Valium, Paris Hilton, and Second Language Acquisition

Since studying for my MA qualifying exam has completely sapped me of all creativity and free time (although, to be honest, there's always time for celebrity gossip - case in point: my testing class teacher, in addition to being a really, really good teacher, loves celebrity gossip. Not only does he love celebrity gossip, but he has a friend who is one of Paris Hilton's personal assistants and gives my teacher the inside scoop on Paris. This makes the man an absolute god in my eyes. Not to mention the fact that he makes the process of designing multiple choice test items way more fun than it has any right to be. Anyway, for a semester project, we're supposed to design multiple choice tests, and mine is a reading comprehension test. I've just gotten the okay to use articles from celebrity gossip magazines in my reading test. This makes me very happy. It means that I have to go to the store and buy Star, In Touch, etc. And read them. All.)...

Um, where was I? Right. Studying for comps. Anyway, I have all these names of researchers and studies to memorize. I have thus far found one interesting researcher by the name of Guiora who liked to study how lowering the inhibitions of foreign language students affected their pronunciation. First, he tried giving them alcohol, and found that their pronunciation improved. Heartened by these results, he next experimented with Valium (to no success). That's my kind of researcher.