Project Class 2

As promised, the powerpoint presentation from today's class is available to download here. You can also get the gapped text we completed in class here and a template for planning your project here.

Articles

If you need some help with articles, I've created a checklist / rule sheet for article usage, which is available here. You can also go here to read the original version of the Guardian piece on swine flu.

Bored of prepositions?

Just in case you lost it or didn't quite catch all of the answers, the full list of questions with prepositions we looked at in class is available to download here.

Participles in Action

This is the simple, boring text:

I woke up. I felt ill. I called the doctor. I visited the doctor. The doctor told me to open my mouth. I opened my mouth. The doctor told me to say “aah”. I said “aah”. The doctor said “oh!”. The doctor saw something green. The green thing was in my mouth. The green thing was alive. The doctor was frightened. The doctor called the police. The doctor shot me in the head.

...which became:

I woke up feeling ill. Having called the doctor to make an appointment, I visited him and he told me to open my mouth, which I did. The doctor told me to say “aah”. While I was saying “aah”, the doctor saw something green living in my mouth. Terrified, the doctor called the police. Having done so, the doctor shot me in the head.

I'm still not happy with that ending, but thanks to Abdullah for raising the question of how participles can help us in our writing.

The handout on participles that we used in class is available here (including answers). The powerpoint presentation from today's class on conditionals can also be downloaded here.

Dragons and Participles

The powerpoint file from today's class is here. You can also click here for the original article about Peter Jones and his business academy. Have a look through it and note uses of participle adjectives and participle clauses that you find.

I'm also in the process of posting and commenting on your summaries on the wiki, so please do visit and have a look.

CAL: Links for Today's Task

Some more links which you can use to help you in today's task, or just explore in your free time.

Academic Word List Links:

The AWL Highlighter and Gap-maker

Averil Coxhead's page

Academic Vocabulary Exercises

Article sources
The Essex University Libarary
Google Scholar
Magazines like The Economist and The New Scientist
Quality newspapers like The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, and The Telegraph

Other academic-related materials
Podcasts from the University of Nottingham
Key Skills

Modal Verbs of Obligation and Phrasal Verbs with Break

I've added a couple of exercises to the wiki. One is to review modal verbs of obligation, which we looked at in class on Monday, while the other is a new set of phrasal verbs, this time with BREAK. Have at them here, and please add your answers, comments, and questions to the wiki.

Writing Task : Potential Sources

You're free to choose your own articles, but in case you're short of imagination after all the tests you've done this week, here are some suggestions.

Compare two different reviews of the same film. You could take one from the Guardian (Film reviews from Film guardian.co.uk) and one from The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/ ) for example.

Using newspapers in the same way (since we might expect quite different outlooks from these two publications), you could compare the comments pages of The Guardian and The Telegraph (or any two newspapers really). On the topical issue of British MPs' living expenses, for instance, we have This mother of all expenses cock-ups is the stuff of banana republics by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, and What Parliament needs now is the spirit of Cromwell in the Telegraph.

Finally, if you want some more David Crystal, you could look at his article on textspeak, along with a debate between Will Self and Lynne Truss .

Writing : Combining Sources

Click here for the handout and and here for the powerpoint presentation from today's class, where you'll hopefully be able to see that my quotations WERE numbered correctly once upon a time. If want only the quotations, here they are:

1."A man is only as faithful as his opportunity." (Chris Rock)
2."Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences." (Isadora Duncan)
3."Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same." (Oscar Wilde)
4."I don't think it's the nature of any man to be monogamous. Men are propelled by genetically ordained impulses over which they have no control to distribute their seed." (Marlon Brando)
5."It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages." (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche)
6."The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one." (Joan Baez)
7."When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of all the other men of her acquaintance for the inattention of just one." (Helen Rowland)

More of Oscar Wilde's epigrams are on this site and if you fancy listening to something both interesting an challenging, why not have a look at (or should that be listen to) Stephen Fry's podcast on Wilde here.

Fact,Opinion, Argument

Beyond today's class handout on facts and opinion, there's plenty of material on this area of language use to explore. I found this online quiz that you might like to try, or you could just read pages like this - the comment and debate section of the Guardian.

GVD Class Wiki

I've posted the ABILITY exercise on a wiki so that you can submit and compare solutions online. We won't have enough time in classes to cover everything that we may need to, so the wiki gives you the option of looking at some extra material and working together on it in what I hope will be a useful and productive manner. I'll send you e-mails with invitations to join the wiki as a writer, so you'll be able to make any amendments you like. If you don't know what a wiki is or how it works, there's a video here that will explain it for you. If and when you're ready to start wiki-ing, click here for the GVD2 section of the wiki.

Online Learning Resources

Here are some online resources for you to explore. Let me know if you have any questions about how to use / access any of the sites, and tell me also if you have any particular requests regarding online resources.

Dictionaries
cambridge dictionaries online
longman online dictionary
macmillan online dictionary
oxford dictionary (and the less legal oxford collocations dictionary)

Corpora and Concordancers
collins concordance and collocations sampler
mark davies' british national corpus search
a huge but fairly anonymous concordancing site

Online Learning Resources

academic word list sites here, here, and here!

bbc online learning resourcesbritish council online learning resources
british council online learning resources
the english learning wiki

phonetics : an pronunciation resource

GVD Class : Homework Key

Here are the answers to Exercise 4 on page 44. Please leave a comment if you have any questions or disagreements:

1. I’ve had a headache since lunchtime.
2. The cost of living increased by 10% last year.
3. The television has gone wrong several times in the last month.
4. Cars replaced horse-drawn vehicles nearly a hundred years ago.
5. I haven’t passed my driving test yet.
6. I didn’t sleep very well last night.
7. You’re too late! The film began at least an hour ago.
8. He’s been a vegetarian for several years.
9. Did you have breakfast this morning?
10. He has become more sociable in the last few weeks.

