Week 10

Another week gone by. This week we finished the activities and contents related to humor and stand up comedy. here's the last clip we watched in class about euphemisms:





On Wednesday and Friday we continued with your class presentations and finally on Friday we started a new topic on telephone fraud, which we will finish on Monday. On Monday, Katie will be back to visit our classroom and she will bring an activity to review and close the subject of American humor. 

On course management, here is the update of the entries recorded in the extensive listening form. With this list you can keep track of which and how many videos you have already done. I'd like to highlight that by this date you should have, on average, around 12 to 14 entries on record. This is not always the case. 

Finally, I have already updated the options for the speech assignment. You can check the updated guidelines here. 

Week 4

This week we finished our previous work on interviews and started the next oral genre: songs. We studied different things regarding songs. Many times songs have a narrative structure with characters and a plot, a series of events that are narrated or described. We also learned that songs have many literary elements such as metaphors and analogies and that in some of the best songs, the musical arrangements and the singing style obeys to the intended meaning and message the song aims at conveying. We saw a good example of this in the some classic rock songs from the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

We also studied a little bit about the history of rock. We learned that rock has evolved from the merge of different genres such as country music and blues. We also learned that, although rock was born in the USA, soon the UK also adopted it and contributed many of the greatest stars of this genre and many of its distinctive features. For those who could not come to class, here's one of the documentaries of the history of rock we watched and one of the songs we worked on:






Next week we will move into advertising as a genre and some of its distinctive features. Particularly on Monday, we will work on the last song that we have in our schedule, discuss some of the elements of the song reviews. We will also have Katie Kingsella as a guest to the class. She will tell you about her experience creating a short video, a video some of you participated in and most are probably familiar with.

See you next week.