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/