Last Week

It seems yesterday when I fist entered to the classroom and saw all my classmates but it is already the last week of the semester and I could say that this class helped me and taught me so much.

I never imagined lot of the things that we did in our class like reading about shakespeare and dickens. Also I learned about a lot from countries that have English as it official language. I liked this class because every week there were something different and you could not say for sure what were we going to do but that always kept the curiosity and the excitement.
I have been in English classes since preschool but never thought about English as a global language. This class taught me the importance of it and I am glad I know English, also I am glad I took this course because my cultural point of view has been extended.
There were so many time when we worked in teams or pairs for expositions, for presentations and that developed many skills like teamwork, patience, tolerance.

You never stop learning English and this class helped me with my speaking, reading, listening and mostly my writing. I have enjoyed the classes all through out the course and had a great new experience.

Yours sincerely,

Adriana Villarreal.

WEEK 15

CHRISTMAS CAROL

 Today in the second session of week 15 we did presentations about the book "A christmas carol" by Charles Dickens. I had heard about the movie before but I have never seen it but now I know about it.

Christmas is my favourite season and holiday of the year. I am christian and I like to celebrate the holiday when my Saviour Jesus Christ came to the world. While doing my research about how Christmas was slowly dying and how Dickens revive the christmas traditions made me sad but then happy. Sad because as you may know A Christmas Carol was published after the industrial revolution and at that time in England the social classes were very divided. So families started to loose hope and to forget about christmas because they thought it was only for rich people to celebrate. But after the publication of A Christmas Carol I am glad that the hope was revived and instead of being a holiday about the richness and lust it became again a humble holiday.

This topic made me feel very excited about Christmas and remind me that is not about the presents or the food, the tree or the lights but christmas is about Christ.

WEEK 15
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES

This week on Monday we had to do presentation about 3 American short stories, In my team we divide us the stories and I had to read the story called: "A Buddhist's Tale" by Thomas Demaria. The story takes place in a beautiful Island of Thailand.


This story was not very complicated to read but it was complicated to comprehend the plot and story. There were 3 main characters: Tommy, Chairat, and The Monk.

The part I liked the most was when Tommy was watching the waterfall and reflecting about how life is like a drop, and when we die we are all like the ocean. The character I relate the most was Tommy because when he meets the Monk he starts asking him questions that he needed to know and I think that would be me with an important person because I always want to figure my thoughts out and if I have doubts I don't like to keep it for myself.

WEEK 14

WEEK 14


This week we saw a movie called The Power of One. The movie is a South African movie with a lot of cultural messages.

When Mr. Wiersema told us that we were going to watch a South African movie I thought it was going to be very boring but it was very interesting and I really liked the movie. I could say that it is my favourite movie for the 2016.
The movie´s main character was P.K. a English boy that was raised by his English mom but also by his south african nanny. Her mom decides that he should go to school far away from them so that he could study. In the school he suffer from bulling. That part really moved my heart and I wanted to pop out in the movie and defend him and punch the bully in the face but you know, that is impossible.
As the movie goes on P.K.´s mom died, he had no love ones and start becoming very sad, depress and he said that the sad birds were always flying around him. That was till P.K. met Doc he took care of him and start to teach him all he knew and treated him like a son. Doc was German but despite the natzi movement he was against all of that and he promoted love, equality and freedom.

P.K. keeps growing and his duty as the Rain maker never dies, he becomes a boxer and uses that to help the African people. Also he starts teaching English to them and sacrifices OXFORD  and also his girlfiend for helping the African people to move on.
This movie taught me that in life we all must do sacrifices, it will hurt us or weaken us but as long as you are fighting for a right cause, it is 100% worth it.

week 13

Adriana Villarreal A00820061

Jessica Talamas A01381313

Countries and Cultures

For week 12 every team had to do a presentation about the country assigned and in this text you will read a report about what we learned about each country.

Wales

First of all we are going to talk about the country of team 6; Wales.

