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Tag Archives: C1
Four Excellent Sites for Online Dictations
Oh boy. Does it bring back memories!
Dictations! To be completely honest with you, I have mixed feelings as regards dictations. I remember back in primary school when the language teacher gave us lots of dictations like a well-deserved break after a tough grammar lesson; and then, this feeling of “I don’t want to ever hear the word dictation again” that I got from my classes at university where the teacher gave us one-page-long dictations so quickly that when he finished, he was panting for breath, and we were seeing red.
Although doing dictations is somewhat regarded as an old-fashioned technique, it is undeniable that a lot of benefits can be derived from doing this exercise. In fact, it is an integrative activity requiring the use of various skills like listening, writing and reading -when you read the passage you have written, looking for grammar or spelling mistakes. You might even add speaking if the dictation is used as a prompt to encourage discussion of the passage.
In case you are not fully convinced that dictations also have their place in the twenty-first century classroom, here are some more benefits you might want to consider:
• It improves spelling.
• It improves recognition of grammatically correct sentences.
• It helps students distinguish sounds in continuous speech.
• It improves students’ awareness of punctuation.
• It gives students practice in comprehending and helps them gain fluency in writing.
If I have managed to convince you, here are some links to online dictations you might want to try or if you are a teacher, heartily recommend to your students.
Dictations Online. (not working anymore)
This site specializes in dictations and although it is free, you can sign in to do more dictations or keep track of your score and view your score history. They are graded from elementary to advanced.
The students hear the dictation four times
- The first time, the whole passage is read at normal speed to listen for gist.
- The second time, each phrase is read slowly twice, with punctuation.
- Then the whole passage is read again to check your work.
- And finally, the written text is shown for you to see your mistakes.
I like the site. It is very user-friendly. The dictations are graded going from Elementary, with short recordings of one or two phrases, to Advanced with recordings of one or two paragraphs.
This site features two levels: elementary and intermediate. It has a very clean interface where you’ll see two recording of the same dictation. One recorded at a normal speed and the other one at a slow speed with pauses to give you time to write down what you hear. You only need to follow the instructions.
ESL: English as a Second Language
Aimed at Intermediate and Upper-intermediate students, this site offers an amazing numbers of dictations
Do you like these sites or would you rather create your own dictations? Here are two online free tools to convert text to speech.
Five Different Ways to Practise your Listening Skills.
I won’t spend much time introducing this post, mainly because today is one of these days when the muse has decided to leave me.
Perhaps you’re wondering what else you can do to pass your listening test with flying colours apart from doing every single listening comprehension exercise in your student’s book and all the ones in the workbook. I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel, but here are a few things you might want to try.
1.Read a few tips and put them into practice. Students often complain that despite grasping the main information content of the recorded material, they sometimes seem to be unable to provide the right answer and this leads to frustration.
Getting a high mark in a listening comprehension exercise requires practice, lots, and also knowing a few tips. The most common types of listening exercises are Blank Filling and Multiple Choice and there are a few handy hints on how best to deal with them that you might want to read. The tips below aim at teaching students to listen effectively to enable them to select the information they require from what they hear.
2.The obvious. Find a good listening site with plenty of listening exercises to choose from.
One of the sites I have been recommending my students lately to practise Listening is Ingles en Aviles, a fantastic blog aimed at B2 (upper-intermediate) and C1 (advanced students) where you’ll find lots of listening comprehension exercises to choose from.
Can I also suggest my own Listening section?
3. Listening to Vaughan radio
Vaughan Radio is a live radio station broadcasting from Madrid, Spain that provides listeners the chance to improve English language skills. So while you’re at home, maybe cleaning or ironing and bored to death, you might want to give it a try. From time to time you’ll hear some Spanish words to help Spanish listeners, but most of the time the show is in English and really worth listening to.
Here’s the link to listen on the computer. Alternatively, you can download the app on your smart phone. Type Radio Vaughan in the search box to download the app. My favourite programme? “The show with no name”.
4. Watching series.
Here, I would recommend ororo.tv. What can ororo.tv do to help you improve your English? What will you find on this website? An amazing number of TV shows and films in their original versions and with subtitles in English. Right now, I am hooked on the Big Bang Theory, an American sitcom about four young scientists, but surely you’ll find attractive alternatives here to suit every taste and mood.
