Some ideas to improve your writing

You should all have handed in the following compositions by now:
- About myself
- National stereotypes
-A joke
-An interview
Last Friday I set writing assignment number 5, the 'For and Against' composition on page 34 in your books. We also had an interesting class discussion about how to write better compositions. Here are some ideas that can help you:

1. Consider a writing assigment as a process: think about it carefully, note down ideas and words you want to use, write a first draft, enrich that draft, read it several times, correct it, write the final version and, finally, hand it in. Even when we write in our first language, we don't usually write good compositions
2. Sometimes, you'll need to do some research on the topic, particularly if it's something you don't know about. The Internet may be usefulf but don't copy and paste from the Internet, just read and get information
3. Before you hand your assignment in, it may be interesting to give it to a classmate to have a different opinion. You can swap writings and note down your opinion and some ideas to improve each other's composition
4. At this level, you need to move on and stay away from plain structures and vocabulary. A nice way to enrich your writing is to write down a list of vocabulary or expressions that are related to the topic and you've recently learnt and force youroself to use it.
5. Link words and connectors are essential to give your composition cohesion and to make it more sophisticated. Make sure you include a wide variety of connectors: it may be interesting to have a check list of connectors (for example, the ones on page 34 in your books) and, again, force yourself to use them. Introduce a variety of sentence adverbs to start some of  your senteces as well: anyway, apparently, gradually, ideally, in fact, obviously, eventually, basically...
6. Think about the register you want to use in your composition. Ask yourself if its a formal or informal text that you are writing: use formal vocabulary or more informal words according to the type of audience or to the type of text you are writing.
7. Reading a lot will eventually help you to write better compositions.

Kate's Thanksgiving Presentation

In case you want to watch the youtube videos from Kate's presentation on Thanksgiving, these are the links (Thanks, Kate, for both your interesting presentation and the links):

Friends episode with the turkey on Joey's head
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJY6L52RhUs

Presidential turkey pardon (longer version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ofgmnAj1Q

The first Thanksgiving video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFDSobNnfQs

How Hollywood stereotyped the Native Americans
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hJFi7SRH7Q

The Addams Family Values Thanksgiving play
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptLD0kCoHG4

Video about poverty on Native American reservations
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq0Joi1ELps

Sight for sore eyes: Stem cells restore vision

Following our scienfic reading, a really interesting video on growing stem cells to cure blindness.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2010/nov/23/sight-eyes-stem-cells-vision

Keeping healthy: a daily walk and an interesting article

I just came across this interesting article in one of my favourite newspapers, The Guardian. The article is about how a daily 30-minute walk can help people keep fit and healthy.As health and keeping fit have been our most recent topics, I thought you'd may be interested in reading it. Hope you like it.
In praise of the daily walk

Two on-line dictionaries

Right, I'm sure most of you use on-line dictionaries -today, a couple of suggestions.
First, dictionary.com, an excellent tool to look up words and listen to their pronunciation. There's a lot of extra material, flashcards and quiz style activities to improve and develop your vocabulary.
Second pick of the day, Urban Dictionary, a brilliant slang dictionary written by Internet users. It's really good if you want to find informal and trendy slang words that are often difficult to find in ordinary dictionaries.
If you have a favourite on-line dictionary, please feel free to write a comment and tell us all about it.

Let's listen... to the radio

Right, most of you are always asking about how to improve your listening skills. Yeah, understanding spoken English is not always easy. Obviously, the more you listen to authentic English, the better for your listening skills. One thing you can do is listen to radio stations from different English speaking countries -this way, you'll also get an idea of how different accents sound. Listening to radio stations can be easily done on the Internet. Try the following link:
Listen to English around the world
Remember that they use authentic English on these radio stations -don't get frustrated if you don't understand everything. A good starting listening practice may be to just get the general topic of what you're listening to. As you become more and more confident, try to get more information.

