WEEK 3 & 4

Written comprehension
You’ve worked in groups in Week 3. You tried to get the gist of a text.
You’ve got to keep in mind the fact that understanding a text in a foreign language requires a patient work and a positive mind.
You’ll build the meaning of the text, going from the global meaning to the detailed meaning step by step. In order to do so, you’ll use and pay attention to
1) Your general knowledge
2) transparent words
3) prefixes and suffixes
4) your capacity of deduction to guess the meaning of the words you don’t know.
- Before reading the text, study the title, the references of the text as well as the
questions referring to it.
- First reading, without stopping. Who? Where? When? Underline or highlight the dates and time indications, names of people and places in the text.
- Second reading, pay attention to the core of the propositions(S + GV) What? Why? How? Try to visualize the situation, the problems.Underline keywords.
- Read the text again, paragraph by paragraph to check your understanding.
So let’s build the meaning of the text page 18: Blaming Hollywood.
Written & Oral expression
You will systematically use the following expressions to deal with the text:
The document is entitled “Blaming Hollywood”. It’s an article which was written by Joe Eszterhas. It was published in Time magazineon August 9th, 2005, a famous U.S. mainstream magazine. It deals with / is about tobacco and the way it was advertised in Hollywood films by a former smoker-drinker Hollywood writer who became aware of the evils of tobacco and therefore became an anti-smoking campaign activist.
The author explains that he was a famous screenplay writer. We are told that tobacco was part of his screenplays which glamorized smoking.