Welcome To My English Portfolio
Emilio Zambrano
Yachay Tech University
English Language Program
UrcuquĂ, Ecuador
My English portfolio Emilio Zambrano
English language program Yachay Tech University
Level 6 – 002 Teacher: Alyssa Wolfe January 10, 2017 Urcuquí, Ecuador
Table of contents: 1. Portfolio letter 2. Response Essay 3. Interpretation Essay 4. Argumentation Essay 5. Final research project essay 6. Additional materials 7. Thank you letter
Emilio Zambrano Departmental block H3-1 12th, December 2016
Dear Reader: My name is Emilio Zambrano and I would like to start my letter thanking every person that helped me on my personal and academic development along this semester. This is a compilation of all the work I did during fall 2016 semester at Yachay Tech. The following portfolio includes four essay a response, an interpretation, an argumentative and a research that is equivalent to the first part of the final research project. I feel nostalgic because I am finally finishing English Language Program but at the same time I am anxious about my future with English language and the doors it can open to me. My experience as an English learner is really gratifying because I can improve my English skills every day, I just need some effort and dedication from myself. When I started my semester I thought it will be really hard to pass level 6, even I thought about quitting this level because it seem too hard to approve but the only thing I needed was some time of adaptation and set more alarms to wake up earlier and not skipping classes. At the beginning of this semester my goals were quite similar to those that I have nowadays, my goal with English language is to make contacts with people around the world and communicate my ideas in the official language of science. This course helped me to improve my writing skills that were not so good when I started the semester. One thing I will also have to add is that my speaking, including pronunciation and vocabulary grew along this semester and I developed this skill because I read more
lectures during my stay in English Language Program. Grammar presentations were also an important part because they contributed to my knowledge about English grammar especially the topic that I had to present, phrasal verbs. In this course I learned many useful things that could help me in my future as a student or professional and these things I learned are not only in the academic field, such as how to write an essay or how to give a presentation, but also I learned in this level some human values like responsibility and punctuality. I also learned how to improvise questions because every day we were asked a personal question at warm-up section. This make me happy because it makes you a fast-minded person and you can be more agile when having a conversation. I was surprised with the abilities of my classmates to sustain a point during the debate organized and moderated by the teacher which topic was “Language and Ethics�. Even though they had a harder argument to sustain, they were more prepared to argue against our point of view. Thank you reader for reading my portfolio. I am sure it will be a good experience and hope you enjoy it. I feel ready for new challenges for my personal development and I will try to do my best the rest of my career.
Sincerely, Emilio
Response Essay
Does the language we speak influence our perception of the world? Emilio Zambrano Yachay University for Experimental Technology and Research October 2, 2016
Does the language we speak influence our perception of the world?
What if I told you that human beings have been developing their communication methods since our biological ancestors started to develop speech? Even in our days language variety continues evolving and actual languages that we know are a product of the more primitive languages. These variations between idioms have brought us one of the most difficult questions in order to understand human behavior, is it true that languages can shape our thoughts? It is complicated to give a conclusion to this question and considering that there are more facts to consider when we talk about human behavior such as the culture, the environment where we grow up and even our thoughts are unlimited and the language we speak is not, so it is unlikely that our language determines how we see the world. The controversy about linguistic relativity started about 1940s when Benjamin Lee Whorf studied a Native American language called Hopi and he concluded that English Speakers and Hopi speakers have another perception of the world because they speak different languages. I think there is something else besides the language we speak that shapes our mind and that something is our culture. For example there is a language called Guugu Yimithirr that is spoken in northern Australia, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr do not have words to describe locations, so they use their words for the cardinal points to describe where an object is (Bodoritsky, 2009). That difference in language permits these native speakers to always be oriented but that happens because they have a different lifestyle from people who live into the cities. Probably in a distant
future Guugu Yimithirr could evolve and introduce some words to its dictionary in order to adapt it for the lifestyle of their speakers.
