Homework:
1. Academic Essay:

What are some of the causes and effects of the spread of the English language across the world?

Write an essay of about 1500 words on this topic, making reference to the texts we have read and any other information you may find. Remember to organize your thoughts into PARAGRAPHS, with a topic sentence for each paragraph. Also remember this is an academic piece of writing, so it should have a formal register and use academic vocabulary.

2. Blogs:

Write another post for your blog, and also read some other students' blogs and post a comment on at least one other blog.

It's Christmas time ...

A quick review of what we did on Wednesday this week!

We had a critical look at the lyrics of the song It's Christmas Time and discussed why they caused some controversy when the song was first released in 1984 to raise money for Ethiopia which had suffered a famine

Controversy again this year when the slightly adapted version was recorded - (this time the cause was Ebola). Here's the video which we didn't look at in class, unlike me, you'll probably recognise more of the singers in this one than the last one!

And here are some critiques of the various versions of the song - first of all "Condescension sells well but doesn't end famine" and another one, "clumsy, patronising and wrong in so many ways", and finally, here's a young woman's video reaction to the video. 

 We also briefly discussed this text in class: How to write about Africa, who it was written for, who it was written by and the extent to which the lyrics from It's Christmas Time fall into the stereotypes of Africa that Binyavanga Wainaina evokes.
It would be good if you could add your opinions on the video in a comment to this post.

Materials from last week's lessons

Here are some of the materials which we used during the lessons last week. Here is a link to Rosemarie Brisciana's presentations, first of all the one she used for PID students, and then for the SEU and SGP students.

Here is the powerpoint from the lesson on Political Speeches. For homework I asked you to prepare a post for your blog analysing a political speech (either a whole speech or part of it) which somehow relates to your group's topic.

Political Speeches

This week we're going to look at two important political speeches 

Bush's speech to congress 20/09/2001
Obama, A New Beginning 4/06/2009
In particular part of Obama's speech which regarded the Palestine-Israel issue, and an issue which we will look at more during lessons as we look at CDA and accusations of bias in the media.
For next week choose a speech which somehow relates to the topic of your blog, and try to analyse it looking out for the aims of the speech, the audience, how the speech is organized and how it seeks to accomplish the aim, lexical choice, rhetorical devices ... there's plenty for you to look for. In your groups you can either each choose one speech or each look at one or two aspects of the same speech. Up to you!
http://www.slideshare.net/franhelm/political-speeches-bushobama