Tuesday, 4 March 2025
Monday, 3 March 2025
Thursday, 27 February 2025
BRIAN BILSTON'S REFUGEES
With his identity clouded in mystery, Brian Bilston has amassed over 80,000 Twitter followers and has become known as the unofficial Poet Laureate of the social media platform. Read here.
Wednesday, 12 February 2025
W.H. AUDEN - 5^C LINGUISTICO
English poet, playwright, critic, and librettist Wystan Hugh Auden exerted a major influence on the poetry of the 20th century. He grew up in Birmingham, England and was known for his extraordinary intellect and wit. His first book, Poems, was published in 1930 with the help of T.S. Eliot. Just before World War II broke out, he emigrated to the United States where he met the poet Chester Kallman, who became his lifelong lover. W.H. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for The Age of Anxiety. Much of his poetry is concerned with moral issues and evidences a strong political, social, and psychological context. Read here.
Tuesday, 4 February 2025
THE 2030 AGENDA FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
The Global Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development seek to end poverty and hunger, realise the human rights of all, achieve gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls, and ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources. The Global Goals are integrated and indivisible, and balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economic, social and environmental. Read here.
https://www.eda.admin.ch/agenda2030/en/
https://www.agenda-2030.fr/en/agenda-2030/presentation
https://www.heroesneversleep.com/en/sustainable-development-goals/
Sunday, 2 February 2025
STUDYING VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Virginia Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” Read here.
Wednesday, 1 January 2025
Friday, 13 December 2024
SAINT LUCIA'S DAY, THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHT AND HOPE
St Lucia's Day is celebrated on the 13th of December, very close to the Winter Solstice. It is one of the most special days in the calendar and as integral to Scandinavia as glögg and herring. One of the biggest celebrations in December, aside from Christmas, it is an annual celebration born from stories that were told about how Christianity came to Sweden.
St Lucia was a young Christian girl who was martyred, killed for her faith, in 304. The most common story told about St Lucia is that she would secretly bring food to the persecuted Christians in Rome, who lived in hiding in the catacombs under the city. She would wear candles on her head so she had both her hands free to carry things. Lucy means “light” so this is a very appropriate name.
The 13th of December was also the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, in the old Julian Calendar and a pagan festival of lights in Sweden was turned into St. Lucia's Day.
On St Lucia’s Day, you can expect to see churches, town halls, schools, offices and restaurants become a twinkling sea of candlelight. The day is celebrated with a Lucia train procession in which a young girl elected to portray St Lucia leads the way wearing a white gown, with a red sash and crown of candles which is made of Lingonberry branches, evergreen symbolising new life in winter. She is trailed by Lucia handmaidens, star boys and gingerbread men who all carry candles and sing carols. The tradition dates back to the original story of Lucia, who delivered food to the persecuted Christians, leading her way with candlelight. A popular food eaten at St. Lucia's day are “Lussekatts”, S-shaped buns flavoured with saffron and dotted with raisins which are eaten for breakfast.
St Lucia's Day first became widely celebrated in Sweden in the late 1700s. St Lucia's Day is also celebrated in Denmark, Norway, Finland, Bosnia, and Croatia. In Denmark it is more a of a children's day and in some parts of Italy, children are told that St Lucy brings them presents. They leave out a sandwich for her and the donkey that helps carry the gifts.
https://www.goodcatholic.com/festival-of-light-celebrate-st-lucy-and-st-lucys-day/
Wednesday, 11 December 2024
Tuesday, 10 December 2024
MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN
The monster has always been the true subject of the Frankenstein story, and Kenneth Branagh’s retelling understands that. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” has all of the usual props of the Frankenstein films, brought to a fever pitch: the dark and stormy nights, the lightning bolts, the charnel houses of spare body parts, the laboratory where Victor Frankenstein stirs his steaming cauldron of life. Read here.
https://fsharetv.co/movie/mary-shelley's-frankenstein-episode-1-tt0109836
Thursday, 5 December 2024
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving and has the potential to bring significant advancements to various industries. As to education, AI holds great promise in transforming the learning experience for students. It is worth exploring the potential benefits that AI can bring to students in the future, revolutionizing the way they learn, engage, and excel academically. Read here.
Despite all the fanfare around AI, it is an undeniable fact that there is no subject in the world which is more human-centric than language teaching. We didn’t learn our native language from grammar books, exercises or even software programs – we learned it from people. Read here.
AI offers benefits like personalized guidance, interactive engagement and progress tracking. Anyway, it raises concerns about diminished human interaction, potential impacts on learners' autonomy, and the evolving role of language teachers.
Finally yet importantly, the ideal language learning experience often combines the strengths of both human teachers and AI technologies. Read here.
Friday, 22 November 2024
Saturday, 26 October 2024
THE GOTHIC NOVEL
The first Gothic fiction appeared with
works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Ann
Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796),
which opposed 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and
wonder. Gothic was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried connotations of rough and primitive grandeur.
The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark,
tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of
revenge. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original
popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic
ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments and its monster.
Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died
of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric devices continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë
sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great
Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied
to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to
the originals.
Gothic fiction asks to be
considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of
a cathartic process, but transient emotions to be enjoyed for their own sake.
Read here.
https://research.dom.edu/gothicliterature/historyandkeyelements
https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/
Sunday, 20 October 2024
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