- •Уо «Мозырский государственный педагогический университет
- •Essential vocabulary
- •Basic American Values and Beliefs
- •Introduction
- •Basic american values and assumptions a land of diversity
- •Individual Freedom and Self-Reliance
- •Joining and protesting
- •Hurry, hurry, hurry
- •Are americans materialistic?
- •Straight talk
- •Equal ity
- •Achievement, action, work, and materialism
- •Directness аnd assertiveness
- •Equality of opportunity and competition
- •Material wealth and наrd work
- •Vocabulary Check
- •1. Analyze the following abstract notions аз they are treated in the text:
- •2. Study the following idioms and see if you can supply contexts for them:
- •3. Reading comprehension check. Write the letter of the best answer according to the information in the chapter.
- •Cloze Summary Paragraph
- •The Protestant Heritage
- •Vocabulary Check
- •Comprehension Check
- •Cloze Summary Paragraph
- •American Values at the Crossroads
- •A. Vocabulary Check
- •B. Comprehension Check
- •D. Cloze Summary Paragraph
- •Customs vary with culture
- •Usa and uk in comparison
- •Character and characteristics: a humorous look at
- •Stereotypes
- •What the British Think of Americans…
- •What Americans Think of the British...
- •4 Assessing Students' Comparative Skills
- •I Look at the chart and decide whether the student
- •Socio-cultural portrait of the uk & usa
- •British values and assumptions. Monarchy the island people
- •The island people (II)
- •Essential vocabulary
- •I. Define and comment on the following terms used in the texts
- •II. Study the following list of geographic names.
- •The united kingdom
- •Introduction
- •As others see us
- •0 Wad1 come Pow'r the giftie2 gie3 us
- •It wad frae5 mony6 a blander free us
- •Views of britain. The official view
- •Тhe people's view
- •British society a changing world
- •Attitudes
- •Stereotypes and change
- •English versus british
- •Multiculturalism
- •Conservatism
- •Being different
- •The love of nature
- •The national trust
- •The love of animals
- •Formality and informality
- •The scruffy british
- •Public spiritedness and amateurism
- •I. Mark the following areas of activity as 'professional' or 'amateur / voluntary':
- •II. Sort out the following as positively or negatively viewed by the British:
- •Privacy and sex
- •Lovely weather we're having
- •II. Explain the meaning of the following:
- •III. Match the adjectives with the nouns they collocate with:
- •IV. Explain the use of articles with the word England:
- •I. Fill in the grid:
- •II. Sort out the details for each "stereotype" of the English person
- •III. Answer the questions:
- •IV. Do you agree that
- •No longer an island
- •Have the english finally left their
- •Island mentality behind?
- •Cast in the same mould
- •Change of direction
- •I. Match the following proper names with relevant characteristics:
- •Monarchy
- •Vocabulary
- •The royal family
- •The Sovereign
- •The Royal Family
- •The Monarchy
- •I. Great Britain is a monarchy. Find out from your partner: what is the role of the monarch in a highly developed modern country?
- •II. Choose the correct equivalent for the word:
- •V. Say if you agree or .Disagree with the following and explain why:
- •VII. Express your opinion on the following:
- •Adapt or die?
- •I. Find out the following.
- •II. Make sure you understand the following words and expressions:
- •III. Match the words on the left with their definitions in the right-hand column:
- •IV. Fill in the gaps with the prepositions:
- •In groups and pairs discuss:
- •III. Choose the right preposition:
- •IV. Fill in the gaps where necessary with suitable notional or functional words, using your active vocabulary:
- •V. Translate from Russian into English, using your active vocabulary:
- •Russian and belarusian values and assumptions. Sharing Your Own Culture
- •1 Pre-Reading Discussion
- •2 Vocabulary Development
- •3 Reading, Thinking, Sharing
- •1 * What do the Americans who visited Russia or Belarus think about these countries and their people? Read an extract from a diary and list the areas which provoke culture shock in Russia.
