The Californian's Tale by Mark Twain

           

        

The Calidornian's Tale is a beautiful short story by Mark Twain. In the story a travelling propector is wandering around California, when something happened to him.

Click HERE to read and listen the story. Enjoy it!




If you need to get the meaning of any word you don't understand click on the work and it'll display a window with the definition of it.

1. Was the storyteller rich? Account on you answer.
2. What was The Stanislau like? Describe.
3. What had other men done in The Stanislau before his arrival?
4. What happened with gold a few years later?
5. Was the storyteller alone in The Stanislau? Account on your answer.
6. Was the man inhospitable to the storyteller? Account on your answer.
7. What was the man's name?
8. What did the storyteller see when he entered the house?
9. What did the man want him to discover?
10. Where was the woman at that moment?
11. Why did the man change his mood with the storyteller?
12. Who was Tom? Describe him.
13. What happened to Tom everytime the man read one of his woman's letters? Why?
14. What happened the following day?
15. Did the woman come back on Saturday? Why?
16. What happened to her after they had got married?
17. Why was that Saturday special for the man?
18. How long had the men been doing the same thing on that day?

1. What is the story about?
2. Try to assign the story a time when it probably took place. 
3. What are the main events in the story?
4. How are they related to each other?
5. Are the events of the story arranged chronologically? Explain.
6. Who tells us the story? 
7. How is the story narrated? Are there any flashbacks, summaries of events or other stories within the story used?
8. Which is the conflic of the plot?
9. Which is the climax of the story?
10. Does the story end happy, unhappy or undeterminate? Account on your answer.
11. Offer your final opinion about the story. Write two lines at least.
12. Write a very brief biography about the author.

On the right of the page you'll find an interactive quiz about the story. Take it and see how well you've understood this classic American story. Write your final result here. 

Hand in your work a plastic fine. Include a cover page to your work.

NATIONAL CULTURE

                       

                                   




Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habilts, music and arts. 

Substantial differencias among societies arise from cultural differences.

Culture changes over the time influenced by economic advancement, technological change, globalization, among others. 

Differences in National Culture influence the people's behaviours.




Nation is a useful way to define the boundaries of a society. Scientifically, technologically, medically, etc. the world is moving at amazing speeds.

In terms of culture, countries are far less isolated from each other than they were in the past, so it is not like one country can thrive without influecing other countries.

Some may regard the worldwide popularity of Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond as a sort of British cultures. These are identified with the British people. 

Watch the following Power Point Presentation and work with it. Solve the activities and hand in your final work in a plastic file. 

National culture from Liliana Lo Preiato

Drama in the Classroom

Drama in the English Classroom

 

Why are we introducing play scripts?

Scriptwriting helps students focus on register, adjacency pairs, vocabulary in context, and fluency. A script can be edited and re-drafted to focus on the writing process. The added benefit is that the students can perform their script when it is completed.

An easy way to learn new vocabulary is to create very short scenes in which they dramatize certain concepts. Aside from practicing newly learned vocabulary, students can focus on specific grammar features. Likewise, students may write scripts for scenes that focus on specific issues.

Why are we using plays?

When students are asked to take a role in a play, they can imagine and plan how to act in situations for which they do not yet have the language skills. This gives them the confidence to try their newly acquired language outside the classroom, too. Moreover, it gives them the chance to recite the same lines repeatedly, giving them the opportunity to practice pronunciation. Lines can be written (or chosen) to focus on particular aspects of pronunciation that are difficult for the student or the class as a whole.

There are many purposes for introducing play scripts into the classroom. Students can read for the main idea, read for details, read to write a different ending, read to understand character’s motivations, read to find grammar points, or learn vocabulary in context, among other purposes. 

Read this article prepared by your teacher. You'll find the steps how to make your own play script!

How to Make a Script for a Play by lilianalopreiato

And now, see an example of a playscript:

A Christmas Carol Short Script by lilianalopreiato

I hope this will be useful to prepare your own play script! 

PASSIVE VOICE

WHAT IS PASSIVE VOICE?

English has two voices: active and passive. 

The active voice is used when the subject does the action of the sentence. E.G. The dog ate my homework. 

 

The passive voice is used when the subject does not do the action of the sentence. E.G. My homework was eaten by the dog. 

We can only form a passive sentence from an active sentence when there is an object in the active sentence (transitive verbs).

 

The passive is formed with any verbal tense of the verb TO BE + the  PAST PARTICIPLE. 

WHEN IS PASSIVE VOICE USED?