5. A new web tool: Youglish.
A very interesting tool to help you with your pronunciation and your listening is Youglish. In the search box, type the word or expression you want to hear in context. Youglish provides you with videos, from You Tube, where the word/expression is spoken by real people and in context.
In case you’re wondering, this is not a sponsored post. It’s just a few recommendations from a humble teacher trying to help students by sharing some useful links.
Thanks for reading!
Six Steps to Writing a Good Book Review
Here are some considerations and tips about writing book reviews. I hope you find them useful.
- Difference between a book report and a book review.
- Getting started.
- Some tips.
- Useful language.
- Revising your review.
- The task.
1. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A BOOK REPORT AND A BOOK REVIEW.
A book report contains facts. It includes information about the author, title, place and year of publication as well as a summary of the content of the book.
A book review, on the other hand, is much more personal. It contains the reader’s opinion and specific aspects of the book. The review will probably include factual information, but it is the reader’s personal opinion that is most important.
2. GETTING STARTED
How can I start? You have read your book. Your next step will be to organize what you are going to say about it. Writing the basic elements down in an outline format will help you to organize your thoughts.
How shall I organize the information? Normally a book review is divided into four parts: introduction, summary, opinion and conclusion.
- Introduction: In the introduction you give facts and background information about the book and its author. It should contain the book title, and the name of the author. Don’t forget to mention the book’s genre (such as mystery, fantasy, biography, essay, comedy or adventure).
- A main body: usually made up of two paragraphs.
In the first paragraph, give a concise outline of the plot and introduce the main characters, mentioning the setting (where and when the story takes place) and the overall theme of the book. Be careful not to re-tell the whole story in detail.
In the second paragraph you can give your opinion, including sentences about how you liked the book, which characters you liked and disliked and how the ending made you feel. You can also express what you felt was the best part of the story. Don’t be afraid to include negative points.
- Conclusion: It consists of the overall feelings and opinions on the story and whether or not you would encourage others to read it and why. No new information or ideas should be introduced in the conclusion.
3. SOME TIPS.
- Before you begin writing, make a few notes about the points you want to get across.
- Try to get the main theme of the book across in the beginning of your review. Your reader should know right away what he or she is getting into should they choose to read the book.
- Mention the name of the author and the book title in the first paragraph – there’s nothing more frustrating than reading a review of a great book but not knowing who wrote it and what the title is!
- Think about whether the book is part of a genre. Does the book fit into a type like mystery, adventure, or romance? What aspects of the genre does it use?
- When mentioning a character for the first time, don’t forget to use his/her full name.
- Make sure your review explains how you feel about the book and why, not just what the book is about. A good review should express the reviewer’s opinion and persuade the reader to share it, to read the book, or to avoid reading and make sure that someone who has not read the book will understand it after reading your review. Don’t be afraid to express your opinion openly, even if it is a negative one.
- Use adjectives and adverbs in order to strengthen your opinion about the book or its plot. For ex. extremely disturbing.
- The style depends upon the intended reader, so it can be either formal or semi-formal, but not colloquial.
Some of these tips are from Rodman Philbrick.
4. REVISING YOUR REVIEW
- Write your draft and then allow some time to pass, at least a few hours, before you start your revision.
- Check the layout and that the information is arranged in paragraphs. Look for unity, organisation and logical development.
- Correct all mistakes in grammar, spelling and punctuation as you find them. You can use this checklist.
- Use a range of present tenses, including the Present Perfect, to outline the plot as well as a variety of adjectives to make the review more interesting to the reader.
- Don’t use informal language, slang or contractions. Make sure that your language is formal or semiformal and academically correct.
- Don’t use long quotations from the book.
- Read your paper through again looking for unity, organisation and logical development. If a sentence looks awkward, don’t hesitate to rewrite it.
5. USEFUL LANGUAGE
Introduction:
- The book/novel was written by…
- This well-written/informative/fascinating book…
- This original first novel…
- This novel is based on…
- “ __” is a powerful first novel by…
Main body
- The story is set in …. (rural Spain at the beginning of the XV century)
- The story takes place…
- The book tells the story of…
- The story begins/ is about…
- The story is told by…
- The plot focuses on….
