Thursday, January 30, 2020

Real world Essay Example for Free

Real world Essay Catherine is a bubbly young girl who wants to experience the real world. She is open and always ready to love or be loved. She doesnt really have much experience of this until she meets Rodolfo. Until now her only real male relationship has been with Eddie. This has been fine until eddies feelings change, when the sexual part of his marriage breaks down and his feelings for Catherine become confused. We hear Beatrice saying we havent made love for 2 weeks this is how we know that the sexual part of his relationship is breaking down. Eddie has the ability to influence her. This is why she cannot fully see Rodolfos real reasons for marrying her. However later on in the play, Rodolfo and Catherine talk and she begins to see that Rodolfo really does love her. do you think I would carry on my back for the rest of my life, a woman I did not love just to be an American. Is it so wonderful? . Eddie has already insulted Rodolfo many times. He calls Rodolfo a paper doll, a weird and a canary. This is because Rodolfo can sing, dance, cook and he can sew. Eddie sees Rodolfo as a bit feminine because Eddie has very narrow views about manliness. He could think that Rodolfo might be homosexual and this could explain why Eddie chooses to kiss Rodolfo in an attempt to draw him away from Catherine. In the final scenes of the play, Eddie completely throws away all of his moral values to simply stop an engagement between his niece and Beatrices cousin. Deep down I think that Eddie knows this is wrong and is even going against Eddies own code of conduct. When the immigration officers arrive, we see a scared and regretful look on his face. This is obviously one of the moments when you do something when you are very desperate and you do something that you are going to regret later. This is probably to do with the fact that he has in-appropriate feelings for her. We realise this continually throughout the play but we are convinced when Eddie is at the end of his tether and he kisses Catherine. This could also be seen as a direct challenge to Rodolfo. He also thinks that Rodolfo is only marrying Catherine to get a passport, Katie hes only bowin to his passport. He is actually marrying her because he loves her and wants to be with her. The reason that Eddie is yelling at Marco in the last scene is because Marco disrespected Eddie in front of the whole neighbourhood and said things that are considered very wrong, such as, That one! He killed my children! That one stole the food from my children. Personal and family honour, as mentioned before, is very important to the Italians and the Italian culture. Even at the end and a violent confrontation is likely, there is still a chance for Eddie to regain honour if only Marco will apologise. He says to Marco, in front of people around them maybe he come to apologise to me. Heh, Marco? For what you said about me in front of the neighbourhood. There is no apology and the violent end plays out. With the final scene, I get the impression that Miller likes Eddie, I think that he slightly favours Eddie over Rodolfo or Marco. I get this impression from the way that Miller writes that he is a very passionate man and that he is not a man who cannot compromise easily and that he has such strong emotional feelings. This is also shown by the fact that Miller does not allow Marco to have any regret or feel any sorrow. In Alfieris final speech he says   we settle for half and I like it better. He also says The truth is holy. This means that where the truth is concerned, you cannot, and should not settle for only half. He talks about Eddie never settling for half. something perversely pure calls to me from his memory not purely good but himself purely he adds though, that he thinks that it is better to settle for half yet, it is better to settle for half, it must be! he admits, even against his own will that he misses him I mourn him I admit it with a certain alarm.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Analysis Of The Scarlet Letter :: essays research papers

