Presentations and peer assessment

Today we are going to do the country presentations for as many of the groups as possible.
 The presentations will be filmed for reasons of assessment.

As the same time you will be doing a peer assessment.

Choose any presenting group and fill in the assessment where
1 is the lowest grade and 5 is the highest.

You MUST write a comment to  justify the grade you have given.





Those groups who were only one person on Monday need to get together and plan for their presentation on the Friday of week 45

A mini presentation of an English-speaking country

Thanks for your blogs. I hope you had fun doing them!

Today we will prepare for our first oral presentation.

Several groups mentioned this in their suggestions for the course.

You will be given an English-speaking country in groups of three.

I want you to give some very basic information about the country-

location, population, kind of government, head of state etc.

Then, according to the curriculum ( see below)

Kommunikationens innehåll
Samhällsfrågor, kulturella, historiska, politiska och sociala förhållanden
Eleven diskuterar översiktligt några företeelser i olika sammanhang och delar av världen där engelska används, och kan då också göra enkla jämförelser med egna erfarenheter och kunskaper

.......... choose one aspect of life and compare it with the way things are in Sweden

Some examples of possible areas of study are:-

 policing, school system (or aspect of it), national feast days, traditional dances, traditional food culture, political system (some aspect),  traditional music, "national" sport   etc.

You will have the whole of the lesson today, homework time this week plus 15 minutes on Friday.

The presentations should not be longer than 5 minutes each.

They will be filmed.

Each person will be graded for their individual part in the presentation and then the group will receive a grade for the entire content.

We will also be using peer grading

Use the document on the blog (I will give you paper copies)

Grade the presentation after yours... The last group grades the first!

Here are the groups:

Group 1    UK   ( 4 people- 2 aspects)  Victor, Andrea, Dennis, Linn H

Group 2 Ireland  (3 people) Adrian, Vendela, Eric G

Group 3 Canada (3 people) Anton B, Anton D, Joel L

Group 4 USA ( 3 people) Axel B, James, Olle

Group 5 Australia ( 3 people) Johanna D, Naj, Emma R

Group 6 New Zealand ( 3 people) Jakob G, Emeli, Isabell

Group 7 Bahamas ( 3 people) Linnea H, Anders N, Martin O

Group 8 Jamaica ( 3 people) My, Alma, Linn R

Group 9 South Africa ( 3 people) Nentan, Jesper, Christoffer

Group 10 India ( 3 people) Lovisa, Adrian, Josefine

We will begin the presentations at 8.15 sharp on Friday in group order.

The presentations on this course are compulsory  in order to receive a grade

Blogger for a day

Today you get a chance to try your hand at blogging.

A blog ( short for weblog) is a social media site for sharing information and getting response.

The most common blog services areTumblr, Wordpress and Blogger.

They provide a non technical user with the necessary tools to present information and views often about specific subjects.

From the beginning blogs were written by individuals on specific themes- fashion, food, gaming, humour etc.

Nowadays the most popular blogs are called MABs (Multiple author blogs) and are run by corporations with commercial aims. A good example of this is Gawker who run a number of different blogs.

Some of them are here on this link

Today I want you to try your hand at blogging. If you need some assistance then try blogger (which I use for my course blogs).

Choose a subject- it can be related to music, horse riding, technology, social issues or whatever!

Then start blogging IN ENGLISH.

Next week we will share our blog links on this page (as comments) and enjoy one another's efforts.

Good blogging!

Welcome back SA12- Twelve years a slave part 2

I want to extend a warm welcome back to the students of SA12 after 2 challenging weeks in Uganda.

The hardest part coming back to Sweden is often to get people to understand what you're talking about!

I hope that your trip was rewarding and that you were able to get enough material for your diploma project (gymnasiearbete).

Today we will see the last part of our film "Twelve years a Slave"

After the break please discuss the following:

1. Get in small groups with at least one (but not all!) student(s) from the Social Science program.

Get them to tell you a little bit about their field trip to Uganda.

What impacted them most ( both positive and negative aspects)

2. Discuss the film questions and help those who missed the first part of the film. Fill in with facts.

3. talk about what you've been doing on the course when the social scientists have been in Uganda. Give some tips and examples of what you have learnt (scanning/skimming for example)

On Friday you will all have the chance to become a blogger for a day. Maybe some of the SA12 students can do a simple blog about some aspect of what they saw in Uganda. 

12 years a slave

Today we will see the first part of the film "12 years a Slave" based on the true story of Solomon Northup.

As the film is 134 minutes long ( 2 hours and 14 minutes) we will see the first 90 minutes today.

That will leave us 45 minutes for Monday and the chance for even some of the Social scientists to see the end of the film and participate in the discussions.

Here is an excellent synopsis of the film with discussion questions.

We will use this on Monday for our analysis.

Never take the freedom you have for granted and remember that freedom without responsibility is no true freedom.

Have a good week-end

Scanning and skimming in non-fiction texts

Today we are going to work on non-fiction reading.

First of all, on Friday we spoke about the two methods of scanning and skimming to read larger amounts of text quickly.

Here is a site to see if you have understood and practise these skills.

Do all four tasks and write a comment to me about them.

Now read the following pdf file about Reading skills 

Use the method stated (scanning and skimming) to find brief information about the following:

What is "reciprocal teaching" and when can it be used?

What is important to remember when writing quick summaries?

Compare "Magnet summaries" and "gist summaries". What differences are there between them?

Now two brief articles on non-fiction subjects but at a very elementary level. Read and do the relevant exercise

Here is the first text 
about the relationship between science and society.

The second text is about Florida and introduces some very simple economic terms. 
Paraphrase the final paragraph of the article. 

The final text is a longer text about the effects of listening to music when reading
Summarize these effects in a few sentences.

Text book Work- Reading skills

We need to see where we are going today.

The course is now 5 weeks old.

So what have you learnt during those 5 weeks?
How much has your English improved?

Before we get into the content of today's lesson we need to look at how you can really improve your language...



Today we are going to look at the skill of reading. 
It is an essential part of language learning.

Often students forget to apply the skills they use as native speakers when reading in a foreign language. They stop to look up every word and find reading very difficult compared to listening.

Here are some strategies to improve your reading:

• Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection
• Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content
• Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
• Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
• Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text.

Today we are going to read two texts from the text book. 

I want you to read the texts and apply some of the strategies 

given above.

After reading I want you to make up a pre-reading activity that a student could have done before reading the text in order to help someone get more out of his/her reading.

Why do you think just this text is in the textbook? How could we apply it to our situation today?

Make up a new title for the text so that a reader more esaily can understand beforehand what it is about.

Here are the two texts:

Falling Leaves  page 19

Dust of life   p. 39

Finally, compare the two texts.

What similarities are there between them and what differences are there?

How about doing your first word list of the year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you have time over you can read either

It's all beer and no books p.26    or

Heroes in the rubble p.45.

These are not extracts from a literary work but are self-contained articles with a specific purpose.

What do you think the purpose is and does the writer achieve what he/she set out to do in your opinion?