Textbook and other reading materials

The texts we have used in this week's GVD class are all available in full at The Economist website via the following links:

- Maddison counting
- The Best Books about Language
- Business software: Office Politics


Meanwhile, can you look at this extract from the textbook Passages and give me your opinions on it. Would you like to use this kind of material in class?

Monday Morning Matters

In class this morning we tried to create complex sentences, and for some reason started with the topic of Khaled buying a farm. The following three variations were eventually arrived at:

• - Khaled bought 3 acres of land to build a new house.
• - Khaled bought an £800,000 farmhouse with 3 acres of land.
• - Khaled bought a house costing / which cost / £800,000 on 3 acres of farmland.

You can suggest answers for the rest of this exercise here on the GVD Group 2 Wiki

On the way to completing these sentences, we looked at following issues:

When used as a countable noun, "land" means "country". Apparently, Britain is the land of hope and glory (click here for the song that proves it and then read the comments underneath the video that reflect the sad reality), The USA is the land of opportunity, and Saudi Arabia is the land of many things that couldn't be specified in class.

We use the pattern QUANTITY + OF + NOUN, to create the following expressions:

- 2 packets of cigarettes 500g of flour
- 2 litres of milk
- 3 acres of land

BUY FOR and BUY WITH are both possible, but with different meanings:

- I bought a necklace for my mother.
- I bought a necklace for £10.

- I bought a computer with my sister.
- I bought a computer with my credit card. / I paid for it by credit card.
- I put it on my credit card / I bought it / paid for it on credit.
- I bought a computer with Windows 7

We then shared all sorts of personal information through complex sentences, and Mohammad became very romantic. After spending some time discussing and correcting the sentences that didn't quite express what we wanted them to, we had the following:

I came to England to study at one of the best English universities, but I ended up in Essex instead.

I will stay in England until the 5th of December 2011.
I will stay in England until I have completed my studies / until finishing my studies.
I’m never happy until I meet you. / until 4pm on Fridays.

If I can’t sleep at night I will watch TV.
When I can’t sleep at night, I (might) sometimes watch TV.
If I were you / I would watch TV.
If I can’t sleep at night, I read any book which makes me fall asleep.

I like Colchester more than George Bush does. (does = like Colchester)
I like Colchester more than Southend, but I hate Southend.
(inf. that isn’t saying much)
The only “thing” I like less than Colchester is George Bush.
I like Colchester more than I like George Bush.

I like Colchester more than I dislike it.

It’s a mystery why Nick Clegg agreed to co-operate with / join David Cameron in governing the UK. (an aside to this was the use of SHARE, and we found that you can "Share power with David Cameron", "Share the cost with a friend" and "Share your toys with your sister! ")

Being much younger than my sisters, I had a difficult childhood.
I lived in Leeds from 1993 to 1996 and, being a student, I did not make any friends with the locals.
Being British, I have to pay lots of tax.
Being Libyan, Fadia has to correct her teachers’ spelling and put up with questions like “what do you do in Saudi Arabia”.

Being a student, I have to study hard.
Being an international student, I will do my best.
I will do the best (that) I can.
I will do everything to the best of my abilities.

1.Being a student, I am fed up with having to live with lazy and noisy British undergraduates. (participle clause)
2.I am fed up with being a student. (noun phrase / object) - this is no different to saying, for example, I am fed up with Colchester / Mark / my house.

Being a student, I can take advantage of my student card.

Want to know more about these advantages? Click here...

Reading materials

This week we have looked at extracts three texts, each related in some way to at least one of the subjects GVD Group 2 students will be studying in October. If you would like to read these texts in full, they are available from the following links:

- A Good African tale

- Sustaining computer-mediated communication in university courses

- How English erased its roots to become the global tongue of the 21st century

Happy reading...

Compound Adjectives and Noun Phrases

I suspect that this might only be of interest to one person, but here's a pdf of the ppt slides we looked at today in relation to compound adjective formation. This is also a nice opportunity to copy and paste what we've produced at the beginning of our last two GVD classes.

On Wednesday, GVD group 2 students described themselves as:

• Hard-working students
• Genius students
• Pre-sessional students
• Excellent students
• Lazy students

and tnen:

• a mixture of lazy and hard-working students
• a group of students
• a student group

A sign (I think) of progess, is that this morning we were able to produce this borderline-ridiculous and potentially untrue statement:

This is a wonderful group of extremely beautiful, young, reasonably child-like, successful, intelligent, hard-working Arabic-speaking students who come to university late almost every morning.

We also learnt that Mohammed is a trainee Olympic weight-lifter, but that's another story.

Political Graphology or an Invasion of Privacy?

This morning I mentioned these photographs and notes from the Guardian's website. If like me you've ever felt ashamed at your own handwriting, you might feel better after seeing Nick Clegg's.

Lobby, A Lobby, or The Lobby?

Just a quick post to give you a link to the Economist article on Smoking in Indonesia. Let me know if you find anything surprising about the writer's use of articles. If you're interested, you can also read about the English teacher who got into trouble in Sudan for blasphemy.