- •15 August, 1996 - Vladimir
- •1 September, 1996 - Vladimir
- •A man of the people
- •Russian mentality
- •People of belorussia
- •1. Strike off one inappropriate word in each tine. Translate those used in the text. Make sure you know the weaning and the pronunciation of the rest words.
- •2. Translate the following sentences from Russian into English using the vocabulary from the text.
Lovely weather we're having
The British are always talking about the weather. Unlike many others, this stereotype is actually true to life. But constant remarks about the weather at chance meetings are not the result of polite conventions. They are not obligatory. Rather, they are the result of the fact that, on the one hand, to ask personal questions would be rude while, at the same time, silence would also be rude. The weather is a very convenient topic with which to 'fill the gap'.
I. Turn the following noun phrases into the corresponding verbal ones. Make the necessary changes.
Example: a lack of respect — to lack respect
Respect for privacy
Increase in informality
Request for information
Revelation about extra-marital affairs
Deviation from what is normal
II. Match the nouns with the adjectives they collocate with:
conventional affairs
demanding attitudes
direct consequences
extra-marital formula / reply
moral life
national questions
negative relevance
personal role
private security
public standards
WHAT IS ENGLAND?
PRE-READING TASK
I. Which of the following proverbs best reflect, to your thinking, the peculiarities of the English national character?
Honesty is the best policy.
Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.
Never say die.
What can't be cured must be endured.
Where there's a will there's a way.
A hedge between keeps friendship green.
Speak fair and think what you like.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
When I was young I was led to believe that being an Englishman meant being an imperial adventurer. Those images, of Englishmen who faced extreme danger with complete equanimity, who cheerfully shot large numbers of animals and black people, and who failed ever to have a conversation with a woman, were always for me images of ideal types which I knew were quite beyond me. I found them impressive and intimidating, but also terrifying and absurd.
Later I became conscious of, and learned to feel at home with, different ways of thinking about what it has meant to be English. For example, I learned to revere Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, John Locke and Bertrand Russell. These giants of English science and philosophy signify, to me, that to be English can mean not shooting big game but daring to think big thoughts (and thoughts get no bigger than those of Newton and Darwin), to be intellectually ambitious and unconventional and not to be intimidated by orthodoxy. Moreover, it is 'English' to celebrate the liberties that make all this possible.
So 'England' has not been an unchanging thing. There have been many versions of it which have been culturally important.
While imperial adventure narratives of 'England' survived until after World War II, another and quite different set of images and ideas had been developed in women's fiction in the 1930s. The idea of Englishness was 'feminized', and offered 'a private and retiring people, pipe-smoking "little men" with their quietly competent partners, a nation of gardeners and housewives'. Englishness was located above all in the southern suburbs and garden cities. Writing Englishness quotes Osbert Lancaster's observation that: 'English is the only language that has a word for "home".'
Gardening was a component of one idea of Englishness which was most immediate for me as a child during the war, that of the unbowed civilian population at war, who continued to 'dig for victory' and to remain calm during airraids. This version of Englishness overlaps with those of Orwell's famous essay on English patriotism, The Lion and the Unicorn, Henry Moore's drawings of Londoners in the underground during the Blitz and Humphrey Jennings's wartime films. This was perhaps the last time when it was possible to plausibly represent the nation as united in a common purpose and as exhibiting a national character to which the masses of people, rather than just elites, could at least aspire. The English person, according to this conception, exhibited calm determination under very difficult circumstances. In Jennings's films, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, people do not rush about and they do not shout and panic, even though bombs fall and buildings blaze. They exhibit quiet heroism and a willingness to make very real sacrifices in the common good. Of course, not everybody behaved like this during the war, but very many people felt that they ought to do their best to do so. After the war, this democratized version of Englishness fed into the building of the Welfare State, the people's deserved reward for their wartime sacrifices and a powerful component of postwar conceptions of Englishness.
What has been the fate of 'Englishness' in the period since the war?
