SÉQUENCE 3 - REMEMBERING OUR HERITAGE

Part 2: Genealogical tourism

4h30
You are now ready to explore another aspect of the increasing interest in Scottish heritage. As DNA
testing becomes more and more accessible, many people are fired by the wish to return to their roots.
So another sort of tourism has developed, ‘genealogical or ancestral tourism’. Indeed, a great number of
visitors, often inspired by the images of breathtaking landscapes that they have caught a glimpse of on
screen, flock to Scotland each year in search of their roots. Part 2 will focus on the appeal of tracing our
ancestors.

Objectives
This second part which deals with ‘genealogical tourism’ in Scotland will enable you to:
• consolidate and perfect the skills and knowledge acquired in chapter one: method, grammar, vocabu-
lary and culture;
• practise oral and written comprehension using the method provided at the end of chapter one, in order
to be able to tackle a document on your own. You will study authentic documents, as you did in chapter
one, in accordance with the format required in Terminale for your final assessments;
• think about the question of transmission and the role genealogy plays in the remembering process;
• relate past experiences and situate events chronologically, whilst expressing emotions;
• work on pragmatic skills by adjusting the language register used in an email according to the contents
and the person it is addressed to.

Activity 1: Vocabulary building

Choosing the right words

Study the word cloud below, and find the words that match the definitions underneath the picture:

Eyjafjallajokull / © iStock / Getty Images Plus

CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS 1

Talking about our family history.

a. Definitions

1) People who were born at approximately the same time and who grow up and have children (the word
refers to both people and a period of time of roughly 30 years): …
2) The series of families that somebody comes from originally: …
3) The fact of being related in a family: …
4) A person who is in the same family as somebody else: …
5) A diagram that shows the relationship between members of a family over a long period of time: …
→ Check the correction.

b. Finding synonyms

The following words belong to the same semantic field as the vocabulary in the word cloud. Some of the
words can already be found in the picture and may have been noted in exercise a), but you may need to
use a dictionary to find some of them (for example: wordreference.com):
1) ancestry: …
2) forefathers: …
3) tie: …
4) available information: …
5) expert in ancestry: …
→ Check the correction.

c. Filing vocabulary

Class the words you have learnt and others you can find in the picture under the following headings; you
may need to find some words yourself for the category ’documents’:

Family members Professions Fields of study Documents

→ Check the correction.

d. Checking pronunciation

— Go to the online Cambridge dictionary:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english
— Check the pronunciation (UK and US) of the following words by clicking on the speaker symbol:
• History
• Ancestry
• Research
• Archives
• Ancestors
• Resource

2 CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS

 — Note any differences you hear between standard British pronunciation and standard American. Note
the stressed syllables when you learn these words.
→ Check the correction.

Activity 2: Compréhension de l’oral

Reportez-vous à la méthodologie de la compréhension de l’oral (partie 1, activité 6) avant d’étudier la
vidéo intitulée :

Ian’s story
Si la compréhension du document s’avère difficile, vous pouvez consulter le corrigé après chaque étape :
a. Étape 1 : Anticipation à partir du titre ;

b. Étape 2 : Première écoute globale où vous prendrez peu de notes ;

“Researching Scottish Ancestry - Ian’s Story” © Visit Scotland, 2017

Vidéo 3   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtxX55rLzD0

c. Étape 3 : Deuxième écoute où vous prendrez un maximum de notes bien aérées ;

d.  Étape 4 : Dernière écoute où vous vérifierez les points essentiels (lieux, dates, personnages connus,
événements) et où vous essayerez de relever des éléments implicites (ton, points de vue, attitude,
fonction et portée du document.)

CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS 3

e.   Étape 5 : Rédigez un compte rendu du document en français qui comportera les points suivants :
• La nature du document ;
• Le thème principal du document ;
• Le nombre de locuteurs ;
• L’identité des personnes et/ou des personnages cités ;
• Les noms de lieux mentionnés et, éventuellement, des précisions concernant ces lieux ;
• Les dates ou les époques citées ;
• Les éléments implicites, notamment le ton et le registre ;
• La fonction et la portée du document ;
Efforcez-vous de respecter la méthodologie et d’éviter d’utiliser la fonction ‘pause’ afin de vous entraîner
dans les conditions de l’évaluation de compréhension orale en Terminale.
Notons que cette évaluation, pour les élèves inscrits au Cned, sera une évaluation ponctuelle et qu’elle
comportera également une épreuve de compréhension de l’écrit, ainsi qu’un exercice d’expression écrite.
→ Check the correction.