GVD Group 2 Self-Study Project

I have set up this wiki so that you can continue to do self-study grammar and vocabulary development in your own subjects and at your own pace. The aim is that we can collaborate on this project and I can give you advice and corrections without taking up any extra time in class. We can of course still look at some of the issues that arise in class. Just let me know what your concerns are, and try to participate as actively as you can.

You'll need to register with pbworks in order to contribute to the wiki, but it's pretty easy to do. Please let me know if you have any questions about how to use the wiki.

If you're wondering what exactly a wiki is, this video from youtube puts it in plain English:



You can access my wiki here.

Collocations

In class this morning we did a little exercise to generate collocations, which we could then analyse and correct. In each case we started with nouns and then tried to add verbs and adjectives. Firstly we came up with the adjectives MAJOR, BASIC, IMPORTANT, CRUCIAL, VITAL, ESSENTIAL, and INFLUENTIAL to collocate with the noun FACTOR (MAJOR, CRUCIAL, and VITAL are all listed in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary). ADDRESS was suggested as verb, but more common collocations are CONSIDER and TAKE INTO ACCOUNT. We came up with some great verbs to collocate with PROBLEM - HAVE, SOLVE, ENCOUNTER, DEAL WITH, and even STUMBLE UPON, but our adjectives (striking, difficult, and sensitive) weren't so good...upon further consideration we decided that SERIOUS was more appropriate. Then Abdullah started talking about FORTY WINKS so we had to move on...

Some nice collocations we produced at speed were:

- CARRY OUT GROUND-BREAKING RESEARCH

- PROTECT AND ENDANGERED ENVIRONMENT

- AN EASY TARGET

- COMMISSION RESEARCH

...but we didn't like these:

- have a public experiment

- study a prolonged study

- invent precise assessment

Do you have any better suggestions?

Universal Grammar Exercise

On Friday morning we did some grammar exercises using this Guardian article on the University of Essex which we had also looked at on Thursday. First I distributed a "de-grammared" version of the text for everyone to amend:

Essex be 1960s university, but it remain small than many its contemporaries, with just over 9,000 students (6,840 undergraduates). They have plenty space roam around university's three campuses – Colchester, Loughton and Southend – with 200 acres of landscaped grounds oldest and largest campus outskirts Colchester. student union invest more than £3m campus past five years and recent open nightclub, follow £1.25m redevelop. £25m Southend campus open spring 2008. £250m capital invest plan involve 30 different projects be current under way. Highlights include £25m student centre Colchester campus and new student accommodate, and studio and perform facilities East 15 act school base Southend campus. Essex boast consistent strong academic perform and rank nine UK quality its research 2008 research assess exercise.

As a class, we then produced the following "re-grammared" version of the text. The two colourful sentences are illustrations of sentence structure, and the horrible greeny-brown coloured words are what we got wrong:

Essex is a 1960s university, but it has remained smaller than many of its contemporaries, with just over 9,000 students (6,840 undergraduates). They have plenty of space to roam around IN the university's three campuses – Colchester, Loughton and Southend – with 200 acres of landscaped grounds in the oldest and largest campus (situated) in the outskirts of Colchester. The student union has invested more than £3m on THE campus over the past five years and recently opened a nightclub, following a £1.25m redevelopment. The £25m Southend campus WAS opened in spring 2008. A £250m capital investment plan involving 30 different projects is currently under way. Highlights include A £25m student centre FOR THE Colchester campus and new student accommodation, and studio and performance facilities at (FOR THE) East 15 acting school based at THE Southend campus. Essex boasts (a) consistently strong academic performance and was ranked ninth in the UK for the quality of its research in THE 2008 research assessment exercise.

In our discussions, we also looked at some particular language points.

1. Patterns with "for"

Khaled was praised for his excellent knowledge of English grammar.

Mohammad received an award for bravery.

2. Followed by vs following

Maha came to class at 10.55, following a coffee break. (1st coffee break, 2nd Maha came to class)

Tjhey opened a nightclub following development.

Maha came to class at 10.55, followed by Muhammed. (1st Maha came to class, 2nd Muhammed did)

They opened a nightclub followed by development.

3. Lists, commas, and the use of and

We can buy many different flavours of crisps. Popular flavours include ready salted, beef,roast chicken,prawn cocktail, salt and vinegar, and cheese and onion

4. Different meanings of BASED

LOCATION

The British government is based in Westminster in London.

INSPIRATION

Baz Luhrman’s 1997 film Romeo and Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name.

Online Resources

As requested, here are links to the three websites we looked at in class on Thursday morning. The first is the slightly silly Google Fight, but you might find the Collins Concordance Sampler and Oxford Collocations Dictionary useful.

There are a growing number of Academic World List-related pages online, and I'm sure you're all capable of exploring them for yourselves. I particularly like the AWL highlighter, as I think it is always best to deal with vocabulary in context, so you can read a text first, and then focus on content that can be found in the AWL. The AWL gapmaker on the same site is a nice tool for testing and revising what you have learned.

