1 . It is often said that if we dream in a foreign language, it’s a sign that we are making progress in learning that language. But is it true?
Before we can look at multilingual (多语言的) dreams, first we need to look at sleep. The link between sleep and language can be applied to how we learn any language, including our mother tongue. Even adults still learn about one new word every two days in their first language, but, if we are going to have a firm grasp of that new word, we need to link it to our existing knowledge. “In order to do that, we need to have some sleep”, says Gareth Gaskell, a psychology professor at the University of York.
It’s during sleep that the integration of old and new knowledge happens. At night, one part of our brain — the hippocampus-takes whatever new information it got in the day, and passes it on to other parts of the brain to be stored. The role that dreams play in this night-time learning process is still being studied, but it’s entirely possible that during multilingual dreams, the brain is trying to connect two languages, according to Marc Zuist, researcher at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Switzerland.
So having multilingual dreams could mean that our brain is trying to master a new word or phrase, but it could also have an emotional significance. Danuta Barker, a professor of psycholinguistics (心理语言学) at the University of Silesia in Poland, suggests that multilingual dreams can express fears and desires around learning a foreign language, including the wish to be a native-like speaker or to be accepted within a certain community.
We clearly still have a lot to learn about multilingual dreams, but one thing seems certain: if you’re trying to learn a new language, you should definitely sleep on it.
1. Which of the following does Gareth agree with?| A．Adults are better at learning. |
| B．We can learn words while sleeping. |
| C．Our existing knowledge is from dreams. |
| D．Multilingual dreams have nothing to do with progress. |
| A．Method. | B．Form. | C．Combination. | D．Reflection. |
| A．Studying the role of the dream. | B．Analyzing the learning process. |
| C．Developing the new area of the brain. | D．Absorbing and delivering information. |
| A．Emotion and dreams. | B．Languages and communities. |
| C．Universities and courses. | D．Words and expressions. |
| A．Why we learn a foreign language in the dream. |
| B．Learning languages is completely from sleeping. |
| C．Sleeping plays an important part in the development of brains. |
| D．How multilingual dreams are connected to language learning. |
2 . Here is some good advice on how to be good at a language.
Pen pals. This way of learning a language is a great way to use your new language. You have to use the language a lot; at the same time, you don’t have to give your pen pals an answer at once.
Internet radio.
Language clubs. When you are ready to practice your new language, try to find a language club in your area.
Find suitable places. Put yourself in situations where you have to speak the language that you are learning.
| A．Speaking with other people can be very helpful. |
| B．Another great and easy way is to listen to your new language in real life. |
| C．So you will be more comfortable this way. |
| D．They will also give you lots of useful advice on learning a new language. |
| E．How about going to a restaurant? |
| F．Doing more exercise can be very interesting. |
| G．Learning a new language can give you much knowledge. |
3 . Four Cool Languages
Chinese
Around 1.4 billion people speak Chinese. Chinese is a tonal (声调的) language, meaning that changing the tone of just one syllable (音节) can affect a word’s meaning. Chinese writing has ancient roots, which is thought to have developed starting around 2000 B. C.
Arabic
Over 370 million people speak Arabic. Written Arabic uses a cursive-style font (连笔) that looks more like artworks than writing. Arabic is written from right to left rather than left to right, making it different from many other languages.
English
Around 379 million people speak English as a native language. It’s an official language in a huge number of other countries.
English is the most widely spoken second language, with over a billion people speaking it as a non-native language. That means around twice as many people speak English as a second language than people who speak it as a first language.
Italian
Nearly 68 million people speak Italian. If you play music or sing, chances are that you already know a lot of Italian because many familiar musical terms are actually Italian.
Not only will learning Italian help you pick up vocabulary, but it will also help you understand the meanings of musical terms in greater depth.
1. What is a feature of Arabic?| A．It doesn’t have cursive-style fonts. | B．It helps artists with their artworks. |
| C．It is written from right to left. | D．It is closely related to music. |
| A．Arabic. | B．English. | C．Chinese. | D．Italian. |
| A．Nearly 68 million. | B．Around 370 million. |
| C．Over 379 million. | D．Around 1.4 billion. |
4 . Do you often feel nervous when speaking English?
●Concentrate on the positive, not the negative (消极的).
●Understand that most mistakes aren’t so serious. Understand that most mistakes don’t matter very much. If you’re always worrying about mistakes, then you’ll feel nervous about your English. But the truth is that when you’re speaking, most people won’t notice your small mistakes.
●Stand up straight, make eye contact, smile and breathe. One involves what you do with your body when you’re speaking English, and that is to stand up straight or sit up straight, make eye contact, smile and remember to breathe.
