SILENT LETTERS IN ENGLISH

The English language has lots of silent letters which  cause difficulties for both native speakers and English learners, because they make the spelling of words different from their pronunciation. Read here.

AUGUST

BRAVE NEW WORLD

 

Brave New World is a novel written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley, and published in 1932. Set in London in the year AD 2540 (632 A.F. - "After Ford" - in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation, and classical conditioning that are combined to profoundly change society.

Here you can find a detailed analysis of the novel and here you can discover some interesting facts about its author.

The title derives from Miranda's speech in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I:

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here!

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,

That has such people in't.

REMEMBERING JANE AUSTEN 200 YEARS ON

JANE AUSTEN BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Lucy Worsley explores the different houses in which Jane Austen lived and stayed, to discover just how much they shaped Jane's life and novels.

Here you can watch the video. 

MY SUNDAY MOVIE - A PROMISE

https://fsharetv.co/movie/a-promise-episode-1-tt2191082

Here you can read a review of the movie.

JULY

"That beautiful season the Summer! 
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
And the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

II PROVA SCRITTA ESAMI DI STATO

Yesterday my students of  5^C and 5^D  Liceo Linguistico  took an English test on the day of their II Prova Scritta.

It included a text analysis and a composition, but they could choose among four different articles. All of them were rather thought-provoking and somewhat difficult.

You can download them here.

BLOOMSDAY

Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, during which the events of his novel Ulysses, set on 16 June 1904, are relived. It is observed annually on 16 June in Dublin.  

James Joyce chose the date as it was the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle. The name is derived from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.

Let's take a journey through James Joyce's Dublin and the events of Bloomsday here.

FEVER PITCH

Read Nick Hornby's autobiographical essay here.

It is the story of the author's relationship with football and with Arsenal Football Club, above all. It is composed of several chapters in chronological order, from the time the author first became a football fan as a child until his early thirties. Each chapter is about a particular football match that he remembers watching, most but not all at Highbury Stadium, and how it related to the events that were going on with his personal life at the time. As well as relating Arsenal's highs and lows, Nick Hornby talks about other football clubs that played in London.

You can find a detailed analysis of the book here.

SUMMER HOMEWORK - 3^C LINGUISTICO

Here and here you can find lots of exercises to revise grammar and vocabulary.

See you in September!

SUMMER HOMEWORK - 2^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can read and download the simplified version of the book.

DANIEL DEFOE'S ROBINSON CRUSOE

From Shakespeare’s The Tempest  to the film  Cast Away,  starring Tom Hanks, and  the TV series Lost, life on a desert island has always served as an inspiration for writers.

Numerous stories of real life stranded sailors provided inspiration for the most famous castaway of them all, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe was a bestseller in 1719, the year it was published.  Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character (whose real name is Robinson Kreutznaer),  a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. 

The story was based on the real-life experiences of  Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra", now part of Chile, which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.

Defoe’s focus on the conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made him a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. He rejected the ornate style associated with the upper classes  and  used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel.

With Robinson Crusoe’s theme of solitary human existence, Defoe paved the way for the central modern theme of alienation and isolation.

Here  you can download a PDF Presentation to widen your knowledge of the first real novel in English literature! 

ANOTHER SCHOOL YEAR IS DONE!

JUNE

"The summer morn is bright and fresh,
the birds are darting by
As if they loved to breast the breeze 

that sweeps the cool clear sky."

William C. Bryant