The Effects of Drama on Oral Fluency and Foreign Language Anxiety: An exploratory study

Previous research has suggested that drama has positive effects on learners' oral communication and anxiety; however, it is unclear which dimensions, or to what extent, they are affected by drama. This research narrows the investigation by examining how a drama-based EFL program impacts three dimensions of oral communication: fluency, comprehensibility, and accentedness, and one anxiety factor - foreign language speaking anxiety (FLSA) -, over time. Speech samples were collected from EFL learners in a treatment and a control group, and subsequently assessed by untrained Canadian-born raters. FLSA levels were measured through questionnaires and interviews. Pre- and post-test analysis indicate that learners in the treatment group made significant gains in oral fluency while oral fluency among learners in the control group remained unchanged. There was a significant reduction in FLSA levels among learners in both groups. Finally, qualitative analyses suggest that drama activities, among others, enhance learners' comfort levels in speaking English.

How are Girls' Attitudes Toward Cyberbullying Affected by Drama for Social Intervention?

This is a study exploring teenaged girls’ understanding and experiences of cyberbullying as a contemporary social phenomenon. Participants included 4 Grade 11 and 12 girls from a medium-sized independent school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. The girls participated in 9 extracurricular study sessions from January to April 2013. During the sessions, they engaged with Drama for Social Intervention (Clark, 2009; Conrad, 2004; Lepp, 2011) activities with the intended goal of producing a collective creation. Qualitative data were collected throughout the sessions using fieldnotes, participant journals, interviews, and participant artefacts. The findings are presented as an ethnodrama (Campbell & Conrad, 2006; Denzin, 2003; Saldaña, 1999) with each thematic statement forming a title of a scene in the script (Rogers, Frellick, & Babinski, 2002). The study found that girl identity online consists of many disconnected avatars. It also suggested that distancing (Eriksson, 2011) techniques, used to engender safety in Drama for Social Intervention, might have contributed to participant disengagement with the study’s content. Implications for further research included the utility of arts-based methods to promote participants’ feelings of growth and reflection, and a reevaluation of cyberbullying discourses to better reflect girls’ multiple avatar identities. Implications for teachers and administrators encompassed a need for preventative approaches to cyberbullying education, incorporating affective empathy-building (Ang & Goh, 2010) and addressing girls’ feelings of safety in perceived anonymity online.

The time-course of lexical activation in Japanese morphographic word recognition: Evidence for a character-driven processing model

This lexical decision study with eye tracking of Japanese two-kanji-character words investigated the order in which a whole two-character word and its morphographic constituents are activated in the course of lexical access, the relative contributions of the left and the right characters in lexical decision, the depth to which semantic radicals are processed, and how nonlinguistic factors affect lexical processes. Mixed-effects regression analyses of response times and subgaze durations (i.e., first-pass fixation time spent on each of the two characters) revealed joint contributions of morphographic units at all levels of the linguistic structure with the magnitude and the direction of the lexical effects modulated by readers’ locus of attention in a left-to-right preferred processing path. During the early time frame, character effects were larger in magnitude and more robust than radical and whole-word effects, regardless of the font size and the type of nonwords. Extending previous radical-based and character-based models, we propose a task/decision-sensitive character-driven processing model with a level-skipping assumption: Connections from the feature level bypass the lower radical level and link up directly to the higher character level.

Post-hatch heat warms adult beaks: irreversible physiological plasticity in Japanese quail

Across taxa, the early rearing environment contributes to adult morphological and physiological variation. For example, in birds, environmental temperature plays a key role in shaping bill size and clinal trends across latitudinal/thermal gradients. Such patterns support the role of the bill as a thermal window and in thermal balance. It remains unknown whether bill size and thermal function are reversibly plastic. We raised Japanese quail in warm (308C) or cold (158C) environments and then at a common intermediate temperature. We predicted that birds raised in cold temperatures would develop smaller bills than warm-reared individuals, and that regulation of blood flow to the bill in response to changing temperatures would parallel the bill’s role in thermal balance. Cold-reared birds developed shorter bills, although bill size exhibited ‘catch-up’ growth once adults were placed at a common temperature. Despite having lived in a common thermal environment as adults, individuals that were initially reared in the warmth had higher bill surface temperatures than coldreared individuals, particularly under cold conditions. This suggests that blood vessel density and/or the control over blood flow in the bill retained a memory of early thermal ontogeny. We conclude that post-hatch temperature reversibly affects adult bill morphology but irreversibly influences the thermal physiological role of bills and may play an underappreciated role in avian energetics

El drama del alma, algo sobre México y Maximiliano, poesía en dos partes con notas en prosa y comentarios de un loco por José Zorrilla

UANL

El gran galeoto ; drama en tres actos y en verso

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Después de la muerte : drama en tres actos original y en verso

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El poder de las tinieblas : (drama en cinco actos)

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Resurección : drama en tres actos y un prólogo, inspirado en la novela del mismo título y Conde León Tolstoi ; arreglo escénico en prosa de Gonzalo Jover y Julio Ayuso

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El drama de la calle de la paz

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La lucha por la existencia : drama en cinco actos y seis cuadros

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La juventud de los mosqueteros : Drama en cinco actos, dividido en dos partes y catorce cuadros

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El hombre que ha visto al diablo : drama en dos actos y en prosa

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El gran galeoto ; drama en tres actos y en verso

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Alma y vida : drama en cuatro actos

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