Project: a survey

Last week I started a new project with my 4º ESO class. The project consists in writing a survey, analysing data from answers and presenting the results to the rest of the class.

Here's the presentation I used for this project:



One of the conversation topics for ISE III is role models, so I decided to use this as the topic for the survey. I asked my students to create a survey in order to find out what their peers consider role models and how they choose their role models. To make it a bit less abstract, I established some areas in which people normally find them: sports, entertainment and close personal circle. Within these categories, I allowed them to use sub-categories, such as the world of cinema, music and technology/design. 

The first step was to get my students familiarised with the term 'role model' and to give them a more neutral point of view. I gave them links to several sites so they could read about role models and what it means to have or to be a role model. These are the links I gave them:

Article on female role models

Link to Diversity Role Models, a non-for-profit organisation that promotes role models from diverse sexual orientations.

Rolemodel.net, a website about the importance of role models in general, focusing on celebrities and their influence on others. 

A class discussion about what they had read ensued. The students had realised that having a role model meant something slightly different to what they had initially thought, and their understanding of the influence a role model can have on young people was deeper. 

Then, the students were arranged into groups. I used TeamUp for this. I asked each group to choose a team leader, who would be in charge of keeping time and assigning jobs. I usually find that students don't always make the most of the time I give them for projects, so a tight deadline, a reporting system like Team-Up and a manager within each group normally take care of all this. As usual, the students had the assessment rubric at hand, so they had a fairly clear idea of the quality that was expected. 

They used Google Forms to make their surveys. I love the Google suite because its apps enable collaboration, and since I always ask my students to share their documents with me, I have visibility all the time. I can check progress, praise students, make comments and so on. 

At first, the students weren't very clear how to start making their survey. I had asked them to include some questions for statistics (age, gender, background ... ) and then, I suggested grouping their questions into sections, each section dealing with a particular sub-topic of their chosen category. This would allow the students to interpret answer results more easily. 

The students could use all different types of answers, but most of them used multiple choice, tickboxes and short answer. I helped them fine-tune the range of answers available, reminding them that surveys are purposeful questionnaires-- this proved a bit harder than I had expected, but then again, making surveys isn't an easy task. 

When they were happy with their questionnaires (and so was I), I suggested adding pictures to the questions in order to make them more appealing. After all, students from all different year levels are going to take the surveys, and teenagers like to look at pictures as well as reading questions. 

This is how far we've come. Once the surveys have been answered by enough people, the students will complete part 2 of the project, which will consist in analysing the answers and presenting their findings to the class. 

I'll update you once this is done. 

Thanks for reading! 

Scottish English

There are a lot of difficult accents and, I'm not going to lie, the Scottish accent is one of them. It's not only the pronunciation that makes it a bit hard to understand, but also the fact that there are a lot of Scottish words most other native English speakers have never heard of, and they are used widely. This is because in most informal situations, people use a variety of English called Scots, which a lot of people from Scotland consider a language in its own right (and a lot of visitors do, too), and many Scottish people take pride in their distinctive sounds and words.

They do say that one of the clearest varieties of English is spoken in Scotland. In Inverness, for example, people speak in a recognisable Scottish accent, but one which is clear enough for anybody to understand without trouble. Go to Glasgow, on the other hand, and you may well need an interpreter.

What are the main characteristics of the Scottish accent, then?

Pronunciation

Broadly speaking, this is what makes it different from standard English:

- Scottish speakers roll their 'r', and it's a strong 'r', not the soft sound Americans make. It's sharp, it's short, and it's there. As a result, a word like 'girl' is not pronounced 'gal', but almost 'gerrrrral', with a small vovel sound between the 'r' and the 'l' (unpronunciable otherwise). Words like this include 'curl', 'whirl', 'Carlsberg'...

- Scottish long vowels are far less frequent than in standard English. 'Bath' contains a short /a/ sound, whereas in RP it's long, /a:/. Thus, there are some words that become homophones, like pull and pool.

