Reading Project - Checklist 3 - BookPortfolio

Finally, here is the Checklist you should use to make sure your portfolio is complete:

Our PORTFOLIO contains:
1. Individual Reading Logs including:
- my reactions and reflections as I was reading the short story/book
- self -assessment (e.g. commitment, what I would do differently, whether I am pleased with my work and the group's work, .... )
2. Information about the author and background historical information
3. Beautiful Passages and discussion
4. Illustration(s) and discussion
5.  Any other texts you've written (e.g. dramatisations)
6. Conclusions and recommendations (Group)
(Points 2-6 = your presentation, mostly)

And now I'm done with checklists :)

Reading Project - Checklist 2 - Groupwork

Click here for a second Checklist, this time about Group Work. It's actually the one you filled in in class and that will be used later in both final assessment and individual interviews.

Reading Project - Checklist 1 - Presentations

Here are just a few questions  - actually a checklist -  to help you prepare and assess your Presentation:

When we introduce the author and historical background:
1. We selected aspects that are relevant for the interpretation of the book/short story
2. After the presentation the audience will be able to establish the connections between author/background and book/short story

About the connections/illustrations:
1. We have discussed them in the group
2. Presentation is the result of that discussion, not individual points of view
3. We are happy with our work mainly because we discovered many new things.

About the Beautiful Passages:
They are either:
1. illustrated and/or
2. read expressively and/or
3. dramatised and/or
4. explained in terms of style/technique


If we have a Powerpoint:
1. We're NOT going to read the slides
2. Most slides are IMAGES that help us illustrate/explain some point
3. If we do have some text, we are quite sure it's just topics
4. Text/topics are 'readable' i.e. right font / right colour / right background

All in all:
1. We are confident because we read the book/short story and are well-prepared
2. We are confident our colleagues will be curious and will most probably read the book (or at least see the film!)

I tried to keep it simple. Add other questions if you must. That would be lovely :)

THE GREAT GATSBY

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was the last book presentation.  A memorable book with one of the most forceful beginnings I've ever read.
So I thought it might be a good way to say good-gye, to post it here, and wish you  many many memorable readings - in English... - in the years to come :-)

See you soon

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought-frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

You can find more in http://www.publicbookshelf.com/fiction/great-gatsby/younger-vulnerable-1

Translating (2)

For our second exercise in translating click here. That's where you'll find the extract from Falling Man by Don LeLillo that you read and analysed in class.

Translating (1)

Check your translation of this extract from Angela's Ashes against the published Portuguese version. What similarities do you find? What differences? Which version do you like best? Yours?

Paddy Clohessy has no shoe to his foot, his mother shaves his head to keep the lice away, his eyes are red, his nose always snotty. The sores on his kneecaps never heal because he picks at the scabs and puts them in the mouth. His clothes are rags he has to share with his six brothers and a sister and when he comes to school with a bloody nose or a black eye you know he had a fight over the clothes that morning. He hates school. He's seven going on eight, the biggest and oldest boy in the class, and he can't wait to grow up and be fourteen so that he can run away and pass for seventeen and join the English army and go to India where it's nice and warm and he'll live in a tent with a dark girl with the red dot on her forehead and he'll be lying there eating figs, that's what they eat in India, figs, and she'll cook the curry day and night and plonk on a ukelele and when he has enough money he'll send for the whole family and they'll all live in the tent especially his poor father who's at home coughing up great gobs of blood because of the consumption. When my mother sees Paddy on the street she says, Wisha, look at that poor child. He's a skeleton with rags and if they were making a film about the famine he'd surely be put in the middle of it.



Paddy Clohessy não tem sapatos, a mãe rapa-lhe o cabelo para ele não ter piolhos, tem os olhos sempre vermelhos e o nariz sempre ranhoso. Anda sempre com feridas nos joelhos, que nunca se curam, porque ele arranca as crostas e mete-as na boca. Anda vestido com farrapos que tem de partilhar com seis irmãos e uma irmã, e quando aparece na escola a deitar sangue do nariz ou com um olho negro já sabemos que andou à pancada de manhã por causa da roupa. Odeia a escola. Tem quase oito anos, é o maior e o mais velho da nossa aula e está ansioso por crescer e chegar aos catorze anos para poder fugir, fazer-se passar por dezassete anos, alistar-se no exército inglês e ir para a Índia, onde o tempo é quente e onde ele irá viver numa tenda com uma rapariga de pele escura com uma marca vermelha na testa onde há-de comer figos deitado, é isso que comem na Índia, figos, e ela há-de cozinhar caril dia e noite e tocar ukelele e, quando ele tiver dinheiro suficiente, mandará ir a família toda para lá, e vão viver todos na mesma tenda, principalmente o pai dele, que está em casa a deitar grandes golfadas de sangue quando tosse por causa da tuberculose. Quando a minha mãe vê o Paddy na rua, diz, Vejam-me só aquela criança. É um autêntico esqueleto coberto de farrapos. Se alguma vez fizessem um filme sobre a fome, de certeza que ele entrava.



Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt - Flamingo, 1997 pp 132-133

As Cinzas de Ângela, Editorial Presença, 2000 - Tradução de Maria do Carmo Figueira

FOCUS on GRAMMAR and VOCABULARY

Here is the link to the worksheet you did on Monday, with KEY. Exactly, the kind of worksheet you just detest ... and which we will keep doing so you can improve accuracy and fluency in English.
Practice makes perfect :-)