Indirect questions & question tags; "From Hell" (film)

Hi there!

Last week was rather short because we only had one day of class. But I think we made the most of it, didn't we? :)

First of all, we revised some grammar and corrected some exercises related to indirect questions and question tags. Remember that indirect questions are a way of making questions more polite, introducing a formula of politeness such as do you know...? can/could you tell me...? etc. They can bit tricky because they don't have the usual structure of a question (QUASI), but the structure of a normal sentence: Sj + Verb + Complements.

(Taken from http://www.bbc.co.uk)

This also happened with reported questions. Have a look at the following examples:

• What's the time? --> Could you tell me what the time is? Indirect question.

• What's the time? --> He asked me what the time was. Reported question (remember that here we go one step back in time; we change the tense).

If you want to practise this a bit more, check out this link. Here you'll listen to a Japanese student learning about indirect questions (click here for the transcription). Then you can take two quizzes to see if you have fully understood indirect questions: quiz 1, quiz 2.

As for question tags, I left two very useful links last week (please, check them if you haven't already), but click here and here for two more.

Then we talked about The Canterbury Tales. So far (hasta ahora) we've talked about Geoffrey Chaucer, his world, and Thomas Beckett. Next week we'll start with the book itself and one of you will present a summary of "The Prologue". Remember to pay careful attention to the description of the characters: it's a real criticism of the society of the time.

Finally, we watched several scenes from the film "From Hell" (2001), starring Johnny Depp. Here you have the link to watch it on cuevana (the "download" option is not available any more, I don't know why... Maybe the Ley Sinde is starting to be enforced...).

As for homework, I'd like you to complete the Vocabulary section on page 107 (exercises a and c). Intermediate F, please, finish completing Grammar Bank 7B. Thank you.

Have a great weekend!