Recently I have taught a lot of new students. The same as I usually do, I talked to them about their study habits. Their reactions have left me a bit confused.
Protected: Kawasaki Dentists: Lesson 3
Links: Apps 4 EFL
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.
Protected: Kawasaki Dentists: Lessons 1 and 2
Sequence Options to Sound Natural
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 while walking might not be popular it is possible.
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Catch Stressed Words to Improve Listening
If you have problems in understanding what people say in your listening, either in face-to-face conversations or when listening to recorded material, why not try using word stresses to help you.
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You Still Haven’t Updated the Blog Yet
The adverbs ‘still’ and ‘yet’ are similar in some cases but also very different. For Japanese learners of English they can translate to the same word, and this can cause difficulty. You’re still here? You haven’t given up yet? Read on.
Links: Sites for Extensive Reading
What is Extensive Reading? It’s the kind of reading you do where you choose the things you read, not your teacher, and you decide how quickly to move on.
Here are a collection of sites for Extensive Reading:
English for Activists
Sometimes you need to use English for a problem. A lot of the time the problems you need to deal with are small. Unfortunately, sometimes they are large problems.
When your problems are so large that you want to do something to solve them, you might need to use English. It is, for better or worse, the main international language. It is the language that most multinational companies and organisations use.
Why be an activist?
Maybe a company is doing something you do not like and you want to persuade them to stop. Maybe a foreign government is doing something you don’t like and you want them to stop. Perhaps you want to show solidarity with other activists.
What can I do about it?
You can:
- send letters and emails to give support to activists, complain to companies and governments, or to newspapers to raise awareness;
- write tweets on Twitter or make videos to put on YouTube or Vimeo to raise awareness;
- collect signatures on petitions (either paper or internet) to show how strong support is for your idea or point of view;
- you can raise money to help solve your problem, too, or help a charity or NGO to raise money.
Examples of activism
Opposition to the Osprey aircraft used by the U.S. military in Japan.
Raising awareness of Coca Cola in Colombia and its links to paramilitary death squads.
Vocabulary
- show solidarity is a bit like ‘give support to‘
- raise awareness means ‘make people know’
- paramilitary means not really the military but a group with a lot of weapons
Highlight Speech
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.
here.
Also, you can stream it on Stitcher here or in the sidebar.