Wales capital city is Cardiff, a important fact that we learned was that only 21% of the welsh population can speak the native language also in Wales the flag had a lot of meaning, it has been changed; furthermore, my classmate said that he wondered if the Union Jack flag was going to change due to the separation of Wales from it. The government of wales is under a parliament and it makes laws about health, education, environment, transport and housing and other manner were in charge of the parliament. Also we learned that Wales has a unique holiday called St. Davis day in which they celebrate it with parades, festivals and food.

India

The team that presented about India taught us about the tribes that India had and it is important to know that they still have gypsies tribes. In India tourism is very important, you can visit India any time and it is assured that you will find a festival or a carnival, because of the many celebrations they have also India has the Taj Mahal, one of the 7th wonders of the world.

India has different traditional food per city because their food and seasoning is very different among all the indian cities. Mahatma Gandhi is one of the main characters and leaders of the world and he is responsible for the freedom of the Indian people from the Brits.

South Africa

South Africa is located as its name says in the south of the African Continent, it is a country with a population of 48,000,000 and it has a combination of black, white, coloured and indian people and poverty is one of their main problematics. South Africa is a democratic country and as for today their president is Jacob Zuma. The main religion in South Africa is christianity with a 68% and the following religion is 28.5% of beliefs that are based in indigenous and animist. An important thing to know is that it has 11 official languages and English is spoken for political words and in the corporate but most of the South Africans know only the basic knowledges of English. South Africa is recognise by many for being the only country that had hosted the cricket, rugby and soccer world cup also for one of the most inspirational figure in the world named Nelson Mandela.

Singapore

Talking about Singapore, we learned that this country is located in the Asian continent being the smallest state in the Southeast Asian region. It has different ethnic groups for example Chinese, Malays and Indian because of their location. This country is known because of their strange laws. One example of this kind of laws is selling or chewing gum. Another example is drink or eat in public transportation.

The team also talked about some special events that they celebrate. For example the Chingay Parade, the Thaipusam, Vesak Day, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival, and of course New Year's Eve.

Philippines

What we learned about Philippines is that it consists of volcanic islands. It is said that Philippines has more volcanoes than towns in the complete country. Talking about history, it is known that Ferdinand Magellan was the first expedition that arrived in Philippines and claimed the islands in 1521. By 1898 Philippine was declared independent from Spain.

The Philippine culture is diverse because they have Asian, Spanish and American culture. Referring to society, it is known that they have strong family values, they pretend to be richer and they have large families.

Because of their location, fish is one of their traditional food. In special occasions, they eat pig with rice and coconut milk.

New Zealand

From this team, we learned that people that live in New Zealand are called Kiwis. This is because a Kiwi bird is able to take fencing wire and do whatever they need with it and resourcefulness apply to who they are.

The team explained that the first inhabitants of New Zealand were the Maori. The Maori culture is still a core part of New Zealand's national identity and traditions.

Auckland is the largest and most popular city in New Zealand because of their Sky tower, volcanoes and museums. They also explained the main sports that people from New Zealand practice. Their main sports are rugby, cricket, soccer, netball and basketball.

WEEK 11

There are situations that inspire us to do something very different, for example watching an add about a girl hugging her mom, might as well make you feel loved and that you will want to sing about it, or a break up could inspire you to write a song, and as we see in class a painting could inspire you to write a poem.

Also we watched a movie called "BOY" it is a New Zealand movie and it is about a boy named boy that meets his father out of the blue to find money that he had buried years ago. Boy had very high expectations about him but he comes to the reality when he gets to know him better.

We had to do a reflecting paper on the movie and I chose the topic about influences and how they affect us and make an impact on us; furthermore, it relates also with the poem-painting inspiration because the writer had an impact based on the painting.

WEEK 10

In this week we prepared our Country presentation, my team and I chose Ireland as our country, because non of the team had ever gone there and it is interesting.

For a requirement for the course we were reading the book "How English became English" and this week is the mega quiz from it. Weeks before, every team prepared a presentations about some of the pages from the book and then we shared them and also there were summaries that we could read and study for the quiz. So after studying hard I finally presented the quiz, I was expecting a tougher quiz but thanks God it was not that hard.

Also this week was the second round for the creative writing and I had to write a real history about a time when my values where challenged.

