Class Nine, Correcting Innovia, Smerf titles and vocab.

Summary of class 23 Nov 2009:

We're getting close to the end. The final DST is on the 7th December. It will be an in-class essay and questions.

This week we looked at your articles about Innovia cafés.

The first remark was that it is important to include all the key information from the “prompts” in your article. Some details can be left off (such as the price of the coffee), but most of the information provided should be used or at least made reference to.

The second remark was about if Innovia Cafes is a singular or a plural word. Compare the following two sentences:

- Innovia Cafes is a company.

- *Innovia Cafes is a restaurant.

Both of these sentences have the “same” grammar, but one is correct and the other is not. This is because of the semantics, the meaning of the words which refer to and describe Innovia Cafes (IC).

“Company” implies a composite of several franchises, referring to Innovia Cafes as a proper noun. It is therefore correct.

“Restaurant” is an individual unit and makes the Cafes part of IC a common noun, and it is plural. So the verb conjugation in the second sentence is WRONG and should be singular.

Pay attention to this interplay of syntax and sematics.

Here are two examples of your essays.

A: Very Good

Welcome to Innovia Cafes where spending a marvellous time with your family around good food and drinks at an affordable price (affordable prices) comes true.

This well known brand of cafes is already strongly established in England, with its 16 cafes in London and many others in the South of England.

Did you know that every year 10 new cafes are ready to welcome you (opened to serve you) ? And (not a new sentence) that we expect to open 20 more restaurants in the next 3 years?

But, as you already know we have a strong competition with the (some) expensive American chains that will (tense) serve you the same food quality as us. Why should you and your family have to pay more? Here you can have a nice time without worrying about the price.

Come and help us to improve our only weakness, our customer service. Innovia Cafes needs you!

B: Needs grammar work and restructuring. Please correct for your homework.

Despite the fact that each day, there is a strong competition from American chains and that there’s a reduction of workforce because of the crisis which leads to some complaints (factual errors), Innovia Cafes chains are still in the place (???). They reach all kinds of people thanks to their innovative offers.

Everybody is invited to share a good coffee around a table. Indeed, there are a lot of choices as far as food which can explain their success. But above all, their majority success is the low prices. Contrary to other competitive chains like Starbuck, Innovia Cafes are cheaper than them, (conjunction needed) they have reasonable-priced products, which is their main asset.

A few years ago, nobody could have known what could happened to them. The expansion was sudden and (new sentence needed) since that, nothing can stop their rise, 16 cafes in London and in the south of England, 10 new restaurants per year and 20 in the next 3 years. (the part between the two greens needs reworking) At this pace, we can expect a global expansion, it seems inevitable (redundant).

Yellow means a vocabulary problem.

Blue is a grammatical problem.

Green is a structural error or incomprehension.

*Watch out for the use of THEY. Who do you mean? This pronoun usually refers to the last “plural” referent which precedes it. Please verify use of pronouns.

HOMEWORK:

1) Write the outline you would use for question C of the previous essay about SMERFS (Cf: last blog entry). Include your Topic Sentences, but you do not need to write out the examples or details.

2) Correct the second Innovia Cafes essay.

Class Eight: rewriting & promotional writing

Class summary of 16 Nov 2009:

Last class, we spent most of the time rewriting some promotional essays which were written by your classmates about the Val d’Oise, the UCP or their home towns. You worked together to correct the mistakes in both grammar and vocabulary usage and then you reformulated the texts to improve them. I liked how you worked together, giving each other suggestions and proposing new solutions to “heavy handed” or “incomplete” sentence formulations. I hope this work was helpful to you (especially for those people whose papers were the Guinea Pigs).

Then you began to work on the first part of a former test that was given in the Expression Ecrite class several years ago. The idea is that you begin to compose spontaneously in the correct register. Each essay you write should be about 150 words.

HOMEWORK: Please finish writing this essay. And do questions a) and b) of Part Two of the exam (below). (Also, write the sentences from last week’s homework, see below on blog).

