Category Archives: General

Revising Relationship Verbs

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I just couldn’t let it pass!  It is not Valentine Day but my fourth year students are working with Relationship Verbs. Bad choice, on the publishers’ side, to ask students to learn expressions related to love when it is time for final exams and they need to concentrate on exams. Now’s the time to hunker down and hit the books! Mental note to email MacMillan about this issue!!!

So, not the right time to learn about love but , anyway,it gives me  the chance to spice up my lessons  using  the WordCoud generator Tagul, which enables you to create beautiful shapes with your words.

The exercise…. , simple  and to the point as I am a bit pressed for time. Students revise vocabulary by looking at the wordcloud and guessing  the right expression.
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Long-Awaited Questions for the Oral Test

General

Sorry guys! I completely forgot about it!

These are the questions we have been discussing in class lately(nicked from Kiss FM). You’ll need to speak about two or three minutes so the number of these questions you’ll be asked depends entirely on how lengthy your anwers are.. Don’t forget my previous post  if you feel you need to improve pronunciation 9 Useful Websites to Help you Improve Pronunciation and Listening, Good luck and I am looking forward to listening to you.

1. What do you do when you need to chill out?

2. What are you  very good at ?

3. When was the last time you did something for someone?

4.What’s your favourite book? What is it about? Why do you like it so much?

5. Have you ever lied to your parents? Did they ever find out?

6. If you could go to the moon, what would you take with you?

7. What’s your favourite means of transport? Why?

Listen and Read News in Three levels

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NewsinEnglish.com is an interesting site that can be very useful for the students as part of their autonomous learning and can also be used by teachers in the classroom.
The stories and news are written in three levels: Level 1 for beginners, Level 2 for intermediate students and Level 3 for more advanced students.
How can it be useful to my students?


♥ They can listen and read to improve pronunciation
♥ They can just Listen as many times as they feel necessary until they can understand all the words
♥ They can Listen, make a summary of the story and then check

How can it be useful to me it?


♥ As a Listening Comprehension either providing the questions or asking students to summarise the piece of news
♥To improve writing by giving them the story in level 1 and asking  them to act out as reporters for NewsinEnglish by writing the same story in level 2.

Some tips for using this site are given here

Still raining!!! you know how it goes… “When the going gets rough, the rough get going!! or “Every cloud has a silver lining!!”

Caption Writing Contest

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Surely you have seen lots of cartoons and pictures with a caption. Wouldn’t you like to  see your words winning this Caption Writing Contest? Well, here’s your chance! I  found this funny picture via Pinterest and I am willing to give away a Free Homework Pass to the winner of this Writing Contest.What on earth could these two dogs be saying to each other? Give me  your craziest, sarcastic, most creative, thoughtful or memorable  caption to go along with this picture and enjoy !! Be original and witty!! Deadline: 15th April (example below)

Some Things to Bear in Mind when Writing your Caption

♥It can be in any form of literary expression- prose, poetry.

♥It can be one word, a sentence, a word play

♥You may enter as many captions as you like

♥Captions have to be written in English

Some Help

When writing a comic, it might be helpful to know some common English interjections. Click here to see some of the most common

How to enter a comment

Click “Comment” and write your name, email address and your caption for the contest in the comment box, in English. Don’t forget to copy the Anti-Spam Word. Click Submit Comment.

Now this is the photograph. Good Luck and Happy Captioning!

Practise Adverbs of Manner and Intonation Having Fun

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I don’t know about you, but most of my thinking time happens when I am driving all alone in my car. This is mainly because that must be about the only time in the day I am alone- Hey, I am not complaining here but it’s difficult to do any decent thinking we when you spend all your day surrounded by teenagers – my own and my students. So, here I was, in my car, driving to work and thinking about the best way to teach Adverbs of Manner to my students when I remembered an exercise I did while taking a course in  IH London.

 

The idea is to combine Adverbs of Manner and Intonation in a very funny way, though to get to the funny part of the exercise there are, first of all, some steps to climb.

Step 1. This is the boring part. On the board, I write the adjectives I am going to use in Step 3 and ask students to form the adverbs of these adjectives(see worksheet ).

Step 2. Now it’s time to start working with intonation. I draw on the board a stave and demonstrate the power of intonation with the word Thank You! It might be necessary to repeat the expression a few times before students associate pitch with meaning
-low pitch= sarcastic, depressed, negative
-middle pitch= neutral
-high pitch = very positive

Students in pairs practise a few times.

Step 3. With the adverbs still on display on the blackboard I give each student a slip of paper with the adverbs of manner: furiously, quickly, cheerfully (Worksheet here). Students now stand up and in pairs tell each other the words I LOVE YOU using the correct pitch to convey the way they feel. The other student should be able to guess the adverb written on the card. Students move around the class talking to as many students as they can. Time limit: 5 minutes.

Step 4. Feedback: students, now, read their I LOVE YOUs aloud for everybody in the class to guess the adverb of manner.

Learn English and Have Fun!!