WEEK 9 

 For our second session of this week we did a translation exercise that made me realize that there are sometimes that our mind thinks like a google translation because we want to translate every single word in Spanish to a similar one in English like "Finalidad" to "finally" or "actualidad" and "actually" and also want to put the words in the same order.

The activity was challenging and I think that the paragraphs we translate were good, at the beginning we did some google translate mistakes but then we started changing them. In our translation we did not commit the mistake of putting "actually" we used "Right Now" and that showed us that we understand that even though the appearance is very similar, it does not have the same meaning.

Activities like this one are very helpful to me and I learned a lot besides the fact that it was fun to do.

WEEK 7

Session 1: Punctuation Challenge with online texts. 

This session was as its name challenging, we worked in pairs and they gave us a text with no punctuation at all, it was all plane with no commas, periods or anything. When I first saw the text I stop for a minute and stare at it, then I started to read it and trying to make sense with all the words. At the end when we checked, I missed some commas (I think that is my biggest problem).

Session 2: Work with How English Became English - Collaborative Reading and Preparation for presentations about the book. 

This session seem boring and longer to me but while reading and scanning the text I started to learn some facts that I did not know about the English language and how it started to spread and mix with all types of English.

Session 3: Presentations Bleak House

This session was something I had never seen before, in the same class there were poems read, paintings, kahoot games, a jeopardy show, interviews, debates. And I could realized how the perceptions of something in this case a book is different for everybody. I really liked this session and I also had the chance to see all my classmates points of view about the book.

WEEK 6

This week in the first session we did the creative writing contest, I wrote a poem about the theme "being invisible" I picked this topic because sometimes I consider myself as an invisible person. And also I love to write poems.

Session three was a long task but interesting and full of knowledge about the life of shakespeare. I worked with Delma we divided the questions and started to look for information. The part that intrigued me the most was when we had to find ourselves in the poem. The poem was difficult to read and understand; however, at the end we discovered the part when we all were included in the poem in the verse that said  "Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read" and I found the poem very interesting.

week 11

WEEK 11

There are situations that inspire us to do something very different, for example watching an add about a girl hugging her mom, might as well make you feel loved and that you will want to sing about it, or a break up could inspire you to write a song, and as we see in class a painting could inspire you to write a poem.

Also we watched a movie called "BOY" it is a New Zealand movie and it is about a boy named boy that meets his father out of the blue to find money that he had buried years ago. Boy had very high expectations about him but he comes to the reality when he gets to know him better.

We had to do a reflecting paper on the movie and I chose the topic about influences and how they affect us and make an impact on us; furthermore, it relates also with the poem-painting inspiration because the writer had an impact based on the painting.

WEEK 5

This week was so different from the past weeks, we did many variety activities.
On Monday we watch the first part of a movie named: "Jerry Maguire" I really liked it actually I tried to watch the second half on the internet but failed at finding the movie; however,  I am still eager to watch the end.
Also we were asked to read 2 articles for the 2 session because we had an activity about relating the articles with the movie. The whole theme of both the articles and the movie it was about honesty at your work. I consider the honesty a very important thing to have, it helps you as a person but also helps to build up the company, industry, relationship that you are working at.

Sometimes we lie to benefit ourselves or our team but if we maintain the honesty, we will last long and we are going to be fearless, because we are doing things right. Even when you see that honesty won't pay you will see the reward later.

And to finish with this week we worked in teams, the task was to look up 4 countries that speaks English as it official language to compare the language, the culture and some fun facts. My team chose South Africa, Australia, Singapore and Hong-Kong and we saw a lot of differences between them.

To conclude I could say this week was so active and full of learning new things with different sources like articles, movies, internet, essays. I liked it all but the fact that there was not so much homework to do during this partial exams week was my favourite.

The Evolution and Importance of English as a Global Language.

This week we show to the class the video that we made as team 5. In the video you can see how the English evolved from celtic language to the early modern English that we speak now.
Below I will post the link where you can watch the video. I got to talk about the beginnings of English and Middle English. Enjoy the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxHwycUvjqQ

·     Thesis Statements

School uniforms have many advantage for students such as not having to worry about what to wear, not caring about the brand you have on your clothes and you can keep using them over the years of school if they still fit you.

