A Course on American Literature. Prof. Cyrus Pattel,  New York University:

http://veduca.com.br/play?c=131&a=1

American Literature from 1945. Prof. Amy Hungerford, Yale:

http://veduca.com.br/play?c=214&a=1

Job interviews - Some hints!

Some students have asked me for hints on how to be prepared for a job interview. So we go on "Surfing the web"!! You can find much information as well as very useful video material on the web!! Take a look!!

Video:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/972538/learn_english_job_interview/
Hints:
http://teenadvice.about.com/od/adviceexpert/ht/htinterview.htm

WEBINARS - CAMBRIDGE ESOL

Cambridge English Webinars for Teachers

Cambridge ESOL has launched a new programme of webinars for teachers. Over the coming months there will be webinars on:

Cambridge English: Key (KET) for Schools, 11 & 13 June 2012
Cambridge English: Advanced (CAE), 16 & 18 July 2012

The next webinar topic is Cambridge English: First for Schools, also known as First Certificate in English (FCE) for Schools. To find out more and to sign up for this webinar, click on your preferred date:

Cambridge English: First for Schools, 14 May 2012. 14.00 - 15.00 UK-BST

Cambridge English: First for Schools, 16 May 2012, 10.00 - 11.00 UK-BST

All of our webinars are free to join and are led by a team of experts from Cambridge ESOL. Downloadable support materials, a certificate of attendance and a recording of the presentation will be available after each webinar. 

The webinars will be held on a Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning (United Kingdom British Summer Time), so that they are accessible to teachers around the world.

To sign up to the general webinar mailing list, go to:  www.CambridgeESOL.org/webinars

http://www.cambridgeesol.org/webinars/topic/exams/fce-schools/intro-fce-schools-session1.html

Workshops: VII English in Use

VII English in Use: “Surfing the Web and Developing Skills" 

 

Encaminho para vocês a programação do nosso VII English in Use que, nesta edição, vem com a temática “Surfing the Web and Developing Skills” . Os encontros acontecerão no mês de maio e são sempre no horário de 17:30 às 18:50. São atividades de alta qualidade e oferecidas gratuitamente. As inscrições para alunos acontecerão no mesmo esquema dos semestres anteriores: os interessados deverão preencher a listagem de inscrição, com nome completo e matrícula, com os representantes de turma, a cada semana que antecede a atividade. Se você quiser trazer alguém para assistir os encontros, peça-o para telefonar para 3214-8200, falar com Adélia, no horário de 14h às 21h. Ela está responsável para fazer a inscrição dos externos.

As vagas são limitadas!

Não perca essa oportunidade!

 

VII ENGLISH IN USE - Surfing the Web and Developing Skills

May 2012 (5:30 to 6:50 p.m.)

May 07, Monday
USING ONLINE RESOURCES TO ENHANCE MOTIVATION IN LITERARY READING
The purpose of this workshop is to present the students tips of online resources that may help them take more advantage of their literary reading activities. The reader shall see that there are many resources on the web to access material and interact with the text the way s/he finds more interesting: public domain files, audio books, video books. The Internet offers the reader the literary texts as more dynamic forms of language.
Keywords: literary reading; online resources; applied linguistics; motivation. Prof. Ms. Cátia Aparecida Vieira Barboza (UNIABEU) - literafenix@yahoo.com.br

May 14, Monday
BRAZIL IN HEADLINES
In this presentation we intend to talk about the development of reading activities, taking into consideration Internet articles that focus the Brazilian reality. It is considered that Brazil, by its recent social and economic importance and also by the next events it will host (World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games in 2016) has been calling attention of all nations worldwide. One of the topics of discussion will be the manipulation of information. Reading must be an active interaction for the construction of meaning and not only the decodification of the words on the page. It is important to discuss the way the facts are told to other societies and also the way other countries have seen us. In this process the students can realize how important English language is to understand these speeches and how Brazil’s international image has been built abroad.
Keywords: reading; vocabulary; Internet. Prof. Leandro Braga di Salvo - leandrobdisalvo@gmail.com

May 22, Tuesday
DEVELOPING INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS IN THE DIGITAL AGE: TECHNOLOGY, THEORIES AND STRATEGIES
The impact of technology in Education has become increasingly evident. This context is accompanied by a variety of terms and concepts such as blended-learning, e-learning, m-learning, cyber culture, digital literacy, digital genres, web 2.0 among many others. Research papers, articles and news have pointed out the gap between teachers and technology, which results in practical obstacles and challenges in applying digital technologies in the development of materials for language learning. This workshop briefly discusses theory and presents some strategies for planning and developing instructional materials based on digital technologies.
Keywords: technology, education, applied linguistics, web 2.0, instructional materials Prof. Dr. Márcio Luiz Corrêa Vilaça (UNIGRANRIO) -
professorvilaca@gmail.com

May 31, Thursday
TIPS FOR IMPROVING YOUR SPOKEN ENGLISH ONLINE
It is very common to find students complaining about their spoken deficiencies in English. Some of them do well when writing, reading and listening skills are involved. Nevertheless, when speaking is the matter they blush, shake their bodies, have their hands wet … words don’t come properly!!! But frustration does. So, this workshop concerns with several important tips for those who want to improve their spoken English without spending money and in a very nice way: surfing the web.
In order to “heat the turbines” my first piece of advice is to get over any fear you might have of making mistakes. You will make mistakes. The key point in here is to know that you need to be understood, so pronunciation and enunciation are what really matters.
Keywords: speaking; pronunciation; online resource Prof. Esp. Cristiane de Moraes Salvino (UNIABEU) -
moraescrisjpa@hotmail.com

Organization: Prof. Cátia Aparecida Vieira Barboza. 

