Thurs 21/03/2013

Today we listened to a discussion about Wikileaks and practised expressions to use in a discussion with others (U5.3 in the book)

Tues 19/3/13

Today we heard Sylvia's interesting presentation on mind maps. We also corrected a lette with sundry mistakes, and finished section 5.2 in the book

Tuesday 12/3/13

Today we talked, listened and practised the weak "have" in expressions like "should have"

Thursday 7/3/13

Today we did the podcast listening from Unit 3 (places). We also introduced the topic of "Secrets" from Unit 5.1

Stay tuned !

A good way to learn english is to focus on the latest news. In this respect, I'd like to share these to links with you:

The first one is 'Words in the news':

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/wordsinthenews/2013/03/130301_witn_wikileaks.shtml

...and the second one is 'six-minute english'. I find this one specially interesting for my students:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/general/sixminute/

    Both resources come from the BBC.

Thursday 28/2/13

Today we discussed dilemmas and ways of expressing what we would do/have done in certain circumstances. We also looked at the correct ways to use "whether". In terms of the book, we covered most of Unit 4.3 (all except section 7).

Tues 26/2/13

First of all, my apologies for not keeping this blog up-to-date; some people ended up not knowing about the homework to be done last weekend. So before I go any further - there's an essay to be written (see Homework tab).
We had an interesting talk by Alfonso on ancient music, and we all tried to get our heads round the "perfect aspect". The biggest problem seemed to be the difference between "Have you....before?" and "Had you ..... before?". The conclusion was that the former is used in a present context (i.e. "before" = "before now", whereas the latter is used in the context of a past-tense narrative (i.e. "before" = "before then").
Finally, we looked at a model text for a problem-solution essay and the use of "parallelism".