There are many ways of writing the history of post-war 'England', different selections can be made of defining moments and outstanding achievements which seemed to clarify what it could mean to be English. The most ambitious literary view is that offered in the novels of Angus Wilson. What did we think that the English had been especially good at? It was taken to be a truism in 1950 that the English could write novels and poetry but could not compose music, but the 1960s changed all that and young people today would find that a strange thought. This helpfully reminds us of just how variable the perception of national identity can be and how unwise it is to attempt to fix it in thought.
My own version of the history of 'Englishness' since the war would conjecture that there has been a radical discontinuity in the vocabulary of 'Englishness'. I would locate in the mid-1980s a moment of national convulsion, a cultural whirlwind of destruction of fables and icons, which radically destabilized accepted ideas of 'England' and 'Englishness'. The mood was apocalyptic and was caught in the work of Hanif Kureishi and others, and with great foresight in Doris Lessing's novels a decade or so earlier.
This was a convulsion caught with particularly ferocious precision in a film by Derek Jarman called The Last of England (1987). His title is borrowed from a well-known Victorian painting by Ford Madox Brown, which shows a group of emigrants looking back from their ship as they sail away towards a new life. They seem to wonder anxiously just what their new life might bring and also perhaps to survey in imagination the England that they are leaving behind. Jarman's film looks back to the war (he uses home movies shot by his father during and just after the war) towards an England with which he had had a troubled and ambivalent relationship and which was now moving for ever out of view.
Contemporary England is presented as a strife-torn and derelict wasteland. Whereas in Humphrey Jennings' wartime propaganda films men in uniform were heroic firefighters, sailors and airmen, in Jarman's film they are the sinister, masked agents of a state turned against its own people. I imagine that some people would not accept that this was an accurate description of England in the mid-1980s, yet it was a time when something like half of the population felt that official attitudes excluded them from membership of the nation. They were deemed to be, in one guise or another, the 'enemy within'.
By the mid-1990s the mood is less apocalyptic but still valedictory. Familiar ideas of 'England', with which we have felt at home for a long time, are moving away from us for ever. As we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of victory over fascism in Europe, the question of England's identity was posed in terms of its relationship with Europe. Forging a European dimension to our identity, a project with which many of us feel quite at home, has become the occasion of much, as yet inconclusive argument. The ancient iconography of 'England' as a warlike, global power is, unfortunately, still deployed by posturing politicians from time to time.
Not only has England's relationship with Europe changed beyond recognition but so also has the relationship between England and the English language. Churchill wrote a book called A History of the English Speaking People. I do not remember at the time, in the early 1950s it must have been, finding the title especially puzzling. But now the idea of 'English speaking people' is wonderfully baffling, and those who are English are enormously outnumbered by those who speak English. What are they all doing with 'our' language, and who is this 'our' in any case? Pronouns which used to seem to work in relatively uncomplicated ways, can now cause confusion. Not only the Scots and Irish but also Americans, Indians, New Zealanders, Nigerians, among many others, speak English and write in English, and this is enormously to our enrichment.
What is 'England' now? It is something to be imagined and created rather than remembered and preserved unchanged, something inclusive and culturally multiple rather than a quintessence or a heritage. Perhaps in future it just won't matter to people so much what England is because it will be so many different but equally valued things. The ideal would be if we were all free to tell our different stories without each claiming to be the inheritor of the only true meaning of Englishness.
John Mepham
WORD STUDY |
|
| |
I. Choose the correct equivalent for the |
word: |
| |
1) to revere — |
a. enjoy oneself |
b. venerate |
c. disclose |
2) plausible - |
a. imploring |
b. enjoyable |
с reasonable |
3) truism - |
a. platitude |
b. ceasefire |
c. vagrant |
4) to conjecture - |
- a. implore |
b. guess |
c. accumulate |
5) ferocious — |
a. cruel |
b. iron |
с fruitful |
6) derelict - |
a. surviving |
b. scornful |
с abandoned |
7) to deem - |
a. consider |
b. condemn |
с respect |
8) valedictory — |
a. adequate |
b. sickly |
с farewell |
9) quintessence - |
- a. revival |
b. embodiment |
c. inactivity |