LEA L2 Expression Ecrite, 2006/2007

Writing Test

Part One:

Write a presentation of Innovia Cafés thanks to the following information (8 pts)

Innovia Cafés

- All income groups, all ages, family oriented clientele

- Good food and drink at affordable prices (£5-£10 per person)

- 16 cafés in London and South of England

Planning a nationwide expansion

- 10 new restaurants next year

- A further twenty within the next three years

Recent developments

- Strong competition from American chains

- Customer service is poor. Complaints frequent.

Part Two:

Read the following excerpt from the International Herald Tribune and:

a) Give a title to the passage (1)

b) Give an equivalent in English for the terms which are in bold (4)

c) Express your opinion about the development of Chinese tourism. What should European Companies do in order to adapt to this evolution (7).

International Herald Tribune
Roger Collis
11-17-2006

No category of travelers is monolithic as I have often reported. Terms like ''business'' and ''leisure'' disguise a raft of modes of travel, depending on type of business, or whether we combine business and pleasure to confound the stereotypes of the travel trade.

We have heard about ''High-End Leisure Travelers,'' who are said to have driven down prices in the premium cabins, and VFRs (''Visiting Friends and Relations'') who may turn out to be the same people. Now here come the Smerfs, who are traveling across Asia and the Pacific for Social, Military, Education, Religious, and Fraternity reasons. What they have in common is the will to travel even if times are tough and even at nonpeak times if it will help keep costs down.

According to Abacus International, a Singapore-based global distribution system (www.abacus.com.sg) formed with a consortium of 11 Asian airlines and Sabre, the Smerf market across Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore is worth $1.7 billion a year to the travel trade, and equivalent to about one third of the total MICE, or Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions market in the region.

SMERFs are part of a wider trend in the travel market towards more “outcome based travel”, or traveling for a purpose other than just to see things.

Social travel traverses the fields of sports, special interest, women’s and ethnic groups, and volunteer workers. Asia’s 32 million-strong military is often on the move, usually in civilian mode, from countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Singapore. Education travel includes international students and summer camps, and study and activity tours to destinations like Canada, China, Britain, Australia, Germany and Turkey. Religious travel includes pilgrimages. Fraternal travel is also growing as civil associations such as Rotary International look to Asia as an ideal destination for international gatherings.

Chinese tourists are following the surge in exports that mimics the growth of Japanese tourism throughout the 1960s and 1970s – except that China, with 1.3 billion people, has a population 12 times greater than that of Japan. So don’t be surprised to find a Chinese traveller sitting next to you on a plane sometimes soon.

The World Tourism Organization (www.unwto.org) forecasts that China will produce 100 million outbound tourists by 2020, a spectacular growth from 20 million in 2003 and 31 million in 2005.

Class Seven, correcting midterms & precise vocabulary

Summary of class 9 nov 2009.

I handed back the articles that you and went over some corrections (though you all have different needs).

Punctuation: When you have a quotation, make sure to put the punctuation inside the quotation marks. http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/quotes.asp

Review the use of the apostrophe form of the possessive (‘s). http://www.anglaisfacile.com/cours_anglais/possessives

When you write “IT”, what are you referring to?

Make sure to verify your pronouns and the words they refer to. Ask yourself, for example, are they singular or plural? (This/Those, his/their)

The word CRISIS is not particular to economics. So, if you use it, make sure to say “the financial crisis” or the “economic crisis”.

A FEW is NOT the same as FEW (like in French)

These words all have the same root, but have different meanings and uses. Learn the difference between, Critic, Critics, Criticize, Critical, Criticism, Critique.

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We have started a new “chapter” in this semester’s work. We want you to be able to write texts which have different registers and (rather because of their) different target audiences, such as a “news article” or a “promotional text”.

One important element is the extent and precision of your VOCABULARY. Work on using 3 to 5 new words (verbs, adverbs, adjectives) each day or week, depending on how much you can actually remember and appropriate for yourselves. Write these into your journal notes and musings.

