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Penzu is a free online diary and personal journal with a focus on privacy. Easily keep a secret diary of thoughts or a journal of notes and ideas secure and on the web.

Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale [English version, apparently from] Horwitz, E. K., Horwitz, M. B., & Cope, J. (1986). Foreign language classroom anxiety. The Modern Language Journal, 70(2), 125‐132.

Thank you for sharing this-something I have suspected for a long time but that is denied by many foreign languages teachers.

"Introduction In recent years, the world has witnessed a growing wave of local initiatives in support of public schools. Teachers, cultural associations and civil society have been playing an active part in grassroots experiments aimed at helping schools in the creative elaboration of new educational methods, also exploiting information technologies. Here answers are coming from those directly faced with educational issues, in contrast with the more common top-down reforms, where experts' committees draw up didactic experimentation plans to be put forward to willing teachers. Experiments like that are often very effective but, unfortunately, they rarely get known beyond the immediate sphere of their promoters. Moreover, they tend to be short-lived because promoters don't have the strength to sustain them and a suitable supporting network is lacking. They are like drops in the ocean: they apparently cannot change the entire educational system. But the ocean of whole human community could be flooded by many such contained experiments that would transform it, if the most meaningful of them could be fostered, spread and developed. ..."

Various interesting articles related to SM and FLL. On the attractiveness of social media for language learning: a look at the state of the art  Facebook-ing and the Social Generation: A New Era of Language Learning  Language Learners' "Willingness to Communicate" through Livemocha.com Online gaming as sociable media

'The Objective of Education Is Learning, Not Teaching' by Knowledge@Wharton, the online business journal of the Wharton School. Knowledge@Wharton covers research in Finance, Strategic Management, Marketing, Leadership, Business Ethics and 9 other knowledge research categories.

"It is often claimed that people who are bilingual are better than monolinguals at learning languages. Now, the first study to examine bilingual and monolingual brains as they learn an additional language offers new evidence that supports this hypothesis, researchers say. The study, conducted at Georgetown University Medical Center and published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, suggests that early bilingualism helps with learning languages later in life."

"The free online course will help you learn how to use English more effectively. It covers different types of writing including imaginative writing, English in the media, journalism, and textual analysis. It goes on to offer a comprehensive guide to using language effectively. This course is ideal for those who want to improve their written English for work or pleasure. It is also suitable for students of English. "

"Second-grade students who read aloud to dogs in an after-school program demonstrated improved attitudes about reading, according to researchers at Tufts Institute for Human-Animal Interaction at Tufts University. Their research appears online in advance of print in the Early Childhood Education Journal. Reading skills are often associated with improved academic performance and positive attitudes about school in children. Researchers wanted to learn if animal-assisted intervention in the form of reading aloud to dogs in a classroom setting could contribute to improved skills and attitudes."

Alessandra Capanna ripercorre il carierra di Iannis Xenakis, uno dei musicisti contemporanei più celebri, scomparso il 4 febbraio 2001. Un musicista, ma anche un teorico e un ricercatore puro che, ponendo alla base di tutte le sue articolazioni compositive il pensiero matematico. Era anche un'architetto. In ottobre del 1956 che egli ricevette da Le Corbusier l'incarico di tradurre attraverso la matematicai suoi schizzi per la Padiglione Philips per l'Expo di Bruxelles.

Brilliant ideas to manage a one sentence a day reflective activities

Lots of useful references