For articles to use as starting points for self-study, I recommend The Guardian and Times websites. The Economist is also good (and not just for economists), while the more scientific among you might find The New Scientist useful. Happy reading...

Bigots, Brown, and Books

A few follow-ups to this afternoon's Graduate Diploma session. You may be interested to read more about Gordon Brown's gaffe, which Chimuco reported at the start of class. For those of you interested in ELT textbooks, you can find more details via OUP and Cambridge websites, as well as these specific pages for Cutting Edge (which is supposed to be a task-based learning textbook) and Inside Out, both of which are popular coursebooks for adults.

Animals & Us : BBC Documentary

The BBC Documentary that we listened to in preparation for next week's test is available here. You can also visit the website of Victor Schonfeld's film The Animals, the trailer for which is below:

Making Connections

The powerpoint presentation from today's class is available here.

You may also be interested in this collection of online activities based around vocabulary in the Academic Word List. They should keep you busy for a few minutes at least...

Providing examples

In the graduate diploma reading & writing class yesterday we looked at ways of incorporating examples in sentences and paragraphs. We noticed that patterns of use vary according to the expression employed and the length / structure of the example:

• Some students, for example Chao, did not come to class today.

• Some students did not come to class today, for example Chao.

• Some students did not come to class today. Chao, for example, is not here. Actually we have not seen him since last decade.

• Some European countries have benefitted greatly from joining the European Union. A case in point is Portugal, which was considered a developing country less than thirty years ago.

• Some European countries have benefitted greatly from joining the European Union. A good example is Portugal, which was considered a developing country less than thirty years ago

(apologies to Portugal if that's unfair or untrue...probably both...)

Here are the sentences we created in completing an exercise from Stephen Bailey's, Academic Writing : A Handbook for International Students:

1. A number of sports, for example football, have become very profitable due to the sale of television rights.

2. Certain twentieth-century inventions affect the lives of most people. For example, in the past, Arabic people were unable to communicate quickly with Chinese people. However, since the invention of computers and the Internet, Yasir and Maggie can send each other e-mails in a matter of seconds.

3. In recent years, many women have made significant contributions to the political world. For example Angela Mirkin became the German chancellor.

4. Three-year guarantees are now being offered by most car makers, such Toyota.

5. Certain diseases are proving much harder to combat than was expected 20 years ago. A case in point is influenza, which has actually become stronger because each year more strands of viruses develop.

6. Many musical instruments use strings to make music. For example, the guitar has two kinds of strings - thick ones and thin ones.

7. Several mammals are currently in danger of extinction. Pandas, for instance, need to be protected if they areto survive the next century.

8. Some students in this class are very intelligent. A good example is Lucy, who can always get the correct answer quickly.

9. The behaviour of some students in this class is quite predictable. For instance, Maggie and Lucy will chat with others or fall asleep when the class is boring.

10. Several members of the group, like Abdulaziz and Omar, have families in the UK.

Finally, we looked again at the difference a comma makes:

Kostas likes girls who cook for him. (he only likes the ones that cook for him)

Lucy likes men, who are better than women. (Lucy likes all men, and all men are better than woman

Youtube Tutorials

I've been asked about how to to perform certain formatting tasks in MS Word, like indenting text for long quotations. Youtube has lots of tutorial videos and it doesn't take much searching to find what you want, but you can click here for an example of a simple overview of paragraph formatting to start with.

Ode to Billie Joe

You can follow the lyrics to this song by clicking here.

Class Notes : Will, Would, Can, Could

WILL

WILL is used for future predictions, but it is also about willingness:
- Will you help me? (not a particularly polite way to ask for help)
- I’ll help you. (it’s always polite to offer!)
- I’ll get the phone.
- I’ll lend you the money.

WILL is a modal verb, and therefore reflects the writer / speaker’s point of view at the moment of writing / speaking. When we refer to the future without prior thought or planning, it’s very natural to use WILL:
- Are you going to the party?
- Yes
- Oh good…I’ll go too.

WOULD

If we think of WILL being a present tense, we can see that its meaning is REAL / POSSIBLE. If we think of WOULD as the past tense of WILL, it makes sense that its meaning is UNREAL / HYPOTHETICAL:
REAL: If Yasir brings a knife to the next class, Omar will feel scared.
UNREAL : If Yasir attacked Omar with a knife in class, Mark would encourage him.

Other UNREAL uses:
- I would never eat dog.
- If I were you I’d get my hair cut.
- If I was a woman I’d be happier.

WOULD is also used to report WILL in the past:

1900: “no man will ever walk on the moon”.

In 1900, it was believed that no man would ever walk on the moon.
In 1900, the idea that a man would one day walk on the moon was unfathomable.

