Tense, Aspect, and Romance

Here's the tense & aspect grid we looked at in class, along with the mini-saga handout. For extra practice, try add the grammar to the following stories and post your solutions as a comment below:

Sergeant Boxwell know he catch burglar at last. “You no have say anything at all” he tell him, “but your bootprints find scene eleven burglaries”. Then triumphantly, “you got anything say?” “Only this”, reply suspect. “Yesterday, I steal those boots”.

School he be no good maths, but outstanding writing and reading. But who need arithmetic? He enter competition with enthusiasm, and produce brilliant, witty, profound, and paradoxical story. He inspire. It be absolute masterpiece. judges sigh. Another one with 51 words.

This one is tricky...

They ARGUE bitterly the night before. He COME IN from the garage with oil on his shoes. Fed up, desperate, she STAB him. Horrified at what she DO, she DRIVE away from the house along the cliff road. Suddenly she REALISE that the brakes NO WORK.

Class 4 Writing Task

Here's a link to the David Crystal article we looked at in class, along with the writing task itself. If you want to find out more about David Crystal and his work you can visit his website here. From his blog it looks like it's perfectly possible to e-mail him, so why not try making friends with him. After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know...

More Relative Clauses

The powerpoint presentation from today's class is here, but I'd also like some answers to the following questions:

• What's the name of the student who does not like dogs?
• What's the name of the student who has good ethics?What's the name of the student who is honest, shy, and wear a black scarf?
• What's the name of the student who is a super football fan?
• What's the name of the student who has taken IELTS more than twenty times?
• What's the name of the student who always comes to class late?
• What's the name of the student who has got a nice bag?

Folktales

We'll look at these in more depth in class when we analyse YOUR writing, but here are a few links to versions of the stories you wrote in class. First we have the intriguingly-titled Billy Goat's Gruff, a variation of which Khalid told Mo. The Fox and the Crow can be found in Aesop's Fables, which you can find free and in full online. The day's most popular story was The Boy Who Cried Wolf, although Sondos' version had a sheep doing the crying. Finally, there's a nice version of The Three Little Pigs here, with lovely pictures. I don't know the story of the farmer and the widow with her box of money, so I'm looking forward to finding out how that one ends...

The class handout is available here.

Online TV and Radio Resources

While you're in the UK you can take advantage of quite a lot of free online content provided by the major terrestrial channels in this country. The BBC iPlayer site has TV and radio shows that can be streamed or downloaded (with a fast enough internet connection). You'll need to download some simple software to download programmes, but it's easy to do and instructions are on the site. 4OD is Channel 4's TV and film on-deman website, and contains a range of programmes and movies, some of which you have to pay for. Most Channel 4 programmes from the past week are available for free, though, and so too are previous episodes of these shows (something the BBC don't offer). Unfortunately (or fortunately for me maybe), I don't watch much on ITV, so I've never used the imaginatively named ITV Player, but it appears to work in much the same way as the other major channels' websites. Just don't try to talk to me about Britain's Got Talent. Finally, if you're after some more academic audio to listen to, you can read a post I wrote last summer here...when I get the time I'll have a look for more of this kind of thing. Happy viewing...

Monday's GVD Class Materials

You can visit some online collocations resources via the links in this old post. E-mail me for a link to the secret site someone mentioned in class. You can also download the powerpoint files from today's class here for collocations work and here for the stuff on relative clauses.

GVD Class : Collocations Exercise

In class you generated lots of phrases, some of which were great and some of which were not so great. REPAIR A COMPUTER, for example, is a good collocation, wheras EAT A TABLE is not. We can say RIDE A BICYCLE and DRIVE A CAR, but not RIDE A CAR or DRIVE A BICYCLE. I've been experimenting with some software to produce online tasks for you to do as homework, and I've created a simple quiz for you based on the phrases you produced. All you have to do is decide whether each of the twenty phrases are acceptable or not. At the moment my skills are quite limited, so the quiz is ugly and perhaps unexciting, but I will try hard to improve and create more attractive online tasks in the future.

To access the quiz, click here, or e-mail me if you really don't understand!

After you have discovered which phrases do not collocation, try to provide a correct alternative and post it as a comment on this website. Good luck!

One last thing...if you'd like to take a look at the powerpoint version of our lesson on future forms and e-mails, you can download it here.

Writing Class Materials

Short and sweet...the powerpoint file from today's lesson is available here.

George Lucas, Semicolons, and Collocations

Just in case you're interested, you can download the powerpoint presentation from today's class here andlearn more about George Lucas here.

If you'dlike some links to other language items that arose today, there's a nice page on the use of semicolons here on the University of Sussex website. I'd also like to draw your attention to some of my previous posts on collocations. I recommend the Oxford Collocations Dictionary to everyone involved in learning or teaching English. If you buy one, you can look up words like heresy, astronomer, astrology, admire, slavery, poverty, and prosperity, all of which were mentioned in class at some point today.

Present Tense Review

Here are the powerpoint presentations from today's class. The first is comparison of the simple and continuous aspect, and the second focuses on differences between state and dynamic verbs.

The BBC World Service website has an explanation of the difference between state and dynamic verbs here, which you can also download as an mp3. Eclectic English also features some online practice activities here.

Introducing Myself or Minding the Gap

In class we looked at this de-grammared text about me, which we then reconstructed and compared with my original text (which can find here). The idea is to find differences between your language and mine and establishing the gap between where you are now and where you want to be. By exploring these differences, we aim to close the gap. Or at least narrow it a little.

Pre-Sessional Course at the University of Essex

Hello and welcome to my new students at the International Academy in Essex. I'll be using this blog to post lesson materials, supplementary activities, and links to relevant texts and online resources. Please post any comments or questions that you may have, and if you want to do some extra writing practice, why not start your own blog. Blogger.com allows you to set up and maintain a blog for free, and it's very easy to use.

School Report : The University of Essex

Read the article in full here.