Last lesson

As you all know next Saturday is our last lesson and as we will continue to give our opinions on different topics I thought a suitable topic for our last post would be your opinions about what you feel you have learned this year and what you feel you wanted to learn but for whatever reason haven't yet. I hope you've enjoyed your lessons one way or another. I know I have. You've been a great class for always trying to speak English, which makes my job much easier.Post your thoughts and I'll see you on Saturday.
Carolyn

Giving Opinions

Dear all,
We'll be taking about 'presenting our opinions' this week in class, so in preparation I thought I could post some topics here and ask you to give your opinion.

1. What about indiscipline in schools? We mentioned this during class this week. What do you think could be done to improve it? And improve the educational system in general?

2. What's your opinion of the successive increases in petrol recently? Where will it end? Should the government intervene? Will we end up going everywhere by public transport?

See you Saturday.
Carolyn

Listening

As we were doing some listening exercises on Saturday and I mentioned the BBC site, I thought I'd include a link to some listening this week. This is a series of audio files on the topic of culture, made for learners of English. Have a listen to week 4. Click on 'Download mp.3' , then 'open'. You'll need to be quite patient because it'll take a minute or two for the file to download. Have a listen and try to answer these questions as you do.
1. What's different about a business meeting in the West and the Middle East?
2. What's different about communication in the West and Japan?
3. What did researchers find more inportant in communication, facial expression, intonation or the words?
4 How is Namibian culture described? (Coincidence - Nelson was talking about Namibia on Saturday!).

Then you can download the script and check your answers. You could also download the files to an mp3 player and listen to them on the bus, for example. There are other episodes you could listen to as well, and other files on different topics at bbclearningenglish - webcasts. Hopefully after a bit more practice you won't suffer so much!
Happy listening , Carolyn

Green day

Hi everyone,
I think I forgot to mention, but next Saturday is Green Day in the British Council and we'll be doing some special activities related to the environment. In preparation, I'd like you to think about environmental problems where you live. For example, I live in the countryside, but overuse of fertilizers is a problem which can contaminate water courses. Although the council where I live has a free service to collect 'oversized' rubbish such as TV sets etc, people still dump things like mattresses at the side of country roads, so it seems that there's still a long way to go as far as education is concerned. I'd like you to write a little bit about your area and what you think are the biggest problems there.See you next week, and wear something green if you have it.
Carolyn

Feedback

Hi everyone. Below are some sentences for correction from our speaking activity on Saturday. However, can I just remind you that making mistakes is OK. In fact, you probably need to make mistakes to learn, so don't worry too much about them. What's important is getting your message across, which I'm sure most of you did, so well done. But maybe if we think about the mistakes, then we won't make them again, so think about these ones during the week and we'll check them next Saturday.

it's the situation more difficult to us
I had scared
the light has afraid the animals
we slept there during 3 years
we had no bussel
when the plane crashed she spoke that she...
we don't build a house

Life stories

I heard a radio programme recently that talked about how someone bet the American write Ernest Hemmingway he couldn't write a story in 6 words. Hemmingway won the bet, but the story was very sad - something like 'For sale, baby shoes, never worn'. What I'd like you to do this week is write your life story - in 6 words. Quite a challenge! Mine is 'Science in Britain, English in Portugal' which summarises the 2 jobs I've had in two different countries. Others I heard which I liked were 'too young, too old, too late' and 'fell in love, married someone else'. so try to be imaginative and post your 6 word life stories.

Lateral thinking puzzles

I've got some puzzles for you to think about during the week. Read them through, post your ideas and then I'll post the solutions. Good luck!

1 A man walks into a bar and asks the barman for a glass of water. The barman pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man says 'Thank you' and walks out. Why?

2 A man and his son are in a car accident. The father dies on the scene, but the child is rushed to the hospital. When he arrives the surgeon says ' I can't operate on this boy, he's my son!' How can this be?

3 A man is wearing black. Black shoes, socks, trousers, jumper, gloves and a mask. He is walking down a black street with all the street lamps off. A black car is coming towards him with its lights off too, but somehow manages to stop in time. How did the driver see the man?

Writing about crime

We've been talking about crime in classes recently, so I'd like you to write a little bit about any brushes you have had with the law. Have you ever committed a crime, or have you ever been the victim of crime? I twice had my wallet purse stolen from my bag on the underground when I lived in Lisbon - I think they target people who look like tourists in the hope that they have a lot of money. They must have been disappointed in both cases because I was neither a tourist, nor had a lot of money. After that I started to walk round Lisbon. It was safer. Luckily nothing more serious has happened to me, and I think the only crime I ever committed was to leave my car parked too long in an area with a 30 minute time limit. I had to pay a fine, but it wasn't much.
To write about your experience you can click on new post, write in a title, then type in your story and click on publish post at the bottom of the page. I look forward to hearing from you all-
Carolyn

new posts

You can write a new post by clicking on 'New Post' at the top right hand of the page. You can change the font or the colour , or you can add pictures and audio files.

This is a picture of part of my garden. I love my garden - it's a place where I go when I feel stressed. I love my plants - I bought a box full of herbs yesterday - rosemary, sage, mint etc and if the weather is nice I'm going to plant them on Sunday.

You could do the same - just click on the picture icon at the top of the message ( it looks like a photo), choose the picture file from your computer and click upload. Then you could talk about your pictures too and show the rest of the class something about you.

Listen to what we're going to do with the blog

hange to bold or italics, just like in a word document.

Getting started

Hi everyone,
I though to start off I'd just put on some links here that might be useful to you outside class.

The first is to an online dictionary which may be useful to help you keep vocabulary records.

Secondly here are a few links to sites where you can get lots of information about English, do grammar exercises, test your reading and vocabulary etc. They are the British Council's own learn English site and the BBC's learning English site.

Lastly, here's a link to grammar information online.