Black Cat Online practice for Cambridge ESOL exams

This morning I received an email updating me about the resources available on the Black Cat Readers blog:  

Did you know that you can find hundreds of different kinds of interactive exercises on the Black Cat Readers blog?

Click on w.w.w.blackcatreaders.com/quizzes and discover a world of useful and interesting activities to practise your English: Grammar exercises, Vocabulary, Pronunciation and Listening activities, but also sections specifically designed to help you practise Cambridge ESOL exams.

Access is free! Hurry up!

 Given my obvious and known interest in any website or blog that claims to help students practise  and prepare for the Cambridge ESOL exams, I clicked on the link and checked out the materials there.

As you can see from the screenshot above, you can search for Exam skills for the different levels of the CEFR - for Cambridge English: Key, Preliminary, First and Advanced.

As the next seminar I will be giving (November 9th San Sebastian) is about Cambridge English: Preliminary for Schools, I selected the activities available for B1 and this list appeared:

It looks very useful.  I'll be recommending it to my students and colleagues to try out.  If you recommend it or use it, let me know what you think!

Have a great weekend!

Great blog(s) for Cambridge English: First!

http://www.cambridgeesol.org/spain/seminarios/index.php

Yesterday, I was at the British Council, Bilbao for a 2 hour seminar on the theme of:

'Planning and teaching short exam courses'

I really enjoyed the session - there were some teachers I've met at previous seminars in Bilbao, plus some new faces.  Great to share ideas with you all!  Thanks for coming!

When planning the session, I decided to take the Cambridge English: First exam as the focus for the course we were going to plan.

We looked at the English Profile website - the Vantage pdf document that can be downloaded via a link there, at the Vocabulary Profile and various other useful resources for material to guide us with our course content and focus planning.  

One point that all of us at the session agreed on is the need to offer students the opportunity to practise and study outside the classroom (especially with students that you may only see once a week for example).

We looked at various online resources for doing this.  I've mentioned some of them on this blog before - mailvu, IH  Bristol...

Interestingly, when looking around the web at what is available for teachers and students to prepare and practise for Cambridge English: First, I discovered that there is a British Council Bilbao blog for Cambridge English: First!

The blog has posts on different aspects of the exam and some practice materials based on authentic texts.

I also showed the teachers in Bilbao a blog about Cambridge English: First that I discovered recently. 

http://fceblog.blogspot.com.es/

This blog, by Claudia Ceraso is (in her own words)

An afterclass meeting point for all First Certificate in English Students

 I like the mixture of advice for the different parts of the exam and the fun links.

Why not visit Claudia's blog  and the FCE British Council Bilbao blog yourself and see what you think!

British Council Seminar on choosing and using resources

Yesterday, I received my weekly newsletter from British Council Teaching English.  (Another site I'm subscribed to).

If I have time, I look through the areas mentioned in the newsletter as soon as it arrives and click on the links to find out more about them.  (If not, the email gets transferred to my 'subscriptions' folder

and stays there till I have time to look at it properly!)

I decided to have a look at the email this morning when I switched on my computer and clicked on the link to

Choosing and using resources with ESOL learners Dot Powell, manager of the British Council's project to create a portal for ESOL teachers and learners, looks at criteria we use to make judgements about ESOL materials.

This took me to the Seminars section of the Teaching English website.  I clicked on:

I then watched Dot Powell, Project Manager for ESOL Nexus in a seminar with teachers discussing the criteria we need to apply when we are choosing and/or preparing resources for students.

Dot then provided examples of resources and applied the criteria with the teachers at the seminar.


The seminar lasts just under 20 minutes, but I found it so interesting and well-presented, that the time just flew by.

I then paid a quick visit to the ESOL Nexus website.

The site is targeted at a particular group of ESOL learners:

ESOL Nexus Welcome to the ESOL Nexus page for learners. The materials here have been specially designed and identified for learners who are working and making their home in the UK. We are sure you will find lots of interesting and motivating activities here which will help you to improve your English in lots of different ways, understand more about UK culture and learn more about UK society and work.

But I have just tried out a couple of activities from the site and I think that many of them would be useful and relevant to our students.
There are many listening activities and the Magazine articles seem interesting.
I liked the several of the poems in the Poems and Stories section.  I hadn't come across the No poem before!

I hope you will visit the Nexus site too and find it useful.  (Most of the stuff there is for higher level learners.

In a few minutes, I will look at the teachers section of the site - maybe for a future post......?


The British Council has lots more seminars on its website.  Here is the direct link to the start up page.