There are new units in ELLA (English Language Lab Asturias) for you to do online. The units cover the three levels taught at schools of languages.
Have a go! Try them and enjoy English. There are lots of activities and lots more are coming. I’m sure you’ll find them useful.
I had already heard about John Steinbeck, since I watched two impressive movies based on his novels: John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and Elia Kazan’s “East of Eden” (1955). Yet, I had never read any of his books. He has always been known as a great storyteller who had been able to build so strong and unforgettable characters like Tom Joad and Cal Trask (played in the cinema by Henry Fonda and James Dean, respectively).
Thus, being in the EOI’s library, searching for a book to read in my last Christmas holiday, I had no doubt when I saw his “Of Mice and Men” laying unnoticed on a shelf: “This one”, I thought.
Apart from being a biography lover, I have always been interested in knowing the writer’s historical context, in search of the motives that made him or her devote himself/herself to the art of writing.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was born in California, in a region famous by its immigration tradition, which made him grow up influenced by social problems of poor people from working class, many of them migrant workers.
“Of Mice and Men” is a gripping novel about two friends who, having neither family, nor a place of their own, search for employment in some ranch, after having lost their former job in a farm.
George promised Aunt Clara, Lennie’s only relative, to look after the mentally handicapped guy. Since her death, they both become inseparable. Yet sometimes George loses his patience with his dumb friend.
Some of the most pleasant passages of the story are related to the times when Lennie asks George, for the umpteenth time, to talk about their dream of having their own ranch. After refusing it firmly, George ends up agreeing to his friend childish claim, providing him with a wonderful description of a paradisiacal place in which they both would be finally happy.
The author manages to impress the reader by showing not only a beautiful pure friendship between two grown-up men, but also the imaginative resources to which they appeal to escape from the long-suffering lives they have here and there.
Yet, the story has an unexpected sorrowful ending which in no way diminishes the sympathy the reader feels towards these two modest men.
Although the book is written in a simple style, I sometines found it a little bit difficult to get accustomed to the colloquial language, plenty of slang, Steinbeck employed to give realism to his characters’ dialogues. Nevertheless, the reading rapidly turns into a delightful experience, boosted by this odd language itself.
Steinbeck won both Pulitzer (for “The Grapes and Wrath”) and Nobel Prizes for Literature in 1940 and 1962, in the order given.
By Helga Maria Saboia Bezerra
Yesterday’s lesson was based on two activities made by two friends and colleagues: Carmen López (EOI Mieres) and María Valdés (EOI Oviedo).Thanks to them, we learnt things about San Francisco and the reasons why men and women are so different (fortunalety, if I may say so!)
If you want to do Partners in Crime again, click here and if you want to try with the test again and get the answersheet, click here.
There are also some videos in Maria´s Blog you may find interesting.
Thank you for your help and support, dear colleagues.
One person and one dog. Only two friends walking through America. Willy is a beggar that hasn’t forgot his old life as a poet. The animal is the one that has shared the whole life with his owner, living together an infinite amount of adventures and twists since those magical revolutions in the sixties. Since then, it is to understand perfectly what humans say what this dog has learnt‐ yeah, Mr. Bones is a dog, but a very clever one. And that is something that you will see as long as Mr. Bones tries to understand human’s life and feelings.
This is a story cleverly told to humans from the point of view of someone that knows “what” is happening among all those things that surround him but that he doesn’t know “why”. Mr. Bones is a vagrant dog that has lived, seen and experimented a lot, so it is not naivety what is his thoughts main characteristic. But the moment he finds himself walking alone in a world not made for him, absurdity of humans and people indoor misfortunes turns up in the middle of the plot with an original style you have never seen before. It has been described many times as something that pours cold water on us.
Although the characters won’t come alive to you, all their dimensions are treated in such an ironical way that it gives the plot the piece it needed to be one of Auster’s masterpieces, in which the author shows us American typical examples that seem so odd to what is supposed to be a rational mind with no passions.
As it is written in not a very elaborated language, reading this book will be easy to follow, and it is a perfect one to start reading this author. Believe me, when you see this way the outrageous lives that we carry on everywhere, I am sure you will say it is a page-turner.
