An Investigation into University Students’ Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety

Reviewing back... 

- Hakan Karatas, Bulent Alci, Mehtap Bademcioglu, Atilla Ergin

In speaking situations, foreign language learners are often anxious about their ability in a foreign language. Ozturk & Gurbuz mentioned that Anxiety which is one of personality factors is a research area in foreign language learning field for so long. focuses on a number of personality factors which may have positive or negative effects in foreign language learning process such as extroversion, self-esteem, motivation, and anxiety. Common definition of anxiety itself is that an unpleasant emotional condition characterized feelings of tension and apprehension. Because of this, they put forward that it plays a crucial role in foreign language learning, and the researchers became interested in conducting research on anxiety and language skills based on the descriptive power of this foreign language anxiety model. And, speaking skill attracted the most attention. The findings of Horwitz’s (2001) study revealed students with high levels of anxiety received lower course grades than the students with lower levels of anxiety. Besides, the research of Saito and Samimy (1996) showed foreign language anxiety can have a negative impact on learners’ performance. There are many researchers who made investigation into students’ foreign language speaking anxiety. For instance, Price (1991) found out the learners were anxious about making mistakes in pronunciation.

Moreover, Balemir (2009) focused on the relationship between proficiency level and degree of foreign language speaking anxiety in English as a foreign language context. This study revealed Turkish EFL university students experience a moderate level of speaking anxiety. How anxiety affects the learning a foreign language is a focus in the current studies such as Horwitz’s (1986), and MacIntyre and Gardner’s (1994). Taking into consideration this focus, the aim of this study is to identify whether the students’ foreign language speaking anxiety demonstrate significant differences in terms of their gender, language level, receiving English preparatory training, and the kind of high school they graduated from. The research group included 320 male (65.6 %) and 168 female (34.4 %) English preparatory students at Istanbul Technical University. Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety Questionnaire developed by Horwitz, Horwitz and Cope (1986) and adapted in Turkish by Saltan (2003) was used as the data collection tool. Data were analysed using independent samples T-test and one-way ANOVA. According to T-test results, it was seen that female students’ score is higher than male students’. Also, it could be reported anxiety of students who have received English preparatory training are lower based on T-test results. Moreover, ANOVA results indicated the students’ language level and the kind of high school do not affect their speaking anxiety. In a nutshell, the foreign language speaking anxiety is affected by gender and receiving English preparatory training.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

missed photo of screenshot

Article Science

Black Holes

Reviewing back...

-Heather R. Smith/NASA Educational Technology Services

www.nasa.gov

Everybody knows that The Universe has many secrets, and we cannot comprehend it as ourself. It needs big technology even NASA still cannot find out more about Universe. This article is part of the NASA Knows (Grade K-4) series where it describes of what Black hole is.

Black hole is a thing that place in space where can pull everything in just like vacuum cleaner. The gravity inside there is very strong, so everything that had been inside there cannot get out. Black hole is invisible. Because no one and light can get out, people can't see black holes. The largest Black hole is called Supermassive, the medium Black Hole is called Stellar, and the smallest Black Hole is called Tiny Black Hole.

According to scientists, Supermassive has masses more than 1 million suns together. They found that every large galaxy contains a Supermassive black hole at it center. Such as the Supermassive in Milky Way Galaxy, Sagittarius A, has masses equal to about 4 million suns together. Supermassive formed at the same time as the galaxy formed too. Stellar has masses more than 20 times of masses of the sun. There are might be many Stellar Black Hole in Earth's galaxy, Earth's galaxy is called the Milky Way Galaxy. The Staller black holes formed when the center of a very big star collapses and it made exploding, it is called as Supernova. Tiny Black Hole has masses equal to about mountain, and it is as small as one atom. The smallest black hole formed when the universe began.

As the amazing of gravity in Black Holes could a black hole destroy earth? Or could Earth get into black hole? According to NASA, black holes do not go around in space eating stars, moons, and planets. Earth will not fall into a black hole because no black holes is close enough to the solar system.

In my opinion Universe is a still mysterious thing in this world, and no one can reach out it except you have very high technology such as NASA. And these all things makes me realize that we are just like a small thing and don't have meaning anything from the biggest outside there.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

Article Science

Overlooked Treasure: The First Evidence of Exoplanets

Reviewing back...

- editor by Tony Greicius

www.nasa.gov

This article from NASA tells about Hubble and Milton Humason began as a janitor, worked together to explore the expanding nature of the universe. Using the legendary telescopes, they recognized the clusters of galaxies are traveling away from each other and the more distant galaxies move away from each other at greater speeds, but there is a far lesser known, 100-year-old discovery from Mount Wilson, one that was unidentified and unappreciated until recently. It's actually: The first evidence of exoplanets.

It started with Ben Zuckerman, professor emeritus of astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was preparing a talk about the compositions of planets and smaller rocky bodies outside our solar system for a July 2014 symposium at the invitation of Jay Farihi,  While preparing his talk, Zuckerman had what he later called a "true 'eureka' moment." Van Maanen's Star, unbeknownst to the astronomers who studied it in 1917 and those who thought about it for decades after, must be the first observational evidence that exoplanets exist. Farihi had suggested that Zuckerman talk about the pollution of white dwarfs, which are dim, dense remnants of stars similar to the Sun that have exhausted their nuclear fuel and blown off their outer layers. But in 1987, more than 70 years after the Mount Wilson spectrum of van Maanen's Star, Zuckerman and his colleague Eric Becklin reported an excess of infrared light around a white dwarf. This was, in 1990, interpreted to be a hot, dusty disk orbiting a white dwarf. Inspired by Zuckerman, Farihi became enamored with the idea that someone had taken a spectrum with the first evidence of exoplanets in 1917, and that a record must exist of that observation.