HOMEWORK:

What verb describes these sentences best? Now, report the above sentences in full, using the correct reporting verb. (The first one is done for you as an example)

1. I’ll send you the revised figures by the end of the week. (apologise, warn, promise)

She/He promised to send him/her the revised figures by the end of the week.

2. Sorry about the delay (apologise, remind, suggest).
3. I could come in early tomorrow to speed things up, if you like. (admit, promise, offer)
4. Our after-sales service isn’t always up to scratch, let’s face it. (suggest, acknowledge, advise)
5. Don’t forget to bring the sales figures. (remind, deny, insist)
6. If I were you, I’d take a closer look at what our competitors are doing. (advise, insist, promise)
7. You’ll never clinch the deal if you procrastinate. (promise, warn, deny)
8. It wasn’t me who sent you an infected file. (apologise, deny, suggest)
9. We’ve got to launch our new BX2 model by the end of September, it’s crucial. (offer, insist, acknowledge).
10. What about hiring more temporary staff? (suggest, offer, promise)

Class Six, Adjectives and Adverbs, a promotional writing style

Reading About India:

This week, after the vacation, you were all prepared to correct your Midterm articles. Unfortunately, I was not. So, we will correct them next week.

However, there was no time to waste, so we went on to look at some “commercial” literature, that is a guide book entry about travelling in India. At first we identified COLLOCATIONS (some extra exercises are here: http://www.anglaisfacile.com/cours_anglais/collocation-english , http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/collocations-lists.htm, among others) comprised of adjectives and nouns, or adverbs-adjectives and nouns.

You should have noticed that there are many more adjectives in a “promotional” type of text rather than in a journalistic, “neutral” or formal type of text.

I then asked you to write several sentences using the same expressions as in the photocopied handout to describe Guadaloupe or other “exotic” place.

HOMEWORK:

Use the same sort of “promotional” language and adjective/noun collocations to describe one of the following (your choice). Write a short essay of 150 words, approx.

1) the University of Cergy Pontoise,

2) Your home town or village, or

3) A tourist attraction in the Val d’Oise.

Remember that you are trying to use lots of very specific adjectives to promote the subject. You may also use adverbial expressions like we saw in previous assignments. These give your (positive) opinion about the subject.

Don’t forget to use your spell check and to verify vocabulary in an English ONLY dictionary (such as the American Heritage Dictionary online, via http://dictionary.reference.com/ ). (If you’re interested in an Open Source, very liberal dictionary, see http://www.wordnik.com/)

Your final goal, at the end of the semester is to be able to write an essay of about 150 words on either a journalistic type of subject, or a more opinionated, biased subject. Start preparing yourselves.

Class 5, hand in article, linking words

Today in class you handed in your first graded homework assignment, a “journalistic” article about an economic or political subject. This article was also typed and subject to certain formal criteria, such as double spacing, a certain sized margin and fonts.

Though these aspects are not as important as the content and treatment of the article, they add to its seriousness and also remind you that an article must be in a suitable form for the reader too (for a copy editor or for your instructor).

As usual, I redistributed your papers to your classmates so that they could have one last chance at helping you correct any vocabulary, grammar or structural errors you may have overlooked.

A discussion followed about the difficulties and ease of both writing these articles and correcting your classmates’ papers. The idea is to help you distance yourself from your own writing so that you can wear the “corrector’s cap” too.

Some issues of interest were the following:
- It was hard to choose a subject which was sufficiently interesting and dense. First, it was hard to condense your subject into 300 words. For others it was difficult not to be temped to copy from the source material (the article where you got the information to begin with). Remember, plagiarism is a serious offence, especially to Anglo-saxons (I am, in particular, pitiless).
- Fortunately, some found it easy to choose a subject because it was something that interested you already.
- It is difficult to know what words and expressions are formal or informal in register. Though this information is not necessarily in a dictionary (with the exception of slang), the more you read from the Economist, the Guardian or the New Yorker, for example, the more you will learn the formal style. Whereas, the more you read from the Sun or People magazine, even the Op-Eds from Time, Newsweek or the Village Voice, the more you will learn a more informal style. You will begin to recognize this with practice.
- How can you correct a sentence or paragraph when you don’t really know what the person is trying to say? True. You must make a guess as to what he/she was trying to say and then reformulate. This should also help you remember that your own argumentation must be clear on paper and not just in your head.
- You don’t feel confident enough correcting papers when your own English grammar and vocabulary are weak. You hesitate and are confronted with a feeling of inadequacy. You ask yourself, “Is this wrong or do I just not know this expression?” Again, the more you do, the more you will learn from these mistakes and these minor confrontations (some of which may even stimulate you to look in a dictionary or grammar book to verify!!! Wow, then my job would actually mean something!).

