WHISTLING A HAPPY TUNE (CATRINA RDEZ MURRAY)

 

This is for a B2 level in which there are quite a lot of teenagers and only a few adults. Only one of the groups was close in deciding what was the advert about, and none of them gave an answer for the second question.

And I had prepared this text to tell them in class:

I saw an advert the other day, which I thought was very funny because it describes life exactly. You can easily feel identified with some of these situations. The funny thing about it, is that even though the video describes disturbing situations, or situations which might be considered annoying in some way, people in the video seem to be really happy!

So, for example, one of the situations is a mum having coffee in the morning, and the little kid, who is probably a toddler, starts playing with the food he’s having for breakfast; he’s having rasperries I think. And at some point, the boy gets one of them and throws it to her mum! But she’s just okay about it. In fact, she just dodges it and keeps smiling. And that’s when the father comes into the scene and manages to grab the rasperry so that the curtains don’t get dirty! No one seems to care, they’re all happy!

Or that moment when two people meet in the stairs and one moves to one side to let the other pass, and then the other person also does the same, to the same side, so then both move to the other side… how weird! I hate when that happens…

But as I said before, they all seem to see the bright side of life; everyone is happy and does not get annoyed with these situations. And I know they are happy because they are all doing something… What are they doing? And what do you think the advert is about?

Answer:

I did the same task with a second B2 group with only adults and I realised they were not so participative, although they also enjoyed the task.

They are all whistling and it is an advert for Nespresso coffee. Students were so motivated they almost begged to watch the advert after discussing the posible answers to the questions.

I used this video as an introduction to the Word whistle, as there was a Reading comprehension task in the book about the whistling language at La Gomera. I will definitely try this technique some other time and will then tell students to do a similar task, preparing a story.

I can only say: Thank You!