CAN and COULD

CAN has several functions. It could refer to ABILITY (I can speak French), PERMISSION (Can I go to the toilet?), and a GENERAL prediction (English can be difficult at times).
COULD also more than one possible use. It can refer to LIKELIHOOD (Some people think that England could win the World Cup this summer), GENERAL ABILITY IN THE PAST (I could swim quite well when I was younger)
This is a potential barrier to clear communication. If we say “Maggie could get married”, are we talking about the past or the future? We can adjust our language to make meaning clearer:
SPECIFIC ABILITY IN THE PAST: Maggie was able to get married three years ago because she found a man who had lost his glasses.
FUTURE PREDICTION: Maggie could get married to a rich Saudi prince in the future if she is lucky.
“Maggie can get married” either refers to her ability – or rather eligibility – or the fact that she has permission to marry.

Class Notes : Verbs of Reference Revision

We can divide verbs of reference into two categories:

1.Verbs that can be used to introduce a quotation:
Note that these verbs can be followed by direct speech in quotation marks, or THAT followed by a subject and a verb.
Informal: Yasir says “Omar should suffer!”.
Yasir says that it is advisable to harm Omar.
Formal: Mark agrees (with Yasir) that corporal punishment is the only approach Omar will understand.
Examples of this type of verb:
- state, argue, (mention, note), claim, think, believe, write
- point out / indicate
- agree / concur (with someone)

An alternative to these verbs is ACCORDING TO:
e.g. According to Yasir, it is advisable to harm Omar.

2.Verbs that are followed by a noun phrase:
- describe e.g. Yasir describes ways to harm Omar. Firstly, he can be cut with a knife. Secondly, if no knife is present, it is possible to beat Omar with a stick or piece of wood. Yasir also discusses the possibility of injuring Omar with poison. However, he notes that none of these approaches will be successful unless we “first tie Omar up with rope”.
- explain e.g. Yasir explains the best way to harm Omar.
- refer to e.g. Yasir refers to scientific evidence that harming Omar is beneficial.

Note that these verbs are used to provide a summary or general overview of what has been stated. They therefore introduce a topic and tend to be followed by further explanation or exemplification.

Question: How can we use REFER in the passive voice?
- Scientific evidence that harming Omar is beneficial is referred to.
- Yasir’s argument has been referred to several times in this class.

They'll never take away our freedom to make references to Braveheart in class

Two files from today's class: the ppt file and related handout. Can you remember the missing words from these five statements? (answers are in the ppt)

1. In the film Braveheart (1995), the English are __________ as cruel, unscrupulous and cowardly.
2. __________The Bible, the first woman was made from one of the ribs of Adam, the first man.
3. The BBC web page, Bloom, __________organic agriculture as “a system of farming based on principles of human, animal and environmental health”.
4. In an article on the state of American politics __________ “What's gone wrong in Washington?”, published in The Economist on the 18th of February, Barack Obama __________ for present problems. The __________ __________ that “the basic system works” and that the current president has been incorrectly “let off the hook”.
5. The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, __________ that “all men are created equal”, although slavery was not abolished until 1865.

To plagiarise or not to plagiarise

I know I've used this Shakespearian construction far too many times this week, but it's hard to make this topic any more interesting than it is. The online quiz on plagiarism created by the University of East Anglia is just a click away here, while you may be interested in reading more / all of the articles I distributed in class:

Ian Jack writing on his experiences at the third International Plagiarism Conference.
A recent story about the Australian group Men At Work
A very short Guardian piece about anti-plagiarism software
A news story about Raj Persaud - next to it you'll find links to other articles about his case

Later I'll upload links to today's ppt and handout, as well as anything else that comes up...

Hamlet in 2 minutes 28 seconds

Notes from Southend

Despite salvaging the missing word file late in the day, I still managed to lose half of the notes from today's class in Southend. After our discussion of gambling and the difference between either electronic or casino-based roulette and Russian roulette (click here for an audiovisual example from The Deer Hunter) we looked at the use of language in this Guardian article about a couple who have just won £56million on the lottery. Issues that came up were white vans, the verb "reveal" and the differences between "job" and "jobs", and "quit" and "hand in your notice". We also spoke about culture of understatement and irony that seems prevalent in Britain...something that you might be able to spot in this clip from the film Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail.

2b or not 2b etc

A few of the things that we looked at today:

- text message poetry

- David Crystal's Guardian article and the related class handout

- today's powerpoint presentation

- a handout on facts and opinions

Resources for Business Studies Students

My student Muhammad and I found this very useful online resource for business studies vocabulary - The Finanical Times Lexicon. He's going to use it to make personalised glossaries for his notes, which I think will be useful We also looked at a pitch from Dragon's Den on Youtube. Plenty more are available, but this is a nice ten-minute example of what you find in the programme.

Monday Materials

Here is the ppt from today's class, and here is the handout which features some nice soundbites on marriage.

Reading...

I thought I'd try to put together some links for some materials that might be helpful to read in preparation for graduate diploma compare and contrast essays...I will update this post with more as and when I find them:

COMMUNICATION & TECHNOLOGY

Three articles about communicating by text: one piece arguing against the use of text speak, one defending it, and one article that combines two different writers' perspectives on the topic.