Almost all languages have the same grammar to form sentences, they have verbs, nouns, prepositions, adjectives, etc. These words may vary from one language to another, for example some languages have feminine or masculine nouns and other languages do not. Tenses in verbs tend to vary from one language to another, in Indonesian you cannot change the tense of a verb, in Russian you have to include the gender and the tense in the same form of the verb (Boroditsky, 2009). Many people might think that each language might emphasize different things and therefore see the world differently but I think that everyone can notice the same thing but they are not including it in their sentences because of the differences in language. Finally, our mind is the most powerful weapon we own, even more powerful than languages because languages are limited but our mind is not. What I want to say is that languages help us to express our ideas and make it easier to understand for the rest of the people but there are some thoughts that cannot be expressed in any language but you can also think about it anyway like a new smell or a strange sensation. Also there are some words that do not have translations for other languages but those things are still the same to the speaker’s eyes. For example, in Dani of New Guinea there are only two terms to describe a color, one for light colors and other for dark colors and it does not mean that New Guineans can only see just two colors and the differences between the rests of the color of the visible spectrum do not exist for them. In conclusion, our way of thinking depends of a lot of factors that influence our minds since the time that we were born, one of them could be the place where we live
and the culture of the people in that place. Each language is different others because every language emphasizes or focuses on different things or ideas like gender or verb tenses but it does not mean that people do not notice what they are not talking about that means they are ignoring some ideas. Languages are not perfect and as a communication method they could help us to express our ideas to other people but our imagination is even bigger than any language. Sometimes we can feel something that we cannot express with words and our mind helps us to label it on a category.
References Boroditsky, L. (2009, June 11), How does our language shape the way we think? Retrieved from: https://www.edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think
Interpretation Essay
Interpretation of the Art Piece “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh Carlos Lara Victoria Suárez Emilio Zambrano
Yachay University for Experimental Technology and Research
L6 - 002
Interpretation of “The Starry Night” When people talk about art history it is necessary to mention one of the most famous and influential persons in art history, Vincent van Gogh. He was a PostImpressionist painter who created over 2000 artworks including 900 paintings and 1600 drawings. Most of his work includes portraits, self-portraits and landscapes. He died at the age of 37 by shooting himself into the chest after years of poverty and supposed madness. Even though his brother Theo was an art dealer, he only sold one painting during his lifetime and became famous after his suicide. McQuillan describes him as the artist “where discourses of madness and creativity converge”. Van Gogh’s popularity arose in the 20th century when artists of German impressionism used his style. He still lives in public imagination and nowadays he is recognized as a misunderstood genius. One of the most known incidents in art history happened when van Gogh fought with his friend, the French painter Paul Gauguin in 1888 (a year before he painted Starry Night) which caused him to cut off his left ear. After this, he was hospitalized at a mental health asylum near the village of Saint-Rémy. In that place he owned a private room and a cozy studio, from which he did not have a clear view of the landscape. It is assumed that Starry night was created using previous paintings that he made and elements of his imagination. Van Gogh considered himself a misunderstood and a visionary but many artists of that time did not think the same about him. Art critics were convinced that his insane mental condition influenced in his talent. They described Van Gogh’s paintings as
sloppy, crude and childish because most of his paintings are charged by heavy brushstrokes but they did not knowthat was his conception of the world.
There are many interesting facts about the traits and characteristics within the painting that are responsible for its popularity. There are many fundamental aspects that intrigue people who look this image, and each trait affects each individual in a different way. That is the night sky full of clouds with fast rotating movement, the stars burning with their own luminosity, and a bright crescent moon. Although the traits are exaggerated, this is a scene that invites us to create a new world in our minds and makes the majority of individuals feel comfortable. We can follow the curves and create different patterns that will play with our senses and our point of view about the real world. This movement captures the audience while the other traits carry us to another dimension. Below the rolling hills of the horizon there is a small village. Perhaps the dark and cold colors and the fiery characteristics provoke highlight hide memories filled with the curiosity of what exists at night and how the sky has a relationship with stars. The center point of the village is the church spire reigning the smaller buildings and trying to touch the sky. At the left part of the painting there is a huge and dark structure, it is a cypress that develops a greater sense of fear and isolation we can have a relation with a state of mourning. The curves of the lines reflect a beautiful and crazy sky, so it creates the sensation of perfect balance between sadness and happiness. Those traits also let the audience to interpret the painting from their own perspective To conclude this piece of art clearly represent a brilliant night full of stars, but when we see it, it does not seems as a night conversely the highly moon looks like a huge sun. Even when the houses are down the night has dark color all the sky and the
stars are colorful and make us feel peace. When we see it deeper and for a long time we can feel that the sky is moving and we consider that Van Gogh was trying to express freedom. In the other hand the cypress tends to represent death so it gives the painting a mysterious feeling of loneliness. Also if we pay attention t in those houses, one of them seems like a church and it is the only one that has a connection with the sky. We can also make reference to the colors that Van Gogh used in this painting, because as we know the black and purple represents sadness also the way that the sky is illuminate by the stars and how the moon is so bright that is make us feel that in that way is where we can find the eternity happiness. We can conclude by saying that the feeling that you receive when you see the painting is related with the mood that you have when you see it, because it is a mix up of emotions in a non-determinate way.
References - Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved November 15, 2016, from https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/avant-gardefrance/post-impressionism/a/van-gogh-the-starry-night - Chamaa, R. (n.d.). Bright Lights and Dark Corners: A Genius. Retrieved November 15, 2016, from https://medium.com/drunken-boat/bright-lights-and-dark-corners-agenius-3ea62e1c76da#.rmcjax9qz -Starry Night Story-Theme. (2015). Retrieved November 15, 2016, from http://www.artble.com/artists/vincent_van_gogh/paintings/starry_night/more_infor mation/story-theme -Newton, K. (April 6,2012). Study.com. Retreived from: http://study.com/academy/lesson/van-goghs-starry-night-description-analysisfacts.html
ARGUMENTATION ESSAY
What has a greater effect on ethics and morality language or culture?
How is something defined as ethically or morally accepted in our society? There are many factors that influence on it but some of them have a greater effect on the construction of an ethic society. Language and culture are included in those factors but having a bigger influence from the cultural traits than thee spoken language. According to a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, a group of volunteers had to think a situation called the “trolley problem�. In that research Costa concluded that those persons who were asked about that problem in their non-native language responded with a more critical thought than those who were asked in their native tongue. Probably it depends on the environment where a person learned a language at this hypothetical situations have not been tested in real life. In the trolley problem, how do you know that the person who makes the decision will think about it on their non-native language? In real life situations people are pressed to make immediate decisions because of the stress and pressure. From this viewpoint, real life situations occur so fast and people do not have enough reaction time they just act as they are programmed to. Around the world there are a lot of cultures, each one of them look stranger that other depending on the person. In Latin America almost every person speak the same language but there are some traditions that are culturally accepted in some regions and rejected in others despite the language in this region is the same for almost everyone. Culture really defines what is ethically and morally accepted. A good example are some
Andean towns still use indigenous punishments to make justice by their own hands. For some people it is correct but for other it is unfair to do not have a legal trial. When you grow up the people that surround you influence the person that you will become in the future. In other words you are just an expression of the ancient cultural traits that have been passed generation by generation. Despite a person speak on other language that person would be expressing what the society taught him or her how to act in public, this includes ethics and moral norms. Ethics is transmitted among generations and it is constructed basing on the morality of each person of the society. To conclude, what is morally and ethically accepted depends on a greater way on the place where a person grew up or the place where you are in a certain moment. Even though language brings you some “memories� depending the situation where you learned it, it is not enough to have greater effect on our ethics. The ethics depends on the culture where you live and your ethics norms are also influenced by the place where you grew up.
References: Costa A, Foucart A, Hayakawa S, Aparici M, Apesteguia J, Heafner J, et al. (2014) Your Morals
Depend
on
Language.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.
PLoS
ONE
9(4):
e94842.
FINAL RESEARCH PROJECT ESSAY
The importance of technology in worldwide education systems Emilio Zambrano L6-002 Yachay Tech December 1st, 2016
Abstract This paper studies the importance of technology in education systems and scholar environment providing an analysis of the technology’s roll in our classrooms and how teachers and students can take advantage of it. Technology comes also accompanied by better outcomes from part of the students because it permits them to create different kinds of material for information transferring. There is a significant increase of 0.17 from standard deviation for students who used a software for learning algebra and pre-algebra from students who studied in the traditional way. Using technology for self-instruction can bring us great benefits to our society because it can bring people out of the poverty because there is a lot of information on internet and most of times is free access. The impact of technology in education systems has no limits and it have come to stay in our daily life especially if we try to learn something new.
