Your Own Best Friend
Talking to yourself may seem a little shameful. If you’ve ever been overheard criticizing yourself for a foolish mistake or practicing a tricky speech ahead of time, you’ll have felt the social restriction against communicating with yourself in words. According to the well-known saying, talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.
Take a trip to any preschool and watch a small child playing with her toys. You are very likely to hear her talking to herself: offering herself directions and giving voice to her frustrations.
As children, according to the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, we use private speech to regulate our actions in the same way that we use public speech to control the behavior of others.
Psychological experiments have shown that the distancing effect of our words can give us a valuable perspective on our actions. One recent study suggested that self-talk is most effective when we address ourselves in the second person: as “you” rather than “I”.
We internalize the private speech we use as children — but we never entirely put away the out-loud version.
Both kinds of self-talk seem to bring a range of benefits to our thinking. Those words to the self, spoken silently or aloud, are so much more than lazy talk.
| A．But there’s no need for embarrassment. |
| B．If you want proof, turn on the sports channel. |
| C．As we grow older, we don’t abandon this system – we internalize it. |
| D．This so-called inner speech can improve our performance on various tasks. |
| E．Conducting a dialogue with ourselves might turn out to be one of the keys to human creativity. |
| F．Psychologists refer to this as private speech — language that is spoken out loud but directed at the self. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Chinese is now the popular language for parents who want their children to learn a second — and sometimes third — tongue.
The sudden rise is likely due to the economic growth of the country as parents want their children to have limitless opportunities in a global economy bringing Asia, the U. S. and Latin America closer together. School districts have expanded Chinese language programmes due to the rise of China in the global economy and students from a variety of backgrounds have joined them.
Parent Karla Godoy, 41, speaks to her son, Paco, in his native tongue English. Her husband talks to him in Spanish and he learns Chinese at his school, Broadway elementary in Los Angeles.
She said, “Mastery of a language spoken by a billion people worldwide will give children an edge in the global economy. With Spanish and Chinese and English, he should be able to do just about anything he wants.”
There are 50 Chinese-language immersion (沉浸式) programs at U. S. schools, compared to a dozen six years ago, said Tara Fortune, immersion project director at the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota.
To aid teaching, teacher Kennis Wong never speaks English in front of her children, so they get used to only hearing Chinese from her. But that does not stop them from speaking English to each other. In an interview, Wong said she accepts English in her class, but rewards Chinese. And the children are surrounded with Chinese characters on everything from the name cards on their desks to the drawing of a fish on a wall.
The same phenomenon is being seen in other parts of the country. Children from Hmong and Somali immigrant communities are also joining Chinese-language programmes. The number of K-12 public school students in the United States learning a Chinese language rose to nearly 60,000 in 2008, from about 20, 000 in 2005.
1. What is closely related to the economic growth of China?| A．A variety of backgrounds. | B．The rise of learning Chinese. |
| C．The necessity of studying Latin | D．Limitless learning opportunities. |
| A．Supportive. | B．Unclear. | C．Negative. | D．Unconcerned |
| A．50 | B．12 | C．6. | D．38. |
| A．English. | B．Spanish. | C．Latin. | D．Chinese. |
【推荐2】Shakespeare wrote in his great play Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” But it seems that not everyone agrees with this. Micro-blog has canceled its 140-character limit for posts, meaning users can now write as many words as they like. And now Twitter, a US social media site that’s similar to Micro-blog, also announced that it plans to double its character limit from 140 to 280.
Twitter has its reasons for the changes. It’s a pain to have to edit your thoughts to less than 140 characters when you have so much to say. And a big problem for English writers is that it requires more space than character-based languages such as Chinese to express the same thing. According to The Atlantic, while the average English-language tweet is 34 characters, a Japanese one, for example, is only 15.
But still, Twitter users don’t seem to be happy with the new move.
Our reading habits have changed over time, and we’re used to keeping up to date with what’s happening in the world by reading just a couple of lines of text. For this, 140 characters are more than enough.