Is Shakespeare still relevant??

On the Bard’s birthday, is Shakespeare still relevant?

By Alexandra Petri

Who? (AP Photo) Whenever I want to depress myself, I make a list of Shakespeare plays and cross out all the ones whose plots would be ruined if any of the characters had a smartphone. It’s a depressingly short list.
Soon, if we want to do a modern staging of his work, we’ll have to stipulate that “In fair Verona, where we lay our scene/The cell reception was spotty/From ancient grudge that brake the AT&T.” Well, not that. Something better.

“Romeo and Juliet would obviously text each other about the poison,” audiences would point out. “Why doesn’t Hermia use her GPS?” “If he was so worried about the Ides, Caesar should have just telecommuted.”
Misunderstandings and missed communications now come in entirely different flavors. We are all in touch all the time, and the confusions that blossom from that are not quite the ones the Bard guessed at. Autocorrect replaces malapropism. You don’t leave your fiancee asleep in the woods unless you want to wind up on a
“Dateline” special. When your coworker implies that Desdemona is cheating on you with Cassio, you don’t go ballistic demanding handkerchiefs. You just log her keystrokes.

And the words. (“Words! Words! Words!” as Hamlet says.) What are we supposed to do with them?

To make it through his works, high school students are forced to consult books like “No Fear Shakespeare,” which drains all the poetry out in the hopes of making him moderately comprehensible.

Insert Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy into the grinder of that book:

“To be, or not to be? That is the question—
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub”
and you get: “The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all? Dying, sleeping—that’s all dying is—a sleep that ends all the heartache and shocks that life on earth gives us—that’s an achievement to wish for. To die, to sleep—to sleep, maybe to dream. Ah, but there’s the catch!”

“But Shakespeare is beautiful! Shakespeare is life glimpsed through the cut glass of poetry!”

Ah, but there’s the catch! What’s the point, if the language is so far away that we have to do that to it?

Maybe Shakespeare has nothing to say to us. Nobody else from the early 1600s still sees himself so regularly adapted. When was the last time you watched a BBC version of Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine”?


Bardolatry seems infinitely old, but it is of comparatively recent vintage. First, Bowdler had his way with the works, removing all the naughty bits and notably tacking on a happy ending to “King Lear.” The apotheosis was not instant. The sonnets weren’t in vogue for years. Shakespeare has only gradually clawed his way up to the pinnacle of English letters, shoving Chaucer and Tennyson and Melville and Dickens down whenever they got grabby and even elbowing Jane Austen from time to time.

There’s a certain level of celebrity occupied by people who are famous primarily because they are famous.

Is Shakespeare one of them? Do we only read him because we’ve seemingly always read him?

Why do we keep dragging class after class, kicking and screaming, through the wilds of “Romeo and Juliet”?

We don’t even know who the guy was.
Perhaps Shakespeare was born today.
Possibly he died today.
He’s an awfully hard man to nail down. As a historical figure, he is proverbially skittish. He might have been Francis Bacon, for Pete’s sake. You wouldn’t get in the car of a man who said he might be Francis Bacon but was not sure. Why read one?
Besides, the man was obviously a hack. Jonathan Franzen clearly takes his craft more seriously. Nobody is as prolific as Shakespeare who thinks he’s producing Great Lasting Works Of Genius. He’s more a P. G. Wodehouse or an Agatha Christie. Stephen King could learn a thing or two from Shakespeare when it comes to pleasing the groundlings.

Why give him this place of honor?

Look at his most famous play. “Hamlet”? A whiny college student, evidently overeducated and underemployed, comes home for break, sees a ghost and dithers. Eventually some pirates show up, but wouldn’t you know, they remain offstage. Shakespeare is one of the few writers in history who, given the option of including pirates in a play, thinks, “Nah, you know what? I’d rather have this dithering hipster talk about mortality some more.”
Come to think of it, maybe he’s never been more relevant.
People complain about their Millennials moving home. Try having Hamlet in your basement for a semester. “Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black...” That would get old at breakfast, I imagine.

His plays still tell the truth, boiled down to their essences.
“King Lear”: Your kids put you in a home? You should be so lucky!
“Titus Andronicus” (or, Guess Who’s Coming As Dinner?): Cannibalism is never the answer.
“Romeo and Juliet”: Check your messages before ingesting poison.
“The Tempest”: Wizards pretty much get to do whatever they want.