The Scarlet Letter is a story that illustrates intricate pieces of the Puritan lifestyle. Centered first on a sin committed by Hester Prynne and her secret lover before the story ever begins, the novel details how sin affects the lives of the people involved. For Hester, the sin forces her into isolation from society and even from herself. Her qualities that Hawthorne describes at the opening of the book, her pale beauty, womanly qualities, and passion are, after a time, eclipsed by the ‘A’ she is forced to wear. An example of this is her hair. Long hair is something in this time period that is a symbol of a woman. At the beginning of the story, Hawthorne tells of Hester’s long flowing hair. After she wears the scarlet letter for a time, he paints a picture of her with her hair out of site under a cap, and all the womanliness gone from her. Yet, even with her true eclipsed behind the letter, of the three main characters affected, Hester has the easiest time because her sin is out in the open. More than a tale of sin, the Scarlet Letter is also an intense love story that shows itself in the forest scene between Hester and the minister Arthur Dimmesdale. With plans to run away with each, Arthur and Hester show that their love has surpassed distance and time away from each other. This love also explains why Hester would not reveal the identity of her fellow sinner when asked on the scaffolding. Roger Chillingworth is the most affected by the sin, though he was not around when the sin took place. Demented by his thoughts of revenge and hate, Hawthorne shows Mr. Chillingworth to be a devil or as a man with an evil nature. He himself commits one of the   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Quinn 2 seven deadly sins with his wrath. By the end of the tale that surpasses seven years, Hester is respected and revered by the community as a doer of good works, and the minister is worshipped for his service in the church. Only Mr. Chillingsworth is looked upon badly by the townspeople although no one knows why. Through it all, Hawthorne illustrates that even sin can produce purity, and that purity came in the form of the sprightly Pearl. Though she is isolated with her mother, Pearl finds her company and joy in the nature that surrounds her.

Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Interlanguage Theory Essay

It is a well-attested fact that learners commit errors when learning a second language. Errors are in fact considered inevitable in any learning process. For a very long time different authors (Corder, 1967; Richards, 1971; Dulay and Burt, 1972, as cited in Taylor, 1975;) see those errors not only as deviations of the rules but also as important sources for studying the process of learning a target language. The learner’s mental process and rules adopted by them at different stages are evidenced by those errors. (Fauziati, 2011). It is, therefore, the language of the learner that Larry Selinker (1972) would study and name interlanguage. He would consider interlanguage as follows: L2 learners construct a linguistic system that draws, in part, on the learner’s L1 but is also different from it and also from the target language. A learner’s interlanguage is, therefore, a unique linguistic system (as cited in Ellis, 1997, pag. 33). This system of the language is evolutional and dynamic, and its grammar is under construction and in constant development. It may have inconsistency errors but it will be changing and developing all the time. Selinker (1972, as cited in Taylor, 1975) claims that interlanguage is not merely the learner target language grammar that is filled with errors due to the learner’s L1 interference but, instead, it is a linguistic system that reflects the learner’s dealing with the deviations of the target language itself. Selinker also states that the perspective of Interlanguage considers the learning strategies which the learner employs in a task despite of their mother tongue or kind of training they receive. According to Selinker (1972), there are a number of processes or strategies that the learner adopts in order to help them acquire the target language. The first one is L1 Transfer, which is a learning strategy where the learner uses their own L1 as a resource. â€Å"[T]he learner transfers their knowledge of their native language into their target language attempts† (Taylor, 1975, p. 393). The second process is L2 Transfer, in which the learner works out the rules of L2 and challenges them. The third process is Overgeneralization; the learner uses an L2 rule in situations in which a native speaker would not use them. This can occur at different levels, namely, at the phonetic level, at the grammatical level, at the lexical level and at the level of discourse. Taylor (1975) defines overgeneralization as â€Å"a process in which a language learner uses a syntactic rule of the target language inappropriately when he attempts to generate a novel target language utterance†. The fourth process or strategy is General Learning Principles; the learner acquires strategies for learning the language, such as association or grouping. However, these strategies are not exclusive to language learning; they can be applied to any other kind of knowledge. Finally, the fifth process is Communication Strategies, which are actions that the learner carries out in order to compensate their lack of knowledge and also to reinforce or optimize communication. Among these strategies are body language, circumlocution, using a general term, resorting to L1, asking for help (the teacher or the dictionary), coining (making up a word) and avoidance. All of these five processes contribute to the development of the L2. Another important characteristic of Interlanguage is Fossilization, which is a term introduced also by Selinker in 1972. It refers to â€Å"the persistence of plateaus of non-target-like competence in the IL† (as cited in Fauziati, 2011, p. 25). Selinker (1972) provides a precise definition for fossilization: [A] mechanism that underlies surface linguistic material which speakers will tend to keep in their IL productive performance, no matter what the age of the learner or the amount of instruction he receives in the TL. (Selinker, 1972: 229, cited in Han, 2002) In other words, fossilization can be described as the interruption of the process of development of interlanguage. Learners are usually expected to achieve progress as their competence advances towards the target language system, and thus it contains fewer errors. However, some errors continue to occur and never disappear completely, and are, therefore, considered as fossilized. That is to say, such errors are permanent and defining characteristics of the learner’s language system (Fauziati, 2011). Among the factors that influence fossilization in the learner’s learning process, there are both external and internal reasons that are worth mentioning. Environment is an external reason that can influence the student’s performance and it can be due to the lack of exposure to the language or probably the level of the course the student is taking is either higher or lower than their level of the language. As regards internal reasons, the learner himself is considered to be a significant influence on their performance. His personality (insecurity, family background, uncertainty), motivation, demotivation and backsliding (the student unlearns things he already knows and goes back to previous stages) contribute to the mechanism of fossilization. Another important point to consider is that of interlanguage pragmatics, which has been defined by some authors, namely, Kasper and Dahl (1991), Kasper (1998) and Kasper and Rose (1999). However, in this paper, the concept of interlanguage pragmatics will be considered as follows: [T]he investigation of non-native speakers’ comprehension and production of speech acts, and the acquisition of L2-related speech act knowledge. (Kasper and Dahl, 1991:215, cited in Barron, 2001) Interlanguage pragmatics deals with use of the language as action and its research focuses on the learner’s use and acquisition of pragmatic knowledge. Although many studies on interlanguage have been based on spontaneous speech data, there is considerable difficulty in processing such data in order to tackle with problems persisting in the L2 learner’s initial state. One possible reason for this is that the speech utterances are gathered so early and may not exactly mirror the L2 initial state. Another perplexing problem is that the collection may be scarce and useless. (Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001) A further problem is that language learners, especially young L2 learners, have been thought to undergo a ‘silent period’, during which they do not produce any utterance (Lakshmanan and Selinker, 2001). Although students may differ significantly with respect to the duration of their silent period since some of them undergo longer periods than others, it is not proven what is exactly happening in this stage. Moreover, it cannot be proved whether there is passive acquisition of some of the elements of the target language while undergoing the silent period. Consequently, an accurate account of the development of the language of the learner is difficult to provide. Another main argument concerning interlanguage is that of comparative fallacy. As Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) state, criticizing the language learner’s speech utterances as ungrammatical without drawing first a comparison between the interlanguage speech utterances with the related speech utterances of the native speaker is not advisable since it leads to either underestimation and/or overestimation of the student’s linguistic performance. The interlanguage competence’s information should be obtained by examining the data of the interlanguage performance. Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001) suggest that in order to achieve this and not belittle or overvalue the student’s performance, it is necessary to compare consistently the interlanguage performance data with the native speaker’s performance. Taking everything into account, interlanguage is a theory that has been supported by a number of scholars because it helps educators know what their learner’s language is like. However, it is worth mentioning that it has some weaknesses that need to be addressed. As for teachers, it is not only important that they support this theory but they also should identify its flaws as well so as not to misjudge our language learner’s performance on the language. References * Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning How To Do Things With Words In A Study Abroad Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. * Ellis, R. (1997) Second Language Acquisition. New York: Oxford University Press. * Fauziati, E. (2011) Interlanguage and Error Fossilization: A Study Of Indonesian Students Learning English As A Foreign Language. (Vol. I No. 1, pp. 23-38). Indonesia: Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics. * Han, Z. (2002). Fossilization: Five Central Issues. Toronto, Canada: The Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), Teachers College, Columbia University. * Lakshmanan, U. and Selinker, L. (2001). Analysing Interlanguage: How Do We Know What Learners Know? (Volume: 17, Issue: 4, Pages: 393-420). Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and Birkbeck College, University of London: Second Language Research. * Taylor, B. (1975) Adult Language Learning Strategies and Their Pedagogical Implications. (Vol. 9. No. 4, pp. 391-399). USA: TESOL Quarterly.

