Tag Archives: vocabulary

Bravo Rafa! and some tennis vocabulary

6 June 2011Word of the Daysports, vocabularyCristina Cabal

Great, great Rafa! Although he was not at his peak, he was hungry for the prize and Rafa Nadal has just won his 6th Roland Garros title and maintains his top position in ATP rankings which, in case of losing this final , he might have given to Djokovic. And what is more, he has equaled Bjorn Borg’s record of six Roland Garros titles .

Have you seen the match? Could you understand the umpire? Tennis has got a lot of words that might be Greek to some of you. If you want to learn what some of them refer to , read the list below to learn some of them and then next time you watch a tennis match , listen for these words you have just learned.

♥ATP Association of Tennis Professionals. The ATP are the governing body of the men’s professional tennis circuit.

♥Serve the shot that begins each point, in which the server hits the ball after tossing it into the air

♥Love no points

♥Match point the last point that a player needs to win in order to win a match

♥Ace a very fast serve that your opponent cannot reach with their racket

♥Deuce the score in tennis when both players have 40 points.

♥Lob a shot that is hit in a high arc, usually over the opponent’s head

♥Tiebreaker an extra game played to decide who will win when both players have six games each.

♥Rally a long series of shots

♥Let a service that hits the net and must be played again

♥Grand Slam the four most prestigious tournaments; Wimbledon ,Roland Garros and the U.S. and Australian Opens

♥Crosscourt a shot in which the ball is hit diagonally across the court

♥Advantage used for saying the name of a player who scores a point after ‘deuce’ , For ex: Advantage Nadal

If you feel you want to learn more vocab about tennis, click here. Thank you Rafa, you are a legend!

Human Bingo to Revise Irregular Verbs

1 June 2011Gamesbingo, fun, games, grammar, irregular verbs, methodology, revising, vocabularyCristina Cabal

I got this wonderful idea from Mel Wawen although I have slightly modified it. As she explains, it can be used as a warm up before the lesson or at the end of it when students feel they have had enough of English,

This time I needed to revise Irregular Verbs and this is how I did it.

I asked students to tidily sit individually and in rows of three or four.
Then, I asked each of them to choose an irregular verb from the ones we had studied. I told them to write it down in its irregular past form on a piece of paper.
Every row is a team, so they should make sure every student in the same team has chosen a different irregular verb.
Tell them you are going to say a verb at a time, using the infinitive form. When the students hear the infinitive for the irregular they have chosen, they must say the irregular past form aloud and then sit down.
The first team with all the students sitting down wins the game.

Follow up:

I used this game when they first learned there was something called irregular verbs. It was funny and it only took about three or four minutes.

The second time I played this human bingo, students also had to write a sentence containing the irregular verb. After checking that their sentence was grammatically correct, I made sure they knew how to pronounce in wors in their sentences.

It was their turn now. They had to stand up and read aloud their sentence but without saying the verb. Students in the class had to provide the right verb in the past to fill in the gap.

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Word of the Day: to Lose Weight

11 May 2011Funny Stuff, Pictures, Word of the Dayeating, food, fun, losing weight, onlinetools, photograph, vocabularyCristina Cabal

Never have I seen so many people around me trying to lose some weight . Spring must be the season when we realize there is no way we will be able to hide our love handles (excess fat around the hips and buttocks, sometimes also called saddle bags– I imagine they are called this way when they are big and ugly) .

Anyway, when it is not summertime and you’re not looking your best, you can always use this funny tool to make you look thinner, even though you haven’t bothered to go on a diet to lose a bit of weight or go to the gym to sweat off your excess of baggage in the treadmill.

The tool I was telling you about is called slimpic.com and with only a few clicks, you can make yourself or someone in your pictures gain or lose weight (the point here is losing weight, we don’t need to go to the Internet searching for tools to make us look uglier, do we?).

Me, before and with 10kgs less! if only it were so easy!

Word of the day : To get drunk and the like

10 April 2011Word of the Dayalcohol, drinking, fun, vocabularyCristina Cabal

I’ve been away for a short school trip and that’s the reason why I haven’t been posting for a week.

Though in my forties, this one has been my first school trip,ever. My father was not a big fan of school trips and me and my sisters were never allowed to go; we were sent to Great Britain or France instead, to study the language under the wings of some religious institution or other. What he didn’t know is that, even under their watchful eyes, I had my fair share of unpleasant and pleasant (if you know what I mean) experiences.

And, in this school trip, and as a teacher, my role was trying that my students didn’t experience any unpleasant things, which they might think were pleasant enough to try. But, unfortunately, I caught two students red-handed trying to smuggle alcohol into their bedrooms. Pity, they were kept in detention and couldn’t enjoy the disco!

In English as in any other language there are countless alternatives to the traditional to get drunk

So, let’s imagine that you and your friends decide to go out on a bender/binge or maybe go pub crawling or bar hopping to get drunk and after two or three beers you are a bit tipsy (slightly drunk) because you challenged one of your friends you could drink him under the table (drink more than him without getting drunk)and then you realized you could not hold your drink (drink without getting drunk) and that he drinks like a fish. So, you decide to go home but your friends decide to go on drinking and after two hours they are loaded /wasted/gone/slushed/hammered/legless/plastered or pissed and one of them starts to puke/spew/gag/chunder/barf, which is quite disgusting.

You phone your friend in the morning and find out he can’t even talk to you because he’s got the worst hangover and needs to take an alka-setzer and get some more sleep.

Do you know any other expressions ?