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...

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.

Rudolph The Tuneless Reindeer

Sorry that it's taken me so long to upload these, but it's never too late to enjoy beautiful beautiful music...

Last Christmas

Jingle Bells, But Who Smells?

Egg Drop Drama

Egg-cellence

Egg Drop Losers

Egg Drop : Engineers in Action

Whatever

The brilliant "My United States of Whatever" by Liam Lynch - a song that Teppei's punk band should have covered:

Lost in the Desert

There’s this man,
and he’s travelling across the desert,
and
he suddenly finds he hasn’t got any water left.
So he’s starting to get worried,
and he’s very thirsty,
but luckily,
a man comes towards him on a camel.
So
he says to the man,
“I’m thirsty.
Have you got any water?”
and the other man says,
“No I haven’t,
but I’ve got a wonderful selection of ties.
Would you like to buy one?”
So the other man says,
“No, of course not!”
and the man rides away on his camel.
After about another hour or two,
he’s desperately thirsty
and he sees a beautiful 5-star hotel.
So he slowly goes up the steps, crying
“Water! Water!
And the hotel manager says,
“I’m sorry, sir,
you can’t come in here without a tie.”

How To Recycle A Goat

Give a widowed mother a goat.
The goat produces milk.
Her children don’t go hungry.
The goat produces manure.
The widow sells more crops.
The goat produces more goats.
The widow keeps a goat.
The widow gives a goat back.

Agreeing and Disagreeing

Some expressions from today's class...

Agreement:

- I couldn't agree more.

- You took the words right out of my mouth.

- My thoughts entirely.

- I know exactly what you mean.

Diplomatic disagreement:

- I see where you're coming from, but...

- I know what you mean, but...

Advent

Today, the 1st of December, is the first day of advent, which you can find out more about here. To me, it's only about advent calendars - a way of eating a different piece of chocolate per day for twenty four consecutive days. Why not?

I searched for online advent calendars and found a cute one for kids here and one with stupid games each day here. Enjoy.

Questions

The questions you answered in class today:

WHEN did you last feel frightened?

HOW MUCH money do you have on you now?HOW MANY hours did you sleep for last night?

HOW did you come to school today?

HOW did you feel on your first day at this university?

WHAT was the name of your first pet?

WHO is your hero?

WHY did you choose to wear those shoes today?

Limmericks

There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamt he was eating his shoe.
He awoke in a fright
In the middle of the night
And found it was perfectly true.

There once was a girl from Great Britain
Who carelessly sat on her kitten
Imagine her surprise
and the look in her eyes
when on the behind she was bitten.

There was a young man from Shizuoka
Who was famous for being a joker
He won lots of mates
And went on thousands of dates
But he lost all his money at poker.

There was a young woman from Gunma
With a wonderfully good sense of humour.
She told great jokes
To hundreds of blokes
And even told one to a puma.

A nice young man from Miyazaki
Thought that bright colours looked tacky
He dressed in grey sack
Or completely in black
And once every month he wore khaki.

There was a girl from Yokohama
Who once went to school in pyjamas
Her friends said "no way!"
So on the next day
She dressed up as Barack Obama.

A young girl from Yokohama
Was talented on the piana
She played it with great style
Cause her fingers were agile
Until her brother hit them with a hammer.

Freedom, Aye, Freedom

Countdown

Feeling bored?  Play the word game Countdown here and time will fly...

Norwegian Wood

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me...
She showed me her room, isn't it good, Norwegian wood?

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,
So I looked around and I noticed there wasn't a chair.

I sat on a rug,  biding my time, drinking her wine,

We talked until two and then she said, "It's time for bed"

She told me she worked in the morning and started to laugh.
I told her I didn't and crawled off to sleep in the bath

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn't it good, Norwegian wood.

Have you ever? Would you like to? Would you ever?

Today's conversation:

A: Have you ever eaten dog?

B: No! Why? Have you?

A: Actually no...but I'd be curious to try.  Would you ever eat dog?

B: Oh no...I don't think so.  I have a pet dog so I couldn't eat one.

A: What about if you were at a dinner party and it was served to y

ou?  Wouldn't you eat it just to be polite?

B: Hmmm...no...I'd have to just politely refuse.

A: Would you eat it for a hundred thousand Yen?

B: No way...I wouldn't eat it if you paid me a MILLION Yen.

A: Ahh...but what about if...

Questions from today's class:

Have you ever...

- had a fight?

- dreamt in English?

- met an Italian?

- performed in front of an audience?

- climbed Mount Fuji?

- been to Europe?

- worn a Spiderman costume?

- kissed a stranger?

- ridden a camel?

- done a bungee jump?

- cried in the cinema?

- been to Disneyland?

- eaten an insect?

Would you ever...

- steal money?

- hit a child?

- kill a kitten?

- cheat in an exam?

- go on strike?

- move to Hokkaido?

- get a tattoo?

- date a much older man or woman?

- eat dog food?

- lie to your boyfriend / girlfriend?

- beg?