Activity 3: More on pronunciation

Vidéo 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtxX55rLzD0

After studying the correction of the video Ian’s story, listen to the video again without the script, paying
particular attention to:
a. The
  pronunciation of the words studied in Activity 1, exercise d. Can you note any differences in the way
these words are pronounced by Ian?
b.  Pick out the words in the video that are characteristic of standard Scottish pronunciation.
c.  Note down any other sounds that are strikingly different to standard British pronunciation.
→ Check the correction.

Activity 4: Culture file

Answer the following questions in English:
a.  Which famous event in Scottish history does Ian allude to?
b.  Why would people who are tracing their Scottish ancestors be interested in this event?
c.  Look up this event in an online encyclopaedia and note down:
1) The date of the event;
2) The people who participated in the event;
3) The significance of the event in the history of Scotland as a nation.
→ Check the correction.

4 CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS

Activity 5: The issue at stake: thinking about the question ‘Remembering
our heritage.’
For your oral exam in Terminale, you will be asked to choose between two quotes, two pictures, or a
quote and a picture in order to illustrate the theme. So you will need to justify why the document you have
selected is the more relevant of the two.
Here are two quotes that are both related to the theme ‘land, territory, heritage and memory’. Choose
one of the quotes and say why you think it resonates with the sequence you have been studying. If
necessary, you can use the tips that figure after the quote.
1st quote:
‘In many ways, each of us is the sum total of what our ancestors were. The virtues they had may be our virtues,
their strengths our strengths, and, in a way, their challenges could be our challenges.’
James E. Faust, (1920-2007)
James E. Faust was an American politician, lawyer and religious leader.
2nd quote:
‘Family does not necessarily mean blood relatives, but often a description of a community, organization or
nation.’
Queen Elizabeth II (b1926-2022)
As you know, Queen Elizabeth II was the reigning monarch of Great Britain and the Commonwealth from
February 1952 to September 2022.

TIPS: commenting on a quote

1. Note
  who the quote is by and the possible circumstances in which the quote was made. As Queen of Great-
Britain and the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth must have a different vision of a nation to a politician in a
republic.
2. Be careful not to paraphrase the quote nor to give a biographical account of the person who uttered the quote.
3. Avoid giving too many historical facts, a few references suffice.
4. Don’t make personal comments.
5. Make sure you ANALYZE the quote with relation to the issue at stake (‘Remembering our heritage’).
6. Be succinct: you only have five minutes.
For further guidance, you can check the website:
https://fr.slideshare.net/thompsonkaren/how-to-write-an-effective-response-to-a-quote

→ Check the correction.

CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS 5

 Activity 6: Written comprehension
Follow the methodology for understanding a text at the beginning of Part 1 in order to tackle the following
written document:
Experiencing the ‘highs and lows’ of genealogy.
§ 1. Googling the words ‘MacDonald’ and ‘DNA’ brought me to a
website for people who had reason to believe that their ancestors
debela / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty images

