martes, 29 de diciembre de 2009

PROGRAMA DE INTERCAMBIO DE ASISTENTES DE IDIOMA

“2009 – Año de Homenaje a Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz”

Ministerio de Educación

Nº Act. DNCI 13/09

Buenos Aires, 18 de noviembre de 2009

Señor Director

Tengo el agrado de dirigirme a Usted con el fin de comunicarle que se ha puesto en marcha la Convocatoria 2010 del PROGRAMA DE INTERCAMBIO DE ASISTENTES DE IDIOMA, resultante del Convenio firmado entre este Ministerio y el British Council.

En el marco de este Programa se otorgarán becas destinadas a docentes de inglés recientemente recibidos.

Es dable destacar que ésta es una oportunidad para los jóvenes graduados de participar a través de esta beca, de la difusión del español como segunda lengua y fortalecer el aprendizaje del idioma que enseña en nuestro país.

El Reglamento y Formularios de Solicitud de Beca pueden encontrarse en las siguientes páginas web:

http://www.me.gov.ar/dnci/becas06.html

Asimismo le informo que el plazo para la presentación de las postulaciones vence el 5 de enero de 2010.

Agradezco desde ya su colaboración para la difusión de la convocatoria y hago propicia esta oportunidad para saludarlo atentamente.

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lunes, 28 de diciembre de 2009

Massacre of the Innocents

The Massacre of the Innocents is an episode of mass infanticide by the King of Judea, Herod the Great, that appears in the Gospel of Matthew 2:16-18. The author, traditionally believed to be Matthew the Evangelist, reports that King Herod ordered the execution of all young male children in the village of Bethlehem, so as to avoid the loss of his throne to a newborn King of the Jews whose birth had been announced to him by the Magi. Like much of Matthew's gospel, the incident is introduced as the fulfillment of passages in the Old Testament read as prophecies: Then was fulfilled that which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet, saying, A voice was heard in Ramah, Weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children.

The infants, known in the Church as the Holy Innocents, have been claimed as the first Christian martyrs. Traditional accounts number them at more than ten thousand, though more conservative estimates put their number in the low dozens.

Nativity story in the Gospel of Matthew

The gospel of Matthew was most likely written c 80 - 85 by an anonymous Christian appealing to a Jewish audience. The author's goal was to portray Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, and a greater Moses. The first two chapters of Matthew comprise a birth and infancy narrative that has no parallel elsewhere in the New Testament, diverges from the corresponding accounts in Luke, and seems to be a secondary composition not originally integral to the gospel.

In Matthew's account, astrologers from the east follow a star to Judea in search of the newborn king of the Jews. They are directed to Bethlehem, and Herod asks them to let him know who this king is when they find him. They find Jesus and honor him, but an angel tells them not to alert Herod, and they return home by another way.

The Massacre of the Innocents is at Matthew 2:16-18, although the preceding verses form the context (the "they" in the opening verse refers to the Magi):

When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. Get up, he said, take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him. So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: Out of Egypt I called my son. When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: "A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."

The story may have its origins in Herod's murder of his own sons, an act which made a deep impression at the time and was recorded by Josephus as well as in the 1st century Jewish apocryphal work, the Assumption of Moses, where it is cast as a prophecy: An insolent king will succeed [the Hasmonean priests]… he will slay all the young. "Here Herod really did kill all the Jewish children who sought to replace him, as Matthew 2:17 would have it, but these were rather his own children with Maccabean blood!" Josephus records several other examples of Herod’s willingness to commit such acts to protect his power, noting that he "never stopped avenging and punishing every day those who had chosen to be of the party of his enemies." Matthew's purpose is theological: he presents Jesus as the Messiah, and the Massacre of the Innocents as the fulfillment of Hosea and Jeremiah, although in order to do so he takes both out of context (Hosea is referring to the exodus, and Jeremiah to the Babylonian exile). The story was patterned on the Exodus story of the killing of the Hebrew firstborn by Pharaoh and the birth of Moses.

Later accounts

The Massacre of the Innocents at Bethlehem, by Matteo di Giovanni

The story is not mentioned by the contemporary Jewish historian Josephus, nor in the other gospels, nor in the early apocrypha. Its first non-Matthean appearance being in the Protoevangelium of James of c.150 AD, which excludes the Flight into Egypt and switches the attention of the story to the infant John the Baptist:

"And when Herod knew that he had been mocked by the Magi, in a rage he sent murderers, saying to them: Slay the children from two years old and under. And Mary, having heard that the children were being killed, was afraid, and took the infant and swaddled Him, and put Him into an ox-stall. And Elizabeth, having heard that they were searching for John, took him and went up into the hill-country, and kept looking where to conceal him. And there was no place of concealment. And Elizabeth, groaning with a loud voice, says: O mountain of God, receive mother and child. And immediately the mountain was cleft, and received her. And a light shone about them, for an angel of the Lord was with them, watching over them."

