Feedback on last lesson Tuesday, 29th April 2014

Last lesson, teacher Luz started by giving us the themes for our group work and
then we had teacher Vanessa again and she prepared very interesting activities
for us.

First of all, we started by finishing the previous activity, which consisted of

choosing our dream job and the city where we wanted to work in the future. We
had to answer true or false according to some categories, such as if we could
have a high salary, a good quality of life, a low cost of living, among others. We
shared our own information with our partner and then he/she presented it to the
rest of the class and we reached some important conclusions. It is very
important to say that many of us consider emigration for our future, since we
see it as a way of following our dreams and have the careers that we want.
Most of us want to go to Australia, since it is a beautiful place, with lots of
biodiversity, the salaries are high and it has a good immigration policy, giving
their immigrants what they need in order to have a good life in the country.
However, there are also some people who actually consider staying here in
Portugal. Although our economic situation isn´t the best, they think that
everything will get better in a near future and they`ll be able to follow their
dreams and also to stay closer to their family.

After this, we had an auction in our class! The teacher Vanessa had prepared a
game called Grammar Auction game, in which we had to correct the mistakes in
the sentences that would appear on the board. The mistakes on the sentences
were the ones that we had made in the previous lesson so it was a great way
for us to finally understand and correct them. We were divided into 4 teams and
each team was given 15 pieces of candy, which would be our money and we
would bid with them. There could only be 3 bids per sentence and our goal was
to outbid the other teams so that we could correct the sentence. If we corrected
the sentence correctly of if we knew that the sentence was already correct we
would be given a point. Here are some mistakes that we often make while
talking in the class:

 If I say “Right now I am in the mountain”, this sentence is wrong, since

we should see a mountain as a surface, which means that we are on the
mountain and not in the mountain.
 Sometimes we also say that we are in holidays, but in fact we are on
holidays.
 There are also some idiomatic expressions in English, which don`t really
have a meaning in Portuguese, for example the expression “you did a
good job!”. It means that we did a great thing and we can never say
“you did a good work”. This is completely wrong.
 Sometimes we also mix the concept of job with the concept of work. We
only say work when referring to the works on the street or a school work
 or an art work. When we talk about our profession, what we do for living,
we are talking about our job.
 Another common mistake is to repeat the subject in a sentence when it is
not needed. For example: The woman it`s at the shop. We already have
the subject, which is the woman, so after that we just need the verb to be
and not the pronoun it. So, it should be: The woman is at the shop.

From my point of view, I think that this game, more than being very enjoyable,
was also a good way for us to remember how to use certain expressions and
prepositions and we`ll not make the same mistake again. I really loved the
lesson and I hope that we can have teacher Vanessa again soon!