Initiation!

In the new English for Work class we used this exercise to highlight the need for social skills as well as being able to use good English. A feedback sheet from the class, which talks about using conversations as frames as well as Chinese astrology, can be downloaded here.

Tatsu's Spectaular Summary

Read Tatsu’s excellent summary of the article Work until you drop: how the long-hours culture is killing us and fill the gaps with an appropriate form of the verb in brackets:


Recently, more and more people in Britain _____________ (put) in long hours at work. At one time, British people _____________ (think) “hard work never killed anyone” but now, an American survey _____________ (show) that long working hours _____________ (increase) an individual’s chance of illness and injury. In fact, Britain even _____________ (have) a recent occurrence of the phenomenon “death from overworking”.

Telephone Wedding!

This story from the BBC explains how a judge in Italy recently supported a Pakistani man's right to get married over the telephone. On the BBC site there are

The article has some difficult vocabulary because there are some specific terms related to weddings and the law. However, if we take this vocabulary away, you should still be able to understand the story. Look at this gapped version of the story and try to guess what words could fill the spaces. The only important thing at this stage is to guess the MEANING of these words. If you can only do this by writing three or four words, or if the words you choose don't seem to be grammatically correct, don't worry. The key thing is that you understand the story.

After you've tried for yourself, compare your guesses to mine, which I've written at the bottom of the page. Can you insert these words & phrases into appropriate gaps in the story?

Now go back to the original text and highlight all the words that were covered up in the gapped version of the story. You should find that even though this vocabulary is new to you, you understand its meaning. The next step is to decide which phrases you could use by yourself. This handout divides the vocabulary into the lexical sets of LAW and WEDDINGS and then gives you space to brainstorm more wedding-related vocabulary in order to speak or write about a typical wedding from your culture, or indeed any wedding you have attended.

Vocabulary Class : Lexical Sets

The materials we used today are as follows:

- Young "hung up on their bodies" courtesy of the BBC

- how to break pieces of wood with Kung Fu Science!

- a very serious Guardian article about Working Yourself to Death!

- a mysterious racy novel in typical Mills and Boon style!

- Ali's prospectus...which university was it?

And don't forget the girl next door...

Pancakes

Pancake day is the greatest day of the year and probably the only interesting thing about British culture...well, it's the most delicious anyway.

The BBC has some nice cultural and historical information as well as the all-important recipes which you ABSOLUTELY MUST try. Click here to entre the wonderful world of pancakes.

What is Red Fuhrerwein???

First make a list of all the vocabulary you can think of related to wine, buying & selling, and Hitler! Next, find out about Fuhrerwein by reading this article. Do you see any of the vocabulary from your lists? Can you use the article to find more accurate phrases than some of the ones you listed?

Look at vocabulary from the article broken down into lexical sets in this handout. Give each lexical set a name and try to work out the meaning of any new vocabulary from context.

A simple exercise for exploring new vocabulary you find in an article is to make a list of all the noun phrases that refer to the main topic of the article, and then try to add adjectives and verbs to the noun phrases to retell the story. Then check the original text for the authentic vocabulary that was actually used. An example from this article can be found here.

Slang

Because it's such a well-loved topic by so many students, I'm happy to pass on this link to a dictionary of British slang. Please feel free to try out anything you learn on me...

High Hopes

Mike Leigh is a British film director whose early work is dominated by issues of class and potential movement between classes (or not, as the case may be). My plan is for us to use scenes from Mike Leigh's 1988 film High Hopes to practice listening to colloquial conversations and to look at the features of different accents. The scenes should also provide the opportunity to talk about social class in the UK and make comparisons with the idea of class in other cultures.

For more about the film, there's a New York Times article on Mike Leigh's High Hopes here.

Lunch on a Roller Coaster

42 Seconds of excitement and food flying all over the place can be viewed here.

Cleopatra and the Ugly Truth

This article from the BBC tells us that the popular image of Cleopatra as an Egyptian beauty might not be very close to the truth.

Look at this worksheet for vocabulary development tasks which include word form, synonyms & antonyms, adjective noun collocations, and lexical chains - whatever they are.

You can view a class gallery of beauty here and use the vocabulary on this worksheet to discuss it.

For listening practice, you can watch this news item online here at the BBC website, or admire Elizabeth Taylor as a more attractive Cleoptara in this film clip:

The Royal Family

The Windsors are everybody's favourite family, aren't they?

Experience "the Queen's English" literally by listening to Liz's speeches made on her 80th birthday and on Christmas Day 2006. Tapescripts can be found here and there's plenty more on this rather regal website.

Take the Windsor challenge by studying these photographs and trying to identify every royal. To help you put names to all those horse-like faces you can listen to Lyndel, Steve, and Mark discussing the British monarchy. Fill in this table as you do so.

Poetry

Don't laugh. Poetry is the new rock'n'roll...honestly. It could also help you develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

You can download and listen to William Wordsworth's Daffodils here and Stevie Smith's Not Waving But Drowning here. Predictably, there's also a worksheet to go with them.

To listen to Wendy Cope's Bloody Men! click here. To use the poem as a dictation exercise you can download this tempate.

Vocabulary Development : Good Manners

This vocabulary lesson is based around a BBC article about the Chinese government's attempts to discourage queue-jumping ahead of the Beijing Olympics. This worksheet and this breakdown of vocabulary from the article should help you to understand and then activate new and interesting phrases through personalisation. That's the idea anyway...

Please post a message if you have any questions or requests.

Front Row - Listening Activities

Nominess for the 2006 Academy Awards have recently been published. A full list of nominees and other related information can be found here.

You can download this speaking activity based on these nominations here, but much more challenging is to listen to these two extracts from the weekly podcast of the BBC Radio 4 culture and arts programme, Front Row. The presenter discusses the nominations with a critic and then interviews Leonardo DiCaprio. Everyone speaks quickly, but if you think about your expectations of this kind of programme and this kind of interview, nothing should surprise you. A tapescript of the discussion is here, along with the questions that DiCaprio is asked. Your task is to try to summarise Leo's answers.

The two recordings are full of lots of useful film vocabulary, and lists of verbs and nouns related to acting and Academy Awards can be found here. A useful online dictionary to help you work out any tricky phrases is the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Try to use some nice new vocabulary in a description of a film you have seen recently, or just one that you love...or hate for that matter.

You can find lots more on culture and the arts on the Front Row webpage, from where you can also download and subscribe to podcasts.

Ilaria's Fifty Words of Poetic Beauty

Look what happens when students actually DO their homework:

You lead me to such unexpected places that, to be honest, are not always so good. You make me meet a lot of people, even if I can’t often even talk with them. You bring me continuously from dark to eight. What life would it be without you, Underground?

Lovely.

Click this way for more...

IELTS

A collection of IELTS materials from previous courses can be found here. There are separate folders for the different sections of the exam, along with one for IELTS-related grammar and vocabulary topics.

1984 : Reading Writing Grammar Class

These are the first two sentences of George Orwell's novel 1984:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The next paragraph, without punctuation, is here. Try to add the missing punctuation.

The third paragraph, this time without grammar, is here. A nice simple grammar exercise with any text is to try to add the missing grammar (articles, prepositions, and verb forms).

You can check your work against the original text. The opening of the novel can be found here. If you're brave enough to read more, the entire novel can be found on this site. There are also audio files for you to listen to here.