And he’s one of the few writers we still have in common. We’re dragged through the thorns of his work so that we’ll have something to talk about on the other side.

That is a definite part of his charm. He’s a common vocabulary, a common set of heroes and villains and everyone in between.

These are not plays we read and see together as a generation or a country. They’re works we enjoy as a species. Shakespeare offers a roadmap to the human. And he does it in verse — sometimes tightly knotted little ornate gardens of verse like “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” other times vast prosy expanses like “Hamlet.” Before Sarah Palin was coining new words, the Bard was on it.

In their proper place, the bright lines that have since sunk into cliche still retain their power to dazzle.
Write what you know? Shakespeare adamantly didn’t. But in the process, he wrote what we all know.
And he didn’t need a smartphone to do it.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/post/on-the-bards-birthday-is-shakespeare-still-relevant/2012/04/23/gIQArx3ucT_blog.html

Happy Birthday, Will!!!

 

Today is reportedly the birthday of the greatest dramatist of all time, William Shakespeare. Whether you love him for his tear-jerking tragedies, romantic sonnets or surprisingly dirty insults, we can think of no one else who has had more of an impact on the arts than this fine gentleman. To praise the great bard, one of his best known sonnets:

18

---

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

 

Learning languages

How to learn languages for free? This collection features lessons in 40 languages, including Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Italian, Russian and more. Download audio lessons to your computer or mp3 player.

http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons

James Joyce’s Ulysses

Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern Library went so far as to call it the most important English-language novel published during the 20th century. Now, you can download it as a free audiobook.

http://www.openculture.com/2012/04/james_joyces_ulysses_a_free_audio_book.html

A good suggestion for improving your listening and reading skills!

The CCProse, available at Youtube offers you a different form to experience reading. They bring literary books on public domain that were converted to video books. Video books are not only audio books, they also bring the text in Close Caption, so you can read the text and listen to it at the same time, an excellent tool for EFL students' training reading and listening skills.

http://www.youtube.com/user/CCProse

Beowulf

Já se encontra disponível a segunda edição bilíngue (inglês antigo/português), revista e ampliada da tradução de Beowulf, com introdução e notas, um das obras vencedoras do Prêmio Jabuti em 2008 (a primeira edição, lançada em 2007, esgotou-se).

Beowulf. Tradução, introdução e notas de Erick Ramalho. Belo Horizonte: Tessitura, 2011. ISBN 987-85-99745-33-5

Maiores informações, no site da Editora: www.tessituraeditora.com.br

Test your knowledge: slangs

ESL slangpage

http://www.eslcafe.com/slang/list.html

Online exercises on slangs

http://www.manythings.org/slang/slang1.html

Some useful sites

To improve your Idioms

To improve your vocabulary:
Beginners

Intermediate

For teachers

Grammar exercises

Drops

A expressão "go-getter" descreve uma pessoa ambiciosa, trabalhadora, que luta por seus objetivos.
Por exemplo:

"David became our supervisor because he is a real go-getter".
"This company wants more people who are willing to work and take risks. We need actual go-getters."
"Mandy was very professional and qualified, but Aubrey was the real go-getter, so I hired her."

Drops

Quando queremos dizer que alguém chegou ou vai "chegar ao fundo do poço", em inglês, usamos a expressão "to hit rock bottom."
Por exemplo:

"Years ago, when I lost my job and my house, I felt I had hit rock bottom."
"She will only learn her lesson after she hits rock bottom."
"You shouldn't wait until you hit rock bottom to turn your life around."

Obra de Virginia Woolf disponível em domínio público.

Três vezes Mrs Dalloway

 
Agora em domínio público, obra de Virgina Woolf ganha novas traduções no país

"A Sra. Dalloway disse que ela mesma ia comprar as flores”. A frase de abertura de “Mrs Dalloway” (1925) foi traduzida pela primeira vez para o português em 1946, pelo poeta gaúcho Mario Quintana, naquela que foi por seis décadas a única versão brasileira do livro mais conhecido de Virgina Woolf. Agora, 71 após a morte da escritora inglesa, com a entrada de sua obra em domínio público, uma leva de novas traduções de seus romances, crônicas e artigos chegará às livrarias nos próximos meses. Entre elas, três novas versões de “Mrs Dalloway”.(...)
http://oglobo.globo.com/blogs/prosa/posts/2012/02/25/tres-vezes-mrs-dalloway-433209.asp

Past moments - Defesas de monografia

Welcome!

We cannot conceive learning nowadays without technology. When we thought about WEBENGLISHING, the idea was to give the students an instrument on the “Web” to study “English” in a progressive way “-ing”. It was also conceived to offer some guidance in relation to the best options for learners of English and their teachers. It contains links, handouts, academic papers, activities and language tips. It is important to understand that the Internet increases the possibilities for learning about any kind of subject, and gives the student more autonomy for improving their skills at a low cost. This blog was conceived by UNIABEU’s team of English professors and we really wish it can help students take hold of their learning of English language and Literature. So, if you accept the challenge, go on and enjoy it!! And don’t forget to give us your feedback and opinions!

Let’s surf on Webenglishing!!