Skip to main content

William et Kate vont se marier

Je dois avouer que je ne suis pas royaliste. Je trouve anachronique notre monarchie qui n'a rien à voir avec une démocratie moderne. Cela dit, William et Kate semblent être un couple heureux et tout le monde espère qu'ils auront un mariage réussi. Mais le plus important, c'est que leurs noces nous donneront un jour de congé supplémentaire en 2011!

Voici le reportage de la nouvelle sur yahoo.fr:

"Le prince William, deuxième dans l'ordre de succession au trône d'Angleterre, épousera sa fiancée Kate Middleton, une roturière, le 29 avril prochain à l'abbaye de Westminster, à Londres. 

Cette annonce, dans le sillage de celle de leurs fiançailles tant attendues, met fin au suspense sur le lieu de la cérémonie - la cathédrale Saint-Paul, au coeur de la City, comme ce fut le cas en 1981 pour les parents de William, le prince Charles et feu la princesse Diana, ou bien Westminster.
"Nous savons que le monde aura les yeux rivés sur Londres le 29 avril et le couple est très, très attaché à ce que la cérémonie de mariage soit l'exemple classique de ce que notre pays sait faire de mieux", a expliqué mardi Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, secrétaire particulier de William.
Il a précisé que les frais de la cérémonie religieuse, de la réception et du voyage de noces seraient acquittés par les deux familles.
Pour des économistes, le mariage de William et Kate, dans un climat économique morose, devrait donner un coup de fouet d'une valeur d'un milliard de dollars à l'économie britannique grâce à la venue de touristes et à la vente d'objets-souvenirs.
L'abbaye de Westminster est le lieu traditionnel du couronnement des monarques anglais depuis Guillaume le Conquérant en l'an 1066.
La souveraine actuelle et grand-mère de William, la reine Elizabeth II, s'y est mariée en 1947 et c'est là que s'est tenu le service funèbre à la mémoire de Diana après sa mort tragique en 1997 dans un accident de la circulation à Paris.
Le gouvernement britannique a confirmé que le 29 avril, qui tombe un vendredi, serait un jour férié, assurant aux Britanniques un long week-end du 1er mai."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...