The importance of technology in worldwide education systems Since human race has existed humans have had the necessity of constantly discovering and developing new technologies in order to ensure the well-being of future generations. As known, technology is constantly evolving and it is actually essential in the daily life of the common human being, including fundamental fields such as education, health, work, living places and many others, being the first one a mainstay for human race development. In education, technology should not be taught as an independent school subject, it should be implemented in every class of every education level with the purpose of improving the student’s opportunities to retain learned information. Nowadays we have the technology at our fingertips and that implies that we could guide it by the path of the knowledge and improve our education systems by using technology as a tool to combat the lack of education. Moor (2005) argues that moral philosophers need to pay particular attention to emerging technologies and help influence the design of these technologies early on before they adversely affect moral change. If we significantly increase the use of technology in education it could result in a decay of values that are transmitted from generation to generation
especially from teachers to students.
This could happen because the
interaction between humans will be considerably reduced and human-machine interaction will probably increase during the next years. When we talk to another person, that person absorbs what you are implicitly expressing especially if that person is a child because your body language expresses many emotions and give another context to the dialogue. Therefore, if children start to learn just from their computers and tablets they will lose an essential part of the learning and that is the part of the human values. That part that is only
transmitted by humans defines who you are because it makes part of your formation as a person. Technology in education might distract some students on what their professor is talking about. If we use technology in our favor any problem related to social interactions or distractions related with technology could be avoided. For example, if we use videoconferences or tools for a better communication like Skype or YouTube, teachers can be “inside� the electronic devices of any student connected to a streaming with more shared ideas of the class. Not only online classrooms can be created, also students can play games or take exams from virtual platforms resulting in students more interested about the topics of the class. When we use technology for the education field in our favor, it could be accompanied by better and more rewarding outcomes for the students and at the same time motivates them to achieve better grades because they have the necessary material to accomplish their tasks (Carrillo et al. 2010). According to Barrow et al. (2009) students who used an institutional computer program for pre-algebra and algebra had an increase on their scores, to be more precise it was 0.17 of a standard deviation from students who studied in the usual way. Also a computer assisted-program was provided to fourth grade children from Mumbai and Vadodara, and the students had to play educational games two hour a week. The program was very effective because it increased math scores by 0.35 and 0.47 standard deviations the first and second year respectively (Banerjee et al., 2005) One of the strongest points of this is that there is a more significant collaboration among teachers and students because technology provides an incredible wealth of resources and the necessary information to take advantage of it. Also with the help of virtual classes the teacher is able to give an instant feedback to the students because he can immediately know the performance of the entire classroom.
The outcomes are not only perceptible in classroom activities because technology also develops higher order skills for students, especially to those from higher levels of education. Students who are skilled creating different kinds of digital content such as animations, videos, presentations, simulations etc. are better prepared for the working world than those that do not develop easily with the technology. People that are exposed to technology have more chance to increase their cognitive abilities and technology becomes even more important if the quality of education is not so good, this happens more frequently in developing countries (Carrillo et al 2010). A good example is the Mas TecnologĂa program, a program implemented by the municipality of Guayaquil. This program tries to implement ICT (Information and communication technology) to the public school in Guayaquil and its objective is to reduce the gap between the quality of public and private education. If technology is correctly used in education systems, it can offer it a significant advance to society thanks to the support that it can offer using the multiple technological tools that nowadays are provided. Being one of the greatest mediums of knowledge transfer, technology actually tends to be in every education levels, including the higher and lower ones. This thanks to the diversity of electronic devices and its respective application that were created using several focuses depending on the capacities of each user. For example, devices nowadays incorporate multiple functions in their OS and these in turn bring incorporated stores with thousands of free and paid apps. Some application can focus on the same topic but with different levels of depth on the treated topic, for example in Google Play Store there are many education apps and some of them are made for younger people and others are for higher level students e.g., "Kids learning anatomy" and "Atlas de anatomĂa".
