Just a quick update to let you know that the next month will be pretty bare as far as new material goes. I’m in the final stages of submitting my dissertation, so as you can imagine, I must be completely focused on reading and revising drafts. My date for submission is June 11, so normal service should resume shortly after that.
On a happier note… Blackpool 3 – 2 winners in the playoff final last night at Wembley. Premier League football at Bloomfield Road!
What’s a common homework assignment or part of the so-called on-going assessment? Getting your students to write a diary is a pretty safe bet. We’ve all requested it and most students will deliver.
The diary is used as a reflection of general speech and trying to get the student to find their own voice in their L2. But at the end of the day, no matter how much of their voice we can help them find, they don’t always progress when it comes to speaking. Be it confidence or perhaps even the physicality of actually speaking the L2, there are often obstacles. One possible way to alleviate these obstacles are to change tact a little bit. Click here to read more.. »
Just a short note on confidence builders in the last week.
I’ve been chatting a little with Koreans on several sites (mostly sharedtalk; no link because I don’t really like the site) recently to try to add variety to how I approach some pretty typical topics of an intermediate nature; nothing overly complicated. Things like lifestyles, family, interests, travel, etc. Stuff that you will talk about with people all the time… nice conversation starters, those kind of things.
Anyway, what’s the confidence aspect? Click here to read more.. »
As many of you will know, the study at university in an English speaking country you’re likely to need the right TOEFL or IELTS score. And that’s a lot of work. Speaking to some of my international classmates though, I’ve come to realise something. Even though they have an excellent command of English and the right score, they don’t always have the tools for the academic setting. They sometimes lack the relevant vocabulary. Vocabulary that many of us take for granted.
So what do they need to study? Endless wordlists to increase their vocabulary to the 20’000 mark or something absurd? Click here to read more.. »
There’s no doubt that the people from the Middle East are very proud people. They are proud of their country, of their history and of their language. Except when speaking English… many of those I speak to wish to lose all traces of the markers that identify them as being from the region. But that’s a story for another time.
Today we talk about Arabic itself. What are the differences between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the colloquial or vernacular varieties? Which is intrinsically the best Arabic to learn? Click here to read more.. »
