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.