- Some dipthongs become long vowels. For example, house is pronounced 'hoose', about is pronounced 'aboot'... and not all dipthongs stay the same. Home is commonly pronounced 'heim', toes is 'teis'...  And some words turn short vowels into dipthongs, like head: 'heid'.

- In some areas, speakers drop the sound /t/ when it's between vowels: be'er instead of better. 

- The sound /x/ ("j" as in "jamón" for Spanish speakers) exists, although it is a bit softer. Common words include loch (=lake), dreich (=wet, damp weather), och (sound people make to express annoyance)... it's very common in names of Gaelic origin, which are ubiquitous once you venture into the Highlands.

Vocabulary

There are a lot of common words that don't resemble regular English:

aye = yes

nay = no

ken= know

gie = give

bonnie = nice

kirk = church

bairn = child

lass, lassie = girl

blether = chat

braw = beautiful

haar = mist

how? = why?

crabbit = grumpy

loan = alley

wifey = woman

In Scottish English, it's common to use 'no' as a shortened form of 'not', although the word order is not always the same as in standard English.

'I'll no tell ye any lies" = 'I won't tell you any lies"

'Don't' is often pronounced 'dinny', and 'didn't' is 'didny', with the stress placed on the first syllable.

'I dinny ken him' = 'I don't know him"

It's also fairly common to use 'ye' to mean 'you', or 'yes' and 'youse' to mean 'you' in plural.

'I'll meet youse outside the pub' = 'I'll meet you all outside the pub'

All of these make it quite exciting (and, if you're new to the country, quite nerve wrecking) to decipher what people are saying to you.

Once you get used to it, it's quite alright, really.

Here are a couple of videos to illustrate some Scottish accents.

First, David Tennant reads Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. Tennant comes from Renfrewshire, in the West of Scotland. 

Next, a short clip from Brave, the Pixar film. Merida is played by Scottish actress Kelly MacDonald, a Glaswegian actress. Her mother, Elinor, is played by English actress Emma Thompson, who does a sterling job at speaking with a broad Highland accent. 

The trailer for Sunshine on Leith is a good example of the accent generally found in Edinburgh. 

Finally, in these videos you will find out some of the problems some Scottish people face because of their accent. 

Thanks for reading! See you next time! 

The Raven

I've come to realise that, no matter how old my students are (ahem, ahem...), they always enjoy celebrating foreign holidays such as Halloween. Last October, I decided to humour them, but I had my rules.

1-. They were going to read a poem.

2-. The poem was long.

3-. It had lots of strange words.

4-. I wanted to record their voices reading it.

Their enthusiasm somewhat subdued, I showed them the following video:

Some of them were touched by this point. Most of them, though, still had their suspicions. It was long, it had a lot of long, difficult words, and the subject matter wasn't all that clear. Who was Lenore, anyway? 

Printed copy of the poem in our hands, we went almost line by line, focusing on the rhythm and the sounds, just getting used to the cadence and the images conjured up by the extensive use of alliteration, repetition and rhyme. Even those students who still didn't understand the poem were starting to let themselves get carried away by the intricate, elaborate and resounding mechanics of the poem. 

OK, then. Death, loss, insanity, obsession... the themes started to fly around in class. Written on the board, bubble diagram covering the white surface. The words started to gain meaning, up until then unclear. Mythological figures became more concrete and significant. Most students were on board and started to make decisions about how they were going to read their lines. 

They wanted to read their lines in pairs, so I gave each pair of students two stanzas. We went over difficult words, drawing their attention to internal rhyme so they could predict their pronunciation. Without saying they were turning into actors, the students were interested in the speaker's frame of mind in order to give their performance some substance. And then, the big day arrived. 

I used WavePad, a voice-recording app on the iPad, and recorded stanza after stanza. The students felt satisfied after we finished, our 10-minute long recording testament to their efforts, to the journey they had to make to reach the master of horror literature, even if it was only with their fingertips. 

When we finished, the general comment was... we should do this more often! 

I agreed. 

Have you used Poe's masterpiece in class? What was your experience? Let me know in the comments below!