●
| A．Speak louder and slower. |
| B．Practice as much as possible. |
| C．What you need to do is to improve your attitude. |
| D．Your body language has an effect on your confidence. |
| E．Are you wondering how to speak English confidently? |
| F．How do you correct your mistakes when writing English? |
| G．So relax and don’t put so much stress on yourself to be perfect. |
5 . Some speaking activities do not give an exact picture of your true language skill. But storytelling does. Storytelling is the retelling of a story. It can be a short piece of invented story; or it can be the retelling of a news event. Or you can talk about something that happened in your own life.
For the storytelling activity, try to provide as much information as possible and aim for a recording of three minutes or fewer. Don’t just say, “I studied at the library.” Say, “
When listening to the recording, do not expect to find all or even most grammar or vocabulary mistakes.
| A．Put your speech into written or typed form. |
| B．The goal of giving such information is not to fill the time. |
| C．I walked into the library and thought about where I should sit. |
| D．That is because it forces you to think about your ideas as you say them. |
| E．Choose a place that you know well, like your home or a nearby bus station. |
| F．But you can easily find some mistakes, such as wrong verb and noun endings. |
| G．Storytelling frees you from forming complex ideas and lets you speak easily in English . |
6 . The practice of students endlessly copying letters and sentences from a blackboard is a thing of the past. With the coming of new technologies, writing by hand has become something of nostalgic (怀旧的) skill. However, while today’s educators are using more and more technology in their teaching, many believe basic handwriting skills are still necessary for students to be successful — both in school and in life.
Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says it’s important to continue teaching handwriting and help children acquire the skill of writing by hand.
Berninger and her colleagues conducted a study that looked at the ability of students to complete various writing tasks — both on a computer and by hand. The study found that when writing with a pen and paper, participants wrote longer essays and more complete sentences and had a faster word production rate.
In a more recent study, Berninger looked at what role spelling plays in a student’s writing skills and found that how well children spell is tied to how well they can write. “Spelling makes some of the thinking parts of the brain active which helps us access our vocabulary, word meaning and concepts. It is allowing our written language to connect with ideas.” Berninger said.
Spelling helps students translate ideas into words in their mind first and then to transcribe (转换) “those words in the mind into written symbols on paper or keyboard and screen,” the study said. Seeing the words in the “mind’s eye” helps children not only to turn their ideas into words, but also to spot spelling mistakes when they write the words down and to correct them over time.
“In our computer age, some people believe that we don’t have to teach spelling because we have spell checks,” she said. “But until a child has a functional spelling ability of about a fifth grade level, they won’t have the knowledge to choose the correct spelling among the options given by the computer.”
1. What can we learn from Berninger’s first study?| A．It focused on the difference between writing by hand and on a computer. |
| B．It indicated that students prefer to write with a pen and paper. |
| C．It found that good essays are made up of long sentences. |
| D．It discussed the importance of writing speed. |
| A．Spelling improves one’s memory of words. |
| B．Spelling ability is closely related to writing ability. |
| C．Spelling benefits the translation from words into ideas. |
| D．Spelling slows down finding exact words to express ideas. |
| A．Window. | B．Passage. | C．Picture. | D．Imagination. |
| A．Handwriting still has a place in today’s classrooms. |
| B．Spell checks can take the place of spelling teaching. |
| C．Computers can help people with their choice of words. |
| D．Functional spelling ability develops fast in the fifth grade. |
7 . Many people who are learning English want to know how to improve their reading skills.
Reading is one of the most important language skills because we use it to expand our vocabulary and improve the way we speak, write and listen.
So how do we practice reading so that our skill level improves? When we read a passage, we need to understand it. We must understand what the important words mean in each sentence. This does not mean that we need to know the meaning of every word. In many cases, we can find out what words mean from the words around them.
Reading is an essential part of your study of the English language. It can help you understand and learn more. It can also become a satisfying hobby.
| A．Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this. |
| B．Unlike listening, reading allows us to take our time. |
| C．Among the four skills, listening is the most important one. |
| D．It is hoped that you will love reading and improve your reading skills. |
| E．When we read, we can see how things are said, from sentence structure to expression. |
| F．If we do not, we will not be able to understand what the entire article or story is about. |
| G．Once we understand what the words mean, we need to figure out what the message is. |
8 . It’s often said that we human beings can dream in a foreign language. Could dreaming in a foreign language improve our memory? Does dreaming in a foreign language mean we are making progress in learning that language?
Before we look at multilingual (多语言) dreams, first we need to look at sleep. The connection between sleep and language can be applied to how we learn any language, including our native language. Even adults still learn about one new word every two days in their first language. But, if we are going to remember that new word better, what matters is that we need to connect it with what we have learned. And in order to do that, we “need to have some sleep”, says Gareth Gaskell, a professor at the University of York.