“Micro-blogs are almost always faster and more efficient than television, radio, newspapers, or any other source,” wrote Knight, a reporter for The Guardian. “It’s like gathering in the town square… in an instant.”
Trying to fit your thoughts into a limited space is also a good way to come up with smart comments, which is why micro-blogs are often where the best humor is found. For example, during former US President Donald Trump’s election campaign in 2016 a Twitter user wrote: “If Trump can seriously win the presidency of this nation, I don’t want to see a job description with ‘experience required’ ever again.” And another wrote, “England: Nothing can be more embarrassing than Brexit. America: Watch this.” These tweets expressed people’s upset louder and quicker than any long articles ever could.
So perhaps we should pay attention to Shakespeare’s words. After all, he only needed 6 characters to make his famous point.
1. Why does Twitter plan to change its character limit for each post?| A．Twitter users always have a lot to say. |
| B．Users are not satisfied with the current character limit. |
| C．More characters are needed when writing in English than in Chinese. |
| D．Twitter saw that the benefit after Micro-blog changed the character limit. |
| A．People want to know what is happening around the world. |
| B．People prefer to look through short posts rather than read long articles. |
| C．People are used to reading short posts in order to get the latest news. |
| D．People’s new reading habits make it hard to read long posts. |
| A．To show that the US presidential election attracted more attention than Brexit. |
| B．To explain how British people and Americans show their sense of humor. |
| C．To prove that Twitter is a platform where you can express your own opinions freely. |
| D．To offer evidence that limited characters can inspire smart posts. |
| A．It should be lifted because it makes it difficult for people to express thoughts. |
| B．It should be abandoned because it doesn’t fit people’s current reading habits. |
| C．It should be kept as Shakespeare argued that using the fewest words is the best. |
| D．It is meaningful because short texts fit people’s reading habits and help create the best humor. |
【推荐3】It is claimed that, on average, one in five of school-aged children in Britain have a first language other than English. These languages are often labelled as “community languages” with some of them identified as the “languages for the future” in terms of supply and demand. For instance, the top five “languages for the future” are Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, French, Arabic and German. Yet, numerous reports point out, support for the community languages in the UK education system, from early years to further and higher education, is seriously lacking.
Part of the problem is the labelling. Languages that are part of the school and university curriculum are usually called “modern languages”. The classification of which language is a modern language for schools, and which is a community language seems somewhat unreasonable and largely a result of the history of language teaching in this country. It is also connected to Britain’s relationship with and attitudes towards the rest of the world. Languages of immigrants from outside Europe are community languages, whereas those from within Europe are modern languages.
It is high time to critically reflect whether it is still necessary and useful to categorize languages. The language curriculum for schools and universities should be broadened to include community languages. We must not forget that many of the so-called community languages in Britain are major national and international languages. We need to have a global perspective on languages. The inclusion of community languages in the education system can also have the added benefits of strengthening community ties by valuing the languages of minority groups.
In the meantime, a word of caution is needed as for the identification of languages “languages for the future”. It is usually done based on the roles specific languages play in the UK’s future prosperity, security and influence in the world. While that maybe an admirable objective, it could potentially lead to a rank of usefulness among different languages, with some being regarded as more useful, and therefore will receive more institutional support than others. However, a Global Britain needs to invest in upgrading and expanding its multilingual capacity. A person who knows more than one language can get more benefits in their future life. And that should begin by showing respect for the multilingual talents in different communities.
1. What can we learn about community languages in Britain?| A．They don’t obtain sufficient support. |
| B．They don’t have distinctive elements. |
| C．They are recognized based on preference. |
| D．They are emphasized in higher education. |
| A．Korean. | B．Arabic. | C．Mandarin Chinese. | D．Danish. |
| A．A Global Britain needs the identification of languages. |
| B．The UK’s future prosperity relies on “languages for the future”. |
| C．Confirming the usefulness of different languages deserves a try. |
| D．Multilingual capacity will likely contribute to one’s future life. |
| A．Disapproving. | B．Indifferent. | C．Tolerant. | D．Favorable. |
