SESSION 19: EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION AND FINAL TASK
2. EXERCISES FOR DISCUSSION
2.1 PLANS: Plan a wedding for a friend of yours. Explain why you have made these choises:
- guests
- food
- venue
- music
- flowers
- honeymoon
- Many people believe there´s no real need for marriage today. Explain your opinion.
2.3 ROYAL LIFE: What is good and bad about royal life? Rank these and share your rankings :
- being a royal
- palaces
- the press
- attending public events
- lack of privacy
- bodyguards
- meeting other world royals
- jewellery
2.4 DISCUSSION: Here are some questions you can try asking yourself before you come to our discussion on Wednesday:
a) What springs to mind when you hear the word ‘wedding’?
b) Do you like weddings?
c) What do you think of royal weddings?
d) Who should pay for royal weddings – the bride and groom or the government?
e) Would you like to go to Prince William’s wedding?
f) What’s a fairytale wedding? Describe one.
g) Do you think Prince William and Kate might prefer a smaller, more private wedding?
h) What do you think the dinner celebration will be like?
i) What wedding present would you buy William and Kate?
j)Do you think royals should only marry other royals and not commoners?
l) Should there be laws to stop the paparazzi taking photos of royalty?
m) Does the press have freedom in Spain to talk about the Royal Family?
n) What do you think of the idea of royal families? Are they necessary or useful in certain countries, like in Spain?
o) What do you know about William’s mother, Princess Diana?
p) What advice would you give to Kate about joining a royal family?
q) What pressures are there on a royal marriage that might not be there for commoners’ marriages?
r) Where is the best place / country to get married?
s) What questions would you like to ask Prince William?
PREPARING A DISCUSSION IS FUNDAMENTAL:
THIS MUST BE DONE IN TWO DIRECTIONS:
FIRST, YOU NEED TO LEARN NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS THAT YOU WILL HAVE TO USE FOR THE DISCUSSION.
SECONDLY, YOU HAVE TO PREPARE THE TOPIC BY LOOKING UP INFORMATION IN THE INTERNET, BOOKS, ENCYCLOPAEDIAS.
THIS WAY YOU WILL FEEL MUCH MORE CONFIDENT AND AT THE SAME TIME YOU WILL HAVE MUCH MORE TO TALK ABOUT.
FINAL TASK:
HERE IS ONE FINAL TASK THAT YOU MAY DO IN ORDER TO COVER THE FOUR SKILLS YOU SHOULD FOCUS ON WHEN LEARNING A LANGUAGE: LISTENING, READING, SPEAKING AND WRITING.
Write a composition and leave it in the blog as a comment to Session 19, I will edit it in the blog so that everybody can learn from other people´s opinions. Choose one of these two options:
- 'In the 21st Century Royal families are an obsolete idea and shouldn´t exist'. Express your opinion.
- There´s no real need for a marriage today. Express your opinion.
Monarchy joins us to an instinctive idea, a world in which a leader, stronger than the rest in the group, must govern and protect them and at the same time gets the most unthinkable privileges.
ReplyDeleteAs many obsolete ideas like racism, machismo, sexism, etc, although not extinguished, at least admitted as the way to follow, monarchy should disappear since it can only exist as a dictatorship or a virtual one with no true politic power, therefore, both of them totally unnecessary. All around the world we can find many examples of republican countries which run perfectly without a king, many of them are even some of the most important in the world, as USA, France or Germany.
In case monarchy still survives in any country, I would like to give it a piece of advice, I would recommend that the heir to the throne will be the grandson or granddaughter of the king or queen and so we would not find heirs as Prince Charles who is 62 years old now and if he becomes king some day he will have to reign from an old people’s home.