-ING AFTER PREPOSITIONS

Opinion article

Write an opinion article of a minimum of 150 and a maximum of 200 words on one of the two following topics:

1) Psychics, believe it or not.

2) Reconsider Columbus Day. Watch the following video and write an article for a magazine expressing your opinion:

On page 49 in your books you will find some help about the structure of this composition. Deadline: Wednesday 20th October.

Me too / So do I

We introduced in class the structures "so do I" and "neither do I" to replace "me too" and "me neither".

If you need to revise how this structures work, click on the following link and read section

2. So/Neither do I, I do, I don't., etc.

If you don't know or you are not sure about when you can use "me too" and when you should use "so do I", here is the answer from the BBC Learning English site to this question:

Finally, here are some exercises about the structure "so/neither do I":

Ken Lee

If you are still alive after Halloween and the Day of the Dead, here is something to kill you. Just how far bad English can take you: the "Ken Lee" phenomenon. And the Bulgarian protagonist lives in Spain. Just in case, don't copy her pronunciation:

In the next video you can read (using the subtitles, unless you speak Bulgarian, of course) how the singer managed to achieve such pronunciation. In spite of everything, I would not reject the method, but I would suggest you refine it a little bit after the first steps (phonetics might help here). Oh, and watch out for some mistakes in the subtitles (at least they do not affect communication):

By the way, here is the original song with the "right" pronunciation. Please, learn this if any:

Books and films: Life Of Pi by Yann Martel

Life Of Pi, by Yann Martel (2001)

A few years ago I recommended this book to 4th year students at the EOI of Lebrija, and then knew that M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) had been chosen by 20th Century Fox, who bought the rights, to direct the film version. It seems he dropped the project to direct The Lady in the Water, which did not turn out so well after all... Then Alfonso Cuarón replaced him but also dropped it to direct The Children of Men. After him it was Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, Amelie) who was chosen but he also dropped "after initial exploration". Finally, it seems Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) will hopefully direct the film, which will be released in 2010/11.


I still recommend its reading before watching the movie, as it is highly inspiring and suggestive and I guess the film will have to cut on lots of interesting parts to fit into an acceptably long motion picture. And also suggest you approach it with an open mind and not having read any summaries about it (thus my lack of links to the book reviews). You will have to trust me here.

So, do it and then let's see if the film is up to the original novel. I bet Ang Lee is the perfect choice to transmit the beautiful feelings of the novel but I prefer finding my own viewpoint and then contrasting it, don't you? Of course, you can always try the easy way and just wait and watch the film, but you will probably lose a lot of the nicely surprising moments of the novel.

A curiosity: the Canadian author of the book, Yann Martel, was born in Spain.


Check out this SlideShare Presentation where different people create illustrations for the novel (ideally after reading it ;-))

Life Of Pi Art

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