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Файл:Тренинги по межкультурной коммуникации на английском языке. Для переводчиков жестового языка. English for Sign language interpreters. Учебное пособие
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reading, experts insist that our brains are exposed to narratives all day long.
In fact, researcher Jeremy Hsu shares, "personal stories and gossip make up
65% of our conversations." so go ahead, listen to your coworker's long and
drawn out story about their vacation, tune in to talk radio, or listen to an
audio book in the car: it's a good exercise for your brain.
3. _____________________________________________
Have you ever felt so connected to a story that it's as if you experienced
it in real life? There's a good reason why: your brain actually believes that
you have experienced it. When we read, the brain does not make a real
distinction between reading about an experience and actually living it.
Whether reading or experiencing it, the same neurological regions are
stimulated. Novels are able to enter into our thoughts and feelings. While
you can certainly hop into a VR game at the mall and have a great time, it
seems that reading is the original virtual reality experience, at least for your
brain.
4. _____________________________________________
Any kind of reading provides stimulation for your brain, but different
types of reading give different experiences with varying benefits. Stanford
university researchers have found that close literary reading in particular
gives your brain a workout in multiple complex cognitive functions, while
pleasure reading increases blood flow to different areas of the brain. They
concluded that reading a novel closely for literary study and thinking about
its value is an effective brain exercise, more effective than simple pleasure
reading alone.
5.______________________________________________
Want to really give your brain a workout? Pick up a foreign language
novel. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden tested students from the
Swedish armed forces interpreter academy, where intensive language
learning is the norm, and medicine and cognitive science students at Umea
University. Both groups underwent brain scans just prior to and right after a
three-month period of intensive study. Amazingly, the language students
experienced brain growth in both the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex,
with different levels of brain growth according to the amount of effort and
learning students experienced in that period of time.
5. _____________________________________________
If you're used to reading paper books, picking up an e-reader can feel
very awkward at first. But experts insist that your brain can adopt the new
technology quickly, no matter your age or how long you've been reading on
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paper. In fact, the human brain adapts to new technology, including ereading, within seven days.
6.______________________________________________
Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and that's a good thing for
your brain. With this structure, our brains are encouraged to think in
sequence, linking cause and effect. The more you read, the more your brain
is able to adapt to this line of thinking. Neuroscientists encourage parents to
take this knowledge and use it for children, reading to kids as much as
possible. In doing so, you'll be instilling story structure in young minds
while the brain has more plasticity, and the capacity to expand their
attention span.
7._______________________________________________
It feels great to lose yourself in a book, and doing so can even
physically change your brain. As we let go of the emotional and mental
chatter found in the real world, we enjoy deep reading that allows us to feel
what the characters in a story feel. And this in turn makes us more
empathetic to people in real life, becoming more aware and alert to the lives
of others.
8. SPEAKING: In pairs, discuss the scientific findings from the
article above. Do you have any evidence that proves / disproves the
facts?
9. WRITING: Compose a written summary of the following article
in Russian. Follow the rendering scheme from the Appendix. Do not
translate the whole text.
The Reading Brain
Does Reading Give Us Access to Other People's Minds?
Jason Tougaw, Oct 22, 2018
In her book The Shaking Woman, Siri Hustvedt delights in reading’s
power to recast her “internal narrator”:
The closest we can get to . . . entrance into another person’s psyche is
through reading. Reading is the mental arena where different thought styles,
tough and tender, and the ideas generated by them become more apparent.
We have access to a stranger’s internal narrator. Reading, after all, is a
way of living inside another person’s words. His or her voice becomes my
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narrator for the duration. Of course, I retain my own critical faculties,
pausing to say to myself, Yes, he’s right about that or No, he’s forgotten this
point entirely or That’s a clichéd character, but the more compelling the
voice on the page is, the more I lose my own. I am seduced and give myself
up to the other person’s words.
Of course, reading doesn’t simply give us access to “another person’s
psyche.” Hustvedt argues it’s as close as we get, without the onus to define
how close that might be. She describes the capacity of a writer’s voice to
become her narrator, to mix with the stream of her consciousness, to give
her access to unfamiliar “thought styles” that may lead to new ideas, new
ways of understanding the world—and, ultimately, living with it.
Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene argues that “the human brain never
evolved for reading. . . . The only evolution was cultural—reading itself
progressively evolved toward a form adapted to our brain circuits.” Reading
is a human invention, made possible by pre-existing brain systems devoted
to representing shapes, sound, and speech. Nonetheless, Dehaene
acknowledges that “an exponential number of cultural forms can arise from
the multiple combinations of restricted selection of fundamental traits.” In
other words, the malleability of the brain’s representational systems enables
the continuous evolution of new forms of representation.
