Earticle

The Merchant of Venice is a comedy entangled with love affairs, wits and rounds of adventures led by young privileged Christians. It also tells a gloomy, agonizing humility inflicted upon Shylock, a Jewish usurer. He is unduly subject to it by force of irresistible social prejudice and discrimination. This paper is an attempt to set a new perspective to interpret the multiple characters of Shylock. They are displayed in the course of his encounter with dominant social norms and modes of conduct. Fallacy of mercy is coined to point to the manifest symptom of the collective moral reactions registered by the privileged Christians to tame the poor, trapped victim personified in Shylock.

The purpose of this paper is to study the theory and practice of using multimedia to teach English. Multimedia as a means of language teaching is concerned with theoretical backgrounds such as The Natural Approach, Programmed Instruction, Component Display Theory, Interactive Discovery Learning, and Information Processing Theory. This paper deals with the areas and methods of using multimedia to teach English such as how to use computer programs, electronic mail and the Internet. In particular, the Internet provides abundant guidelines and collections of English resources which are well-organized and frequently updated. It brings information, data, images, and even computer software into the classroom almost immediately, which would be otherwise hard to acquire. This paper also discusses the roles of teachers and students in a multimedia classroom. It is suggested in this paper that the success of using multimedia to teach English depends mainly on the abilities and efforts of both the teachers and the students.