Literaturas em Língua Inglesa

Módulo de fechamento do curso, nos leva por diversos países de língua inglesa através dos contos relacionados abaixo:


21/01
“The half brothers” by Elizabeth Gaskell;
“The minister’s black veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
O conto é muito explorado em vídeo, com projetos de todos os tipos feitos por alunos de Língua Inglesa. Este foi produzido por EnglishGuyInTexas, como parte do curso de literatura americana:

É possível também conferir a leitura do conto em três partes: 1 / 2 / 3.

28/01
“The Christening” by DH Lawrence; 
Este conto pode ser encontrado no projeto LibriVox, lido por Cathy Barratt.
“Eveline” by James Joyce;
Este conto pode ser encontrado no projeto LibriVox, lido por William Coon.
“My Oedipus Complex” by Frank O’Connor. 
Sem dúvida, o meu favorito até agora! Confira a versão lida e comentada por Helen Dunmore para Guardian Books.


04/02
“Loot”, by Nadine Gordimer;
Todos podem ter o privilégio de ouvir a própria escritora sul-africana, Prêmio Nobel de Literatura, lendo o conto na universidade de Harvard em April de 2005.


Um comentário interessante sobre o conto pode ser lido aqui, escrito pelo professor e escritor Matthew Cheney.
“Happy August the tenth” by Tennessee Williams;
“Rope” by Anne Porter.
Post interessante, "A Great American Short Story", escrito por Andy Mayo.


11/02
“A street car named desire” by Tennessee Williams;
É sempre interessante dar uma lida nas SparkNotes e CliffNotes.
“The mosquito” by DH Lawrence;
Escute Anticonsensus lendo este poema no seu canal do Youtube (aproveite e escute também The Tyger by William Blake).
“The bed book” by Sylvia Plath.
Indico um vídeo fofo em que a pequena Jasper Milstein recita o poema:

From The Bed Book

 by Sylvia Plath (PARCIAL)

(...)

Most beds are beds
For sleeping or resting,
But the best beds are much
More interesting!

Not just a white little
Tucked-in-tight little
Nighty-night little
Turn-out-the-light little
Bed -

Instead
A Bed for fishing
A bed for cats
A bed for a troupe of
acrobats.

The right sort of bed
(If you see what I mean)
Is a bed that might
Be a submarine
Nosing through water
Clear and green,
Silver and glittery
As a sardine
Or a jet-propelled bed
For visiting Mars
With mosquito nets
For the shooting stars
(…)

Para o WebQuest: "First Confession", by Frank O'Connor.

Estilística - arte de alinhar palavras e mundo

O módulo Estilística em Língua Inglesa nos levou por caminhos tão diversos quanto figuras de linguagem, ritmo, repetições e até um anúncio de cemitério!

A minha escolha para o WebQuest final foi a análise estilística de poesia. Os textos escolhidos: Willow Poem, de William Carlos Williams e The Road Not Taken, de Robert Frost.

CALL for Virtual Learning Environments

Computer Assisted Language Learning, nice to meet you. Yes, we became CALL boys and girls this month, at the Use of New Technologies Applied to Teaching English Language module, thanks to Prof. Ms. Ana Julia Perrotti-Garcia.


Here is the result of our work these past 30 days.

Virtual Learning Environments

View more presentations from Paula Carnasciali

For a complete article, check "Computer Assisted Language Learning:
Virtual Learning Environments"

Advanced Grammar to the nth degree

          The time we were waiting for finally came: time to dive into grammar structures and syntactic analysis. In this last module we were introduced to our newest friends: Professor Laura Fortes and The Grammar Book. We may have got more than we bargained for.

The Grammar Book - An ESL/EFL Teacher's CourseAuthors: Marianne Celce-Murcia, Diane Larsen-Freeman2nd Edition © 1999 •  854 pages 10 1/4 x 7 1/4
Level: Focus on Specific Areas 
ISBN-10: 0-8384-4725-2   |   ISBN-13: 978-0-8384-4725-3 
Buscapé results | DISAL | SBS

Let me explain. Our WebQuest this month was presenting a grammar topic from The Grammar Book and we got chapters 34 and 35, on Comparatives, Equatives and Superlatives. I knew I had a lot to learn about the topic, but going through all those details and information and also doing all the extra reading for the discussions in class with professor Fortes was tough. We managed somehow and here is the report on the work Maira and I did to create our presentation. Enjoy!


          Initially, we scanned chapters 34 and 35 of The Grammar Book to find out what its basic structure was. We could easily pinpoint the three main aspects presented by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman: the form, meaning and use of comparatives, equatives and superlatives.

Our first impression was that the structures presented were much more complex than we imagined. Besides, we both teach at language schools, use didactic material produced by the franchise, and follow a more or less strict method, so we found interesting that the authors propose a different order of presenting the structures to students as well as more detailed definitions.

As our next step, we decided to choose how we would prepare our slideshow presentation: What is going to be our focus?  What can be interesting for our classmates to reflect about? We first selected the authors' suggestions for ESL/EFL teachers, because those seemed logical choices. We also highlighted structures that seemed interesting to us as students, teachers and simply as curious non-native speakers of the language. The challenge, however, was to summarize a complex and rich grammar resource like this one in a few slides to be discussed under 15 minutes.

Slideshow Presentation: degrees

View more presentations from Paula Carnasciali

The presentation itself was supposed to be clear and appealing. Our experience in the classroom was an advantage since we enjoy standing in front of the class, sharing information and bringing up topics for discussion. Personally, we would like some more time to hear our classmate's opinions.

In conclusion, we could realize that most of the doubts concerning exceptions are common for both teachers and learners and it is our job to provide reasonable answers to these apparent unsolved problems of form, meaning and use.


