发布日期：20100311

V. Amusement Session 趣味环节
提示信息（Directory Information）：“感受英语学习，体验快乐写作”（experience English study and enjoy a happy writing time）是我们“英语写作”课堂的亮点之一。为了达到这个目的，除了课堂精讲内容之外，我们还通过计算机网络、电子邮件、课外活动、小组讨论等多种多样的教学辅助形式，把我们的写作课堂延伸到图书馆里、寝室宿舍、餐厅饭桌、咖啡厅里，乃至校园的每一个角落。为了保证这个教学环节顺利实施，我们设计了丰富多彩的课后趣味活动，鼓励学生踊跃参加，培养他们的团队精神和协作意识。
Peer Evaluation 团队优势
提示信息（Directory Information）：为了进一步凸现“互相尊重，合而不同”（Show Respect to a Reasonable Difference）的理念，我们把学生用书“入围要旨”（Sample Selection）板块，转贴如下，请同学们了解“文学与科学互补”（a good combination of literature & science）的深刻内涵，品味“协作学习”（collaborative learning）与“探索学习”（learn through exploring）的丰富底蕴。
A Survey from the Brontë Sisters Society
来自勃朗蒂文学研究会的调查
When literature critics say that the English novel of the 19th century was female, they suggest that this century witnessed a constellation of brilliant women writers（如群星般璀璨的杰出女性作家群体）whose works gave voice to the feelings and aspirations of educated women of their age. “The Brontë Sisters” are definitely the most outstanding representatives（杰出代表）of this group. As you know, Charlotte Brontë （1816-1855）was the eldest sister who wrote Jane Eyre（《简爱》，1847）, Emily Brontë is the elder sister（1818-1848）who completed Wuthering Heights（《呼啸山庄》，1847）, and Anne Brontë（1820-1849）was the youngest one who composed Agnes Grey（《阿格尼斯?格雷》, 1847）. What an admirable literary family!
We are three intimate friends（密友）who possess many things in common（相同之点甚多）. For instance, we all like reading Brontë sisters’ works, we all enjoy creative writing in English, and we all are gourmets（美食家）and environmentalists（环保主义者）. Out of sheer admiration（出于一种欣慕）for these intelligent sisters and their works, we have become members of the Brontë Sisters Society. For the same reason we use Charlotte, Emily and Anne as our pen names. Here is a self portrait of us（自画肖像）.
Being the eldest of the three, I am Charlotte. Jane Eyre is a person I admire and a model I follow. “How about the personality（人品）of this modern Charlotte?” curious readers may ask. I do not know how to describe myself but my younger sisters think that I am an erudite（博学）, farseeing（远见）, faithful big sister, plus a trustful leader and a big problem shooter（解决问题的专家）. Possibly they are right. Then, how do I look at my younger sisters? Well, it is something hard to say but I will try my best. Emily is far more passionate（热情奔放）than I am. She is always full of enthusiasm, romantic dreams, and is crazy about new things. We regard her as an explorer of challenges（寻求挑战）. Being a girl with curly hair and bright eyes, Anne is the youngest and loveliest girl of the three. She is a born artist and dancer（天生的艺术家、舞蹈家）, having a brilliant mind which makes us jealous all the time. We treat her as a reliable source of imagination and creativity.
As a matter of fact, our Brontë Sisters Society is certainly a prestigious association（有声望的协会）in the field of contemporary literature research. Consisting of more than a hundred experienced writers, critics, and literature lovers, the society is sponsored（资助）by the New Era’ Network Company. What makes a good matching point between our society and the sponsor is that we share something in understanding the social and psychological functions of literary works. Consequently, we adopt “Feel the Pulse of the Times”（感触时代脉搏）, “Hear the Aspiration of Your Heart”（倾听心灵渴望）, and “Make Your Mind a Richer World”（丰富精神家园）as our mutual working principles.
The whole world notices that ever since the 1990s, China has successfully placed itself among the fastest developing countries. As technology and science are developing by leaps and bounds（飞速发展）, Chinese society is becoming more and more modernized and advanced. As literary workers（文学工作者）, we have also observed some big changes in Chinese literature circles. These dramatic changes have something to do with issues such as creation motives（创作动机）, theme selection（所选题材）, style variations（文体变化）, and readers’ tastes（读者品味）.
As sincere members of the Brontë Sisters Society, we are very much concerned about those changes and their social psychology（社会心理）. For example, we notice that traditional literature styles are no longer appealing（不再具有吸引力）to university students, while they are all crazy about popular and experimental styles（实验文体）in web literature（网络文学）and pop literature（通俗文学）. Consequently, a brilliant idea came to us. Why not conduct a survey of the influence of technology development and social changes on the reading psychology（阅读心理）of university students? More specifically, we wanted to know their attitudes towards literature in general and their tastes in literature in particular. Our research project has won a unanimous approval both from the literary society and from our sponsor company. In light of the reading theory “You are what you read”（roughly meaning, 萝卜青菜，各有所爱）, we decided to do three things in our research:
Conduct a survey among 100 college students who were chosen randomly from 10 different universities, nationally.
