Hannah from the Futurelearn contacted me recently to let me know about courses that the British Council have free IELTS preparation courses available. It says that there is a price on the page BUT it’s free if you only want access to the course for 5 weeks. You only pay if you want to see … [Read more…]
Today’s post is a response to an email from a reader, Viettan, who is worried about their English when presenting in public. They are in charge. Agendas First, have a meeting agenda, which is a list of things to talk about. Try to keep to this.
Something to practice /l/ and /r/ sounds.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
When you speak English, one of the things you must think about is relationships. Who are you talking to? How well do you know them? What is the situation? It is useful, especially in business situations, to be formal. In most native-English speaking cultures, business relationships start formal then become more informal as the relationship … [Read more…]
I went to a conference about teaching English a couple of weeks ago and saw a presentation by Paul Raine, the owner of a great website Apps4EFL.com. It’s a free website for students and teachers.
When you are giving a list of options for others to choose from or explaining options to people, try to sequence the options so you sound natural. An example of this could be transport options. You can get the train, the bus or walk to my house. This is OK but you can show that … [Read more…]
In today’s podcast I talk about how you can highlight your speech, in much the same way as you could by making written words bold, italicised or by highlighting text.
The other day I was teaching an upper-intermediate student who had difficulties presenting her ideas about a process. She said she finds writing much easier than speaking. “You should start an audio diary,” I suggested. “What do you mean?” she asked.
There are so many different standardised tests available to test your English skills: the Cambridge certificates, TOEIC, TOEFL, IELTS, BULATS and, here in Japan, the Eiken/STEP test. For a lot of people, these tests are pointless. If you need the certificate to get a job or a college place, go for it. If not, read … [Read more…]