The first non-Christian reference to the massacre is recorded four centuries later by Macrobius (c. 395-423), who writes in his Saturnalia:

"When he [emperor Augustus] heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old whom Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered to kill, his own son was also killed, he said: it is better to be Herod's pig, than his son."

Macrobius' statement shows that the tradition of the massacre of the innocents had become firmly established in the culture at large, for the fact that Christianity is not mentioned in any of his writings, despite the predominance it was asserting in every aspect of contemporary Roman life, coupled with his vigorous interest in pagan rituals, leaves scholars in no doubt as to his pagan religion.

The story assumed an important place in later Christian tradition, the Byzantine liturgy having 14,000 Holy Innocents and an early Syrian list of saints stating that there were 64,000. Coptic sources raise the number to 144,000 and place the event on 29 December. Taking the narrative literally, and judging from the estimated population of Bethlehem, the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) more soberly suggested that these numbers were inflated, and that probably only between six and twenty children were killed in the town, with a dozen or so more in the surrounding areas.

In the arts

Cornelis van Haarlem, Massacre of the Innocents, 1590, Rijksmuseum

Medieval liturgical drama recounted Biblical events, including Herod's slaughter of the innocents. The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, performed in Coventry, England, included a haunting song about the episode, now known as the Coventry Carol. The Ordo Rachelis tradition of four plays includes the Flight into Egypt, Herod's succession by Archelaus, the return from Egypt, as well as the Massacre all centred on Rachel weeping in fulfillment of Jeremiah's prophecy. These events were likewise in one of the Medieval N-Town Plays.

The theme of the "Massacre of the Innocents" has provided artists of many nationalities with opportunities to compose complicated depictions of massed bodies in violent action. It was an alternative to the Flight into Egypt in cycles of the Life of the Virgin. It decreased in popularity in Gothic art, but revived in the larger works of the Renaissance, when artists took inspiration for their "Massacres" from Roman reliefs of the battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs to the extent that they showed the figures heroically nude. The horrific subject matter of the Massacre of the Innocents also provided a comparison of ancient brutalities with early modern ones during the period of religious wars that followed the Reformation - Breugel's versions show the soldiers carrying banners with the Habsburg double-headed eagle (often used at the time for Ancient Roman soldiers).

Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents, Toronto

The 1590 version by Cornelis van Haarlem also seems to reflect the violence of the Dutch Revolt. Guido Reni's early (1611) Massacre of the Innocents, in an unusual vertical format, is at Bologna. The Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens painted the theme more than once. One version, now in Munich, was engraved and reproduced as a painting as far away as colonial Peru. Another, his grand Massacre of the Innocents is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. The French painter Nicolas Poussin painted The Massacre of the Innocents (1634) at the height of the Thirty Years' War.

The incident is the point of departure for an entire literary epic, called the Human Age, a trilogy (actually an incomplete tetrology) of novels by the Modernist painter and author Wyndham Lewis, founder of the movement dubbed Vorticism by Ezra Pound. The first title in the cycle is The Childermass, after the traditional name for the Feast of the Holy Innocents (see the next section of this article), which was first published in 1928. The epic, meant to correspond to the Divine Comedy by Dante, describes the adventures of two Englishmen, named Pullman and Sattersthwaite, who are killed in World War I and whose afterlives begin in a bizarre camp outside the Magnetic City, where they are destined to eventually go; as a story about waiting after death, it seems to correspond to the afterlife locality called Limbo, perhaps specifically the Limbo of Infants. Presumably, the title refers to these dual protagonists as innocents killed in war. From the point of view of High Modernism, The Childermass itself is the more interesting book in the cycle, being the most visionary, inspired by the painterly author's imagination; the imagery consistently anticipates much later Science Fiction and cinematic special effects. Since the Childermas in question is evidently that of the two martyred soldiers, and since they are the protagonists of all three completed novels, it may be argued that the entire epic corresponds to the Feast of the Holy Innocents. In the novel The Fall (La Chute) by Albert Camus, the incident is argued by the main character to be the reason why Jesus chose to let himself be crucified—as he escaped the punishment intended for him while many others died, he felt responsible and died in guilt. A similar interpretation is given in José Saramago's controversial The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, but there attributed to Joseph, Jesus' father, rather than to Jesus himself. As depicted by Saramago, Joseph knew of Herod's intention to massacre the children of Bethlehem, but failed to warn the townspeople and chose only to save his own child. Guilt-ridden ever after, Joseph finally expiates his sin by letting himself be crucified (an event not narrated in the New Testament).