The Economy of the Premier League

I'm sure there's lots of material out there, but perhaps looking at some documents and opinions on the recent Manchester United bond issue might be an intersting option. It's summarised here and discussed here and this perspective also has a link to the official prospectus as a pdf.

Funding Education

A key section of a national report is here as is this article voicing mixed opinions, this piece from the Guardian arguing that students should pay, and this very recent article from The Economist. I'm sure you can find much more on the subject.

Global Warming

Yesterday The Observer published this debate about global warming, which could be a useful hub from which to explore the subject.

Graphs and Diagrams

In class we looked at a selection of graphs, tables, and charts from The Economist's online Daily Charts (click here to browse the archives). There's a slideshow of the data we looked at below, and a writing template is available here along with ppt files from Wednesday and Thursday's Graduate Diploma classes. Handouts on data commentary (adapted from Swales and Feak's Academic Writing for Graduate Students) and Monday's homeowork are also available if you click in the right place.

Shaun of the Dead

Two introductions to Shaun of the Dead...the official trailer:



...and if you click here, an attempt to splice scenes together in order to tell the whole story in five minutes.

Which vs That

OK. What's the difference between WHICH and THAT?...let's take a deep breath and then begin...

Perhaps the first step should be to look at DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSES. In Cassell's Students' English Grammar, Jake Allsop defines relative clauses as being "like adjectives in that they give information about a noun or a pronoun". However, unlike most adjectives, relative clauses FOLLOW the noun (e.g. the woman that I love, the book that I read).

There are two types of relative clause - DEFINING and NON-DEFINING. Suppose I was to say "I hate the student". Would you know which student I was referring to? I think not, because I have lots of different students. If I DEFINE which student I mean, you will understand more clearly. So, how about "I hate the student WHO ASKS ME QUESTIONS ABOUT GRAMMAR AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS, BEFORE HE HAS EVEN SAID HELLO TO ME". With this extra information, you can understand that "the student" is Yasir. The clause "WHO ASKS ME QUESTIONS ABOUT GRAMMAR AT THE BEGINNING OF CLASS, BEFORE HE HAS EVEN SAID HELLO TO ME" provides a definition of "the student". OK? Hmm....perhaps I should have chosen a shorter and more simple example. How about "I never eat food". It's not true, is it? So we add "I never eat food WHICH HAS BEEN REHEATED IN A MICROWAVE". The extra information defines the type of food to which I am referring (it's very hard to define defining relative clauses without using defining relative clauses. I love grammar).

The examples I have given so far contain examples of WHO and WHICH, but not THAT. So here's the first key difference between WHICH and THAT:

WHO refers to people (like THE STUDENT WHO ASKS ME GRAMMAR QUESTIONS). WHICH refers to things (like FOOD WHICH HAS BEEN REHEATED IN A MICROWAVE). THAT, however, can refer to both. So we can say THE STUDENT THAT ASKS ME GRAMMAR QUESTIONS and THE FOOD THAT HAS BEEN REHEATED IN A MICROWAVE. Easy. Lovely. Perfect...WHICH = THINGS, while THAT = THINGS or PEOPLE...simple...

If only life were always that simple...actually there are some relative clauses in which it is NOTpossible to use THAT. These are NON-DEFINING RELATIVE CLAUSES, which just give extra information. That last sentence is an example of one, but here are two more:

- I hate Yasir, who comes from Saudi Arabia.

- I read War and Peace, which many people find difficult boring, in less than a week.

In these two sentences, I expect my reader to know who / what I am referring to when I write YASIR or WAR AND PEACE. My reader doesn't need a DEFINITION of these nouns, but I want to provide some extra information, so I provide it through a relative clause. Notice, however, that these relative clauses are surrounded by commas. The comma shows that the clause is separate and, if you like, not ESSENTIAL for understanding my main point. In cases like this, it is NOT POSSIBLE to use THAT. So we can't say "I read War and Peace, that many people find difficult..." or ""I hate Yasir, that comes from...". No no no...

So here is a second key point about WHICH and THAT. Don't use THAT after a comma. This is useful to know, because sometimes WHICH is used to continue a sentence and give extra information about a whole clause or statement. THAT is not used for this person. For example:

- I missed my bus, which is why I was late for class.

- I ate too much cheese last night, which is why I had nightmares.

Remember that THAT does not follow a comma, so if we wanted to use it in these examples, we would have to start a new sentence:

- I missed my bus. That is why I was late for class.

- I ate too much cheese last night. That is why I had nightmares.

Of course, if we are developing an argument in academic writing, we are more likely to use THIS than THAT, because THIS makes the subject seem more immediate and relevant to our reader. This is why (can you see what I'm doing?) you will not find many sentences which begin with THAT in academic writing.

No doubt you are bored of reading this by now, but I should mention two further functions of THAT and WHICH that / which (ha ha) show how different they are.

