CAE Tuesday 12.2.13

 

Tuesday done and dusted already!

 

We spent some time today looking at adverb/adjective collocations and then looked at the British National Corpus - use it this afternoon to check out some of the words we talked about today.

 

Then we listened to a radio play from the city of Swansea in Wales. There was a huge amount of colloquial language and slang it in, you'd do well to try to remember so of it. 

 

Here's a comedy based in Wales about a Welsh girl and a London boy who fall in love, blah blah blah and all the comedy that ensues as their families get to know each other. Check it out, it's old enough at this stage so you should be able to find all of it online.

 

 

 

 

We spent a few minutes planning the homework then, the task is to write a review of a pub. I've written the task in CAE style but the winning review will actually be published in the Delfin Magazine. There's a nice prize for the winning submission to the article too, so you could be in for a nice treat if you put some time into it.

 

The questions we would ask ourselves as you begin planning a writing task:

• Who's going to read this? (Who are the audience? In this case, it's Delfin students)
• What style / format will it be in? (It's a review so no bullet points!)
• How many content points are there? What are they?
  [Food (if any), drinks, prices, music, staff, customers, location, evaluation and recommendation]
  
• What sort of language do I need to use? (Informal)

I've attached the pages from the CAE book to the Facebook page, please feel free to look at them there.

Don't forget, this is due by Thursday morning.

 

And please, do the speaking homework tonight. PLEASE!!!

Thanks.

 

See you tomorrow,

Éadaoin

 



CAE Monday 11.2.13

Good afternoon and welcome to another week!
This week is review week so feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular that you'd like to address.

My plan for this week is to cover future tenses and modals in grammar, we'll also look at prepositins, phrasal verbs, some idioms and some vocabulary to do with innovation and descriptions.

Today we briefly reviewed future tenses and within that, first and second conditional. Here is a slightly more indepth version of the notes I gave you in class, if you have any questions at all please email me or ask me in class. **Note - You must save these jpegs as images and then open them. You can also get a pdf version of the same on the facebook group.

 

And here's Only Fools and Horses' Del Boy telling his younger brother Rodney about their future. This is a classic Cockney sitcom and would be well worth the watch if you are interested. It will probably take a bit of time to tune in to the accents and some of the jokes are quite culturally specific but not all of it. Enjoy it!

So, that's that.

Homework:
Please record yourself for a period of roughly two minutes speaking about the future. It can be your own personal future, the future of your family, company, profession or country. Or even your favourite musician or sports team. I really don't mind, but what I do want you do work on is using a variety of future structures to express your opinions, predictions and the plans and intentions of you or your chosen topic.

When you've recorded yourself, listen back to it. Spend a few minutes listening to yourself and do a brief analysis of your speaking. How is your pronunciation? How is your accuracy - ie did you use the correct grammar and the correct vocabulary? And how is your fluency? Fluency does not refer to the speed at which you speak but more to the pace at which you speak - is it comfortable and communicative? Is your stress on the correct words?

Give yourself a grade in each area out of 5, like so:
Accuracy: X out of 5.
Fluency: X out of 5.
Pronunciation: X out of 5.

Also, make a note of some of the mistakes that you made - make a list of them and try to be aware of them the next time you speak.

Use your phone or laptop to record the file and then email it to me at eadaoinhomework@gmail.com. (ALONG WITH your grades and errors so I can see what you think of it)
If you can't record that way, you can go to www.vocarro.com and record yourself there. Please be careful though, when it asks for an email address you need to send it to yourself first in order to listen to it and then send it on to me.

I look forward to hearing them.

See you all tomorrow,
Éadaoin

Wednesday CAE 7.2.14

Here are the answers to yesterday's homework.

I'll add anything else interesting I find later!!

Wednesday CAE 6.2.13

Happy Wednesday!

We had a cold start this morning with some reported speech structures - you might want to work on them a little more??? There's an exercise in yesterday's blog, it's quick and easy to do but will hopefully be helpful to you. There's also an exercise in your homework for tonight.

Narrative tenses: You have the tenses we use and why we use them from today. Here's the exercise again, if you want to finish it or try it again.

And here's an online exercise for you - you have to type your answers but it seems like a great activity so take your time with it. There's some interesting vocabulary in it too. 

Narrative tenses activities.

Homework:

• Noun + preposition exercise from the photocopy.
• Open cloze
• Unit 8 review.

And here are the answers from yesterday's homework:

As always, have a look at your answers after you've corrected it and if you have any questions at all don't hesitate to ask.

See you tomorrow,

Éadaoin

Tuesday CAE 5.2.13

Well, it sort of snowed last night/this morning and I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much from you but yet almost a full turnout. Impressive! I think I'd have stayed at home if I could have! 'Realfeel' of -10 degrees, yikes!

So we covered reported speech and reporting verbs today. I don't think there's very much to say on it really, it's just a case of remembering which verbs go with which patterns.
Here's another exercise to check how much you remember - it's very short.
Advanced reporting structures exercise.

I've set up a different facebook page - actually, not a page at all, a group. It might be more useful to you in that you'll get updates and can post more easily I think.
Thanks for the suggestion Jonathan, hopefully this will be better for you all.

You'll find it here: Delfin CAE

Don't forget, homework:

• You're editing our overly-long interview down to around 150 words.
• Reporting structures/ tenses.

Monday CAE 4.2.13

Welcome to week 5 folks!

This week we're looking at motivation and travelling as unit topics. We'll be covering reported speech and narrative tenses and we'll be working on some of the speaking exercises from the CAE exam.

Today we talked about motivation and what it is to be a self starter. The necessary qualities for being a self starter and the importance of a mix of work styles within any company.

We looked at three part phrasal verbs in the context of work and working relationships. Here is a link to a good phrasal verb dictionary should you ever need one - Using English Phrasal Verbs.
You can use this by searching verbs or particles. For example, I chose to look up go ahead with from our class today.
By searching for go in the verb box we get this:

And then when we click on go ahead with we get this definition:

Meaning: to proceed
Example: We now intend to GO AHEAD WITH the final stage of the project.

For homework I've asked you to read this interview and write a very short personal profile of the actor interviewed. We'll be doing something else with this interview tomorrow so I hope you can find the time to read it. If there are any phrases you don't quite get, just underline them and we'll talk about them tomorrow.

Click on image to read the interview with Peter Coonan of RTE's Love/Hate

Also, please complete the reading comprehension that we started in the class.

See you tomorrow,
Éadaoin

Friday morning CAE

Happy weekend one and all!

Here are the answers to the homework from Thursday:

And here are some links to some Irish dramas/soap operas you might enjoy.

Moone Boy

Love /  Hate

Fair City

Don't forget the review for homework and I'll see you all on Monday.

Éadaoin