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.