SHEFFIELD

LINCOLN COLLEGE OF ENGLISH

Classes for foreign students at all levels

3 months, 6 months, 9 months and one year course

Open all year

Small class (maximum 12 students)

Library, language laboratory and listening center

Accommodation(膳食供应) with selected families

25 minutes from London

Course fees for English for one year are ￡1, 380 with reduction 减少for shorter periods of study.

    Making friends is a skill like many other skills. It improves with practice. If you want to meet people and make friends，you must be willing to take some actions. You must first go where there are people. You won't make friends staying home alone. Join a club or a group. Talking with those who like the same things as you do is much easier. Or join someone in some activities. Many people are nervous when talking to new people. After all meeting strangers means facing the unknown. And it's human nature to feel a bit uncomfortable about the unknown. Most of our fears about dealing with new people come from doubts about ourselves. We imagine other people are judging us or finding us too tall or too short，too this or too that. But don't forget that they must be feeling the same way. Try to accept yourself as you are and try to put the other person at ease. You'll both feel more comfortable.

    Try to act self­confidently even if you don't feel that way. When you enter a room full of strangers，such as a new classroom，walk tall and straight，look directly at other people and smile.

    If you see someone you'd like to speak to，say something. Don't wait for the other person to start a conversation.

    Just meeting someone new does not mean that you will make friends with that  person—friendship is based on mutual liking and“give and take”. It takes time and effort to develop.

    A primary school in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province has announced it no longer requires parents to sign their children's homework, which was aimed at getting parents to supervise(监督) their children after school. China Youth Daily comments: Putting an end to the requirement that parents sign off on the homework of their children eases the burden on many parents, as otherwise they would have to do primary school homework after a hard day's work. But there are worries that if parents stop having to sign off on their children's homework, the children will not get good grades.

    However, the most effective way for children to study is to develop their willingness to learn and do their own studies. When doing homework, students practice and hopefully apply what they have learned. It is true that teachers are supposed to check students' homework and identify their mistakes. But some parents correct their children's mistakes by themselves when signing off on it.

    It is the duty of students to do their homework, be responsible for their studies and correct their mistakes. Parents' supervising their homework, checking their answers and dealing with the harder problems will only make children less aware of their mistakes and encourage them to wait for their parents' help when they face any problems.

    Children have to manage their own learning and develop the ability to study by themselves, as competence will not be achieved if a student simply repeats strict tasks in which he is assisted in school by teachers and at home by parents.

    A delayed satisfaction experiment conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s proved that children with better self-discipline(自律) performed better in their studies and interpersonal relationships.

    There is little doubt that parents' supervision can make children's homework better. But it does not give children the chance to practice their ability to solve problems independently.

    One of the great concerns that ornithologists have is that climate change will throw the nesting activities of birds out of sync (同步) with the availability of food for the raising of chicks. For one species, the pied flycatcher, a new study shows that some of its clan are proving to be remarkably adaptable.

    Upon returning to Europe from their African wintering grounds, the flycatchers time their egg-laying to the short period when juicy caterpillars (毛毛虫) are most abundant. During the past three decades this caterpillar peak has advanced by three weeks. Pied flycatchers initially had difficulty adjusting, but over time have started laying their eggs earlier to grab the caterpillars. Some, though, are doing a lot more to improve their reproductive chances of success, according to a study in the Journal of Avian Biology led by Christian Both of the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands.

    Like most bird species, pied flycatchers have long been thought to lay a single clutch of eggs during the breeding (繁殖) season. This was widely considered to be a trait that wouldn't change. Then, in 2007, a Swiss team led by Dr Ravussin began to suspect that clutch numbers were flexible. They discovered a female pied flycatcher that immediately produced a second brood with a new male after raising an early set of chicks. Aware of Dr Ravussin's findings, Dr Both wondered whether this was just a single, odd instance or if second broods might be happening on a larger scale driven by the arrival of earlier springs. So, they cooperate to delve into the data to find out.

    The team studied pied-flycatcher populations in the Netherlands and Switzerland that were known to be among the earliest nesting members of the species. In total, they tracked the egg-laying times and hatchling-rearing success of 8,848 breeding pairs in the Netherlands and1, 372 in Switzerland between1980 and 2018. They found that since 2006, 11 cases of second broods were observed, all of them among the earliest breeders in both populations.

    Further studies ruled out that the birds were making up for a failed first attempt at raising chicks or that the second group of nestlings suffered.

    With no obvious downside to laying a double clutch, Drs Both and Ravussin conclude that the birds are attempting to double their annual reproductive output. While this behavior is still rare, they argue that if the tendency is driven by heritable genes (which it may well be), then a succession of early springs could make the strategy much more common.

    I owe my father a huge thank you! Sure, I need to thank him for all those years of paying my bills, fixing my bikes, and providing a shoulder to cry on. But this year I realized that his contributions to my childhood were much more than that.

    I grew up as Daddy's Little Girl. If I had a problem that needed fixing or a question that needed answering, he was the one I ran to. He helped me get through everything from math homework as a high school student to career choices as a young adult. He always expected that I do my best in whatever I did, and he believed I could succeed in anything I put my mind to. As a result, I learned to hold myself to those same standards. He always showed me unconditional love, which helped me learn to love myself. It was something I'd taken for granted until I realized from talking with my friends that they had no similar view of their self worth. Having fathers that didn't believe in them left them to grow up not believing in themselves.

    As I was growing up, my father also modeled how a woman should be lavished. He treated my mom with love and respect. As a result, I grew to expect nothing less than that from the men I dated and from the man I would eventually marry. Dad was a living picture of godliness (虔诚), honesty and responsibility. It was only recently that I realized what a deep effect fathers have on their daughters' lives. That is why I want to thank my dad for the godly example of love that he has been to me throughout my life.

    By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony 一 and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing (伤自尊的) words. But lost in the uproar (喧嚣)was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

    Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously, in a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a “dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very clumsiness prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

    In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom on tests of logic, grammar and humor -extremely overestimated'' their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile (百分位数) they guessed they were in the 62nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition 9 clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "meta cognitive skill" the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that field? In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

    There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

    If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼)speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.