Saturday, January 23, 2010

Haiti

Natural disasters is the title of a lesson in our students´coursebook for 1st Bachillerato and the earthquake in Haiti is a good example of one... It´s a good topic to teach and learn vocabulary and, unfortunately, to talk and write about current news.
There´s so much information in the media about the earthquake and the destruction of Haiti! I have tried to collect different information that may help you to learn something about the country while you improve your English.
Before you watch the video below - which is a piece of news from the FOX TV Channel- you should read something about the origin and history of Haiti because many important facts of its history are included in the report; that´s why I think if would be useful if you watched Haiti's History of Misery first (quite a meaningful title, isn´t it?)




And I´ll take advantage of this situation to tell you about a website called VOANews(VOA stands for Voice of America), which has podcasts in American English about all sorts of topics, including this one about Haiti, A Race Against Time to Help Haitians: you can download the podcasts or just listen to them as you read the text on the screen of your computer. What makes this webpage so good is the fact that it was born to communicate by radio in clear and simple English with people whose native language was not English, with people who were not fluent in English. An excellent tool to listen, read and watch! Of course, the speakers are all American -and I must admit I love how they sound...What about you?



As for photographs, one of my favourite websites is The Big Picture, which describes itself as "News Stories in Photographs". Each picture has a short explanation right below it: something about the place where it was taken, the people in the photograph, an explanation of what they are doing...and the quality of the images is just excellent!

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