Word of the Day: Bring Up and Educate

Word of the Day,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

These two words can be a bit confusing for some learners as in some languages the translation is the same, for example in Spanish.

  • BRING UP is used for the moral and social training that children receive at home. The noun is upbringing.
  • EDUCATE is used for the intellectual and cultural training people get at school and university. The noun is education.

EXAMPLES

I was brought up by my grandmother.

She was brought up as a Catholic

Her strict upbringing shaped her whole life

My mother was educated at a private school

His lack of education prevented him from getting a good job.

NOTE: Don’t confuse being educated with having good manners. 

Ex from WikiHow

If you want to have good manners, then you have to master dining etiquette, phone etiquette, as well as to learn basic etiquette, which includes being polite and holding doors for people.

 

6 Excellent Free Sites to Practise Reading Comprehension

Reading,

It’s been too long since I’ve written about improving reading skills. Last time I posted about sites to help you practise reading comprehension was in May last year. Way too long. The truth is that doing reading comprehension activities in class takes time, especially if we are talking about long texts with an amount of difficulty, and very often this is one of the tasks we give students as homework.

On the other hand, I am one of those teachers who think reading aloud in class is a good exercise. In my opinion,

  • Reading aloud fluently not only helps to improve the reading ability, but also oral expression.
  • It gives students a chance to focus only on fluency, pronunciation and intonation as they don’t need to worry about grammatical accuracy.
  • It gives teachers a nice opportunity to correct pronunciation mistakes.
  • It helps students enhance comprehension as pauses should be made in the correct places.
  • Reading aloud is especially good for students who don’t feel very confident speaking English in public. It gives them a nice chance to use English in a safe environment and helps them gain confidence.

These are some of the sites I’ve been recommending my students to further practise reading comprehension.They are all completely free.

1. Newsela. Have you already tried Newsela? It’s a really good site to help students become stronger readers while reading current event articles.

I teach different levels, and what I like most about Newsela is that you can give the same news article to all your classes no matter the level. Why? Newsela offers five different levels of the same news item. You just need to choose the levelled version you want to use.

The site also offers a multiple choice exercise to test your comprehension of the article.

Although you have to sign up, the site is free. As a teacher, you can assign articles to students in your classes and monitor their progress. Find out how to do it here .

2. Dreamreader is a free website with more than 500 reading lessons. Every lesson comes with free audio, a free printable worksheet and a free multiple choice quiz.

The site offers 5 categories, but the most interesting ones to help enhance your reading comprehension ability are “Fun English” and “Academic  English”. This last category is full of lessons and quiz questions for beginner, low intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced students.

3. GCF LearnFree.This is a fantastic site to improve your reading skills. There is a wide variety of topics displayed at the top of the page. Choose the topic you want to read about and then at the bottom, select the kind of exercise you want to do. If you want to practise reading comprehension, select “Text” and then from the two options offered, choose “Reading Comprehension”.

The site is very visual and user- friendly and I highly recommend exploring all its possibilities.

4. Easy reading. 

This is a section of the British Council especially aimed at teens though I have often used it with adults with great success, too. Here, you can read stories and articles written at three different levels A2 (elementary), B1 (intermediate) and B2 (upper-intermediate).

After the reading test, you can do an online interactive multiple choice exercise to test your comprehension and a grammar exercise based on the text. The site also gives you the possibility of downloading the text and the activities.

5. Literacynet. Aimed at adults with an advanced level of English, it offers texts on a variety of subjects.

Select a topic and the piece of news you want to read. Click on “Story” and then from the menu on the left, choose the activity you want to do. There are five comprehension activities.

6. Teaching Kids News is a very interesting site that offers original news articles on topics that are “timely, relevant and intriguing”. Though it doesn’t offer the standard type of comprehension exercises you normally find in English exams, each article includes Writing/Discussion Prompts, Grammar Features, and a Reading Prompt.

Hope you find these sites useful!

Blog de Cristina is also on Facebook. Follow us!

Tourism: Developing Writing Skills through Collaborative Writing

Lesson Plan: Advanced, Writing, , , , , , , ,

It is true that I don’t dedicate enough time to writing activities. I ask my students to do small writing tasks but not the real thing, at least not as often as they would probably need. Would it be a plausible excuse to say that I have 148 students and that it takes an awful lot of time, time I don’t have, to correct their essays? No, I know. I need to make amends, and I have started this week.

Haven’t you always dreamed of travelling to exotic off the beaten track destinations? Well, this activity is all about it! I guarantee you’ll not only enjoy writing and presenting your chosen destination, but you’ll also love hearing what your classmates have to say!

This lesson plan, which aims at developing writing skills through collaborative writing, is based on the theme of tourism and travelling.

Topic: Tourism

Level: Upper Intermediate and above

Time:  About 2 teaching sessions

Aims

  • To consolidate and extend understanding of vocabulary associated with tourism and travelling
  • To develop writing skills through collaborative writing
  • To give a presentation in front of an audience

Materials: suggested destinations here

THE TASK

Setting the context. You own a travel company and offer luxury holidays. Business has been bad the last couple of years due to the crisis and you have decided to lower the price of one of your most successful package tours, which happens to be a three-day trip to… (chosen destination)

You and your team have decided to attend the international tourism trade fair in London and try to sell your trip there.

You’ll need to explain the following to the potential customers:

  1. Brief description of the tour
  2. Transport to the chosen destination and once there
  3. Accommodation (options available) and meals included in the price (any extras?)
  4. Brief description of the three-day tour itinerary (sightseeing/ things to do…etc)
  5. Why customers should book with your agency

Display on the walls of the class posters of different package tours. Ask students to stand up and stand next to the tour they would like to take. There should be about 4 students per tour. Suggested  destinations pdf  here.

