Morphing English: Tuesday
23 02 2010This class will start in your regular room, then my replacement will take you over to the library to use the computers there.
There is no fifteen-minute writing task today. We’ll get back into that once I am back.
In this double session, I want you to complete your presentations and speeches about new words in English. The full information about that task is here.
You can find your presentations in
W:\Resources\OMEAM\Morphing English
You’ll need to save it back to your own drive when you are finished. Then copy it across to my drop box on the W drive.
I’ll probably take you through some presentation techniques for a few minutes on Friday and then some of you will be presenting.
ALSO
You should still have those pieces of paper with feedback about each other’s presentations. I’d like you to cut or tear those into strips for each person and give them to each other so you have all that feedback when you are working on your presentation. I know that you might think that you already know what needs correcting, but you’d want to be carved out of chocolate to ignore perfectly good feedback.
If you have a few minutes once you’ve finished writing your presentation and talk, look through this presentation about giving a talk.
Hey Mr O’meara, I have a question. Why does ‘I’ have to be a capital, but ‘a’ doesn’t? Thanks, from Molly.
I is a pronoun and used in place of a proper noun, your own name (as it happens). So instead of writing, “Mr O’Meara woke up this morning,” [note the capitals for the part which is a proper name], I write “I woke up this morning.” [Note the capital for the pronoun, which stands in for a proper name.
However “a” is an article, not anyone’s name so it doesn’t attract a capital unless it gets one for being at the start of a sentence. The purpose of an article is to tell us if we are talking about just one thing or a specific thing.
For example
A cat
The cat
The first is the indefinite article. It is just one of many possible cats.
The second is the definite article. It is talking about a specific cat.
Does this help?