Self-Study closed on September 2nd.

Sorry for the inconveniences. You may stop by on Tuesday during the usual hours.

Lexicalization

Lexicalization is the process through which words express different concepts. This process works in a different way in different languages. That is why, many ideas may be present in only one word in a language but not in another. Think about the word "stride" in English: This word contains not only a notion of  walking, but also a notion of the manner in which someones walks (with long steps or strides). If you want to express the same in Spanish,  you will have to resort to some kind of adverbial complement to express manner, because it is absent in the word "caminar" itself and we have no other synonym that includes this  semantic feature.
The following exercise will help you become aware of this situation. English tends to be a synthetic language which lexicalizes many ideas or notions in a single word. Spanish tends to be "wordier" so being concise in English is sometimes hard to accomplish.
There are two sections:

Lexicalization(verbs), exercise
Lexicalization(verbs), key

Language 3. Practice for Essays

Task 1

1. Use some of the information below to write an essay entitled “Unusual Tasks for Robots”. Your essay should have at least four paragraphs.

• analyze soil and fertilize it when necessary
• decide when a plant is ripe for picking
• guide a blind person on the street
• hand things to a person in a wheelchair
• help in dangerous situations
• help on the farm
• help paralyzed people to walk again
• help the handicapped
• help the police defuse terrorist bombs
• inspect the interior of a nuclear reactor
• locate weeds and kill them
• search for survivors inside a burning building.

Task 2

Write two paragraphs for an essay . The beginning and ending are given below.

“While most people agree that a woman has the right to work as a heavy-machine operator and a man to become a midwife, is this supposed open-mindedness being put into practice? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that workers are still being judged by their gender, and not by their skills, and this is a situation which needs to be dealt with.”

“To sum up, gender should not be an issue in any workplace, since a powerfully-built female is just as capable of hard manual labour as a kind and gentle male is of child-care. The only obstacles are those which exist in our own minds; as the American therapist Dr. S.F. Perls once said, “We have to lose our minds to come to our senses.”

Schedule for Exam Term

Monday July 29th, 11.00 to 14.00
Tuesday July 30th, 12.00 to 15.30

YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE!!!

The Self Study Room will be closed in the morning on May 27th and on June 3rd. It will open at 1 pm. Sorry for the inconveniences this may bring about.

EXERCISES ON TEXT TRANSFORMATION

Below you will find an activity that is similar to the classical sentence transformation exercises but at a textual level. These exercises will help you to improve your composing skills, to polish your language and to make it more idiomatic. You are supposed to re-write the texts on the left,  following the pattern suggested on the right. If some extra info is needed, you will find it in parentheses.  There are keys available for each text. If you have doubts about your own production and would like to check it or ask further questions, please stop by the Self Study Room in my office hours.

A Message in a Bottle
Supermarkets
Work as a Shop Assistant

New!!!!

If you want to contact me via email, please send your messages to selfstudyroom@yahoo.com.ar. I'll be checking the account during my office hours.