By Malcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker, August 17, 1998 Issue)

1. ANNALS OF BEHAVIOR about Judith Rich Harris's new theory that children are more influenced by their peers than by their parents. Judith Rich Harris, a textbook writer, had her epiphany about child development on January 20, 1994, while reading a paper about juvenile delinquency, which argued that adolescents participated in delinquent behavior in an attempt to mimic adults. Harris, however, came up with an opposite thesis--that adolescents are more interested in imitating and learning from their peer groups rather than their parents.

2. This thesis unravels all the conventional wisdom about parents and family and child-rearing; it means that, in some key sense, parent's don't much matter. Over the next 6 months, Harris immersed herself in psychological and anthropological research and in late 1994, she wrote an article on her theory, which was published by the academic journal "Psychological Review." After the article was published, Harris was inundated with E-mail, because everyone in the field wanted to know more. At this point, Harris was suffering from a lupus-like illness, but nevertheless she began a book on her theory, "The Nurture Assumption," which will be published this fall. This week, Harris will travel to San Francisco for the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, where she will receive a prize for her "Psychological Review" article.

3. Harris's idea that peers matter much more than parents runs counter to nearly everything that a century of psychology and psychotherapy has told us about human development. The writer discusses the Colorado Adoption Project, a University of Colorado study held between 1975 & 1982, which tested and observed 2 groups of 245 parents: one group with adopted children & one with biological children. They found that when there is no genetic connection to parents there is no resemblance, which seriously contradicts the "nurture" argument.

4. Harris argues that science has been in the grip of a parent-centered bias known as the "nurture assumption." Research shows that in many cases of a child's personality development, the parents seem to be irrelevent. Harris also argues that a parent's behavior might be shaped by the personality of her child, and not the other way around, a phenomenon she calls child-to-parent effects.

5. David Reiss, of George Washington University, and Robert Plomin, a behavior geneticist who also headed the Colorado study, have just completed a 10-year, $9-million study of 720 American families which found that the manner in which parents relate to their children makes no predictable difference in the way those children end up. Harris uses the story of Cinderella to show that children learn early on that they can reconstruct themselves away from their parents, which is an important limitation on the power of parents. The writer cites several studies which uphold the theory of the Cinderella effect. Thus, Harris argues, a parent's behavior toward a child affects how the child behaves in the presence of the parent, but it doesn't necessarily affect how a child behaves outside the home. And, she continues, what our parents do to us is overshadowed, in the long run, by what our peers do to us.

6. The writer describes Harris's perspective on delinquency, which claims that delinquent behavior is more attributable to growing up in a bad neighborhood or without a lot of income rather than anything the parent might do. The writer describes Harris's friendship with Indiana University sociologist William A. Corsaro, a pioneer in the ethnography of early childhood, who has spent months observing preschoolers and who found that, even at that early age, the children were defining themselves as a group in opposition to their elders. Harris's theories & her interest in child development stem from her problems with her own children--Nomi, her biological daughter, and Elaine, who is adopted. Although Harris treated them the same, Nomi was a perfect daugher, while Elaine always got into trouble. This led Harris to the conclusion that parents really can't have a big effect on children. Almost singlehandedly, Harris has helped wrench psychology away from its single-minded obsession with parenting.

Вариант 2

Задание 1. Напишите академическое эссе на русском языке (темы на выбор предложены в приложении 1).

 

Задание 2. Оформите результаты вашего диссертационного исследования 1) в виде научных тезисов на русском языке (требования представлены в приложении 2) в виде речи на защите диссертации.

 

Задание 3. Подготовьте обращение к родителям учеников средней школы на русском языке, посвященное интернет-гигиене школьников. Составьте тезисы данного материала на английском языке для его представления в виде презентации.

Задание4. Составьте электронное письмо на русском и английском языках коллеге по работе и подтвердите свое участие в деловой встрече, уточните время и дату встречи. Следуйте формальной структуре электронного письма и используйте клишированные формулы.

Тема / Subject
Приветствие / Opening
Формулировка цели / Stating the aim	I am writing to you…
Предоставление информации / Giving information
Описание ожидаемых действий / Describing the actions you expect
Заключение / Closing
Подпись / Signature

 

Задание5. Прочитайте научно-популярную статью на английском языке. Отметьте особенности научно-популярного подстиля. Какие языковые нормы строго научного стиля здесь нарушаются (лексический состав, синтаксическая организация, композиционная структура). На основе статьи создайте тезисный доклад для выступления, используя стандартные речевые клише.