Across the Universe

The story is about two young people who fell in love with each other, it looks like something usual but it's not. They lived in the 60's in the middle of the war, and they had different point of views about everything and loving wasn't enough to stick them together. Beattle's songs , and all 60's fashion entertain us to get thinking how hard was to face that time and how they pursued their dreams. This above picture shows when he was high and trying to get some inspiration from the moment he was in, and for me the strawberries show how many soldiers have died in that war for nothing, how the war was bad and in someway it had influenced everybody around him.
The movie has a lot of thinking and many things behind a simply love story.
I really liked it !

My Presentation

Metacognitive strategies
The metacognitive-like processes are ubiquitous; especially, when it comes to the discussion of self-regulated learning. Being engaged in metacognition is a salient feature of good self-regulated learners. Groups reinforcing collective discussion of metacognition is a salient feature of self-critical and self-regulating social groups. The activities of strategy selection and application include those concerned with an ongoing attempt to plan, check, monitor, select, revise, evaluate, etc. Metacognition is 'stable' in that learners' initial decisions derive from the pertinent fact about their cognition through years of learning experience. Simultaneously, it is also 'situated' in the sense that it depends on learners' familiarity with the task, motivation, emotion, and so forth. Individuals need to regulate their thoughts about the strategy they are using and adjust it based on the situation to which the strategy is being applied.
Metacognition helps people to perform many cognitive tasks more effectively.[1] Strategies for promoting metacognition include self-questioning (e.g. "What do I already know about this topic? How have I solved problems like this before?"), thinking aloud while performing a task, and making graphic representations (e.g. concept maps, flow charts, semantic webs) of one's thoughts and knowledge. Carr, 2002argues that the physical act of writing plays a large part in the development of metacognitive skills (as cited in Gammil, D., 2006, p. 754.




Immersion Program

Language immersion is a method of teaching a second language (also called L2, or the target language). Unlike a more traditional language course, where the target language is simply the subject material, language immersion uses the target language as a teaching tool, surrounding or "immersing" students in the second language. In-class activities, such as math, social studies, and history, and those outside of the class, such as meals or everyday tasks, are conducted in the target language. Today's immersion programs are based on those founded in the 1960s in Canada when middle-income English-speaking parents convinced educators to establish an experimental French immersion program enabling their children 'to appreciate the traditions and culture of French-speaking Canadians as well as English-speaking Canadians'.[1]

In the United States, and since the 1980s, dual immersion programs have grown for a number of reasons: competition in a global economy, a growing population of second language learners, and the successes of previous programs [2]. Language immersion classes can now be found throughout the US, in urban and suburban areas, in dual-immersion and single language immersion, and in an array of languages. As of May 2005, there were 317 dual immersion programs in US elementary schools, providing instruction in 10 languages, and 96% of programs were in Spanish [3]

Source : Wikipedia

Classroom Speaking Activities



This is the summary of a text we had read in class, we were supposed to do it in groups:

In the text, the author talks about how to deal with activities that involve speaking and working in groups in a classroom. He divides the activities in three different groups.


> Acting from a script: It’s basically a role-play activity, where they have to act out scenes that are given by the teacher. In most cases the students have to go to the front of the classroom and present what they have prepared. The author enforces that the teacher needs to be careful when choosing the first students who go to the front. He says we have to ask the most confident students first and then go to the others.



> Communication games: They are normally imported from radio and TV. They normally work in pairs or groups like a competition that can involve scores and prizes. One example of it is the “Twenty Questions game”, a guessing game where one student answers questions made by his classmates that are trying to guess what he/she has in mind.



> Discussion: In this activity, the students have to discuss about a difficult or popular situation. He suggests that the students first write the topics that they agree and disagree and then rehearse in small groups and only after that, the teacher should open the discussion to the whole classroom. He also brings a real problem: when students are not comfortable to give their opinion and that’s why he suggests the written and the small groups’ preparation.


HARMER, Jeremy. The practice of English language teaching. 3rd edition, Longman