Afterthought: my talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference 2020

In my recent talk at IH Milan's annual ELT conference, I shared 5 materials-light language practice ideas.

In my Activity 4, I was talking about the idea of appropriacy (Hymes, 1972) in using functional language. Here were my two examples:

• buying a cuppa at a busy train station - 'A large tea, please.'
  
• visiting the post office to pick up a parcel - 'Could I collect my parcel, please?'
  

In the second example, I used an unnatural model in order to highlight the contrast of registral style with the first. On second thoughts, who would even be that formal in the UK? Unless you live in Windsor or (maybe) Sandringham, most people would just ask 'Can I pick up my parcel?' 

Thanks also to my colleagues for raising my awareness of English varieties. I'd always thought the word borough was pronounced /bʌrə/ until the week before my talk. There's a different pronunciation in the US, /bɝːoʊ/, which I didn't know before.

Lexis: connotations and culture

 A brief snapshot of yesterday's lesson with Teens FCE Preparation:

... we were grouping some adjectives of personality by connotation. The two groups are 'usually positive' or 'usually negative'.

The word emotional came up. My two students, who are first-language Italian speakers, immediately said it's 'usually positive'. Then I asked them this question - 'If someone is emotional, does that person often over-react? Is he or she stable emotionally?'

We concluded that most people use emotional in the negative sense to criticise others, not in the sense of describing the state of being filled with emotions, e.g. 'I'm getting emotional.'

Reflections:

I've questioned why I associated emotional immediately to a negative connotation. Was this one of my numerous British moments? After all, we've inherited some traits of Victorian England, one of which says you shouldn't be expressing your own emotions too outwardly. In other words, it's the famous 'British/English stiff upper-lip'.

Maybe being emotional is considered acceptable in Italian societies, whereas in the UK such behaviour is usually frowned upon and would be regarded as aggressive. Cultural differences.