The literary wing of the so-called "neurohumanities" has been busy with
researchers and theorists investigating what it might mean to “live inside
another’s words” and the variations of reading possible within the
physiological constraints Dehaene describes. Three books in particular have
made a splash: Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and
the Novel (2006), Suzanne Keen’s Empathy and the Novel (2007),
and Blakey Vermeule’s Why Do We Care about Literary
Characters? (2009). The titles of these books represent the clarity of their
purposes and their shared interests in so-called "mind reading"--how we
know what another person thinks and feels, or how literature trains us to
guess.
Zunshine draws on theory of mind research in cognitive science to argue
that literary texts satisfy, create, and test “cognitive cravings,” focusing
mostly on cognitive capacities to imagine other people’s mental
experiences—and the centrality of doing so to navigating social relations.
She makes a strong argument that writers like Virginia Woolf and Jane
Austen offer a kind of cognitive exercise, pushing us to practice levels of
"cognitiive embedment"--for example, she realized that he thought she
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was laughing inside, and this worried her." We practice imagining each
other imagining each other's minds.
Keen emphasizes neuro-cognitive research—especially the fMRI studies
of Tania Singer—that link empathy to so-called mirror neurons. Responding
to influential research on empathy and mirror systems by Tania Singer, she
observes that “Singer and her colleagues conclude that empathy is mediated
by the part of the pain network associated with pain’s affective qualities, but
not its sensory qualities.” In other words, we can imagine other people’s
pain, but we can’t feel it. As a result, Keen’s conclusions are multifarious—
and not entirely rosy: It may be easier to empathize with fictional characters
that real people; novelists (and writers and artists in general) may be more
empathetic than the general population; empathetic responses occur more
readily in response to negative emotions; empathy does not necessarily lead
to altruism or action; and empathy can lead to an aversive response as well
as a sympathetic one.
Vermeule focuses on literary characters, as “tools to think with”:
“Literary narratives prove us and make us worry about what it is to interact
with fictional people. And we should worry, because interacting with
fictional people turns out to be a central cognitive preoccupation, one that
exposes many of the aspects of how our minds work.” Vermeule’s “fictional
people” include characters like Clarissa Dalloway or Humbert Humbert, but
also representations of actual people we don’t know like Barack Obama or
Caitlyn Jenner and people we do know, even those we’re intimate with.
When we imagine other people's mental lives, we create a kind of
productive fiction. Literature, she argues, makes us attentive to forms of
representation that shape the ways we live. If we don’t recognize the role of
representation in the shaping of social relations we will mistake our mental
reproductions of others for “the real properties” of those people, rather than
recognizing the cognitive filters that enable us to relate to them.
Some of this research has gotten a lot of press—for example, Natalie
Phillips’s fMRI research on reading Jane Austen, featured on NPR, the
Huffington Post, and Salon well before it was published in journals. Phillips
conducted her research on a fellowship at Stanford, which touted it with the
headline “This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen.” Phillips’s research is a multidisciplinary collaboration—whose process mirrors its premises with a
productive irony Austen might appreciate. She's interested in the limits
of attention, studying Austen’s fiction to make arguments about how it
challenges readers to adopt multiple perspectives that test those limits.
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Samantha Holmsworth, a neuroimaging expert on the project, describes
the challenges: “We were all interested, but working at the edge of our
capacity to understand even 10 percent of what each other were saying” – an
estimate revised to 30 % in an academic article that finally fleshed out the
results that had received so much preliminary hype. Phillips presents her
research with the enthusiasm of hypothesis that requires further study. In
short, close reading (attending to questions about form) and pleasure reading
(getting lost in a book) involve related but different forms of representation.
The “neural signatures” involved multiple brain systems, and Phillips
envisions future research using a “functional connectivity” approach to
measure “synchronous patterns that emerge in parallel across the brain and
investigates how these connections change as we engage stimulus over
time.” Close reading seems to initiate more widespread activity than
pleasure reading, including the somatosensory cortex and motor cortex –
areas involved in space and movement.
This is nascent research, and its hypotheses are tentative. That seems
appropriate. If Jane Austen abhorred anything, it was too definitive a
conclusion. In Austen, mind reading is always misreading.
(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-elusive-brain/201810/the-reading-brain)
10. SPEAKING: Have you heard of deaf writers? Can you give any
names?
