I Recorded Short Story Contest

Audio, Create your own stuff, freeware, Students' Corner, Writing, , ,

Welcome to our I Recorded Short Story Contest. Open to all my students until May 31st!
Are you willing to try your hand at writing a short story in English and then reading it? This could be your chance to be internationally known; who knows who might be visiting the blog and listening to your stories and , well, you might end up being a well-known writer !!!
Yeah! I know !, Probably too far-fetched ! But ,what is undeniable is that this activity can help you improve writing and pronunciation, and this  is what  really matters!
As in every single contest of some importance , there are RULES. These are mine:

♥Entries must be in English
♥They must be recorded using the online tool Sound Cloud (Tutorial in Spanish , here)
♥Recording should last up to three minutes
♥Stories must be entirely your own work and must be previously unpublished
♥Only one entry per person
♥There is no set theme
♥Closing submission date: 31st May 13
♥Top three prizes to be determined
♥Winner will be announced the first week of June ,online and in this blog
HOW TO SUBMIT A SHORT STORY
♥First, you need to record yourself using SoundCloud.
♥Then , go to the comments section in this post
♥Write your full name
♥Write the name of your short story
♥In the Share box of your recording Copy/paste the link provided by soundcloud (starts with https)

Good luck !! Some pictures that might inspire you ,below!!!

I got this fantastic idea from the wonderful blog -MCargobe’s Blog-Room- written by a colleague from the EOI Valencia, which I highly recommend if you are willing to practise your English. Click here to see her blog.

See the winners here and listen to their stories.

A Five-Minute Activity to Bring Music into the Classroom

Listening, Music, Words in a song, , ,

Wouldn’t you like to be listening  to the latest hit on the radio and find out that you are able to understand the lyrics? Wow!!! Don’t you, every now and then,  sing along even though you can only remember some  of the words from the chorus and you don’t have the slightest clue about what it means? I’m sure you do! We have all been there!

But time flies and the course is short  and even though I feel listening to a song can be as good as doing a traditional listening comprehension exercise  the truth is that dedicating 20 minutes to a song never seems to fit into my lesson plan .

The idea is to bring music into the class as often as possible but without this activity taking too much time off my lessons. My focus in this five- minute-maximun activity will be on teaching  vocabulary – a structure , an idiomatic expression, a phrasal verb or a certain word. The idea is to help students  improve their listening skills and pronunciation, as well as teaching vocabulary.

In this song, we focus on the verb “to try”.

STEPS

♥Orally introduce the word you want students to learn by giving examples and asking them to infer the meaning. In the case of the verb “to try” I might want to teach the structure: Try+inf

♥Choose a song that contains the word or words you want to teach

♥Crop the video with, for example, tubechop; remember you don’t want to play the whole song .

♥First time: Students listen to the cropped video and identify when, in the song, the highlighted word(s) has been used -they can raise their hand when they hear the target word(s) .

♥ Second time: students do a fill- in- the- gaps exercise or a spot- the -mistakes exercise with the lyrics.

♥ Third time: students sing along; yes, why not? It’s  a very good pronunciation exercise!!!

♥ HOMEWORK: Now, very important, students need to go home and write a sentence containing the highlighted word(s). Ask for volunteers to translate the cropped song .

My Fill in the Blanks

DESIRE,DIE,GET UP, SOMETIMES,SOMEONE’S, LIES,WONDER,JUST

Ever _____ about what he’s doing
How it all turned to ______
__________ I think that it’s better to never ask why

Where there is ____
There is gonna be a flame
Where there is a flame
____ bound to get burned
But ______ because it burns
Doesn’t mean you’re gonna _____
You’ve gotta _____ and try try try
Gotta ……

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Modal Verbs of Obligation, Deduction and Possibility

Grammar and Exercises, , ,

Tired of always looking for exercises for different grammar points I have started putting together everything I need, related to a certain point of grammar on the same page.

Today I have uploaded Modal Verbs of Obligation (must/have to, mustn’t ), Possibility (may/might/could) and Deduction (must and can’t). I have gathered together Grammar and Exercises for a pre-intermedite level.

Hope it is as helpful to you as it is to me. Now, I can safely take them to the computer room, ask them to go to this url where they’ll find everything they need to work on. Very useful too, to do as homework or revise just before exams at their own pace.

Click here to start practising

SoundCloud: need to share a recording?

Audio, Create your own stuff, freeware, Resources, Speaking, Tutorial, ,

Are you running out of time to test your students’ speaking ability? Are you  a student and looking for an easy-to-use tool to send your teacher your speech? I’ve found the perfect tool for you! It is called SoundCloud and has been around for some time now ,so one can only assume that it is entirely reliable.
Sound Cloud is an amazing site which has a lot of potential for teaching and learning English. What can you do with SoundCloud? You can upload your own audio and you can record yourself. You are then given a unique url and the possibility to embed the audio in your own website or blog.
Why am I so enthusiastic about my students using SoundCloud? Because my students willl be able to send me their recordings and I will be able to correct them by inserting comments about their pronunciation, grammar…. directly into the recording and exactly at the exact second at which the mistake is made.

You need to register but it is completely free up to two hours ; then, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan or delete some of your recordings.

Below I’ve embedded a SoundCloud Recording to tempt you to try this useful tool!

Snow Patrol – You Could Be Happy [HD] by Cristina Cabal

Here’s a tutorial I found on the Internet which clearly explains how to upload and share your recording.

and now, for teachers, here’s a chopped tutorial from Princippia Innovación Educativa, about how to insert comments on a Souncloud Recording.

Listen and Read News in Three levels

General, , ,

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!!”