·      Drinking and driving can lead you to major problems like putting in danger your life and others but you can avoid them by using a cab or have a designated driver.

·      Over the years the way of thinking about the legalization of marihuana have changed, some people think it should be legal because it is helpful and they see it like a way to get out of stress; on the other hand, people think it should not be legal because of the problems that it brings with it.

·      Animal testing can be stopped by a combined work between the organizations that defend the animals and the people that test the animals by respecting the rights because it can only work that way.

·      Changing Universities can be hard because each university have different ways to manner; you need to get used to the new policy of the school and the learning plan can be different.

·      Endangered Species protection should be an important thing to consider because the diversity of animals is decreasing due to the species that have already extinct because of the bad behavior of humans with animals.

·      We think that Life on other planets is not possible because the researchers have not found enough natural resources for a human to live and we should have already known if there is life in other planets but the proofs are not trustful.

·      Art museums are places where you can learn different types of art, you can get to know different artists work and how the art have changed through the years.

·      Nutritious Food help to build a healthy life because it gives all the nutrients that the body needs, it helps the function of our brains and there are lots of delicious food.

·      Gambling can bring you an addiction to play, to win money and will always be ambitious to win more.

·      The use of technology in language education has many ways to help because there are lots of people interested in the new and different ways of learning and it is accessible to basically to all the world.

·      Cosmetic surgery is a vanity way to change something in your body that you are not confident about, but there is the possibility that you will end disappointed with the result.

·      The English Language has many things to learn from like where it came from, how it started and how it has changed.

Second week

This second week was different, for the first class we were asked to read an article that it was about the English Language as a global language. In class we pair in groups of two then we answered some questions, me and Jimena agreed that we as Spanish speakers are disadvantage in it, and if we feel that way we cannot imagine what would people that does not speak any English feel. But seeing it as a global project was better because thinking about it, those who doesn't speak english as its mother language will have the opportunity to speak for a world audience. So we agree and disagree with the author in some ways.

Speeches are something that I really like but something that makes me very nervous. Wednesday was the due date to hand in the essays that our speeches were based in and it was also the first day of speeches presentations. Thanks to God somebody told the teacher that the even numbers went first because I was too nervous that day, I could feel my heart pumping so fast and strong. So that day I heard some awesome speeches from my classmates.

Thursday was my speech day and I wasn't as nervous as the day before, and so the teacher called my name I went in front of the class and just started talking about what was happening in the music industry. Doing my essay based on that topic was great because I love music and that helped me to improvised when my mind shock for a little bit while I was talking.

From this week I can take the importance of music industry, the UN, Animal rights, the olympics and also to know that every person has a point of view from a topic because lot of my classmates talked about the same theme but they manage it and focus in so many different ways. 

My First Class

Language and Culture in the English Speaking World First Class

Hello everyone, I started college studying the Major: Industrial Engineering last Monday at ITESM in Monterrey, Mexico and my second class was LCESW (Language and Culture in the English Speaking World). I arrived to the classroom and everyone was outside the classroom because there was an other class before so we had to wait for them to come out. I was eager about the class, and thinking that it was going to be in English made nervous as well.

We entered to the classroom and this teacher was there, He introduce himself as Nico Jan Wiersema and he is pretty cool. The introduction of this class was interesting, I had no idea what was this course about and I think now I have the idea.

I got a 74 grade in the Cambridge Test and that means I could have taken an other language but I had no idea, so I tried to change this course but my career director said: "No, you can not change any courses" I know she did not try to be rude but it is just that in my career there are like 250 students only in first semester and dealing with us and a couple of hundreds more is not easy so I understand.
I am glad She said no because I am liking this course and it have only been 3 sessions of it, so I am looking forward to learn a lot in this class also meeting some new people and improving my culture and language in my speaking.

You may as well come and visit my blog next week to find out how well or not I am doing at this class.

I will write to you latter,

Adriana Villarreal