11. READING: Read the article and answer the following
questions:
1) What is strange to Sara about her own book being released in an
audio format?
2) In what ways are her meeting with the readers challenging?
3) Sara uses ASL at public places, doesn’t she? Why?
4) Why is it necessary for a writer to read his works aloud?
5) What is wrong with dialogue in Sara’s writing?
6) What are the benefits of being a deaf writer?
What it's like to be a deaf novelist
Sara Nović, Sat 23 May 2015
‘Sometimes I turn off my hearing aids and dip below the surface of the
sound.’ Sara Nović explains the challenges of being a deaf author and why
deafness is still used as a synonym for stupidity.
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My first novel has recently become an audiobook to which I will not
listen. The characters have been assigned voices and accents and inflections
that I’ll never hear. This is not a complaint, exactly; to have written a book
that someone wants to publish in any and all formats is a writer’s dream.
But to hold some disc or drive that contains a thing I made, transformed into
a new thing I can no longer understand, is a predicament in which few
writers find themselves.
This disconnect will appear with increasing frequency as I embark on a
series of literary events following the launch of my novel. As an audience
member I have been to my share of readings in New York. I go because I
am in love with books; I go to be with my friends. But even as a spectator
they require a lot of concentration, and sometimes when I’ve worked myself
into a cross-eyed headache I turn off my hearing aids and dip below the
surface of the sound, let myself drift in the quiet. At my own events I won’t
have the choice to opt out.
So far I have read in public only three times, each distressing in the
regular ways (an audience!), with the added terror of exposing an
increasingly unknowable part of myself – my voice. I can feel my words in
my chest and mouth, but can’t be sure of what they sound like out in the
world. As far as I’m concerned my voice has no echo; it does not stick to
the tape recording. What does it mean to perform for an audience with such
limited control of your output?
Books have always provided me with a sense of solace and
companionship when I found the hearing world overwhelming. Growing up
I filled notebooks with the things I was afraid to say aloud. Libraries, too,
seem designed for me – a place where one isn’t supposed to talk, equality
under the rule of silence.
Since my hearing loss was progressive, I was educated in spoken
English alongside my hearing peers; later, when that became too difficult I
learned American Sign Language (ASL) and used interpreters in class.
When given the choice between the two, my preference is by far for ASL, in
which at least I do not feel self-conscious. But having been brought up in
the hearing world with an English education, and now in turn writing and
teaching in English, I spend much more time immersed in English than I do
in ASL. My ASL is fluent, and I can dream and think in sign, but it is not
my primary thinking language.
In reality, the language – or linguistic modality – in which I am most
fluent is written English. When I’m writing, my mind and body need not be
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translated for a hearing audience. I don’t worry that I am unclear, that my
lips and tongue will revert to their unpractised ways under pressure, or that
I’m speaking at the wrong volume for the background noise I cannot gauge.
When I’m reading a book, I do not have to guess in the way that I do when
lipreading – paper never covers its mouth or turns its head.
And yet there is a disconcerting entanglement between speech and the
practice of being a writer. I frequently see advice from famous authors –
Stephen King among them – that you absolutely must read your own work
aloud in order to edit it properly. Without listening to your words in your
own voice, you can neither fully understand what you’ve written nor hear
how to fix it. At best this kind of advice leaves me feeling a little left out,
but at worst, I wonder: am I making mistakes a hearing writer wouldn’t?
Another part of writing that seems inextricable from hearing is dialogue.
Someone who writes dialogue well is said to “have an ear” for it. I don’t
think I write dialogue well. Whether this is just your average writerly
paranoia or is linked to the physiology of hearing loss, I can’t say. Relevant
here is a cultural divide between the deaf and hearing worlds with regard to
frankness. By nature of its visual modality, sign language is more direct
than spoken language; there are no euphemisms in ASL. Further, the
threshold for “rude” or “inappropriate” is much higher in the deaf world.
Stemming perhaps from the days before SMS and email, when it was harder
to keep tabs on a deaf person’s wellbeing, there is no shame in bluntly
discussing one’s feelings, plans and bodily functions with friends, or even
acquaintances.
In the writing world, any trace of this directness translates as “bad
dialogue”. “That’s not how people talk,” my workshop mates have said.
And of course, they’re right.
In English the phraseology of silence and deafness overwhelmingly
signifies the negative. To hear is synonymous with understanding – “I heard
about that” or “I hear you” suggests the speaker’s knowledge,
comprehension, or capacity for empathy on a given topic, whereas, across
the headlines, cries for justice or peace often “fall on deaf ears”. So as long
as deafness is a synonym for stupidity or wilful ignorance, d/Deaf and
signing people will continue to be “othered” into a position of inferiority.