came from Clan Donald. The project had over three hundred
members, all of whom had submitted their DNA. There was even
a press release from the project coordinator, Mark MacDonald,
spelling out Someted’s DNA signature. All I needed to do was
persuade Chuck to participate.
§ 2. Even though Chuck was my great-uncle, he was only three
years older than Mom, so he’s always been more of an uncle to me,
and I called him Uncle Chuck. He was a military guy, and he has
stories about bar fights in various parts of the world, but now he
was retired from all that. Officially, at least.
§ 3. I often spent time with him when I went back to Chatham, but
I didn’t have his number or email address, so I gave Mom a call.
She was the first woman to be elected Mayor of Chatham, and she
ran a tight ship. She knew how to persuade. ‘I think Chuck probably
wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to him.’
§ 4. And soon, Uncle Chuck was sitting at Mom’s house, opening
his mouth and saying ‘aah’ while she swabbed the inside of his
cheek with the little plastic scraper. ‘Well,’ Mom told me after the
operation was over, ‘we’ll just send back the scraper and see what
happens.’
§ 5. Several weeks went by, and one day I woke up and had a glass of water, and poured the grinds into
the coffee maker and while the coffee brewed, I looked at my email.There was a message from the DNA
company, Uncle Chuck’s results were in.
§ 6. I clicked on the link in the email, and it took me to a website that had been set up for us. Here was the
DNA signature of my great-grandpa Lee, and of his father Will, and of his father William Duncan, and of
his father Hiram. I went back to the website that listed the Somerled signature, and wrote it down in my
notebook, number by number.
§ 7. Then I started with the first of Uncle Chuck’s genes, checking it against its Somerled counterpart.
The first few matched, but then there was a mismatch, and then a few more matches, but then another
mismatch. As I moved from one gene marker to the next, Chuck’s genes showed more and more
mismatches against Somerled’s like a baseball team falling further behind with each inning. When I got
to the end there was no doubt. Chuck’s DNA signature wasn’t even close to the signature of the Clan
Donald chiefs.
§ 8. I was disappointed, and then I felt guilty for being disappointed.
§ 9. Not knowing how to find out what the results meant, I once again turned to the most time-tested
method: I typed Uncle Chuck’s DNA signature, every single number, into Google. And I found a post on
an Internet message board by Mark MacDonald, the coordinator for the Clan Donald DNA Project, who
had access to the DNA signature of every project participant. In the post, Mark was asking others where a
certain DNA signature might have originated: Did it come from Norse Vikings, like Somerled’s signature,
or was it indigenous to the Scottish Highlands? The signature was almost identical to Chuck’s, so it must
have come from a cousin of ours. Mark was asking about my family.

6 CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS

§ 10. The consensus from the other researchers seemed to be that the signature was too rare to tell
for sure. Mark thanked them, and as he thanked them, he referred to us as a ‘small but historically
prominent family of MacDonalds.’
§ 11. Small but historically prominent. What did that mean?
§ 12. I already knew that we weren’t descended from clan chiefs, but maybe ‘small but historically
prominent’ meant that we were related to some other famous MacDonald.
Ryan Littrell, Reunion: A Search for Ancestors, Chapter 7.

→ Check the correction.

Pour rappel : la fiche méthodologique étudiée dans la partie 1.

Méthodologie - Compréhension de l’écrit

Étape 1 : Anticipation :
La méthodologie est la même pour la compréhension d’un document écrit que pour un document sonore.
Commencez par faire des hypothèses à partir du titre, de la source et des éléments visuels.
Prenez des notes en anglais puisque les questions posées seront en langue cible.
Par exemple, si le titre est : Outlander author gets award for boost to Scottish tourist industry, vous pouvez d’ores et
déjà remplir les rubriques ci-dessous :
Main topic: Award for an author
Place: Scotland
People: Author of a work of fiction or a documentary; members of the Scottish tourist industry?; judges of the film
awards?
Dates: Probably recent news, after Bafta awards ceremony
Events : Awards ceremony
Si la source est : www.bbc.com>news>uk-scotland, vous noterez :
Type of document: Online press article; reliable source, serious news
Étape 2 : 1st reading : global comprehension (niveau A2)
Faites une première lecture rapide pour confirmer ou infirmer vos hypothèses et pour surligner ou noter les mots
clefs. Notez également votre première impression en fonction du vocabulaire récurrent et du style. Faites une ou
deux phrases pour résumer l’essentiel de ce que vous avez noté à ce stade.
Par exemple: The text is a recent online press article about the Scottish tourist industry which has benefited from the
success of the TV film ‘Outlander’, so much so that the author of the series has received an award. The style is terse
and factual with a lot of figures and statistics.
Étape 3 : 2nd reading: Detailed comprehension (niveau B1):
Relisez le texte en résumant en un ou deux mots les informations essentielles de chaque paragraphe. Relevez les
mots du texte ou reformulez avec vos propres mots. Par exemple :
Paragraph 1: Tourist increase
Paragraph 2: Economic boost
Paragraph 3: Predictions
Paragraph 4: Political implications
Étape 4 : 3rd reading: Implicit elements (Niveau B2)
Relisez attentivement, puis notez l’intention de l’auteur et les stratégies employées pour faire passer un
message explicite et/ou implicite.
Par exemple :
Key message: The journalist aims to make us realize that greater economic prosperity is likely to fuel a desire for
independence amongst the Scots.

CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS 7

Activity 7: Recap: practice in written expression

Write a paragraph in English summing up:

a. The narrator’s feelings (expressed explicitly or implicitly);
b. The reasons for these feelings;
c. What we learn about his/her family and his/her forefathers;
d. The significance of the final paragraph.
→ Check the correction.

Activity 8: Tenses and chronology

a. Re-ordering chronologically

Re-order these actions in chronological order and then make them into two sentences which highlight
this chronology. You will need to conjugate two of the verbs accordingly:
1) The narrator received an email about his/her ancestors.
2) The narrator found a post by Mark MacDonald.
3) The narrator spent time with his/her uncle.
4) The narrator looked up a website dealing in Scottish ancestry.
→ Check the correction.

b. Translation

Traduisez les deux phrases de la question a) en français. Que remarquez-vous ?

→ Check the correction.

c. Entraînement grammatical

Observez la phrase ci-après :

After I had brewed the coffee, I read the email.
L’action « brew the coffee » est antérieure à l’action « read the email », par conséquent elle est conjuguée
au pluperfect. La conjugaison du pluperfect ne présente pas de difficulté (had+ participe passé), l’emploi
non plus. Notez toutefois que ce temps est employé de façon systématique en anglais pour exprimer une
antériorité. Il est donc plus courant que le plus-que-parfait en français.

Reportez-vous au chapitre 6 intitulé « Prétérit, present perfect et pluperfect » de la Petite

Grammaire Anglaise de l’écrit et de l’oral pour vous entraîner.

8 CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS

Activity 9: Médiation
En français, écrivez un paragraphe pour expliquer à un(e) camarade le lien entre la généalogie et le
tourisme en Écosse.
→ Consultez le corrigé.

Activity 10: Written expression: writing an email

Study the two following emails, and note the salutations used for:
a. A formal email;
b. When writing to friends or family.
a. Formal register.
Dear Mr MacDonald,
I was thrilled to read your post on the MacDonald website this afternoon. My name is Flora MacDonald, and
I have recently become interested in genealogy. It is a really compelling activity. Our family has lived in the
United States since the nineteenth century, but I don’t know much about my ancestors before that.
I was intrigued by the term ‘prominent’. Could you explain what you mean by that?
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Flora MacDonald.
b. Informal register.
Hey my favorite uncle,
How’s your cheek after Mom jabbed at it with that scraper? Well, you ain’t no chicken, eh? What with your
record in Nam and all those bar fights, it ain’t one little scrape that’ll make no difference. Just kiddin’ ya,
Chuck.
Anyway, guess what? Seems we are related to some famous MacDonald after all. But not those old Clan
Chiefs, but some ‘prominent’ MacDonalds all the same. What can that mean, d’ya think?
Write back and let me know your take on that one.
Love from your favorite niece,
Flo xx

Activity 11: Writing an email to a Scottish relative

You are a descendant of Flora MacDonald of the MacDonald clan. Your
family has lived in the US for several generations. You traced one of your
relatives online, and you came across an aunt named Agnes, who has
taken you around the Glencoe visitor centre and hiked with you through
the glen, then given you lunch and shown you the BBC video. Back in
your hotel, you write her an email to thank her.
(120 words minimum)

Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), Flora

MacDonald, 1749. Oil on canvas,
Ashmolean Museum (University of
Oxford, UK).

CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS 9

 Glencoe GlencoeMacDonald Monument
g b s 0 9 7 / iStock / Getty Images Plus JaimePharr / iStock / Getty Images Plus

Checklist
a. Put yourself in the shoes of an excited descendant of the Macdonalds who has just met a distant
relative and visited the historic site of the massacre.
b. Check the adjectives that will enable you to express your emotions: joy, sorrow, indignation, pride. If
necessary, revise the whole sequence.
c. Check the use of past tenses, making sure that you know how to relate past experiences.

d. Add some cultural elements that show that you have some knowledge of Scottish history.
You can do a quick search by googling “Flora MacDonald”.

e. You can also check the website of the Scottish National Trust for further information:
https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/glencoe/
https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/glencoe/highlights/visitor-centre

→ After doing the exercise, check the corrections where you will find a model answer.

L’étude de cette séquence est maintenant achevée.

10 CNED PREMIÈRE ANGLAIS