EUROPEAN DAY OF LANGUAGES

The European Day of Languages, September 26th, jointly organised by the Council of Europe and the European Union, involves millions of people across 45 participating countries. Its activities celebrated linguistic diversity in Europe and promoted language learning. The general objectives of the European Day of Languages are:

1. Alerting the public to the importance of language learning and diversifying the range of languages learnt in order to increase plurilingualism and intercultural understanding;
2. Promoting the rich linguistic and cultural diversity of Europe, which must be preserved and fostered;
3. Encouraging lifelong language learning in and out of school, whether for study purposes, for professional needs, for purposes of mobility or for pleasure and exchanges.

ADOPT A WORD

To celebrate the European Day of Languages, at Institut Ítaca we are going to adopt words. Choose a word you like and translate it to different languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, French and any other languages you want. You can use an online dictionary or translator. There are a lot of them at DICTIONARIES.

Once you have the word you have to make a poster with the word in the different languages. We are going to use a resource called wordle, a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. You have to send the image with your word to mceide@xtec.cat. 

Follow the instructions in the website, they are in English and very easy to understand, but ask your teacher if you have any problems. We have adopted the word ENGLISH and this is our wordle puzzle. Do you like it?

INTRODUCTION

We are going to work in English classes using computers and internet resources. You will have activities on the contents of the different units of your book Voices 4, with exercises, grammar references, vocabulary activities, etc.

The first thing you have to do is introduce yourselves in English, so the other people can know about you. You have to leave a comment to this article (Envia un comentari at the bottom of the page) with a short personal introduction in English (50-70 words). Your teacher will evaluate your introduction, so try to write correctly and without mistakes. I have left my own personal introduction as an example!

It is important for you to know the e-mail of your teacher (mceide@xtec.cat) so you will be able to communicate with her, send questions, homework, extra activities or other important things.