Verbs of Reference

The powerpoint presentation from today's class is downloadable here. Don't forget to visit the wiki to compare your answers to the noun phrase homework task.

Incidentally, not sure if any of you are interested in etymology, but I looked up the phrase "buy the farm" on an online etymology dictionary and got this entry, which claims that it dates back to the second world war and has ironic associations with the idea of returning to a safe and prosperous life (which echoes Khaled's suggestion that "buy the farm" should mean the opposite of "die").

Finally, for lazy Mo's benefit, here's a link to my previous post on free access to online corpora.

More on Tense and Aspect

Consider the following pairs of sentences and answer the questions below each.

- Mark was married for nine years.
- Aziz has been married for nine years.

1. Who is still married? How do you know?

- Eman has met the Prime Minister.
- Hani has been meeting the Prime Minister.

2. Which of these two students seem more likely to be a political adviser? Why?

- Mohammed lost his keys.
- Bandar has lost his keys.

3. Who will find it difficult to get into his house? Why?

- Ran has read three books this month.
- Su has been reading three books.

4. Who is a more organised reader, Ran or Su? Why?

- Nada has painted her house.
- Azhar has been painting her house.

5. Whose house probably looks better? Why?

- Majed has kissed Angelina Jolie.
- Ahmed has been kissing Angelina Jolie.

6. Who do you think Angelina prefers? Why?

- Khalaf has broken his toe.
- Abdullah has been breaking his toes.

7. What type of hospital should each man go to and why?

Please leave a comment with any observations, questions, or concerns you may have.

GVD: Phrasal Verbs with Put

Here is the class handout on PHRASAL VERBS WITH PUT. Please leave a comment if you have any observations or question.

Writing Group 4 : Online Practice

I've put yesterday's homework on a wiki so that you can submit and compare solutions online. We won't have enough time in classes to cover everything that we may need to, so the wiki gives you the option of looking at some extra material and working together on it in what I hope will be a useful and productive manner. I'll send you e-mails with invitations to join the wiki as a writer, so you'll be able to make any amendments you like. If you don't know what a wiki is or how it works, there's a video here that will explain it for you. If and when you're ready to start wiki-ing, click here for the homework task on working with noun phrases.

Resources for GVD Group 2

The word file that we edited in today's class is available for you to download here. We started off with the problems in this document, so if you compare the two, you'll see all the changes we made.

To check and review your vocabulary notes, you might find this online version of the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary useful. Also useful, but perhaps not particularly legal is this site featuring entries from the Oxford Collocations Dictionary.

GVD : Past Continuous Homework Key

Here are my answers to the exercises on pages 34 to 35 of your book. Leave a comment if there's anything you disagree with or want to ask about:

Exercise 1

a) While I was working hard my lucky sister was enjoying herself on the beach.
b) I couldn’t answer the phone when it rang because I was having a bath.
c) When Jane’s husband left her she sold all of his records and spent the money on a holiday in the Caribbean.
d) I didn’t hear a thing because I was watching television when the burglar broke into my house. e) The bus was late as usual so when I got to work everyone else was already working.
f) Before cars were invented people had smaller carbon footprints.
g) Just as I was parking my car another driver stole the space.
h) When I finally passed my driving test I was wearing a mini-skirt. or…When I finally passed my driving test I hugged the examiner.
i) Look at the rain! It’s hard to believe that this time last week we were sunbathing in the garden.
j) While David was waiting outside one cinema, his girlfriend was awaiting outside another.

Exercise 2

One of the most embarrassing incidents in my early career as a doctor happened when I was working in the Accident Department of a large city hospital. I usually cycled to work when the weather was fine as I was trying to lose weight. That particular morning it was just beginning to rain as I left the house but I thought I could reach the hospital before the rain got too heavy. I cycled down the hill, turned in to the main road and was heading for the city centre when the bus in front of me began to slow down. As I moved out to overtake it, there was a loud bang and everything went black. When I came round, I was lying on the pavement and a crowd of people were standing around me. Then I heard an ambulance in the distance and my heart sank. Five minutes later I arrived at the hospital and was carried in the Accident Department on a stretcher.

GVD Homework Key : Comparatives & Superlatives

Here are the answers to exercise 4 on page 25 of your books:

a) In your opinion, what is the most stressful aspect of being a doctor?
b) Who is more useful to society, a policeman or a social worker?
c) I think women drive more carefully than men.
d) Please talk a bit more quietly. You’re disturbing everyone.
e) He feels much fitter since he stopped smoking.
f) There’s nothing more annoying that losing one’s door key.
g) Michael prefers to be alone. He is the least sociable person in the office.
h) He did not do very well, but at least he tried harder than last time.
i) That really is the worst food I’ve ever eaten!
j) I bought her the most expensive present I could afford.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions or alternative suggestions.

Writing Workshop

The edited version of the handout we worked on in class today is available here, with some comments from me in the section on "opinion". Feel free to post any questions you have about any of the changes we made.

E-mail writing task

I will give you another student's e-mail address. Write to them and ask politely if you can borrow their notes from a class you normally attend, but which you missed this week. (You can decide the details of what you need from them). When you send the e-mail, cc it to me - mhollow@essex.ac.uk

More instructions will follow...