Friday 5 February 2016

How to improve you listening skills with Breaking News English


Listening is a skills that many of you find very difficult. It's normal. Fast, natural English can be hard to understand. I know a lot of you listen to English regularly via TV series, films, podcasts and YouTube videos. However, if you do some intensive practice, like dictations, you can really develop your listening skills.You can use the website Breaking News English. to do dictation exercises based on news articles. The video below explains how to get started and how it works:

 
Another excellent website is the Voice of America learning English website, where you can hear different American speakers reading news articles aloud for English learners. There are three different levels to choose from depending on number of words and the complexity of the language. There is an explanation of difficult words at the end of the article.  
Level Two News Story main page on the Voice of America website

You can also watch subtitled videos about news topics which are in careful spoken English that is easier to understand. Some of the videos are also about language such as 'Everyday Grammar' or 'English at the Movies'.  

Learning English TV video with subtitles, spoken in slow, clear American English.
English at the Movies videos with explanations of expressions heard in films.
If you're not so interested in news broadcasts, you can listen to other types of audio and video on topics such as American pop culture.


Don't forget to follow VOA Learning English on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube so that you don't miss the latest videos or audio. I hope you enjoy using these resources.

Job Interviews

For this class on job interviews, we used part of this lesson plan, namely the images from the warmer and worksheets 6 and 7. We then used the exercises on self-evaluating our good and bad points in TJ Taylor's English for Job Interviews.

Thursday 4 February 2016

Stereotypes Part 1

To follow on from our work on the film "L'Auberge Espagnole" we worked on different national stereotypes, firstly about English-speaking countries and after about France and French people.



Burns Night

As a Scottish person, I generally celebrate Burns Night on the 25th of January. This evening of haggis eating and poetry reading is in honour of Scottish national poet, Robert Burns. In this lesson, there is a video from scotland.org about Burns' life as well as a worksheet and a hilarious video all about haggis that also comes with a worksheet. Everything is on the padlet below. The fantastic haggis video came from Michelle Henry's website.