Goodbyes! :(

I want to take this moment to say goodbye to our dearest friends Mariana Malaquias and Sandra Costa. They are going to take a break from the course and I just want to thank them for all the great moments and for all the help. I hope you keep in touch (say hello through the comments in the blog, at least, OK?). See you guys soon!

Class 4 - Didactic Material Analysis

In our September 3 meeting we examined one of CNA’s (Cultural Norte Americano, Brazilian language school franchise) student’s books, used for teaching the pre-advanced level students. This examination was made with the help of a list of questions used by MEC (Ministry of Education - Portuguese: Ministério da Educação - MEC, is a Brazilian government ministry) with this same objective. These questions were divided in three groups: 1) oral and written texts, 2) written comprehension and 3) linguistic-discursive knowledge: grammar and vocabulary. What we are going to present next is a summary of the results.

As for the topic of oral and written texts, we can say that the material brings texts which are representative of different spheres of social activity. It also presents texts of different genres and types, which represent the formal and informal registers. However, the texts do not present a diversity of original supports and do not indicate their source, which were apparently adapted.

As for the written comprehension, we can say that the reading activities present pre-reading and post-reading activities, promoting the development of strategies like information location, production of inference, and general and detailed understanding of the text. Moreover, the activities count on a plurality of interpretations, explore intertextuality and encourage the search of texts and information outside of the book. On the other hand, we could not detect the polyphonic nature of the texts.

Finally, from the linguistic-discursive point of view, we concluded that besides offering opportunities for the learner to use the language structures with appropriateness and correction, the material is grammatically correct and adequate to its thematic content. The linguistic input is contextualized and it is embedded in varied and authentic discursive practices. The vocabulary activities stimulate the understanding and use of expressions and idioms in the student, helping them develop organization and expansion strategies of their lexical knowledge.

Class 3 - Pro Dia Nascer Feliz

     On our third class on 27th August, we saw the first part of the documentary “Pro dia nascer feliz”, which showed the lack of infrastructure of the most schools in the countryside. Starting from the transport, which is done by very old buses carrying more students than they should, the total lack of basic facilities like water, toilets and illumination and many other essential things vital to give the students a proper place to study, the education on these areas seems to be left behind by the Educational System.  Besides that many students are not really interested in their education, because they do not see a purpose for that. On the other hand, most teachers are demotivated as they have no hopes about their or their student’s future. 
On the second part, we watched the educational reality at Colégio Santa Cruz, in São Paulo, where most students were born rich, with all kinds of facilities available and with motivated teachers. It was shown that these students just have a slight idea of what the world outside their school’s gates is, but they also feel uneasy as they seem incapable of thinking of a solution, because they are just teenagers.


     As a next step of the class, we divided ourselves in groups and used the jigsaw reading technique to analyze some relevant articles. Our group, in particular, discussed the text ‘Multiliteracies and Language - Orders of Discourse and Intertextuality’ by Norman Fairclough. In the text, the author presents the ‘designs of meaning’: the creative application of the language according to the needs of communication. He also mentions the marketization of the language, which is the language of some areas being influenced by the language of the market in order to achieve people in a more profitable way. According to the author, globalization is an economical, social, political and cultural process which leads to a global use of languages, changing the relationship between them in their cultural and linguistic aspect.    

References
FAIRCLOUGH, Norman. Multiliteracies and language. Orders of discourse and intertextuality. In: COPE, B. e KALAZANTZIS, M. (Eds.) Multiliteracies. Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Pro Dia Nascer Feliz - Parte 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74jokEl7RQ4
Pro Dia Nascer Feliz - Parte 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqPVcpnN8cU&feature=related
Pro Dia Nascer Feliz - parte 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4t3ROgtrCQ&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL

Museu da Pessoa - Valéria Fagundes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4tmPU23_M

Valéria Fagundes, 16 anos – Escola Estadual Antônio Guilherme Dias Lima, Inajá, PE
http://www.cecac.org.br/MATERIAS/pro-dia-nascer-feliz_e_os-problemas-das-escolas-brasileiras-25.6.2011-.htm

DIAS MAIS FELIZES EM MANARI
http://www.museudapessoa.net/historias/historias_ontemehoje_07_07_08.shtml

Class 2 - “New people in New Worlds”

     On our second meeting, we read and thought about the text “New people in New Worlds” (Gee, 1999) which described two different kinds of students: one born and raised in a wealthy family and another one, in a poorer family. Reading this, we could realize that the social context plays an important role when learning is concerned. So we teachers need to recognize our students social life before we start our practice, but the most important thing is that we have to contextualize language for the students that live in this new globalized world, so they can learn how to speak English effectively.

     To exemplify that, we studied examples from another text: “Situated and Explicit Pedagogy” (Mills, 2010) from the book “The Multiliteracies Classroom”, which shows a teacher with a class of students from all over the world trying to make her practice meaningful. For that, she decided to show the students a claymation movie and, after that, she asked them to make a movie themselves. In an exercise like that, the collaboration between students is essential, and that’s why she had good and bad results. She focused her practice in the world of the technology, so the students had to use digital cameras to prepare the movement of the characters in the movie. The instructions had to be very clear, and the concept of scaffolding had to happen for the work to be done.

     The learners had problems, but at the end the goal was accomplished, she taught the students how to interact using technology; she could teach other subjects besides English and the results were fairly good.

     The poster below is our attempt to represent this experience and the author’s ideas by using pictures and the main words related to it.

References
Gee, J.P. New people in new worlds: Networks, the new capitalism and schools. In COPE, Bill; KALANTZIS, Mary (Ed.). Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. London: Routledge, 1999.
MILLS, Kathy A. Situated and Explicit Pedagogy”. In: ________. The Multiliteracies Classroom. Salisbury, Uk: Multilingual Matters, 2010.