The Massacre is the opening plot used in the 2006 movie The Nativity Story. The composer Christopher Fulkerson has written a chamber concerto inspired by the Lewis novel.

Feast days

The commemoration of the massacre of these "Holy Innocents"—considered by some Christians as the first martyrs for Christ—first appears as a feast of the western church in the Leonine Sacramentary, dating from about 485. The date of Holy Innocents' Day, also called Childermas or Children's Mass, varies. 27 December is the date for West Syrians (Syriac Orthodox Church, Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, and Maronite Church) and East Syrians (Chaldeans and Syro-Malabar Catholic Church). 28 December is the date in the Roman Catholic Church (before 1961, violet vestments were worn (unless 28 December fell on a Sunday) instead of red, the normal liturgical colour for celebrating martyrs), the Church of England and the Lutheran Church. The Eastern Orthodox Church celebrates the feast on 29 December.

In Spain and Ibero-America (except Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony), December 28 is a day for pranks, equivalent to April Fool's Day in many countries. Pranks are known as inocentadas and their victims are called inocentes, or alternatively, the pranksters are the "inocentes" and the victims should not be angry at them, since they could not have committed any sin. Various Catholic countries had a tradition (no longer widely observed) of role reversal between children and their adult educators, including boy bishops, perhaps a Christianized version of the Roman annual feast of the Saturnalia (when even slaves played 'masters' for a day). In some cultures it is said to be an unlucky day, when no new project should be started.

In addition, there was a medieval custom of refraining where possible from work on the day of the week on which the feast of "Innocents Day" had fallen for the whole of the following year until the next Innocents Day. This was presumably mainly observed by the better-off. Philippe de Commynes, the minister of King Louis XI of France tells in his memoirs how the king observed this custom, and describes the trepidation he felt when he had to inform the king of an emergency on the day.


2010 is coming...


Another fresh new year is here . . .
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest . . .
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!

I have the opportunity
Once more to right some wrongs,
To pray for peace, to plant a tree,
And sing more joyful songs!

William Arthur Ward quotes (American dedicated scholar, author, editor, pastor and teacher)


miércoles, 23 de diciembre de 2009

BRITISH COUNCIL - NEWS

Argentina eNews Talking English
click to contact us December 2009
Talking English

Just before you take your well-deserved holidays, the British Council would like to share with you some of the latest scholarship opportunities and other exciting news in the world of ELT! Below, you will find details of our latest developments.

We would also like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Christmas and prosperous New Year!

Mary Godward

Projects Director

info@britishcouncil.org.ar


Innovation in English Language Teaching

The British Council is running a competition to identify and reward innovation in ELT in public primary schools. The winner will be invited to attend the IATEFL

Conference in Harrogate from 7 to 11 April 2010 flying with British Airways.


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Hornby Scholarship now open
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The Hornby Educational Trust offers scholarships to study a one-year full-time Master's Degree in the UK in an ELT-related subject. We are looking for people who want to make a real difference on return to their countries and who will inspire their colleagues.



Argentinian shortlisted for prestigious award

Jorgelina Carlassare, of the Ministry of Education of the Province of Buenos Aires, has been shortlisted for the Cambridge ESOL International Award for Innovation. Jorgelina has been shortlisted for her primary learner handbook, Welcome to English 3! We wish her the best of

luck in the final round.



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Language Assistant's Programme
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Every year the Ministry of Education works together with the British Council to send teachers of English to the UK to practice as language assistants. The 2010 winners will receive a fully-funded scholarship to spend up to 9 months working at a school.


British Council Directory of UK ELT Research 2005 - 2008

Institutions in the UK sent in details of research in ELT to be published in this downloadable directory. The idea is to share UK-based research with ELT professionals worldwide, and to get researchers talking to each other. There are around 850 research outputs from 52 institutions. Better get reading!


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Google and the Lexical Approach
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Google is great for searching, but is what it searches just a giant corpus? This article gives several practical examples of how you can use Google, combined with a lexical approach to teaching, to enrich your class material with authentic examples, as well as building learner autonomy.





If you are a learner or teacher of English, LearnEnglish has something for you.

Search English - a news, information and networking tool for English language teaching professionals.


teaching English - produced by the BBC and the British Council as a resource for teachers.


ELTeCS - a professional network helping teachers work together across borders to share knowledge and improve practice in their regions.


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