It’s during sleep that the integration (整合) of old and new knowledge happens. At might, one part of our brain — the hippocampus — takes whatever new information it receives during the day and passes it on to other parts of the brain to be stored. The role that dreams play in this night-time learning process is still being studied, but “it’s entirely possible that during multilingual dreams, the brain is trying to connect the two languages”, says Marc, a researcher at a university in Bern, Switzerland.
So having multilingual dreams could mean that our brain is trying to remember a new word or phrase. However, it could also have an emotional (情感) significance. Danuta, a professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Silesia in Poland, suggests that multilingual dreams can express “fears or wishes” around learning a foreign language, including the wish to be a local speaker or to be accepted within a certain community.
We clearly still have a lot to learn about multilingual dreams, but one thing seems certain: if you’re trying to learn a new language, you can sleep on it.
1. Why does the author mention questions in paragraph 1?| A．To compare different ideas. | B．To introduce the main topic. |
| C．To present different types of dreams. | D．To discuss the human language ability. |
| A．The other new words. | B．The native language. |
| C．The gained knowledge. | D．The speaking practice. |
| A．They may influence people’s sleep quality. | B．They can reflect language-learning feelings. |
| C．They are the best option to learn a language. | D．They help to clear up the useless information. |
| A．A novel. | B．A diary. | C．A guidebook. | D．A magazine. |
9 . Elements of Latin have made their way into many western countries. Data varies, but as much as 70% of words in English have a Latin or Greek root. By learning more about these roots and how they combine (结合) to create words, you will have an advantage in understanding new words, even if you’ve never seen them before.
The great thing is that you’re not learning the whole language with its grammar. You just need to memorize some parts of the vocabulary that you often see in English. So how do word roots work?
Every word has a root. This part contains the key to a word’s meaning. Take the word “happy”, for example. This word only contains the root, which means full of joy. Some words, however, have extra parts. We call these affixes (词缀), including prefixes, the part attached before the root, and suffixes, the part attached behind the root. Based on the additional meaning of the prefixes and suffixes, the meaning of the final word will be shaped to mean something new.
Take the word “autobiography” for example. The root is “bio”, meaning life. You may have noticed that many words with “bio” have something to do with life or living beings—biology, biography, and so on. When the suffixes “graph”, meaning to write, is added to it, it means a story about someone’s or something’s life. “Auto” means by oneself. Altogether, an “autobiography” is a story about a person’s life, written by the person himself or herself.
In a word, a better grasp of word roots can make you understand the English language better, and will help you with your vocabulary recognition and memory skills.
1. What’s needed to understand new words with roots?| A．A good understanding of Latin or Greek. | B．A full understanding of grammar. |
| C．The ability to recognize different parts of words. | D．The ability to speak various Western languages. |
| A．It can’t form a word by itself. | B．It is a necessary part of a word. |
| C．It is more important than affixes. | D．It has a relatively simple meaning. |
| A．The science that is related to living things. |
| B．A person who does research about chemistry. |
| C．A person who does research about living things. |
| D．The study of chemical reactions occurring in living things. |
| A．Secret of understanding new words. | B．Latin’s way into Western language. |
| C．Amazing power of affixes. | D．Tips on language exams. |
10 . Learning a language doesn’t happen in a day.
•
When you organize to learn a lot of vocabulary or study several grammar patterns that are pretty challenging, your mind can’t take all of them simultaneously (同时地). Therefore, it is better to start with little steps every day. There is no need to learn 100 new words in one day.
• Don’t be afraid of making mistakes
No one likes making mistakes. It affects your confidence and you are embarrassed (尴尬的) especially if there are more people around you. But when you learn a foreign language, making mistakes is something quite normal and expected. If you make mistakes, it isn’t the end of the world. Try to learn from your mistakes.
• Track Your Progress
Checking weekly or monthly progress against your language goals is highly-recommended. You might track the sentence structures learned, the phrases memorized, or the lectures followed. Being aware of your progress can help you see how much your efforts pay off.
The previous tips are from successful language learners who gladly shared them with you. You, just like them, one day can be proud of yourself and your achievements in language learning.
| A．Make them useful experience. |
| B．Try hard, and you will finally succeed. |
| C．Study a little bit every day but efficiently. |
| D．It takes a lot of time, organization, and effort. |
| E．It is not only challenging but also full of fun when you enjoy it. |
| F．It is often more efficient to learn 10 new words every day, instead. |
| G．You can also treat yourself with a small gift when you reach a new level. |
