The "Fun Theory" attacks again

The Fun Theory: fun can change behaviour for the better. This trend has given birth to excellent advertising campaigns like the one with the musical stairs.

Here is another example which combines technology with fun. It comes from Sweden and it intends to make people pay for their broadcasting fee, a tax citizens must pay also in the United Kingdom in order to be entitled to watch TV at home (click here for details).

Here are the two campaigns. Which one do you find more effective?

SWEDISH CAMPAIGN

(click on the picture to go to the site)

BRITISH CAMPAIGN

International Biodiversity Day

To read about the meaning of this celebration, click on the picture.

And here is a beautiful story to make us think:

Interview with woman suing telephone company after cell bill exposed her infidelity

Yesterday, the Canadian newspaper National Post published an interview with Gabriela Nagy, the woman who is suing her phone company, Rogers Wireless Inc., claiming that a breach of her contract had led to her husband discovering she had had a love affair. Click on the picture to read the interview.

Plurilingualism: how to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull

Although we have been getting news of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull practically every day since its eruption started, you rarely hear its name on the news.

Firstly, its real name is Eyjafyoll, as the rest makes reference to the glacier which covers it and not to the volcano itself. You can read more about this and about the fun Icelandic people are having with the mispronunciation of this landmark in Telegraph.co.uk : British attempts to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull causes hilarity in Iceland

As for the pronunciation, here is a fragment from abc.NEWS.com which is available in yahoo.news where an Icelander pronounces it. But she does not make clear the fact that the real name is shorter. Maybe she wants to keep the difficulty for the fun of it.

How to Pronounce Eyjafjallajökull

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Life-cycle: John Lewis's ad

As a teacher, I tend to choose materials by how useful they are in the learning context but some other times their artistic or entertaining value makes them worth mentioning.

Here is an ad for John Lewis which has both. When I first saw it I really liked it but it also made me think about how good it was to introduce the topic and vocabulary of the different ages we go through in life: childhood, adolescence, maturity... (see other suggestions below)

It seems I'm not the only one who liked it, as it has gone viral on YouTube this week. Here is the video and a link to MailOnline, where you can read an interesting article about it.





The £6m ad that's got Britain talking - and sobbing

Added on May 9th:

Why the John Lewis advert has us hooked

More ways of exploiting the advert:

* "Can" for abilitiy: the song, Billy Joel's She's Always A Woman is based on the repetition of the structure "she can ..." to make a list of the "abilities" a woman may have (from the point of view of the singer, of course). This can also be used as a topic for discussion at higher levels.

*Descriptions: students may describe the different actresses and see their similarities and differences (on top of age). Actually, at a certain point, they might notice some slight change in height in one of them. Also the background changes but here is where the ad has received the only negative criticism, as it does not seem to change in time.

*Biographies: the story in the ad could be used to invent a biography and add details which are not mentioned, like the woman's job, her husband, where they live, etc.

More suggestions?

Summer Term

Classes shut and exams threatened as ash cloud clogs working Britain - Times Online

The problem comes from the fact that most schools start today after the Easter Holidays and many teachers and students were abroad when the "ash crisis" started.

The academic year in primary and secondary schools in the UK is divided into three terms: Autumn, Spring and Summer (traditionally called Christmas, Easter and Summer terms, these names have changed due to political correction). In the middle of each term there is a week holiday called half term. There are also some bank holidays scattered along the year as well as the main vacation periods: Summer, Christmas and Easter.

For more detailed information about the British school calendar you need to check the information about a particular area. Here is the calendar for 2009/10 at the London Borough of Hackney:

The Learning Trust - The Future for Education in Hackney

It is interesting to contrast this calendar with that of New South Wales in Australia: New South Wales School Calendar

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Oxford & Cambridge: The Exchange Boat Race.

Tomorrow, 3rd April, the annual boat race between the Oxford and Cambridge squads will take place on the River Thames.

Where to watch it? Click on the picture >>>>

To read about the origins of this famous race:

http://www.theboatrace.org/article/introduction

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April Fool's Day (Santos Inocentes)

Related vocabulary

Hoax: Act intended to deceive or trick.

Practical joke: a prank or trick usually intended to make the victim appear foolish.

Prank: a mischievous trick or practical joke.

Valentines and love letters.

Here is a video that could be used to introduce a class about St Valentine's Day:

One thing I like about it is that it uses lots of song lyrics in the sentences the character is trying to write and it could be a good idea to make some competition in class to try to identify (and sing!!) some of them. Students could also try to "help" the man to write his love letter or valentine without watching the end of the story.