Words of advice:
- “BE EXPLICIT AND DIRECT.” Don’t assume that the audience knows all the background information and can skip the steps in logic.
- First think of being clear, then think of choosing the most beautiful and poetic way of expressing yourself. Remember, anglos are PRAGMATIC.

Then, in class, we looked at and classified several linking words and expressions. Here is a short list with their function. Both Conjunctions (linking parts of a sentence) and Adverbs (linking across sentences) are given.

TIME: After, before, when, as, as son as, until, since, once, finally, then, later, eventually, afterwards, in the end, meanwhile, beforehand, firstly, secondly, lastly
ADDITION: And, as well as, in addition to, besides, also, as well, too, in addition, furthermore, moreover, besides, what’s more
CONTRAST: But, although, while, whereas, even though/if, in spite of/despite, nevertheless, nonetheless, however, yet, even so, still, on the other hand
REASON & RESULT: Because, as, since, so, therefore, consequently, because of this, as a result, that’s why
PURPOSE: (in order) to, so that

CONDITION: If, unless, in case, so/as long as, provided that


Finally, you listened to a short recording of a woman speaking of her arranged marriage. You then were supposed to summarize it or write an article about arranged marriages.
This exercise, though we did not have the time to properly treat it, was designed to replicate you going to a seminar or conference in which the speaker gives a presentation, you take notes and then you are supposed to summarize in a report or an article. It required both listening and writing skills.

HOMEWORK:
There is no formal homework for you to do for the next class period. (Do I hear a huge sigh of relief?) However, keep writing EVERY DAY or at least five times a week in your journals. Try to challenge yourself now by using linking words or different registers in your writing. You may even try to write a summary of something you listen to on the radio or watch on TV or DVD. This journal is for you to improve but also to have fun with! Drawing or adding images, pressed flowers or even souvenirs is fine too.

Please remember to bring it in after the break so that I can take a look at what you do.

Class Four: Topic Sentences and group corrections

A paragraph should be like a lady's skirt: long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting. (English Proverb)

In our last class, we worked again at being astute critics and copy editors of each other's paragraphs. You were asked to correct grammar, vocabulary and phrasing of your partners' papers. In particular, you were supposed to look at:

- tenses. Past tenses are mostly used for relating events such as the Police notes.

- prepositions. Many of you need to remember which preps go with which verbs and nouns. (follow up on this with http://www.englishpage.com/prepositions/prepositions.html)

- logically organized material. Most police reports are, after the scene is set in the first sentence, chronological recounts of the night's events.

- adverbial expressions. These allow some of your opinion to be visible.

We still need much more work in this area because you are all too timid to ask yourselves and your classmates to be rigorous with their style and grammar. Please remember that you are HELPING them to be better, not criticising their intelligence.

ORGANIZING THE PARAGRAPH

Then, we looked at TOPIC SENTENCES, which are the focal point of each paragraph.
A typical paragraph should have 4-10 sentences and the TOPIC sentence is the one which tells you what the entire paragraph is about. All other sentences support this claim or give examples. Remember also, DON'T make a new line at each new sentence.

For the exercise we did in class as well as many other examples, please see: http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=constructing-the-paragraph
(please note that I gave you ONE false answer... sorry. It was about George's nose!)