Monday, January 6, 2020

William Blake - Visionary Pre-Romantic Poet, Printer and Artist

William Blake was born in London in 1757, one of six children of a hosiery merchant. He was an imaginative child, â€Å"different† from the beginning, so he was not sent to school, but educated at home. He talked of visionary experiences from a very early age: at 10, he saw a tree filled with angels when he was wandering the countryside just outside town. He later claimed to have read Milton as a child and he began writing â€Å"Poetical Sketches† at 13. He was also interested in painting and drawing in childhood, but his parents could not afford art school, so he was apprenticed to an engraver at the age of 14. Blakes Training as an Artist The engraver to whom Blake was apprenticed was James Basire, who had made engravings of the work of Reynolds and Hogarth and was official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. He sent Blake to draw the tombs and monuments at Westminster Abbey, a task which brought him to his lifelong love of Gothic art. When his 7-year apprenticeship was complete, Blake entered the Royal Academy, but did not stay long, and continued to support himself making engraved book illustrations. His Academy teachers urged him to adopt a simpler, less extravagant style, but Blake was enamored of grand historical paintings and ancient ballads. Blakes Illuminated Printing In 1782, William Blake married Catherine Boucher, an illiterate farmer’s daughter. He taught her reading and writing and draftsmanship, and she later assisted him in creating his illuminated books. He also taught drawing, painting and engraving to his beloved younger brother Robert. William was present when Robert died in 1787; he said that he saw his soul rise through the ceiling at death, that Robert’s spirit continued to visit him afterwards, and that one of these night visits inspired his illuminated book printing, combining poem text and engraved illustration on a single copper plate and hand-coloring the prints. Blakes Early Poems The first collection of poems William Blake published was Poetical Sketches in 1783 — clearly the work of a young apprentice poet, with its odes to the four seasons, an imitation of Spenser, historical prologues and songs. His most loved collections were next, the paired Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), both published as handmade illuminated books. After the upheaval of the French Revolution his work became more political and allegorical, protesting and satirizing war and tyranny in books like America, a Prophecy (1793), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) and Europe, a Prophecy (1794). Blake as Outsider and Mythmaker Blake was definitely outside the mainstream of art and poetry in his day, and his prophetic illustrated works did not garner much public recognition. He was usually able to make his living illustrating the works of others, but his fortunes declined as he devoted himself to his own ideas and art rather than to what was fashionable in 18th century London. He had a few patrons, whose commissions enabled him to study the classics and develop his personal mythology for his great visionary epics: The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804-08), Vala, or The Four Zoas (1797; rewritten after 1800), and Jerusalem (1804-20). Blakes Later Life Blake lived the last years of his life in obscure poverty, relieved only a little by the admiration and patronage of a group of younger painters known as â€Å"The Ancients.† William Blake fell ill and died in 1827. His last drawing was a portrait of his wife Catherine, drawn on his deathbed. Books by William Blake Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience (facsimile edition with introduction by Richard Holmes, Tate Publishing, 2007)Songs of Innocence and of Experience (CD-ROM edition, pages embellished with pop-up commentary and annotations, narrated by Stuart Curran, Octavo, 2003)William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (reproductions from the Blake Trust, with introduction by David Bindman, Thames Hudson, W.W. Norton Co., 2001)The Complete Poetry Prose of William Blake (ed. David Erdman, with commentary by Harold Bloom, revised edition, Anchor, 1997)Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job (Dover Publications, 1995)The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Facsimile in Full Color (Dover Publications reprint, 1994)