WHICH is used for questions when, as Jake Allsop states "you wish to identify one or more things or people from a group of things or people". For example:

- Which do you prefer, coke or pepsi?

- Which Spice Girl would you most like to kill...sorry, I mean kiss?

- Which shirt shall I wear tonight?

In such questions, it would be impossible to replace WHICH with THAT. The same is true when we creat a noun phrase with WHICH, such as in the sentence "I can't decide which shirt to wear tonight" or "I don't care which Spice Girl you kill first". Yes, I meant "kill" that time...

Finally, THAT has functions which / that (ha ha again) cannot be performed by WHICH. One is DEMONSTRATIVE, like in the phrase "that time" (two sentences back - remember?), "I want that one!" or even "I don't want to kiss that Spice Girl".

THAT is also a conjuction (e.g."It's so funny that you want to kill the Spice Girls" and "I find it surprising that the Spice Girls are all still alive") and can be used to report speech and ideas - something that university students SHOULD find incredibly useful. Consider expressions like:

- I think that I love you.

- I believe that I love you.

- I know that I love you.

- Don't forget that I love you...

- Have you heard that the Spice Girls have broken up?

...and so on and so on. That's enough love for one evening. Notice, though, how THAT is used to introduce a statement or idea, and it allows us to use one subject and verb after another. I KNOW THAT THIS IS NOT EASY BUT TRY TO REMEMBER THAT I AM DOING THE BEST I CAN...

If you're really clever, you'll ask why I didn't write "the best THAT I can"...but that's a question for another day...

Monday Materials

Three files from this morning's class: the ppt file, a handout, and my feedback on last week's writing. Any questions will be welcomed with open arms...

Sentence Structure and Punctuation

I was asked last week about the following three sentences, taken from this article in the Guardian:

It could have been "coddies", "chengguan", "slumdog" or even "fundoo". "Jai Ho!" would have been fun. Even "noob" wouldn't have been that bad.

The question was why this needs to be three sentences it's all about the same thing. Why isn't it just one sentence like so.

It could have been "coddies", "chengguan", "slumdog" or even "fundoo", "Jai Ho!" would have been fun, even "noob" wouldn't have been that bad.

My answer, which probably wasn't clear enough, was that we need to start new sentences because we have new subjects and new verbs. By "subject" I'm referring to grammar, not content. So in these three sentences, the subjects are IT (the one millionth word in English), "JAI HO!" and "NOOB". The verb phrases for each subject are "COULD HAVE BEEN", "WOULD HAVE BEEN", and "WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN". Notice that each subject is different and each verb phrase is different (even though one is simply negative).

This, to me, is an important point when thinking about sentences and punctuation. If you have a new subject and / or a new verb, you need to either do something clever with grammar (to form a sentence that is no longer simple) or start a new sentence. This handout encourages you to think about this with regards to three paragraphs taken from an article written by a sociologist. I will talk you through the steps...

First, read the three paragraphs, and circle every verb you find. Then go back and find a subject for each of your verbs. Underline or draw a box around your subject. You can compare your ideas with the handout, on which I have marked verbs and subjects with circles and rectangles respectively. Now look at the relationship between all your subjects and verbs and punctuation. You should find that before each new subject and verb there is either a full-stop, or a grammatical construction used for creating complex sentences. If you find any exceptions to this, let me know...

By the way, it would of course be a good idea to look at your own writing like this sometimes. What do you find before each new subject / verb that you use? What SHOULD be there?

You can compare your ideas with mine...in the following text I have

Thursday's Graduate Diploma Class

Most of Thursday's class was taken up by a writing workshop so there's not a great deal in this powerpoint presentation. However, the last two slides do contain an exercise on graphs which everyone should complete before next Monday. In class I circulated this handout with which you can devote some time and thought to forming complex sentences. There are four tasks. Each gives you a main sentence alongside some extra details which you have to somehow combine to form a complex sentence. When you have formed your own complex constructions, you can check the original text to see how the author did it.

Colchester is almost as exciting as London...and other lies

The notes we made in today's class are available here, and you can fill the gaps in our language study handout by referring back to Monday's model compare & contrast essay. Easy.

Student Writing

It's frustrating being a teacher sometimes. It seems as if every day a student approaches me and asks me how they can improve their writing, how they can increase their vocabulary, or how they can read more effectively. I always give more or less the same advice. I tell them that there's no substitute for practice and that if they devote time and effort to improving, they'll be fine. I always offer to have a look at any extra writing they do in their free time. How much of this writing do I ever see? None. Ever. Seriously. If you could learn a language by telling your teaching that you're worried and have problems, I'd know at least five hundred students who speak and write English perfectly. Sadly I can only think of about five students who can now write as well as they want to be able to...

Last Monday I had an idea for a task which would ease my students back into their studies and review some vital skills that they have looked at before and which they will need to do well this term. There was a simple homework task - not too time-consuming but, in my opinion, very useful practice all the same. Only two students submitted their homework. These two:

Q&A with Konstantinos

Konstantinos was asked what his greatest fear is. He said that he had nothing to fear. Konstantinos was then asked what makes him unhappy, and answered that he doesn't feel good when he hasn't had enough sleep. Finally, Konstantinos was asked whether it is better to give or to receive, and he gave an immediate answer: 'both'.

