Love at first sight
There are so many worlds existing parallel, the rich and the poor, the young and the elderly, those who are healthy and those who suffer. Recently I have come across another one.
I was imprisoned in my clumsy body and had to approach the surface every fifteen seconds for breath, but diving over a coral reef turned to be my dream come true. Surrounded by a shoal of fish in any color man could imagine, I felt like a part of the underwater world. The rays of sunlight were gently touching the variety of shades and shapes. Unbelievable. Awesome.
Only then did I realize that I had just knocked on the door to the world I had never known before, the world I would love to explore. Without intervention, only pure observation and admiration of its endless beauty.
At this very moment, as I am sitting in front of my PC, that world lives its own life. I am so content to be aware of its existence and hope to have a closer encounter with it one day.
diana_ielts7
Of plants and people
Dear All,
the spring is coming. Where would you rather be? Just look around the garden. Does it seem barren and hostile? Why not bring some life to it?
Most garden plants are highly adaptable, thriving in most soils and situations where they get a good deal of sun. They can be planted directly where they are to flower. They require the minimum of care – weeding, removing dead flowers, watering in dry spells and stalking of the tallest specimens is all the attention they ask for. They are often outstanding value for money; a packet of seed will cheer up any garden from spring until autumn frosts, and can provide an inexpensive supply of cut flowers.
Life is wonderful.
yours
Chance the Gardener
PS There are few plants, however, that need to be taken special care of. They …
Life is a state of mind.
Looking awry
Last year, when a colleague teacher who was using Coffee and Cigarettes at a lesson, tentatively flashed the dvd disc, the title got penciled in and patiently awaited its turn. Until a few months ago, when we discovered what a jewel it was! In this real curio, shot in black and white, about two dozens of distinct characters, coupled separately in eleven short episodes, chat over coffee (or occasionally tea) puffing away clouds of smoke.
You can hardly call the episodes cinema, they are very theatrical in form. The camera is more than restricted, it just shifts sideways, capturing the talkers’ busy faces, and every now and then goes overhead to capture tables laden with cups of coffee and cigarette stubs.
The beauty of Coffee and Cigarettes, however, is the stories they bring to the tables. Stories within stories. Actors mostly play themselves – a pair of British luvvies, cocaine-demented rockers, sleep-deprived rappers, whingeing and cursing Italians, ageing New York bohemians … they all drag their their own lives and careers with them, and as they are getting high on caffeine and nicotine, they unfold most peculiar, at times idiotic, stories to share onscreen. In between thin coffee-table dialogues and silences they gaze or cast glances at each other. Once absent-minded, intoxicated, or mysterious, at other times curiously checking the opponent’s reaction, pensive or crafty, adding more, getting deeper, revealing some momentary truth.
And there is always a story that happened before they appear sitting round the table, and a story to be continued, when their figures fade into black at the end of each episode.
Double alienation
When we work with a course book and we decide to put the language over in a certain order, we place the learners in a situation of double alienation:
(a) this is not their language (not their mother tongue)
(b) this is not what they want to express (we ask them to re-use, with a greater or lesser degree of freedom, gobbits of language chosen by people from outside their group, that is to say the authors and readers who work for the publishers).
This double alienation impacts negatively on the participants’ motivation and on their ability to understand, retain and integrate the foreign language. It also impacts negatively on the way the people learning the language relate to each other.
In traditional methodological terms, the “transfer” phase of the lesson which is meant to allow the learners to freely re-use language previously presented in the course book, in practice often runs into trouble and imposes artificial constraints on the learners. The same can be said for techniques that present participants with language at the start of the lesson and then require them to re-use some of this language right away.
(Bernard Dufeu)
