Elsa, the 7th mermaid = a parody of a fairy tale + reported speech

Hey,

today we first read a new text entitled "The Pangs of Love" and analysed it briefly to see why we could say it was a subverted fairy tale.

The main character, Elsa, is a mermaid but unlike her sisters (and the famous mermaid of Hans Christian Anderson), she is not polite at all. She is rude and quite coarse. She is even punished at the end. She is sent to the cave and "made to miss her supper".

Then we worked on speech verbs and we improved the story with verbs that were more meaningful than /say/... Here is what we wrote in the copybooks:

"to be written by Félix / William"

We also had time to work on reported speech. Here are the sentences that we made:

- she said she didn't see why she had done it.

- she insisted disrespectfully that love for a man was ridiculous.

- she didn't know how she had suffered for love.

- she retorted that she didn't understand this "suffered for love".

- she added that she sounded very silly and obviously had spoiled her life.

- the mother admitted that she might have spoiled her life.

- the little mermaid asked in a high-pitched voice what he had done.

- the mother admitted that he had done nothing.

- the mermaid wanted to know what he sacrified for her. (= asked what he had sacrificed)

- the mother answered that he hadn't sacrificed a lot and added that she believed they didn't on the whole and that it didn't stop mermaids loving them. (= humans)

- the mermaid shouted that it would stop her and she said that she had to get a look at some of that mankind and perhaps she would then understand more.

- her mother reminded her that she had to wait until her 15th birthday
and that it had always been the rule with her sisters.

- the 7th mermaid swore and whispered that times changed. And she added that she was as mature now as her sisters had been at 15. She asked her if she agreed for the day after.

- her mother replied that she was sure she didn't. 

HW: finish re-writing the direct dialogue into reported speech until the end of the text.

Don't forget that Group 1 needs to turn in their parodies by Tuesday 11th by email (so that I have time to help you improve your pronunciation) and same thing for group 2 but by Thursday 13th.