Tag Archives: translation

Lesson Plan : Money

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Speaking, , , , , , , ,

Level: Intermediate

Step 1.  Warm up

A: Students watch the video. Unless they beg for more, I would just play the first  15 seconds, enough for students to focus on the pronunciation of the word “money” which they tend to mispronounce, and on the chorus Money makes the World Go Round, which students will later need to discuss.

B: This second warm-up is a great one. I got it straight from George Chilton‘s blog Designer Lessons – I copy/paste from him–, which I highly recommend.

Ask your students how they would spend a day in their city/town/village without spending any money. What activities could they do? They’re not allowed to stay at home, they have to be out of the house for the whole day.

Put them in small groups and get them to come up with a plan of the day – from 10 am until 8 pm. Conditions – They are allowed to drink water from city water fountains and any food that they find. They should present their plans at the end of this activity.

Step 2. A Bit of Fun with Translation.

Previous to this exercise students have studied Vocabulary related to money, so now it’s their time to show what they have learned.

Students work in pairs or in threes. To make things easier for me, I’ll provide them with slips of paper so that when the time’s up they can raise it up and I can have a quick check. Sentences with mistakes will be automatically discarded and the correct translations will get one point. Time limit: 90 seconds.


Step 3. Speaking. Speed Dating Technique.

♥Photo and explanation of the technique here . 

♥Money Questions here

 

Linguee: the web as a dictionary

Dictionaries, Writing skill, , ,

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context.
Let’s see how it works. Click on the word Linguee and it’ll take you straight to the dictionary. Try the Spanish idiom      ” darlo por hecho” … see? Helpful , isn’t it?

Now, let’s try a single word such as “terminar” .

Now it works as a dictionary with an expandable list of the words in context and   the added possibility of listening to some of the translations.

Give it a try, I’m sure it’ll help you a lot improve your writing skills!