive domain in taxonomy that is knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evolution. The stages develop as recall data and information, understand it and apply it to new situation, examine information and compile it, final stage is about justify the information. Knowledge is the result of thinking and comprehension and synthesis reflect the nature of thinking.

 Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom, revisited the cognitive domain in the learning taxonomy in 1990s. As the taxonomy reflects different forms of thinking and thinking is an active process verbs were used rather than nouns. He changed the name of six categories as remembering, understanding, applying, analysing, evaluating, and creating. It listed in order below, starting from the simplest behaviour to the most complex. The revisited taxonomy generally focuses on the thinking. The first three categories is lower level thinking and last three categories is higher level thinking. This leads to the simple thinking to critical thinking for the particular topic. The six stages are help learners to achieve the goal in thinking process.

History of Critical Thinking

Thinking is an internal and mental process to operate information. Thinking is the complex process of ideas in the human mind. According to Dewey, thinking is as the stream of consciousness which cannot control. With educational context, Dewey present the development reflective thought is most important goal in learning and it is teacher who develop the sense of thinking by engaging them in to the various task of thinking. There are some perspectives for the thinking in the educational context. Bloom presented the psychological view of thinking and according to the psychological perspective the thinking is cognitive process. Research proves that the teaching thinking as the valuable means raise the educational level. To understand this complex matter one scholar named Thagard present the analogy of the computer and human mind. According to him as software is work as mind and the mental representation are like the store data in the computer. The other perspective is related to the sociological view the thinking affect by different social context. According to Philosophical perspectives, thinking is useful to know the development knowledge in educational process.

 All perspectives have different views of thinking but there is same view of the importance of it in the educational purpose. The main point is that the critical thinking is help lot to fulfill the goal. The history of critical thinking is very ancient and seen the various aspect of critical thinking in every stage is modified with need of the learning. Socrates set the root of tradition of critical thinking and it is known as “Socratic Question” and it is prove to best critical thinking teaching strategy. It reflects the difference between what is reasonable and what logical belief is. This followed by many scholars and in middle ages the systematic critical thinking in teaching tested and examine the logical and reasonable beliefs. In 15 and 16 century the eco of the all scholars was turn to analysis and criticism. Francis Bacon, in England put the ground of modern science with the thinking process in his book ‘The Advancement of Learning’. So the critical thinking begun with think about art, politics, society, human nature etc. further the intellectual critical thinking emphasized by Boyle and Newton but they were not in fever of traditional perspective. There was the great contribution of French scholars in 17 century and they emphasized more on the reason and critical questioning for the sound thinking. Critical thinking is further extended and applied in politics by Karl Marx, in the biological life by Darwin, to understand the human mind by Freud. In field of linguistic, it used for function of the symbols and language in human use. In 20 century, there is the emergency of formulation to understand the critical thinking and one of this is the sociocentrical tendencies of human mind to think. In modern time the baseline are these fundamental thoughts and reasoning.

 As critical thinking is most important in the learning process, it should start from very early stage of the learning. For the practice intellectual language, learners need the minimal critical thinking of every possible subject. Critical thinking is not only to memories information and examine but it is the process to cultivate the reasoning and critically proves facts.

This is the brief information about the history of critical thinking. The link given below will help for the detail history of critical thinking. 

http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/a-brief-history-of-the-idea-of-critical-thinking/408

Attempt of Writing Article (with reference of academic writing)

Birthday is not always Happy Birthday

Everyone is waiting for the special day of the life and that is the Birthday. The new trend in our country is to throw the party on the birthday. The whole planning starts one or more month earlier than the birthday. According to the survey made by students of social sciences of one university, most of the people are so conscious about their birthday and the plan of the birthday. But at the time of party, something gone wrong that ruins whole party.

The survey made by New Generation magazine, most of the people thinks that their birthday party is ruined by some and other factors.

Never	Some times	Always
10%	30%	60%

The table shows that 60% people believes that somehow their party ruined because the expected person did not show up, the birthday cake was not deliver on time, family protest to do the party and in most case the surprise already revealed. This is same with 30% people who think that sometimes their party gets ruined. As per the analysis, there are lucky 10% people who never face trouble in birthday party in their life.

As per the above research, researcher try to observe some birthday events and conclude that the birthday of person is not always the happy birthday. The observation of the Indian family, old ones are not believe in young ones thinking and so they have far different views for the birthday celebrations, and thus the celebration starts and ends with cool chaos. Sometimes the birthday party is placed to show off, and to reach the level of the others, person try so high that affect their financial condition. In many cases, the birthday parties are forcefully asked by friends and relatives. The birthday surprises are also in the trend, but in most of the case the secrets reveled by someone and it carry away the charm of the birthday party.

Now a day people get upset in very small incidents. None like their birthday become the sad day. The psychological survey proved that the person who conscious about the birthday planning are much emotional than those who do not care about that stuff. So it is not necessary that the Birthday is always a Happy Birthday to everyone. Those who are thinking much about birthday party face many emotional and other hurdles to get it best ever day, rather not to think about it is the best option to make it best day ever.

Language Acquisition

Stephan Krashen talks about phonemic awareness in context of second language acquisition. Phonemic awareness is ability to take words and break it in to sound as per the oral ability. This can be done by divide the words or blend the words. National Reading Panel claim that phonemic awareness is training, significantly improve learners reading-spelling ability. Krashen claims that phonemic awareness is misguided. According to him phonemic words cannot be pre course for reading. Learners can increase the reading ability without noticing phonemic awareness.

Web 2.0 and Language learning

The modern hope in language learning is web 2.0. Web tools use in language learning. Blogs , Wikis , Pod casting , Video , etc. are famous web tools. Blogs relate us with what happens in word wide. Wikis can be used for online classroom work. Pod casting used to produce audio and share it. These all are like digital library , which motivate language learning.