Today’s class felt somewhat subdued. Perhaps it’s just me, or perhaps it’s the after-effects of all the food and drink over the past two days or so. For the Spanish, it’s just the beginning. The festivities carry on until Epiphany, when the three wise men bring their gifts for everyone…
We began with a little chit-chat to see who did what over the past two days. I explained a comment I made on an error in the Wiki and re-drilled some words we did in the last lesson to practise the sound /tʃə/ for ‘ture’ as in ‘literature’ or ‘culture’, adding in mature /məˈtjʊə/ and asking which the odd one out was.
They followed that up by continuing an examiner-candidate role-play on questions about friends and family which they started in the previous lesson. A little PACS session followed.
We then looked at a couple of emails. They skimmed through them and answered some questions before I showed them the first part of a video on writing formal and informal letters/emails, setting them these questions as the observing task:
- What problems can arise if you are too formal in an informal email?
- What problems can arise if you are too informal in a formal letter?
- What do you write in the very beginning of a formal/an informal letter?
Copyright 2012 Chiew Pang
They did the tasks quite well. The second video was a little longer and they had these as their tasks:
- Try to remember some useful words or phrases from both formal and informal writing.
- How do you end the letters?
Again, they responded very well. At this point, there were only 15 minutes of class left, but it was enough for them to get started on responding to an email from a friend, and I went around making suggestions and corrections.
Subdued but useful? The first feedback from a student seems to suggest so. I’m hoping the rest of them think the same.
The Dogme Diaries 