Q&A with Maggie

I asked Magi some questions, the first of which was "what is your greatest fear?". She answered that her greatest fear is that her parents might divorce. The second question was which living person Maggie most admires, and why? She said that she admire hers colleague, because he is a noble person. The third question I asked was whether it is better to give or receive, to which Maggie responded that she prefers to give than to receive, because this makes her look like a generous person.

Monday Materials

A short and sweet entry today...my response to the grammar question asked by Vas, the model essay we looked at in class, today's ppt file, and a link to some more Japanese proverbs. Enjoy.

Thawb Thursday

The powerpoint file from Thursday afternoon's Graduate Diploma class is here for you to download, along with this word file, featuring class notes and the boards from our game of AWL Collocations Noughts and Crosses (which sounds much more glamorous than it is...)

If you're interested in loanwords like "thawb", you can find lots of them here on (sorry) Wikipedia...but don't be too quick to trust everything you read there!

Collocations

If you're still not quite sure what a collocation is, try this very short and sweet quiz on the BBC Learning English website.

Neologisms and Collocations

We looked at punctuation, sentence structure, and lexical sets in this article from the Guardian, and you can download today's ppt here. Notes that we made at the start of the class about JUST and GET are available on a word file here. As promised, the collocations we looked at from the Guardian article are listed below:

• a group of US wordsmiths in Texas
• a collective sigh of disappointment
• declared the idea preposterous.
• the next generation of
• internet applications,
• be formally crowned
• a universal means of communication.
• be able to communicate so easily

Q and A : My answers and how we reported them

I get embarrassed all the time, but perhaps one time when I was on the underground and gave up my seat to a woman who I thought was pregnant. She looked confused, and then I realised that she wasn’t pregnant – just a little overweight.

1. Mark was asked “what was your most embarrassing moment?”

2. Mark was asked about his most embarrasing moment.

3. Mark was asked what his most embarrassing moment was. He said he tried to be polite to a woman on the London underground by giving her his seat, thinking she was pregnant when in fact she was not.

I would prefer not to bring back anything that is extinct. I don’t want any dinosaurs in my street.

In answer to a question about something extinct that he would like to bring back to life, Mark said “ I don’t want any dinosaurs in my street”.

This is quite a boring answer, but I don’t want to meet any great or famous people. I would much prefer to invite my closest friends to a dinner party. I don’t see them as often as I would like to, so it would be great to have everyone around the same table with some good food, good conversation, and a lot of laughter.

When asked who he would invite to his dream dinner party, Mark chose his friends rather than anyone famous.

Monday's EAP class - from the board

These are the things that you identified as being important to know when you learn new vocabulary:

- meaning (plus synonyms & antonyms)

- part of speech (adjective, verb, noun etc)

- collocations

- pattern grammar

- register (e.g. formal or informal)

- spelling

- pronunciation

- usefulness

Especially for verbs, you might want to check:

- is it regular or irregular?

- is it transitive or intransitive?

If you can't find the information you need in your dictionary, it may be time to get a new dictionary...

Q&A: Steve Coogan

This week we'll be using some questions from the Q&A page of the Guardian Weekend Magazine. This week's edition features a question and answer session with a British comedian called Steve Coogan. You can read it here, or just watch the video below of Steve in action:

H is for Oss - The Black Country Alphabet

Useful newspaper article of the day...

...I'm not saying I'll do this every day, of course...that would be far too predictable (not to mention time-consuming) but today's Guardian has some useful advice on buying cheap train tickets in the UK:

Click here for Miles Brignall's article

Mind Your Language : Juice

I should apologise in advance for any borderline (or blatant) racism in this old British sitcom, but it may at least raise a few smiles...I'm not sure why this teacher doesn't correct the Italian student's pronunciation of "lemon juice".

The neglected writing blog...

Graduate Diploma students: there are still six days for one of you to do SOMETHING (anything) with the writing blog we set up. So far only two of you have responded to the invitation and nobody has written anything.

Don't be shy, go the the blog here and make a contribution...

Summary Writing Follow-Up Language Work

Notes from today's class are available here. You may also be interested in this model version of the task you attempted. Let me know what you think of it:

Graduate Diploma Class Notes

As requested and promised, I've uploaded the notes we made in class today. There are three separate word files:

-Notes on prepositions

-Notes on essay organisation

-My survey and model(ish) summary

Incidentally, I have no idea why Maggie thinks that English food is greasy...

Why this man is crying, and other Wednesday wonders

The PPT from today's class is here, and I've also uploaded the notes I made on love, implying and inferring, and the use of hyphens. To find out whether this Japanese man was crying or sneezing, you can read this story from the Guardian website.