Scientists are still exploring polluted white dwarfs and looking for the exoplanets they may host. About 30 percent of all white dwarfs we know about are polluted, and Farihi was thrilled about how his Mount Wilson archive detective work turned out. In 2016, he described the historical find in the context of a review paper about polluted white dwarfs, arguing that white dwarfs are "compelling targets for exoplanetary system research." Who knows what other overlooked treasures await discovery in the archives of great observatories -- the sky-watching records of a cosmos rich in subtlety. Surely, other clues will be found by those motivated by curiosity who ask the right questions.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

Article Science

Slurp no more: smart cutlery for the noodle gourmet generation

Reviewing back...

- Mike Pegler

The innovation from a Japanese food firm, Nissin Food, has developed a noise-cancelling fork to take the socially awkward "slurp" away from eating noodles. Eating noodles is a favorite food for some kind of people especially Japanese, they usually eat noodles with slurp sound which is disturbing for another people. They think eating with sounds is impolite and it looks weird when you did it, but why Japanese usually does it? They reasons are because of the flavor and the enjoyable itself, if you eat noodles with slurp sounds, the noodles taste delicious and you can more enjoy it.

Because the differences of their thought, Nissin Food Product develops a tool that minimized the noise sounds named a noise-cancelling fork. The fork itself is 4.4cm wide and 15.2cm long and uses a microphone to detect offending slurps, which then triggers a smartphone app to "mask" the sound. Users can judge for themselves whether the chosen sound of "soothing, flowing water" emitted by their phone is any less embarrassing than a slurp. The gadget is only going to be made available if a target quota of 5,000 pre-orders is hit by mid-December.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

missed photo of screenshot

Free Reading

Mysterious Dimming of Tabby's Star May Be Caused by Dust

Reviewing back...

- editor by Tony Greicius

 www.nasa.gov

The mysterious stellar object, called KIC 8462852 or Tabby's Star has done unusual dips in brightness. None of this behavior is expected for normal stars slightly more massive than the Sun, but speculations have included the idea that the star swallowed a planet. Researcher, however, found less dimming in the infrared light from the star than in its ultraviolet light. Any object larger than dust particles would dim all wavelengths of light equally when passing in front of Tabby's Star. The new study suggests the objects causing the long-period dimming of Tabby's Star can be no more than a few micrometers in diameter (about one ten-thousandth of an inch).

From January to December 2016, the researchers observed Tabby's Star in ultraviolet using Swift, and in infrared using Spitzer. Based on the strong ultraviolet dip, the researchers determined the blocking particles must be bigger than interstellar dust, so dust that orbits a star, called circumstellar dust, is not so small it would fly away, but also not big enough to uniformly block light in all wavelengths. This is currently considered the best explanation, although others are possible.

To future exploration study authors have a good idea why Tabby's Star dims on a long-term basis, they did not address the shorter-term dimming events that happened in three-day spurts in 2017. Previous research suggested a swarm of comets may be to blame for the short-period dimming.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

Article Science

NuSTAR Finds New Clues to 'Chameleon Supernova

Reviewing back...

- Elizabeth Landau

www.nasa.gov

An astronomer named Carl Sagan famously said. "We're made of star stuff, Nuclear reactions that happened in ancient stars generated much of the material that makes up our bodies, our planet and our solar system." When stars explode in violent deaths called supernovae, those newly formed elements escape and spread out in the universe. To explain it, scientists must reconsider established ideas about how massive stars live out their lives before exploding.

Astronomers classify exploding stars based on whether or not hydrogen is present in the event. While stars begin their lives with hydrogen fusing into helium, large stars nearing a supernova death have run out of hydrogen as fuel. But SN 2014C, discovered in 2014 in a spiral galaxy about 36 million to 46 million light-years away, is different. astronomers concluded that SN 2014C had transformed itself from a Supernovae in which very little hydrogen (Type I) to an abundance of hydrogen, which are rarer (Type) II supernova after its core collapsed.

NASA's Chandra and Swift observatories were also used to further paint the picture of the evolution of the supernova. The collection of observations showed that, surprisingly, the supernova brightened in X-rays after the initial explosion, demonstrating that there must be a shell of material, previously ejected by the star, that the shock waves had hit.

The study suggests that astronomers should pay attention to the lives of massive stars in the centuries before they explode because another possibility is that the star did not die alone. Astronomers will continue monitoring the aftermath of this perplexing supernovae.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

 

Article Science

NuSTAR Probes Black Hole Jet Mystery

Reviewing back...

- editor by Tony Greicius

www.nasa.gov

We know if everything whom passes in front of black hole can be eaten by black hole, such as vacuum cleaner or hover. But do you know if it doesn't eat everything? Of course you don't, maybe some of you know it, but in this article from www.nasa.gov said if a black hole doesn't eat everything like ravenous eaters that is a small portion of material which it will gets shot back out in powerful jets of hot gas, called plasma, if the small portion gets into black hole and it can wreak havoc on their surroundings. Scientists have long debate about where and how this happens in the jet. However, using NASA's NuSTAR space telescope and ULTRACAM, scientists from Spain have been able to measure the distance called Acceleration Zone that particles in jets travel before they "turn on" and become bright sources of light. Making these measurements wasn't easy.

The best theory scientists have to explain these results is that the X-ray light originates from material very close to the black hole. Strong magnetic fields propel some of this material to high speeds along the jet. The results also appear to connect with scientists' understanding of supermassive black holes, much bigger than the ones in this study. The results also appear to connect with scientists' understanding of supermassive black holes, much bigger than the ones in this study. The next steps are to confirm this measured delay in observations of other X-ray binaries, and to develop a theory that can tie together jets in black holes of all sizes.

by Dini Dwintika Karuniati

16611042

Article Science