Finally, we tried to (but ran out of time) organize Brainstormed notes about a topic into a coherent outline. Here are the steps to take:

1) Brainstorm any and all ideas you have on the topic (keep the topic relatively concise and precise)

2) Organize your ideas into headings which group your brainstorm ideas and put examples from your brainstorming into supporting arguments. Write TOPIC sentences which head each paragraph.

3) Then write your Introduction and Conclusion once you know where you are going and how you got there.


HOMEWORK: due on the 19th Oct 2009, for a grade.

Write an article for the press about an economic or political subject (approx 200-300 words, no more!). It should be formal, or relatively so depending on your public. You choose the subject, but not about Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize, please.

Give your article a headline, and sign your name.

Also say which newspaper or magazine (or target audience) you are writing for.

You must TYPE and print out the article to hand in. It should have 11 or 12 pt font, double spacing between lines and at least a 2cm margin on all sides. Use the spell check function of your word processing software (if I find spelling errors or typographical errors you will be severely sanctioned).

Use an English only dictionary to verify vocabulary.

With your typed article, also hand in all of your perhaps handwritten notes and scribbles which led to this article. Staple them together.

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Late papers will NOT be accepted after Tuesday 20th Oct, at 15:00 (if you put them under the door of my office, 568, I can get them).

Class Three: Comparing articles, group corrections

This week we looked in detail at three different articles about (relatively) the same subject but from different sources and with different target audiences.
(Image from http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/tabloid.htm)

Here are the three described in more detail.

Hooked on Nicotine

Teenagers, young people, people interested in science

“Like any other teen”, example of teen smoker for you to relate to. “Don’t ever start” Science examples

Science World http://teacher.scholastic.com/products/classmags/scienceworld.htm

Butt Out, Please

Adults, people interested in world politics, intellectuals

Cynicism (rules don’t apply to MPs), talk of torture and terrorists, Humour (the mother of all cigarette bans)

The Economist http://www.economist.com/

18 Certificate

Adults - parents, the “masses” or the working class

Informal/slang language, e.g. “Kids”, inflammatory language

The Sun http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/

Next, you worked in groups of three and read each other’s written homework and tried to correct the grammar mistakes and improve the texts overall. This meant examining the structure and making sure that vocabulary was precise and concise.

You should have been asking yourselves the following questions:

- “Does this sentence add something to the article? Does it move the reader forward? Or is this just empty text (blah blah)?”

- “Is this the most precise word or is this ambiguous and vague?”

- How can this text be improved?

There was some success in this group exercise, though most of you do not have practice being thorough and reading critically. More group correction work is necessary so that you understand the importance of truly analysing texts.

Remember, this is CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM and should only help you to improve. If you feel uninterested or embarrassed (either is possible) you are not taking the exercise seriously enough and are not helping your classmates.

HOMEWORK:

1) Keep writing every day in your journal.

2) Write a FACTUAL police-type report in about 100 words. Give all the specific details about the event such as the precise location, the people involved, the outcome (arrests or not, for example). Use a very neutral tone and give only the necessary information.

Here is an example from the Police Notes section of the North Seattle Herald-Outlook http://northseattleherald-outlook.com/ :

STABBING AT BUS STOP

A man was stabbed at a bus stop on Aug. 14 at 8:17 p.m. A witness said the man was sitting on a bench at the bus stop when a woman and two men, all of whom appeared to be in their late teens or early 20s, approached the man and asked for cigarettes. When the man said he didn't have any cigarettes, the woman slapped him. The men then grabbed the victim and threw him on the ground. They began punching him repeatedly. One of the men then pulled a pair of scissors from his sock and stabbed the victim in the lower back. The trio then fled.

3) Write a short commentary about a current event (political, social or economic) (approx 100-150 words). Include hints of your opinion and use several (3-4) of the adverbial expressions given below.

coincidentally, conveniently, curiously, fortunately, frankly, in retrospect, incredibly, ironically, luckily, mercifully, oddly, on reflection, predictably, remarkably, significantly, typically, unbelievably, unexpectedly, unfortunately.