Do you remember Mr Harry Wormwood? And Miss Agatha Trunchbull? Mr Harry Wormwood is a car salesman, Matilda’s father, in the story of “Matilda” by Roald Dahl. One evening Mr Wormwood abruptly takes the book out of Matilda’s hands and forces her to watch TV with the rest of the…
"Creativity is not a capacity of special people but a special capacity of all people. It shows speakers as language makers and not simply as language users"! I find this conclusion absolutely fantastic! It comes at the end of the book titled: "Language and Creativity: the Art of Common Talk" written by Ron Carter -professor at Nottingham University- and published by Routeledge (second edition, 2016). Two fundamental points of this statement deserve to be highlighted: 1) "Creativity is a special capacity of all people" and 2) "Creativity shows speakers as language makers not simply language users"
It is a hard time to speak about understanding. It is hard in this time to "imagine all the people sharing all the world" as John Lennon sang.... It seems a time when we don't want to understand each other.... when we are learning to survive with deaf ears... when explosions replace the sound of music... Is this what we want for our children? Did we give up feeding their hope? spark their imagination? encourage them to stand for the future they want to?
On Friday morning we saw Gabriele and Chiara drawing something on the wall of the patio. Students and teachers were gathering for the last day of the summer school.As usual there were chats, laughs, mugs of tea and cups of coffee while everyone was still waking up. Then, some of us noticed…