Edgar Allan Poe: Short Stories (1º ESO)

The master of horror, the father of detective fiction, the main contributor to the obscure and the macabre... Halloween wouldn't have been completed without  Poe. Last year, I got my Advanced students to read The Raven collaboratively. Because of technological glitches, I haven't been able to upload the recording anywhere... so this time I approached the task differently.

It was my 1º ESO students this time. First, we had a look at the following presentation, which I created specifically for this project:




The students were given a calendar to help them plan their work:


Then, we split the class into two groups, and having a close look at the (adapted) text of the two stories, the students began to unleash the performers within and finally... we made two recordings, added pictures and... voilà!

The project was complete.

In a task like this, students learn about literature, read a creative story, practice pronunciation and intonation, and develop their digital competence by putting together an audiovisual product. They also work as part of a team and develop collaborative working skills.

The assessment was done by using this rubric:




As expected, this project involved quite a lot of hard work, but the students really enjoyed it.

Thanks for popping in! See you next time!

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! 

Australian English

Here's one of those accents most people would be happy to understand. However, few English learners try to sound Aussie when they try to sound 'natural'. At least, that is the case in Spain, where most native English teachers come from either the USA or the British Isles and, naturally, teach their students their own accents. 

There are two main differences between dialects: vocabulary and pronunciation. Grammar tends to stay more or less the same in every dialect, although we could make some generalisations about this as well and say that such-and-such a dialect is similar to British English or to American English.

I'd say that Australian English is similar to British English, as far as grammar is concerned, and thanks to TV series like Neighbours, a lot of Brits have adopted some Aussie words, and even some of the intonation typical of speakers down under. 

VOCABULARY

This video illustrates some differences between Australian English and American English. 

In this video, you can see how Australian speakers tend to shorten words in colloquial speech. 

PRONUNCIATION

Well, it's been a bit of a challenge to find good videos to illustrate pronunciation... most of them were either really boring, or had been made by non-Australian people. Anyhow, here we go. 

An Australian comedian, Simon Taylor, goes over a few Aussie accents. 

Here, you have a comparison between Canadian English and Australian English. 

I hope you enjoyed this post... see you next time!