Views on How to Improve English Listening Comprehension

The modern language teaching theory highly emphasizes the effect of"listening"on the learning and the use of language. The teaching of English listening is not only a teaching of language, but also a kind of training of ability. In the four skills of listening, writing, reading and speaking, listening is considered as the basic, and the most important skill. It isn't only the main way of acquiring language information, but the base of improving other skills. Listening practice is especially important in classrooms where English is taught as a foreign language, that is, in situations where English is not the language of the country and where opportunities for hearing English outside the classroom are few. Students in such environments often learn to read and write English, and even to speak English, but they frequently have great difficulty comprehending English spoken to them.Plenty of Chinese students claim that the listening test is the most difficult part of English test. As a result, teachers should take particular pains to avoid such simplification and to provide opportunities for students to hear the kind of language that will prepare them for situations outside the classroom. Teachers should try to anticipate the kind of English the students will hear when the opportunity arises for them to be in an English-speaking country. In this article, I start with the factors which may exert an influence on listening comprehension, shows ways to improve listening comprehension and design some useful activities in the class. And I also focus on the activities of English listening teaching and insist that the activities should be both emphasized on the process of listening and the result of listening, due to different situations.

TextGen： a realistic text data content generation method for modern storage system benchmarks

Modem storage systems incorporate data compressors to improve their performance and capacity. As a result, data content can significantly influence the result of a storage system benchmark. Because real-world proprietary datasets are too large to be copied onto a test storage system, and most data cannot be shared due to privacy issues, a benchmark needs to generate data synthetically. To ensure that the result is accurate, it is necessary to generate data content based on the characterization of real-world data properties that influence the storage system performance during the execution of a benchmark. The existing approach, called SDGen, cannot guarantee that the benchmark result is accurate in storage systems that have built-in word-based compressors. The reason is that SDGen characterizes the properties that influence compression performance only at the byte level, and no properties are characterized at the word level. To address this problem, we present TextGen, a realistic text data content generation method for modem storage system benchmarks. TextGen builds the word corpus by segmenting real-world text datasets, and creates a word-frequency distribution by counting each word in the corpus. To improve data generation performance, the word-frequency distribution is fitted to a lognormal distribution by maximum likelihood estimation. The Monte Carlo approach is used to generate synthetic data. The running time of TextGen generation depends only on the expected data size, which means that the time complexity of TextGen is O（n）. To evaluate TextGen, four real-world datasets were used to perform an experiment. The experimental results show that, compared with SDGen, the compression performance and compression ratio of the datasets generated by TextGen deviate less from real-world datasets when end-tagged dense code, a representative of word-based compressors, is evaluated.

Saussure’s Prolegomena——Toward a Semiotics of the Mind

The study of language is based either on the word or on the sentence as basic units.Ferdinand de Saussure opted for the word;other linguists later preferred the sentence or chose to ignore the difference between word and sentence.Words,however,have extra-linguistic functions related to the topologies of thought,the spontaneous geometrical imageries of meaningful mental figuration,as we know them from sign posts,from verbal descriptions,and from the semiotics of diagrams.If words,rather than sentences,are in this sense the essential connectors of language and thought,then the general architecture of linguistic structures,including semantics and syntax,should be centered around this lexical“window”into the thinking mind,and the semiotic modes of language and signs may then be described by similar architectures directly connected to the figurative mind itself.This paper offers tentative connected models of the architectures of language,signs,and the figurative mind,and suggests the possibility of interpreting Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiological intuitions in the sense of a semiotics of the mind along these cognitive-semiotic lines.