User talk:Polo norman/sandbox

Wikipedia Peer Review

1. Straight out of the gate the first sentence does a great job describing what the article is going to be about. I think that is crucial when visiting a Wikipedia page because people want information quickly and efficiently. The rest of this paragraph continues on to talk about what type of test was done and the results of the test. I particularly like how you broke the down the three points of how and why language learning declines. It makes it easy for the reader to find main points and flows well with the overall paragraph. The next thing I notice and appreciate is the properly labeled (explanatory) paragraphs. I can quickly skim the rest of the page and see if there are any topics that I am particularly interested in. I found the paragraph discussing “Affective Factors” was extremely interesting because it’s true yet neglected. The part about teachers enabling a more welcoming class environment and how it can correlate to language learning should be read by every person that does any type of teaching. Overall, I think the article is well structured and holds detailed, relevant information.

2.	 In the beginning paragraph, the language should attempt to sound more neutral and informative as opposed to that of a research paper. For example,”Some may stop studying a language before they have fully internalized it, and others may stop improving despite living in a foreign country for many years. It also appears that children are more likely than adults to reach native-like competence in a second language. There have been many studies that have attempted to explain these phenomena.” ‘Some may stop,’ ‘others nay stop,’ ‘it also appears,’ ‘studies that have attempted to explain these phenomena.’ I feel that it would be possible to shorten these sentences and extract a simpler item of detail; something like: Individual variation in a second-language is attributed to factors such as age, location of speaker, etc. The Language Aptitude and Age paragraphs do well to present neutral facts and information. Perhaps, try splitting the strategy use paragraph to make it more organized. Introduce both the learning and communicative strategies in the initial paragraph, then expand on each idea individually. The Affective Filter paragraph does not require ‘furthermore’ in the beginning. The Personality Factors paragraph could limit information provided about the study and give more detail on what results were produced from the study. Overall, I think that the improvements that should be attempted would be synthesizing information from annotated bibliographies and rewriting them in Wikipedia in a neutral, informational format. Avoid making the articles sound like research papers and be concise with information. The first paragraph that introduces the idea of individual variation in second-language does have information that would best be put elsewhere in the article.

3. I think the most important thing that the author(s) can do to improve this article is too segment/break down the information. There is a lot of information but mostly, the subject of which is being talked about needs to be introduced. The information could be presented in a more interesting way. It seemed like I was just reading the abstract of the research paper. Maybe if you presented the information in terms of importance of language acquisition such and individual variation and why it is important. Also, information about dual language learners and bilingual learner individual differences seemed left-out. Other than that, there was a lot of good information about individual differences. I particularly like the topic of age but would have like read more about it.

4. In your article, you mention that Anne Fernald conducted a study that looked at how children reacted to television. In our article we are looking at how electronics affect child language development, and we have found that they have positive results when using ipads in the classroom. It is interesting that they react positively to television as well even though they are looking more at the children’s emotions rather than then their language acquisition. I believe this could be useful to our own article since we haven’t looked at the effects of language development with television.

4. In your article, you mentioned how a virtual environment helps second language learners develop their vocabulary in a second language more efficiently. In our article, we are looking at how electronics affect language development in children. We have found that technology such as Ipads have a positive effect on language acquisition, and it is interesting to see that other technologies can help second language learners master another language as well. This evidence can further support our own that technology is helping language acquisition rather than hindering it.