Writing. Students sit in groups now. Assign the following writing task to the group:

Student 1-

  • Brief description of the tour
  • Why the customer should book with your agency

Student 2 –

  • Transport to the chosen destination and once there
  • Accommodation (options available) and meals included in the price (any extras?)

Students 3 and 4 –

  • Brief description of the three-day tour itinerary (sightseeing/ things to do…etc)

Walk around the class offering help and guidance.

Presenting. Ask students to imagine they are at the International tourism trade fair in London and that they are going to try to sell their trip to their potential customers (the students in the class). Ask all the students in a group to come to the front of the class and read their part enthusiastically.

Buying. Ask students in the class to vote for the best trip.

(below, students trying to sell their trip)

Below, a nice presentation of Nepal created by Noelia Espinosa, Isabel Pardo, Yolanda Alonso and Silvia García. And here’s a link to the beautiful website created by Sharon Calderón as support for her presentation.  Thank you girls!

 

Photo by Kerry Lee Smith

Creating visual content for my classes with two awesome free online tools

Create your own stuff, freeware, Grammar and Exercises, Lesson Plan: Advanced, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Speaking, , , , , , , ,

Let’s go visual!

If you have been following my blog for a while you probably know how much I like exploring new tools to spice up my lessons. We all know students prefer looking at a screen than at a book so, for this lesson I have decided to explore two new free online tools, which have a lot of potential for language teaching.

 

Perhaps  you have never considered creating your own content because you think you aren’t tech-savvy and you don’t really know how to go about  these  modern things, but I can assure you that creating these two videos has been as easy as falling off a log.

In class, we are studying how to express preference with the structure would rather and (would)pefer  and this is just the perfect excuse to “play” with these two little tools.

1. For a revision of the grammar for Would Rather and Prefer, I have used biteable.com. This is how this tool works:

  • Login for free.
  • Click “create a new video”.
  • Choose your scenes one by one and enter the text. You can choose between animation scenes, footage scenes and image scenes where you can upload your own pictures. Click + to add a new scene.
  • Choose the colours for your presentation and then the music track or upload your own.
  • Click Preview and the video will be sent to your email address once it’s created.
  • At this point, you can download it, share it on facebook and twitter, or post to youtube.

(presentation created with biteable)

2. For a speaking activity using Would Rather, I have used emaze.com. This is how this amazing free online tool works:

  • Log in for free.
  • You can create a new presentation form scratch or upload a power point presentation.
  • Choose a template.
  • Share it or embed it on your blog.

(presentation created with emaze)

Powered by emaze

Give them a go! You won’t regret it!

Blog de  Cristina is also on Facebook

 

Teaching Collocations: a Low-Prep Activity

Common Errors, Games, Vocabulary Games, , , , ,

I am almost embarrassed to share this super easy lesson plan with you, but right now I am in the middle of a love affair with collocations and all my classes, no matter the level, are working  with collocations.

Please, don’t freak out! I am not going to give you an obnoxious list of collocations and ask you to learn them by heart. That’s not the way I do things!, but you’ll surely agree with me  that there is no point in learning the adjective “interested” if you don’t know that it’s followed by the preposition “in”. Yes, Ok, you can say “I’m interested”, but that’s it!! And we are aiming for a bit more, aren’t we?

(at the end of this post, you’ll find  some interesting links to learn more about collocations)

So, take a deep breath and follow me!

Step 1. What is a collocation? Though students don’t really need to be familiar with the term, it might be a good idea to introduce the concept.

In English we can say I absolutely agree but we cannot say I absolutely go; we can say I am interested in, but not I am keen in. We can say a heavy drinker, but not a strong drinker or a  chain drinker. These conventional combinations of words, chosen naturally by the English speakers to express an idea, are called “collocations”.

Below you’ll see some of the collocations I am going to use, but this activity will work with any collocation:

Depend on/ interested in/ arrive in/ arrive at/ fed up with/ spend on/good or bad at/ close to/fond of/keen on/ look forward to…etc.

Step 2. Slips of paper. Oral activity.

  • Select the collocations to be studied, as many as students you have in the class. In my case, I have decided to give them dependent prepositions with common adjectives and verbs because I have noticed they always make mistakes here.
  • Write the adjective or verb on the slip of paper and on the back of it, the preposition(s) it collocates with. Stand up in the middle of the class for everybody to see you. Show students the slip of paper containing the adjective or verb and ask them to guess the missing preposition, and then give you a sentence containing the collocation.
  • A small competition. Divide the class into two groups and repeat procedure. This time, groups will need to guess the preposition and give a sentence -different from the one they gave in the previous stage- to win the point.

Step 3. Slips of paper. Writing activity.

  • Give every student a slip of paper from the previous activity and ask them to individually think of a question to ask their partners containing this collocation.

Offer help if necessary.

Step 4. Speaking activity using the speed-dating technique.

Students sit facing each other. Some students will remain seated during the whole event (in real speed dating, women remain seated). They have 4 minutes to talk asking and answering the question they have written containing the collocation. Then, a bell rings and “men” need to stand up and move to their right to start a new conversation and the whole process is repeated again. I didn’t have a bell so I used a Class Timer (here).

A highly engaging activity your students are likely to enjoy!

Useful links to learn more about collocations

Blog de Cristina is also on Facebook. Follow us!

Thanks for reading!