Developing Listening Skills : Podcasts

There are lots of free resources available to anyone who wants to improve their listening skills, and below I have put together a list of links which could provide you with audio material and podcasts which you can access for free and practice listening to in your free time. You'll need some software to manage subscriptions to podcasts, and iTunes is an obvious choice, with its own searchable podcast directory.

To start with some slightly less academic material, it's worth visiting the audio/visual pages of the Economist website. The BBC website also has audio and video supplements to its news stories, which allow you to read text and then listen to an oral version of the same story (not the same words though). The BBC also provide a huge bank of podcasts on a range of topics. Navigate the menus on this page to find something relevant to your field. The Guardian has a similar wealth of audio material on mostly serious subjects here. Extra software is not necessary for audio provided by the Guardian.

For more academic listening materials, openculture is a useful hub of links to universities all around the world offering free audio resources. Universities with lectures available as podcasts include Bath and Ulster.

I think that should be more than enough to keep you going. Let me know if you need any suggestions as to activities to do while listening to these recordings.

Graduate Diploma Class Materials

In case you didn't finish copying answers down from the board (or is it just a wall) this morning, I've uploaded the PPT file from today's class here. Last Thursday's class PPT is now here too.

Language Issues and Self-Study Resorces

The Word document that we looked at and edited in class is available here, and you can follow the links below to use some of the online resources I showed you:

Cambridge Dictionaries Online

Collins Corpus Concordance and Collocations Sampler

Nottingham University's Academic Word List Tools

Two other books that I mentioned in class that you can look out for are Exploring Grammar in Context and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary.

Graduate Diploma Class Notes

Click here for a Word doccument containing the notes we made in today's class. I've also uploaded PPT files for today's session (GDRW7) and last Thursday's (GDRW6).

Graduate Diploma EAP Reading Project

If you're interested in reading some of the articles selected by your classmates, you can follow the links below:

- What do you look like on the web? - from the 360abc blog

- Making Its Bookmark from The Economist

- Himalayan sherpas bugged by the sight of house flies at 5,000m from The Guardian

- When Nina Went Awol and All That Jazz from The Guardian

If yours is not listed above, it's just because it's not available online. I will give you some comments on how you have completed the first self-study task, and from now on you can keep reading and using the worksheet to help you to practise writing and to record interesting vocabulary and grammar. If you would like to keep an online record of your reading, writing an English blog would be a good way to do so. It's easy to set up a blog with blogger (the website I use), and you can simply write summaries and comments on any text you choose to read. By adding links to your source texts, you'll be able to refer back to them with ease (and it will make life easier for me too).

Second Hand Books

This afternoon I was asked if there are any second-hand bookshops near here. I've never visited Greyfriars Books on East Hill, but I have walked past it several times and it's the only second-hand bookshop I'm aware of in the area. Click here for a map of how to find it. An alternative way to get second-hand books, apart from browsing the occasional stalls that pop up in Square 3, is to check departmental notice boards for student-posted adverts, or better still join the small ads mailing list. There are actually many mailing lists you can join at the university, so it's worth looking at the mailing list web page to see if there's anything that caters for your personal interests.

Needs Analysis and Reading

This website gives you assistance in establishing what your needs are in terms of knowledge and use of grammar. The list of exercises here will help you to understand what some of the terminology used refers to.

To find reading materials, I recommend The Guardian and Independent websites, as well as The Economist and Financial Times (for economics students in particular), and perhaps even the New Scientist.

Graduate Diploma Class Two

Here is the PPT file that we looked at in class after your timed reading. We will look at more resources for exploring these language areas over the next couple of weeks.

E-mail etiquette

For a more detailed exploration of e-mail etiquette, you can have a look at this powerpoint presentation on e-mail etiquette. You'll need to download and open it so let me know if you have any problems doing so.

After you've gone through the PPT, you can try the e-mail etiquette quiz online here. A page you should definitely read is the University's guidelines on e-mail use.

Graduate Diploma Reading and Writing Class 1

Hello and welcome to my Graduate Diploma students. It was good to meet you all properly in class today. I'm glad that almost everybody seems interested in food. Here are the answers to the questions you asked in class. Good luck with your homework:

1. BA in English Language and Literature. MA in English Studies (Literature, Culture, and Modernity). Trinity Certificate and Diploma in TESOL.
2. I’m not fussy, but I like nice hair and smiles.
3. One well and two quite badly (French and Italian).
4. West Bromwich Albion. It’s in my blood.
5. Enough to live on, but job satisfaction and quality of life are more important to me.
6. My official job title is "Lecturer in EAP".
7. Football is the only sport I care about.
8. I tried but failed. Now I can only remember seafood vocabulary like “ebi” and “hotate”.
9. I hope (I try not to expect) that you all become independent learners and end the course with the skills required to achieve your goals, academic or otherwise.
10. Just keep your eyes (and your mind) open.
11. Maybe Robert DeNiro or Pele.
12. First a girl and then a boy.
13. I love it.
14. World peace.

Leave a comment if you can't guess (or remember) what all the questions were...