1.  When the agent of the action is unknown:

E.G. My wallet was stolen last night. (we don't know who stole the wallet)

2.  When the agent is unimportant:

The new students’ centre was completed last week. (the people who built the centre are unnecessary information for the meaning of the sentence)

3. When the agent of the action is obvious from the context:

I was born in March of '55. (Everyone knows that it was my mother bore me then)

4.  To emphasize (put importance on) the recipient (receiver) of the action:

a. Only Jane was injured in the accident; the remainder of the passengers were unhurt. (we want Jane to be the subject of the sentence and at the beginning to emphasize her importance)

b. Erina was chosen as best student, and of course this made her happy. (the teacher who chose Erina is not what we want to emphasize)

5. To connect ideas in different clauses more clearly:

a. Pharmacologists would like to study the natural ‘pharmacy’ known as the rainforest, if this can be done before clear-cutting destroys it. (in this sentence, keeping THIS near the first clause makes the sentence's meaning clearer)

b. The music was being played too loud by the students, who were finally asked to turn it down.

6.  To make generic statements, announcements, and explanations:

a. Something should be done about the traffic jams in this town.

b. Patrons are asked not to smoke.

c. It's said that it's going to rain tonight.(Often, people will say, 'They say that it's going to rain tonight', the they being the weatherman.)

HOW DO WE FORM PASSIVE VOICE?

The passive form is created by combining a form of the VERB TO BE with the PAST PARTICIPLE of the main verb. 

In the passive voice the object of the active sentence becomes subject in the passive sentence. The subject of the active sentence becomes the agent of the passive sentence or is left out.

In fact, the agent of the passive sentence is not mostly written: we are not normally interested in the doer of the action in the passive sentence or the doer is unimportant or obvious. When we need to mention the doer of the action, we use the preposition BY.

example:

Active:	Peter	builds	a house.
Passive:	A house	is built	by Peter.

The passive can be used in different verbal tenses. Let's take a look at the passive forms of the verb write.

Tense		Subject	Verb	Object
Simple Present	Active:	Rita	writes	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	is written	by Rita.
Simple Past	Active:	Rita	wrote	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	was written	by Rita.
Present Perfect	Active:	Rita	has written	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	has been written	by Rita.
Future	Active:	Rita	will write	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	will be written	by Rita.
Modals	Active:	Rita	can write	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	can be written	by Rita.

Tense		Subject	Verb	Object
Present Continuous	Active:	Rita	is writing	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	is being written	by Rita.
Past Continuous	Active:	Rita	was writing	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	was being written	by Rita.
Past Perfect	Active:	Rita	had written	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	had been written	by Rita.
Future Perfect	Active:	Rita	will have written	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	will have been written	by Rita.
Conditional I	Active:	Rita	would write	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	would be written	by Rita.
Conditional II	Active:	Rita	would have written	a letter.
	Passive:	A letter	would have been written	by Rita.

For more explanation about to turn active sentence into passive clikc HERE.

WHAT SHALL I DO WHEN THE ACTIVE SENTENCE HAS TWO OBJECTS?

When there are two objects in an active sentence, there are two possible passive sentences.

E.G. The professor explained the exercise to the students.

There are two objects the example:
object 1 = indirect object: the students
object 2 = direct object: the exercise

An indirect object is very often a person, a direct object a thing. 

Each of the objects (direct and indirect) can be the subject in the passive sentence.

passive sentence - possibility 1
subject	verb	object	(agent)
The students	were explained	the exercise.	(by the professor).

passive sentence - possibility 2
subject	verb	object	(agent)
The exercise	was explained	to the students	(by the professor).

Possibility 1 is sometimes called Personal passive and it is the most common used in passive voice.

CLICK ON THE EXERCISES BELOW TO PRACTISE PASSIVE VOICE

EXERCISE 1

EXERCISE 2

EXERCISE 3

EXERCISE 4

EXERCISE 5

EXERCISE 6

EXERCISE 7

EXERCISE 8

EXERCISE 9

PROJECT EPALS

During last term 6º B took part in the project ePals, a safe social learning network which enabled students to communicate with peers from other part of the world using e-mails.

ePals made it possible to connect my students with teenagers from Floodwood School in Minnesota in the United States of America. 

All my learners involved in this project showed a real interest in the exchange. They were deeply engaged in the process of learning English since they wrote in English but they became techers of their peers in Minnesota who are learning Spanish as a foreign language. Interacting and working together, all students learn about each other and their cultures. In addition, students learn how to use social media tools for education purposes which greatly enhanced their self-confidence. 

I wanted this project to end in a different way but sometimes communication was not as fluent as we expected. Although our students got actively involved in the work, they did not always receive the same response. 

That's why I wish to send you my hearty congratulations on your genuine commitment to this work. You made me proud of you due to your sincere determination to this collaborative project.

Don't be disappointed if things did not work as expected. Some students are dreamers... others are talented... You, my babies, are both. Keep aiming higher! Sky is the only limit. 

