Hi, again!!
I am trying and collecting all the activities we did during week number two, starting with false friends. We also worked with translation, and the importance to translate the overall meaning or sentences in context, that is mediation. In the afternoon, we were listening to a BBCSound about polyglots which gave us some tips to learn a new language, such as:
-you are never too old to learn a language (Thank goodness!!)
-don´t play too much importance to the grammar
-don´t worry about making mistakes.
If we want to learn English, we should create an English environmental context that helps us to get immersed in the language. This video and the listening below can give a good idea of what being a polygloth involves.
A list of life´s little pleasures was the subject for Tuesday morning classes. We learnt about Bertol Brech, the exiled German composer and poet who wrote a poem with this title.
We listened to a BBC radio program about his life and poetry; by reading out his poem, we did some drilling to improve our intonation and finally, we ended up writing our own list of little pleasures, reading it out slowly, giving prominence to the stressed syllables so as to give intonation to the poem. Here I am attaching the link for further study.
With our second teacher, we did a mind map about everyday life and in pairs we had to compare everyday life in our own countries to life in Britain (food, people´s behaviour, daily routine, physical surroundings, travel and transport, etc). While doing the discussion, the teacher was taking notes, identifying the errors or/and grammatical problems we might encounter for later assessment.
On Wednesday Jeremy´s session started by looking up some definitions in different sources such as wordreference, google, cambridge, wikipedia and the urban dictionary. The words to be defined were: Propaganda/ Public Relations/ Advertising/ Lobbying
This was the introduction activity to start talking about WWI through a funny Mr Bean´s video where it is explained in plain words why The Great War broke out.
By the way, you can slow down the speed of the dialogue (quite useful, indeed).
This Video led us to talk about the involvement of the US in the Great War thanks in no small part to Edward Bernays, the inventor or the Propaganda; In short, the lobbyings in US wanted to join the WWI to sell their armies and, for that reason, Edward Bernays , who happpened to be Freud´s nephew, manipulated the masses by creating an advertising campaign based on the fear that German armies could attack them.
He is also well-known for his campaign about women smoking as a symbol of liberty; torches of freedom" was called

The final activity was to devise a campaign to persuade people about an issue and to present it to the whole class.
After the break, James wrote 6 words on the blackboard and we had to guess the relationship among them: wig/Barcelona/airport/nervous/arrested/glued/immigration
Can you guess the story?? Some students in class had heard about it before, so James gave us the Guardian´s article entitled "Man held in Spain over attempt to smuggle cocaine under his wig"
Working with the text, we had to find out all the words with 3 or more syllables and look for the stressed pattern; then, we read all of them out.
Thursday was the project day: in groups we had to devise a project on science; I did one with my colleague Frank on genetic diseases and it turned out to be quite a rewarding experience.
With James, we were learning some colloquial expressions which served us to
revise the Future Tenses
and unfortunately, the last day of my mobility arrived; we revised everything we had done in class and in pairs, we had to write down a press release of the project we had presented on Wednesday; ours was about building a nuclear plan in the area. After the presentation of the press release, we created a self-deprecating Advertising campaign, so hilarious!!!!
After the break, we worked with lexis by means of a game; then, we tried to be polite rephrasing some sentences to avoid offending a Brit. Do you want a try?
As a final thought I would like to say that it has been a great experience, not only because I have been able to boost my English in the classes which, by the way, I have considered top quality sessions, but also because I have had the opportunity to get immersed in the English culture I adore!! Looking forward to repeating the experience again!!!!