Collect the information about what types of literary works they would like to read.
Find reasons for their likes and dislikes（好恶）.
However, some serious problems began to appear when we tried to analyze the data collected from this survey. We were quite amazed at the diversity of the books university students read. They have such a wide range of reading that their favored types include web literature（网络文学）, science fiction（科幻作品）, modern romance（爱情小说）, detective stories（侦探故事）, swordsmen legends（剑侠传奇）, celebrity biographies（名人传记）, and more. So it seems impossible for us to draw a clear-cut conclusion（得出了一个清切的结论）to show what they like and what they dislike. To deal with this problem, we decided to narrow down the scope of（缩小范围）our research and tried to answer this question: What is the feasible approach that could reflect the real psychological states（心理状态）and literature tastes（文学品位）of young students?
As you can fully understand, it was a rather challenging job when we tried to provide a feasible answer to this research question. We were stuck there for a few days and felt exhausted for meditation（苦思冥想）. Till one day when Anne was browsing（浏览）a copy of New York Times at random（随意）, she suddenly got a good idea.
“Yes! It’s premature（尚不成熟）and impractical for us to categorize（区分类别）the types of literature university students read by conducting a wild investigation. To know their reading psychology and tastes, I think we can start our research by asking them to write a book review for a book they choose!”
“What did you say?” I asked, being a little bit astonished.
“Ask each of our subjects to write a review for their favorite book so that we can get further information about what they read.”
“Do you think it will work（能否奏效）?” Emily seemed to have some doubt.
“Of course I do! I mean through reading their book reviews, we can not only know their thoughts, attitudes, tastes, but also their favorite types of readings. Print version（纸版读物）or electronic version（电子版作品）,” Anne added.
“That’s a marvelous idea! Remember the slogans we have had in our writing class? One of these slogans says ‘You are what you write（人以文分）’. In our current case, we may equally say ‘You are what you review!’ I am sure that if we give our subjects（受试，调查对象）a task like this, it will be a good chance for us to know more things about their viewpoints, values, and depth of understanding,” I became excited and stimulated.
“I got you（明白你的意思）, sisters! You are talking about something at a higher level than reading itself. A fashionable label we can attach to this survey is a socio-cognitive survey of reading behavior of university students（大学生阅读行为的社会认知调查）. How do you like it? Isn’t it fancy enough?” Emily became alive as well.
“You are right! That’s the point I want to express but have not found an appropriate expression. Thank you so much, Emily!” Anne said happily.
“So, girls, let us get down to business!” I knew it was time for me to give an order. When I uttered these words, I observed that the first beautiful smile in all those days bloomed on the two lovely faces（美靥如花，灿烂绽放）.
Following Anne’s brilliant idea, we began to prepare a modified research plan（修订计划）. To further narrow down the scope of our study, we decided to conduct a survey by selecting science students as our subjects so that a better understanding of things such as how science students think（理科思维）, what they read, and how well they can express themselves in English could be achieved. Our new investigation was designed to do the following 4 things:
Conduct a survey among dozens of science students who were chosen randomly from several departments of a Chinese university.
Collect potential information about what types of literary works they would like to read.
Try to find potential reasons for their choices.
Know something about their reasoning patterns by analyzing their book review texts written in English.
Two weeks later, we collected about 14 review pieces and so we started our reading, analysis and evaluation processes. After another week’s hard work, we finally decided to choose two as sample pieces, which make up 14 % of the whole data selected. Table 1 below tabulates（列出）further information concerning these selected sample book reviews. Table 1 Information about sample pieces
Book Review – Cai Zhiheng. The First Intimate Contact
Book Review – The Facts of English by Ronald Ridout and Clifford Witting (2nd version)
What we put below is a brief summary of our selection plus an initial evaluation for the two sample reviews. For more detailed discussion concerning these selected pieces, please go to the Peer Evaluation（同学互评）part in the Instructors’ Book.
Kevin’s piece is a review of a very famous web-novel — The First Intimate Contact（《第一次亲密接触》）, a very beautiful love story. Throughout his piece, the author maintains to be quite critical, objective, imperturbable（平静的）, and has developed some very profound points of view（深邃的观点）. He has a good grasp of the book’s theme and displays a skilful language use. He is able to present precisely in front of our eyes the real visage of the novel with both merits and demerits clearly pointed out.