Friday lessons

Please remember we'll have lessons on the following Fridays:

October 22nd
November 26th
January 14th
February 11th
March 18th
April 8th
May 20th

Billy Joel: For the longest time

The media: the press

Reading newspapers on line is an excellent way to improve your reading skills and learn new vocabulary. Also, by reading newspapers on line you can learn loads of cultural and social facts about English speaking countries. These two websites will link you to a huge variety of newspapers:
-List of newspapers in the UK (Wikipedia), apart from links to online newspapers, there is some information about formats (broadsheet, tabloid, compact...)
-Worldwide newspapers in English: a comprehensive list of online newspapers, not only from the UK but also from the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Africa...
Well, I hope you enjoy your read...

The story so far (1)

For those of you who can't attend all lessons, and for those of you who can and want to remember all we've done so far...
-A great deal of speaking: class introductions, question revision and speaking in pairs
-Error correction with the text about Arnost (photocopy: grammar-introduction)
-First composition: a similar text about yourself
-We've completed file 1A: we've talked and read about names, we've discussed our names, we've listened to people talking about their names. Apart from names, our first grammar topic has been phrasal verbs. Also, we've revised character and personality vocabulary: we've talked about national stereotypes and we listened to this German guy talking about what he thinks about German people and stereotypes.
-We've also been discussing strategies to improve  your reading and your listening skills.
 By now, you should have completed all activities for file 1A, including the workbook exercises, Grammar Bank 1a on phrasal verbs and the Vocabulary Bank on phrasal verbs.
The last thing we did in class was a brainstorming of some ideas about stereotypes of Spanish people: remember you should write the first paragraph of an informal writing about people from Spain. Check out sections A and B in the Writing Bank (page 156) before you write that 50-word first paragraph.

Character and personality

There you go -a great group-made revision of adjectives related to personality and character.

Monolingual dictionaries

A monolingual dictionary is an essential tool to make progress with your English -monolingual dictionaries give you a great deal of useful information concerning not only meanings of words and expressions, but also pronunciation, collocations (words that usually go together), register, grammar...

Some tips about dictionaries:

1. Make sure you get the latest edition of the dictionary you want to buy. English Language Teaching and Learning editors usually publish new editions of dictionaries frequently.
2. Make sure you get a dictionary with a CD-ROM version. The CD will allow you to load it on your computer, which is extremely helpful when writing or surfing the Internet.
3. Make sure you spend some time reading the introduction and understanding the contents and conventions of your dictionary. That will help you take advantage of all its features.

Some good monolingual dictionaries are the following:
- Longman Active Study Dictionary
- Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (*)
- Cambridge Learner's Dictionary
- Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary (*)
- Oxford Wordpower Dictionary
- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictonary (*)
- Macmillan English Dictionary (*)
- Collins COBUILD Student's Dictonary
- Collins COBUILD Advanced Dictonary (*)

Dictionaries with (*) will take students from B2 to C2 levels. The rest of dictionaries are also extremely good but cover the language range between B1 and B2 levels.

Phrasal verbs

http://www.englishpage.com/prepositions/phrasaldictionary.html
On this site you'll find some extra grammar information about phrasal verb patterns and a useful phrasal verb dictionary.
Hope you find it useful.

Names: Layla

Layla, the first woman in our first listening this year, was named after this famous song by Eric Clapton. Hope you enjoy it.

Mohammed now second most popular boys' name in Britain

If you want to know more about popular names in Britain, this article is interesting.

Mohammed now second most popular boys' name in Britain 

Were you surprised?

Some ideas to improve your English

YouTube is an invaluable source of listening material. For a start, a couple of clips with interesting ideas to help you move on and improve your English learning.
How to improve your English: study tips

Five tips for learning English

Welcome

Welcome to our lessons. Remember these will be every Monday and Wednesday from 6 to 8 pm. We'll be using room 4.4. Remember we'll also have one Friday lesson each month.


Apart from other materials, we'll be using the textbook on the left -NEW ENGLISH FILE Intermediate Plus, by Clive Oxenden and Christina Latham Koening. The student book is sold together with the workbook (with key) and a multi-ROM. This material should be available at the usual bookshops in Almería, so it'd be interesting for you to get it as soon as possible.

The textbook has an interesting student's site with plenty of additional material: http://www.oup.com/elt/global/products/englishfile/intplus/