(The capital “D” is used to refer to those who associate themselves with the
Deaf community; a minority are medically deaf but choose not to associate
with that community.)
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In the face of all this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the works of fiction
written in English by d/Deaf writers can be counted on one hand. It is
important to note that sign languages foster a rich tradition of storytelling
and slam poetry, but books written in English – many d/Deaf people’s
second language – are few. On the other hand, this means the experiences of
Deaf characters present a rich and relatively unmined cache of material with
which to work. Plus, being a Deaf writer means I can write anywhere
without being distracted – I wrote most of my first book on the New Jersey
Transit Northeast Corridor line.
And while writing in a language that works against me can sometimes
seem a less-than-ideal occupation, what is the job of a writer if not to
reinvent language, or at least to create the space and tools for the silenced?
I am reminded of Chinua Achebe quoting James Baldwin, who
expresses frustration with the limits of the language: “My quarrel with the
English language has been that the language reflected none of my
experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way …
Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use
it, had only learned to imitate it.” Achebe goes on to say: “I recognise of
course that Baldwin’s problem is not exactly mine, but I feel the English
language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it
will have to be a new English.” And while Baldwin’s and Achebe’s
problems are much bigger than mine, I can look at the successes of these
literary giants and extract a hope that English, with a little work, can carry
the Deaf voice, too.
Sara Nović’s novel Girl at War is published by Little, Brown.
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/23/what-its-like-to-be-a-deaf-novelist)
12. GRAMMAR: Correct the 13 grammar mistakes in the Book
information from Amazon.
Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf
of Oliver Sacks
'Seeing Voices is both history of the deaf and an account on the
development of extraordinary and expressive language' Evening Standard
Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices offers a way into a world that
is, for much people, alien and unfamiliar - for to being profoundly deaf is
not just to live in a world of a silence, but also to live in a world where the
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visual is paramount. At this remarkable book, Oliver Sacks exploring the
consequences of this, including the different ways in which deaf and hearing
impaired learns to categorize their respective worlds - and how they convey
and communicate those experiences from others.
13. TRANSLATION: Translate the following book description
from Amazon into Russian in writing.
Product description
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Picador; Main Market edition (5 July 2012)
Language: English
Review
Seeing Voices is a manifesto, characteristically humane and
impassioned; once more, Sacks proves he is the doyen of science with a
human face. (Sunday Times)
Empathetic, intelligent and compassionate. (Guardian)
Scholarly and carefully documented, Seeing Voices makes the gigantic
leap so essential to understanding total deafness. (Sunday Telegraph)
A passionate meditation on the richness of sign language. (Independent)
About the Author
Oliver Sacks is a physician and the author of many books, including The
Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings (which inspired the
Oscar-nominated film) and Musicophilia. Born in London and educated at
Oxford, he held positions at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York
University School of Medicine and was Professor of Neurology and
Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is the first, and only, Columbia
University Artist, and is also a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
In 2008, he was appointed Commander of the British Empire. His
memoir, On the Move, was published shortly before his death in August
2015.
14. WRITING: Choose some Russian book of the same genre and
compose your own book description.
15. SPEAKING: Do you read book reviews? If you do, where do
you find them? What is the purpose of such texts? Who usually
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composes reviews? Are they useful for readers? Discuss the questions in
class.
16. GRAMMAR: Read the tips on how to prepare to write a book
review and make the questions its author has to answer.
How to Write a Book Review
by Bill Asenjo
A book review describes, analyzes and evaluates. The review conveys an
opinion, supporting it with evidence from the book.
Before writing, consider:
Title: What – it – suggest?
What – general field – genre? Book – fit?
What – point of view – book – written?
You agree – disagree – the author's point of view?
You – can – follow the author's thesis, "common thread"?
What – author's – style? Formal? Informal? Suitable – intended
audience?
Language – clear – convincing? Ideas – developed? How accurate –
information?
If there – footnotes, they – provide important information?
There – maps, illustrations? They – helpful?
Compare the book to others by this author, or books in this field by
other authors.
Points to Ponder:
What – story – was – about?
Who – main – characters?
Characters – credible?
What – main characters – do in – story?
Main characters – run into any problems? Adventures?
Who – your favorite character? Why?
Your personal experiences
You – relate to any – the characters – the story?
You – ever done or felt – things, the characters did?
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