Finally, I hope you will share life with others, enriching with others. Life is worth living!

Let your indomitable spirit never fade away! See you soon! And...

HEROES & VILLAINS

HEROES AND VILLAINS - Williams Carlos Williams by David Widgery

Read the following article retrieved from a quality newspaper

The first thing any practicing doctor who also writes gets asked is, ‘How do you find the time?’ A combined career ought, in theory, to be perfectly possible: writers and doctors are both only trained observers. And there is a distinguished list of literary medics. But almost all end up doing one or the other. And if they are any good as writers, the stethoscope takes second place. There never seems to be time to do both properly.

But William Carlos Williams, the great Modernist poet, succeeded. Williams, who was born in 1883 and died in 1963 after a series of strokes, was not only a prolific poet, critic, novelist and dramatist, but also a lifelong, full-time general practitioner in Rutherford, New Jersey. Although he could have easily set up in private practice in Manhattan, he chose instead to work in a working class industrial township with many recent immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who spoke little English.

His ‘Doctor Stories’ deal with crises understood by any contemporary inner-city GP: still birth, autopsy, patients who refuse examination or cannot understand reassurance, never-ending evening surgeries, externded family consultartions in broken Englisuh, the particular test of night-visiting. My visits are made to the concrete tower-blocks of Tower Hamlets in London’s East End, and the new immigrants are from Vietnam and Bangladesh. There is no other writer who deals so well with how to listen, how to care, how to be there at the moment of physical need. He must have jotted these feelings down on prescription pad or notebook, then transcribed them o his laboratory typewriter, when hammering often awoke his children. ‘By the time we assembled for breakfast, he had probably already done an hour’s stint,’ recalls his physician son William.

As much as his industry, I like his laconic tone. His tenderness is hard-edged, his humanism slightly cynical; best of all, he is never sentimental about the oppressed. And there is the sheer quality of his literary work.

Williams, whose mother was Puerto Rican, was only a second-generation English speaker, so he struggled to develop a truly American voice. His innovations were a simile-free- metaphor-stripped diction arranged with a syntax and prosody based on lug breaths. It produced a wonderful, still woefully underrated body of work, ranging from the long love-poem ‘Asphodel’, to the haiku-like lilts in ‘Pictures form Breugel’.

Williams is heroic because he was a prophet in his own land, because he reclaimed poetry from European-imitating academics and because he stayed a working doctor – and enjoyed it. ‘I never felt’, he wrote, ‘that medicine interfered with me but rather that it was my food and drink, the very thing that made it possible to write.’ So whenever I become disgruntled about the workload, I mutter a phrase of Williams’ about one of his patients, which sums up my own mixed feelings about practicing in the East End: ‘her smile, with a shrug, always won me.’

(David Widgery, The Independent)

ACTIVITY

MULTIPLE CHOICE 

Choose the most suitable answer for each question

1. How is William Carlos Williams unlike other literary doctores, according to David Widgery?
   1.   He enjoyed working as a doctor.
   2.   His work as a doctor was a source of ideas for his writing.
   3.   He managed to continue both careers for all his life.
   4.   His powers of observation developed with his writing.
    
2. The problems that Williams encountered among his patients...
   1.   ...were typical of the time.
   2.   ...exist in similar settings today.
   3.   ...have disappeared with advances in medicine.
   4.   ...were specific to the region where he worked.
    
3. In which area is there a similarity between William Carlos Williams and David Widgery?
   1.   Literary tastes
   2.   Temperament
   3.   Family origins
   4.   Working environment 
    
4. When did William Carlos Williams do his literary work?
   1.   At night
   2.   After evening surgery
   3.   During the afternoon
   4.   In the early morning. 
    
5. According to David Widgery, the reputation of William Carlos Williams...
   1.   ...is now higher than it has ever been.
   2.   ...is not as high as it deserves to be.
   3.   ...has declined since his death.
   4.   ...has been overshadowed by that of his contemporaries.
    
6. Regarding his own medical work, David Widgery...
   1.   ...fails to find it challenging.
   2.   ...sometimes wishes he had less to do.
   3.   ...continues practising for the sake of his patients.
   4.   ...finds it interferes with his aims as a writer.
    

 

SAY & TELL

These two verbs have similar meanings, but they are not always used in the same way.
 
The main difference between them is the order of the complements after the verbs:
 
Say something to someone.
          D.O.               I.O.
Tell someone something
          I.O.           D.O.
 
So, say is usually followed by the direct object, while tell needs an indirect object first.