If you want to know how science students think, we would like to suggest you read Arthur’s book review on The Facts of English. This review article is explicitly and concisely written, with no empty and fancy words to beat about the bush. His arguments are well organized and supported by powerful evidence. His language is precise and smooth. For this reason, this review article has been chosen as our sample piece. To make our work different from what those smart guys from the Classic Book Company have done and encourage a more meaningful reading, we chose the second version of Arthur’s review piece, instead of his original draft. If you are interested in his first version, please go to Unit 6 of this book for more reference.
A word from the Professor: I think the modern Brontë Sisters have done a wonderful work in their sample selection. As a matter of fact, their subjects were a group of science students who attended one of my writing classes a couple of years ago. When I read their review pieces for the first time, I was also impressed by their unique perspectives and interesting discussions. To encourage them to do a better job in this writing assignment, I suggested them to go over my feedback information and try to rewrite their pieces. They accepted my suggestions and completed their revised work. For the results of this rewriting process, I believe, the three young girls from the Brontë Sisters Society will have more interesting stories to tell us in their peer evaluation part. Dear readers, please go to the relevant part in the Instructor’s Book and you will have more fun!
Idiosyncratic Views 一家之言
提示信息（Directory Information）：为了反映丰富多彩的校园文化，调节单调乏味的英语学习，丰富课外活动的内容，我们还专门开辟了一个“一家之言”（Idiosyncratic View）论坛，专门展示同学们风格各异、具有原创性的“千字文”。收入这个论坛板块的短文，兼具学习和娱乐两种功用：首先，入选的每篇千字文，都和相关单元的讨论内容息息相关，有“启迪思维，揽镜自照”（mirror-image learning）之妙用；其次，这些文章，均由中文写成，有小品随笔（essay）之长，写得活泼生动，引人入胜，供大家在紧张的英语写作训练之余，“聊借佳文怡倦眼，此中妙趣两相知！”（Relax your strained eyes by reading this fresh & brilliant papers and enjoy the bitter happiness mutually!）
本单元“一家之言”的题目为“理科思维”，请大家浏览欣赏。
理科思维是一个年代比较久远的话题了。讲不了大的道理，就从对系列电影MATRIX（《黑客帝国》）的认识来窥视一下理科思维。
花哨的打斗场面和绚丽的美工自是不用多说，大手笔的投入造就了一如既往的酷。观众随着剧情不断质疑人物和场所的真实和虚幻，沿着批判哲学的道路思考，永远只是一个个疑团，天外依旧有天，人外依旧有人。对虚拟世界的思考也上升到了哲学的高度，按时间顺序把哲学史捋了一遍，从在不断否定中寻找真理的批判哲学到存在主义，又到无法用理性方法推断的神学……
这是按照正常文科思维方式对影片的欣赏。
全片由于贯穿了各种高科技技术，因此吸引了许多从事IT行业的理工科人士。在痴迷的欣赏之余，网上出现了多种结合理科思维的哲学理论，如Matrix in Matrix和Two Parallel Matrix 等理论，还有程序员甚至推出了双重MUD（网络泥巴游戏）理论和游戏测试理论。
对于此片，其实无论是哪种科技哲学理论，溯其根源，都是由于人类发现了0和1所可以创造出来的计算功能。从Dos开始发展到Windows，然后一直发展到现在蓬勃发展、五彩缤纷的各式软件和界面。其实这些演变，都是用一堆原始码和既定的规则所创造出来的。这让我们方便管理和创造。但是，也许正是因为电脑的演变，让人们联想到自己，会不会这就是上帝借电脑的演变和运行方法，向我们透露出他创造万物的方式？我们自己的世界是不是也是由一些原始而简单的代码和既定的规则创造出来的呢？我们自己是不是MUD游戏里的一个NPC（预先定义好角色的机器人）？会不会是某个大型游戏里的一个小小的测试角色？……正是这些问题，引出了上面提到的多种理论。
按照理科思维，这部电影说明了一个可能性，就是万物的起缘，都是由简单的元素所构成的，然后套用一套写好的程序（或者公式）发展了不同的领域，每个领域又有自己的一套逻辑归纳方法，从而发展出这个领域独特的一套东西。上帝也许就是个程序员，他说不定就是用一套很简单的程序让万物按照自己的意识生存，而天使和鬼魂的出现或者其他一些不合常理的灵异现象只是大程序的某个局部出bug罢了。几千年人们苦苦追寻的哲学问题，似乎能在这个体系中得到很好的解释。其实，这只是近些年来哲学内部新兴的重要领域——“信息哲学”比较通俗的一面。
哲学自古以来都是很深奥的，所以哲学课程也一向是很难教授的一门课，但如果都能像MATRIX电影这样，以理科思维的方式传达各种流派的哲学思想，不仅学习者喜欢，哲学家们肯定也会很欣慰，因为他们再也不会觉得曲高和寡了。很多科学家，特别是物理学家在晚年一般都会成为哲学家，这也跟他们有着缜密的理科思维不无相关。
课堂精讲

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