Using Multimedia in the Foreign Language Classroom | Page 33

Activity 2

Below there is an authentic text about the Tower of London, taken from the
internet. However, the three paragraphs it consists of have been jumbled. Can
you move the paragraphs so that they appear in the correct order? Work with
your partners.

Later on king Richard I dug a big ditch around it and filled it with water from
the River Thames, and he called that a moat. Maybe some of you have built a
sandcastle and scooped out the sand around it and filled it with water. That’s what
they did at the Tower of London. This made it a very good place for the kings and
queens lo live because their enemies couldn’t get into the fort to attack them.
The Tower of London is quite large, and lots of neat things have happened
here. It was built a long time ago by a Frenchman called William the Conquerer who
came over to England in the year 1066—that’s almost 1,000 years ago! He wanted to
build a castle inside a big fort so that future kings could live here. After he died other
kings built smaller towers and walls around the castle William had built, and all the
buildings together became known as the Tower of London.
Nobody could get into the Tower of London unless they had permission from the
people who were inside. If they wanted to let someone in they would lower a wooden
bridge on chains across the moat, and then the people could just walk across. This
bridge was called a drawbridge. If they didn’t lower the drawbridge the only way a
person could get into the castle would be to swim across the moat. Since that was
usually filled with nasty smelling water filled with garbage and old potato peelings,
people didn’t want to swim across. Besides, with the drawbridge up the door was
closed, so even swimming across wouldn’t really work. The moat is no longer there
because it was very smelly, and they probably didn’t want people falling in (…hehehe
…) now there’s just grass where the water used to be.
Do you want to find out whether you have rearranged the paragraphs
correctly? To do so, click on the text. If your choices were not correct, you can
come back to and rearrange the paragraphs, again.

Activity 3

Read the text again and, with your partners, try to find whether you can
answer any of the questions you have formulated in Task 1b above. Write the
answers under your questions.

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