Developing countries are not the only ones who have to implement technology in their education systems, countries like Philippines, China, Finland and many others are increasingly introducing new technological devices to their education systems. According to Duţă and Martínez (2014) students use technology in many ways like interacting, sharing content, evaluating, organizing material and communicating results. They also claim that social networks make the students to learn autonomously and independently. That is, technology contributes giving the students the opportunity to form networks among learners like groups, social networks, channels, blogs and this permits them to absorb and share the knowledge of each one of the members from the comfort of their homes and at their own pace. Technology has extended beyond the classroom and it actually permits to reach every person’s objectives without the need of a teacher or a school. We are able to access information using any electronic device connected to internet, in other words that information is actually surrounding us and we can take it from the internet in most of cases. Not infrequently are the cases in which a self-taught achieves great objectives with the use of technology a clear example is Jack Dorsey, a self-taught programmer that became CEO of Twitter and Square. He could develop all his capacities thanks to his interest in technology since he was a child, at the age of thirteen Dorsey had programmed his first dispatch routing software (Popovic, n.d.). Poverty is one of the most limiting issues for the society progress, especially for students. It is our concern to care about people who do not have the economic capacity to afford a good quality education. Council of Hemispheric Affairs [COHA] (2011) affirms that in 2010 there were over 15.5 million children living in poverty in America. Poverty and language barrier are the major reason to students dropout schools and universities but
with the help of technology self-taught professionals can be formed in their own homes lowering educations costs.
When we talk about the benefits of technology, the beneficiaries are not only the students. Teachers can also exploit the advantages of technology because they need less time when checking students’ assignments at the same time that do not spend time reading unworthy works. These features help the teacher to augment their capacities and teaching performance, so it would be easier to give the students information that could be rapidly absorbed by them. To conclude, technology has arrived to our lives to stay especially to transfer information from teachers to students. Even though technology has been acceleratedly introduced in classrooms we have to remember that technology is just a medium for transferring information and the human value is still one the most relevant worth for our society like Bill Gates (n.d.) said “Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important”. Despite the cost of acquisition new technologies can help to enhance our education systems offering multiple tools to give more pedagogical classes for both teachers and students. Technology also is accompanied by better student’s outcomes because it improves the way we get information to study and permits us to share learning with other students around the world without giving importance to social classes or ethnic.
References
Banerjee, A., Cole, S., Duflo, E., Linden, L. (2005, December). NBER Working paper series remedying education: evidence from two randomized experiments in India. Retrieved December 07, 2016, from http://www.nber.org/papers/w11904.pdf
Barrow, L. (2008, August). Technology's Edge: The Education Benefits Of Computer –Aided Instrcution. Retrieved December 07, 2016, from http://www.nber.org/papers/w14240.pdf
Carrillo,E.,Onofa, M. & Ponce, J., (2011, January).Information Technology and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Ecuador. IDB Working Paper No. 78. from: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1818756 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1818756
Council of hemispheric affairs [COHA] (2011, November 09). Child Poverty and Access to Education: Adding Up the Hidden Costs on the U.S.-Hispanic Community. Retrieved December 07, 2016, from http://www.coha.org/child-poverty-and-access-to-education-adding-up-the-hidden-costs-on-the-u-shispanic-community/
Duţă,N. & Martínez, O. (2014). Between theory and practice: the importance of ICT in Higher Education as a tool for collaborative learning. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 180, (2014) 1466 – 1473. Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/puuclnc
Gates B. (n.d.). BrainyQuote.com. Retrieved December 7, 2016, from BrainyQuote.com from: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/billgates390682.html
Moor, J. H., 1985, “What is Computer Ethics?” Metaphilosophy, 16(4): 266–275. , 2005, “Why We Need Better Ethics for Emerging Technologies,” Ethics and Information
Technology, 7(3): 111–119. Reprinted in van den Hoven and Weckert 2008, pp. 26–39.
Popovic, S. (2015). Jack Dorsey - How a self-taught programmer became CEO of Twitter. Retrieved December 07, 2016, from https://www.hottopics.ht/stories/finance/jack-dorsey-how-a-self-taughtprogrammer-became-ceo-of-twitter-square/
REFLECTION
- Experiences at level 6:
THANK YOU READER FOR
CHECKING MY PORTFOLIO.