- “___” is rich and detailed in plot.
- The plot has an unexpected twist…
- The plot is absolutely thrilling/ boring/clever/ exciting…
- A plot with well-developed believable characters.
- The character I like best is
General comments and opinion
- The characters are very well drawn and readers can identify with them easily.
- The story is totally convincing.
- It has a tragic/dramatic /surprising end.
- There was an unexpected twist to the story.
- What we don’t learn until the end is…
- What I liked best was (the way)…
- What I didn’t like was…
- My only reservation about this book…
Recommendations
- Don’t miss it.
- I would/wouldn’t recommend it because…
- It is at the top of my list.
- It’s a highly entertaining read.
- Don’t bother with this one.
- It’s well-worth reading.
- It will change the way you see…
- It’s a bore to read.
- I definitely recommend that you add this book to your collection.
- The book was so good that I couldn’t put it down..
- The book certainly lived up to my expectations.
Adjectives to describe a book
- Positive: gripping, best-selling, intriguing, thrilling, fascinating, enthralling, evocative, heart-warming, sensitive, memorable, powerful, beautifully written, engaging, fascinating.
- Negative: disturbing, unconvincing, preposterous, predictable, dull, unimaginative, poorly-written, confusing.
- Neutral: fast-paced (most of them collocate with the adjectives above).
Adverbs (most of them collocate with the adjectives above)
- Amazingly, considerably, exceedingly, extraordinarily, extremely, highly, immensely, noticeably, radically, remarkably, significantly, totally, truly, utterly.
6. THE TASK
(adapted from Advanced Masterclass)
You have seen this announcement in a magazine.
Pdf here. Hope you find it useful!
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An Engaging Activity to Work with Modals in the Past
Dear readers,
Let me start thanking you for all your comments, likes and shares on my posts. That’s really encouraging!
In today’s post I want to share with you an activity I did with my B2 students that worked really well. It’s the kind of activity that I like because it includes movement and it encourages interaction between students. The focus is on grammar but, at the same time this activity gets them out of their seats and moving. They will need to interact with other classmates and use English to discuss English grammar while having fun at the same time. So, what else could one wish for?
Aim: The focus of this lesson is on students integrating grammar, speaking and writing using modals of certainty and possibility in the past.
Level: B2 (upper intermediate)
Time: 20-30 minutes
Materials: post-it notes and pictures to display (see mine here)
Although this is an activity to reinforce learning and the grammar should have been explained beforehand, it might be a good idea to revise orally or on the board the targeted grammar.
Warming-up
Remind students of the use of the structure modal+have+past participle to make suppositions about actions that did or did not take place in the past.
Explain that for this activity they will be working with the modal “must” to speculate about the past and with the modals could/may/ might in the past to discuss different possibilities. Drill pronunciation of must/might…+have+past participle
- Must have been | ‘ mʌstəv ‘biːn |
- might have gone | ‘maɪtəv ‘ɡɒn |
The Task
On the walls of the class display the pictures you want to use. See the ones I used here. Ask students to try to guess the answers to the questions in the pictures and then, write them down on the post-it notes provided using the modal must in the past to speculate about what must have happened. Tell them that on the back of each picture you have written the answer to the question. They’ll win one point if their answer is the same as the one written on the back of the picture.
Procedure
- On the walls of the class display the pictures you want to use.
- Ask students to work in threes.
- Give each group a different number and some post-it notes. You will need to give them as many post-it notes as pictures on the walls. They will need a post-it note for each picture.
- Now, ask students to stand up and have a look at the different pictures.
- In their groups they will have to discuss the different possibilities using the structure may/might/could +have+ past participle.
- Then when they reach an agreement, they will need to write their suggestion on the post-it note using the modal “must” in the past. Ask students to write their assigned number on the post-it note. Ex. He must have saved someone or he must have discovered a bomb
- Ask students to sit down. Take the first picture and turn it around. Read the sentence explaining the picture. Read the post-it notes to see which group guessed correctly. Award them one point. Needless to say, the winner is the group that gets more points.
Thanks for reading!