English and Cultural Studies

Common Threads     Players are challenged to figure out the common characteristic or category for lists of three related items. Age Range : 4 to 12 Skills Used : factual knowledge, reasoning, listening Number of Players : 3 to 8 Noise Level : moderate to high Activity Level : low Materials : cards with lists of three related items Setup Create cards listing three items that have something in common. For example: hooves, paws, talons—kinds of feet; sash, cummerbund, belt—things that go around your waist; Ford, Allis Chalmers, John Deere—kinds of tractors; a hunter, Robin Hood, Cupid—all shoot a bow and arrow; and so on. Include the answer at the bottom or on the back of the card. How to Play The game director reads the list on the card and asks, “What’s the common thread?” The players, or teams, quickly say their answer. The first correct answer is awarded a point. If two or more players answer at the same time, only those players are eligible to answer the ne...

Engaging Classroom Games for All Grades: Great activities for classroom teaching Game:  Bed of Nails      Players put rubber bands on an array of nails following rules about which nails can be encircled Age Range: 7 to 10 Skill Used: strategic thinking Number of Players: 3 Noise Level: moderate Activity Level: moderate Materials: rubber bands in three colors, wooden game board, 100 nails, pair of dice Setup The game board is a 12 12 piece of wood. It is prepared by pounding nails into the board in a half-inch grid pattern, with the heads of the nails sticking up about an inch. The points of the nails should not protrude from the bottom of the board. The grid should be 10 by 10 nails. The rubber bands should be sorted into the three colors. About 30 of each color are needed. Thin bands of about 1 or 2 inches in diameter are easier to use for this game since they do not need to be doubled to make a play stay in place. How to Play Each player ...

Engaging Classroom Games for All Grades: Great activities for classroom teaching Teams collect points by answering questions and then use their points in a race to spin bolts along a rod. Age Range: 9 to 12 Skills Used: factual knowledge, strategic thinking Number of Players: 5 to 13 Noise Level: moderate to high Activity Level: moderate Materials: question-and-answer cards,  stopwatch, threaded metal rods (2 feet each), thirty bolts, paint Setup The starting end of the threaded metal rods should be painted in a distinctive color to distinguish it from the finishing end, and the  bolts should be checked to make sure they fit the rods and spin freely. Question-and-answer cards should be prepared and given to the game director. Any single subject area or a combination of factual information can be used for the questions. For example: What is 7  multiplied by   8? (56); What is the capital of Wisconsin? (Madison); Who invented the light bulb? (...

Effective English speaking skills for beginners:   Did you try answering the questions in the previous part? What was the English word he was looking for when he said portable bed? What  did  he  mean  by  the  people  in  charge  of  looking  after  people  that  have  had accidents? Which of the Communication Strategies was he using in both cases? Compare your answers with these: The first word the Danish speaker did not manage to remember (or did not know) was stretcher . The second was paramedics or ambulance crew. In both cases he used paraphrase to resolve the problem. Now let’s us go to The second task For this task you will need to have a partner you can speak to in English. (If you don’t have  someone  you  can  work  with  face  to  face, ,  you  could  use  web  software  such  as Voxapop at http://ww...

Effective English speaking skills for beginners:  In order to practice English well, ESL learners have to be involved in a wide range of positions such as  chatting with friends ,  buying things in shops ,  asking directions in the street ,  discussing a problem in a tutorial ,  consulting a supervisor , giving a seminar presentation , and so on.  To speak effectively in English you need a variety of ‘’tools”. I will be exploring and suggesting ways in which you can practice and improve using them in English. So, the tools for speaking are: Conversation is a complex activity, even in our first language, and can cause difficulties for either speaker or listener:  (1) As  a  speaker  you  may  not  remember  the  exact  word  or expression  for  what  you  want  to  say.  In  this  case,  you  need  to adopt  ...

To demonstrate further, as the camera follows the Saudi physician Zaynab who walks in a hospital corridor, we see a woman deny the camera even a glimpse of her eyes. When she discovers the camera’s presence, she covers her face with a notebook. In this sense, Saudi women see the documentary’s camera as intrusive and therefore, resist and deny it the ability to gaze at them.   Figure 5:  A Saudi woman puts a notebook on her eyes, resisting the gaze of the Western camera.            Thus, whilst the women’s voices are silenced by the film language, their agency and resistance to the film’s Orientalist ideology cannot be canceled. The filmmaker and her crew are quite controlled by the veiled Saudi women. Their desires and demands are denied. Therefore, their role or freedom of representation is limited and bounded by the veiled Saudi women. In this situation, the documentarist’s position in representation is not a...

The Representation of Muslim Women in the Western Documentary Films 2/6 Hafidh Shamseddine Anisa Saeed However, this way of portraying Saudi women reflects the failure of the interpretation rather than of the articulation. In fact, these Saudi women ‘speak,’ but since their views do not conform to the Orientalist ideology of the documentary, they are not heard by the documentarist who, then, tries to undermine their speech with her perspective.  In effect, these women are made to be “subaltern”. As Spivak argues in the case of female as subaltern, It is not so much that subaltern women did not speak, but rather that others did not know how to listen, how to enter into a transaction between speaker and listener. The subaltern cannot speak because their words cannot be properly interpreted. Hence, the silence of the female as subaltern is the result of a failure of interpretation and not a failure of articulation. [23] In the light of this view, we can say that th...