If you need more materials about St Valentine's Day, Larry Ferlazzo's blog could be of use. Here you will find more links to what he considers the best sites to learn about St Valentine's Day.

Now here is a song which is not mentioned in the video above but which is directly linked to its theme. It could represent the reaction of the lady who receives the letter from the man in the video.

The song is "Love letters", a classic, in the voice of Alison Moyet (the first version I heard although not necessarily the best, that is up to you).

To help you write valentines, here is a suggestion I have taken from Times Online. The two first lines are the "cliché" of valentine "poetry". The rest is a highly political statement and the basis for the joke.

It makes reference to an interview in which the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, opens his heart about private matters in front of the cameras. This has been perceived by some people (the cartoonist Peter Brookes , for example) as a change of attitude in the prospect for votes in the next election.

TV shows and teenagers

Here is an article (click on the image) from Guardian.co.uk, the online version of The Guardian , a British broadsheet newspaper.
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In the article, some of the most popular UK TV shows among teenagers are described by one of them, Liberty Love (15), by answering to three questions:

- Who watches it.

- Why it is good (written as an indirect question, thus the word order).

- Best character.

A similar activity could be done in class (about programmes in your own country, other types of programmes, or for other age groups) and present it as an article or as a short talk.

Of course, as it is an opinion article, disagreement and debate could be another ingredient in the final recipe.

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Interesting vocabulary: must-see (adjective created from shortening the sentence "must be seen", meaning you cannot miss it or worth seeing). Read about its origin in Wikipedia.

Oxford Street and Christmas lights.

Well, I have to say that they had to cover patches with tarmac here and there, as the works have not been completely finished yet. We thought this only happened in Spain, but here it is the same.

Today is the day the Christmas lights will be lit up in Oxford and Regent Street and this attracts crowds in the same way "el alumbrado" does in Seville for the opening of the April Fair, so it had to be ready by all means.


It is a great improvement, though, and it is fully functional in spite of the patches I mentioned.

And I thank the Mayor of London as I always come out of the underground station on the wrong side (I am that silly) and it is crazy trying to cross the street at this point, fighting masses of people in all directions.








Here you are some information about Xmas lights in London, with the calendar for the different areas, as they are not lit up at the same time.


This year and thanks to Disney, Regent Street and Oxford Street will be lit up at the same time (the crossing of these streets is Oxford Circus, above).

Oxford Circus has been decorated with references to Disney's adaptation of Charles Dicken's Christmas Carol, showing today the world's premiere.

The English Blog

The English Blog, by Jeffrey Hill, is in my list of favourite blogs and the following post is a good example of why. Of course, on top of the interesting posts, there are excellent links and resources for students of English:

In The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy,

a "mega-selling cult classic", as defined on the back of the 2009 McMillan edition of the 1.979 humorous novel by Douglas Adams, Bethselamin is mentioned as a "fabulously beautiful planet" affected by one of our modern diseases: tourism.



Adams describes the situation as follows: "Bethselamin is now so worried about the cumulative erosion by ten billion visiting tourists a year that any net imbalance between the amount you eat and the amount you excrete whilst on the planet is surgically removed from your bodyweight when you leave: so every time you go to the lavatory there it is vitally important to get a receipt".



Today, The Independent publishes a piece of news about monuments in danger in the UK and, although tourism may also play an important role, it is not always the main cause. Click on the image to read the article.

At the end of the article you can find that the organization who "watches" over monuments in danger gives a list of their World Monuments Watch for 2010. Among them, the historical landscape of Seville is included, but this time it is not tourism the main cause of danger. Can you guess what it is? Click on the following link to find out:

What's your opinion about it?

ABILITES

Abilities and resolutions are somehow connected, especially when we think about learning new skills. Most of the times, what we can do and what we would like to be able to do are two different things and that means needing a lot of will and effort to gain a new ability. One of these abilities is learning a new language, which is what we are trying to do with English, isn't it?

In class we heard the song "Spanish Lesson" by

Madonna, where she becomes the Spanish teacher in spite of being far from speaking the Spanish language. We have to thank her, though, for her love of Spanish culture and the "type-1 conditional sentence" she introduces: If you do your homework, baby I will give you more.

Here is a link to the song: SPANISH LESSON

And now a little homage to someone who is able to surprise us with his skills on the court. Click on the photo and read the article in the Australian press (The Australian on line):