Say and tell are both used in direct and indirect speech, but we must point out a few things:

 

• In direct speech, say can introduce statements, exclamations and questions, tell can only introduce statements. Inversion of say and noun subject is possible when it follows the statement. Mary said: "What a beautiful morning! = "What a beautiful morning!" said Mary. (Notice the subject-verb inversion). However, there is no inversion with tell.
• In indirect speech, both say and tell can be used in statements, but not in questions. Other verbs such as ask, inquire, wonder or want to know can be used. "Where do you live?" He asked me where I lived.
• In reported commands, requests or advice, we can use tell, but say is not possible. "Could you open the window, please?" He told her to open the window.

There are expressions in which these two verbs are not interchangeable. These are collocations and they must be learnt by heart:

 

SAY	TELL
yes	the truth
no	a lie
something	a joke
a prayer	the time
a word	a story
hello	a secret
goodbye	the difference

 AND...

WHY ARE YOU LOOKING DOWN HERE? IT'S YOUR TURN TO SAY SOMETHING!!







ACTIVITIES

Click on the links below and practise SAY & TELL

EXERCISE 1

EXERCISE 2

EXERCISE 3

EXERCISE 4

EXERCISE 5 

REPORTED SPEECH - ORDERS & REQUESTS

Orders - or commands - are reported with ordered and the infinitive form with to.

e.g. "Wait a minute!" becomes:  He ordered me to waiT a minute.

Requests are reported with asked and the infinitive form with to.

e.g. "Please, wait!" becomes:  He asked me to wait.

       "Could you close the door, please?" He ASKED me TO CLOSE the door.

 

Negative orders or requests are reported with ordered or asked and not to + infinitive.

e.g. "Don’t tell me anything, please." becomes:  He asked me not to tell him anything.

      "Don’t talk anymore!" becomes: He ordered me not to talk anymore. 

AND NOW...

 

Click on the links below to practise how to report orders and requests

EXERCISE 1

EXERCISE 2

EXERCISE 3 

PERSONAL, POSSESSIVE, AND REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS

All the words of the English language fall into one of these eight categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. Likewise, there are several types of pronouns: 

 

• personal: I, me,...
• possessive: mine, yours,...
• reflexive: myself, yourself,...
• demonstrative: this, that,...
• indefinite: some, any,...
• interrogative: who, what,...
• relative: which, that,...

 
Today we are going to see the first three types, which, like all pronouns, are used instead of nouns. Don’t get confused: personal pronouns do not only refer to persons. They are called like that because they refer to the three grammatical persons: 
 

• First: person who speaks
• Second: person who is spoken to
• Third: a person or thing different from the first and second.

  

Some personal pronouns can be the subject of a sentence, others can be direct or indirect objects. They can refer to the first, second or third person, and they can be plural or singular. Only the third person singular pronouns can be masculine (he/him), feminine (she/ her) and neuter (it).
 

You can find all these pronouns in the table below.

Persons	Subject pronouns	Object pronouns	Possessive adjectives	Possessive pronouns	Reflexive pronouns
1st. p. sing	I	me	my	mine	myself
2nd p. sing.	you	you	your	yours	yourself
3rd p. sing. masc.	he	him	his	his	himself
3rd p. sing. fem.	she	her	her	hers	herself
3rd p. sing. neut.	it	it	its	its	itself
1st p. plural	we	us	our	ours	ourselves
2nd. p. plural	you	you	your	yours	yourselves
3rd p. plural	they	them	their	theirs	themselves

Let’s see how we can use these pronouns:

SUBJECT & OBJECT PRONOUNS
 

If we had to change the nouns for pronouns in this sentence Paul loves Laura, which ones would you use? 

Taking into account that John is the subject and Laura is the direct object, the sentence would be He loves her. We cannot say *He loves she, as she is a subject pronoun, not an object pronoun. (See table above).

 
Object pronouns can also go after prepositions: Hurry up! They are waiting for us, not *They are waiting for we. INCORRECT

POSSESSIVES 

Possessive adjectives accompany nouns, while possessive pronouns go alone.  

E.G.That’s her car and this is mine.
        adjective                 pronoun
 

Possessives agree with the possessor and not with the thing possessed.  

E.G. That’s my book. Those are my books.
Note that the possessive adjective remains the same with either singular or plural nouns.

Note that I have also included the possessive adjectives because their use is very close to that of the possessive pronoun.

REFLEXIVE

Reflexive pronouns  are used in cases when the same person is the subject and the object of the sentence. 

E.G. Sarah is teaching herself to speak Spanish.
In this example Sarah both does and receives the action of the verb.
 

They can also be used as indirect objects: I bought myself a beautiful watch. And also as the object of a preposition: He is angry with himself for failing the exam.
 

Sometimes they are used for emphasis: I don’t think you need help with your homework. You can do it yourself.
 

Preceded by the preposition by, reflexive pronouns mean “alone”: He likes living by himself = He likes living alone.

I hope all this will be useful fou you!