Try it 
Jaime
Title: The Innocent man
Author: John Grissam
Plot:
The story talks about two men that got unfairly caught in the webs of a rotten system and who would have to fight for his freedom because of a murder they did not commit. 1982, Debbie Carter, a twenty-something girl is found raped and dead at her home in Ada, a small town in Oklahoma where justice is more than doubtful. Almost instantly the prosecution is focused in Ron Williamson, a guy from the town, known for his brief career in professional baseball and for his clear mental problems (manic depression, personality disorders, alcoholism and mild schizophrenia); and Dennis Fritz, who gets involved in the crime just because of his old friendship with Ron. Without even trying to get more suspects, two police officers from the town, Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers, begin harassing both men in order to get them in prison. Finally, after tricking them with many doubtful legality cheats, they manage to get false confessions from both men and testifying with many way unreliable sources, false witnesses and snitches they get to put Ron and Dennis behind bars, sentenced to death penalty. Then, they begin their ordeal to prove everyone that they are innocent and the real murderers are still out there.
The story also centres on a similar case, in which Denice Haraway happens to be murdered, and Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot prosecuted and eventually put behind bars under the same premises of Ron and Dennis.
The Innocent man is a nail biting legal thriller, a heavy descriptive page-turner that will get you almost instantly and will almost make you weep terrified with the cruel injustices committed by those who are supposed to protect us.
Writing Style:
The writing style is very complex, the language is sometimes simple and sometimes quite hard, especially during the trials, mainly because of the great quantity of specific terms related with justice matters and that kind of things.
During the few spoken parts, the language is adapted to the speaker. Thereby, for example, when Ron speaks, the language is full of pet phrases and curses; when Barry Ward, Ron’s attorney, speaks, the language is correct and appropriated to the trials.
Characters:
Ron Williamson: A former baseball player wannabe who was forced to retire early because of his arrogance and injuries and got mad as time passed. During the novel, we can see his mental evolution, since he was a little boy, going through his young sane glory days and ending in his mind losing.
Dennis Fritz: A former teacher at a high school who sees himself involved in a murder investigation just because of his old friendship with Ron. He and Ron had been “drinking buddies” for some time long ago, but Dennis had decided to stay away from him due to his dangerous behaviour. Anyway, their friendship finally takes its cost.
Overall impression/recommendation
This is one of the most thrilling and page-turner book I’ve ever held in my hands. My recent lackness of nails can tell you the emotion I’ve felt until I turned the last page.
Fernando Neira Sánchez
A CHRISTMAS CAROL, by Charles Dickens Dickens is probably the best known and loved author of the Victorian era. He wrote many memorable tales.
A Christmas Carol may be the most popular one. At the age of 12, some sources say that Charles Dickens worked for 12 hours a day, six days a week in a boot factory finishing the bottles of boot polish. On the seventh day he visited his family at the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. This lasted for two years (a traumatic time for young Dickens). He never forgot it, yet, he used his pain to create memorable characters like Scrooge and Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit’s disabled little boy.
The reader can almost see young Dickens chained by poverty to his polish pots as little Tiny Tim is invisibly linked to his crutch. The descriptions and dialogues are rich. The characters are striking and memorable. The imagery is colourful, despite the bleakness of the winter months.
The story told in this book is to apply to most of us. Even in our old age it is not too late to change. In Dickens’ tale Ebenezer Scrooge, an old miser, bitter and resentful man is shown his past, his present, and his future by three ghosts. The first ghost reminds him of how he once enjoyed life’s pleasures. The second ghost shows Scrooge his current deplorable state. The final ghost foretells the likely outcome of his way.
This book it is not so much a Christmas story as a New Year’s story. For those of us who want to change the course of our life, for those of us who want this year’s resolutions to actually mean something, we need to go through an Ebenezer-like process. Whether your life is a bad life or an abused life or a flat life, you can use the ideas from this simple story.
Alberto R. Ayala
A “Grief Observed” is a work of C.S. Lewis where he explains his own experience when he comes down to a terrible situation of life; the loss of a beloved one. When his wife dies, he falls in a deep depression and he tries to find the free way to get better in the writing.
When someone who you love dies, the feelings of loneliness and anguish are overwhelmed and here, the author doesn’t find comfort even in God. Where most people turn to religion to keep on the faith in a better life after death, Lewis doesn’t care about the other side but the side where everything reminds him of his wife.
There are no more characters than the sadness of the author and that’s enough to fill the absence of any more. However, this difficult situation of the life is something that everyone has to suffer sooner or later and in this book, Lewis shows that his way of getting one’s strength back is to get angry with everybody about everything. That personal way of expressing himself makes that the book isn’t written in a style immediately accessible to any reader. The language is not plain at all and there are a lot of new adjectives and nouns to describe so personal feelings.
“Grief Observed” is a difficult book due to the amount of new vocabulary that it contains. Its heavy going and the fact of having to re-read lots of paragraph made me that I couldn’t get into it.
David Bulnes
