Advent calendars

We are right in the middle of the build up to Christmas.   I am running a bit late with my Christmas cards this year.  I may well end up sending more greetings online this year.

Picture from:  blog.cardsdirect.com

I suppose it is a sign of the times.  Although I still love the act of opening a paper envelope to read the card inside (and hopefully a note or a letter too), there are also some fantastic ways of sending messages and greetings to friends and family electronically.

I have just created an advent calendar with photos to send to my friends.  This is the first time I've done this and as usual, although these things take time to master, you always learn something while you're doing it!

I did it using the site:  advientos.com.

And you can see the Cambridge ESOL Spain Advent Calendar here.  This was created using the Advientos website.

And while we are on the subject of technology and advent calendars, I came across this great wix.com advent calendar.  Each day gives you a great link to sites that you can use in or outside class with your students.  I plan to try a few out very soon - watch this space!!


Right - back to those Christmas cards ....... !

Online Cambridge exam style exercises

Picture from: Education week

In almost every class, there will be students who barely have time to make it to class every week and struggle to get their homework done on time.

There will also be other students who have more time on their hands (or maybe they just manage to find more time for English!)

Picture from:  Cortland edu

For both of these types of students, I try to cater for them as well as I can.  I set homework for everybody and tell them that it's really important for them to do it by a set date.  And for those who want and have time for more, I point them in the direction of other things they can be doing.



When a friend mentioned the International House Bristol website and the online practice exercises there for First, Advanced and Proficiency, I looked at it immediately.

I have mentioned it at several Cambridge ESOL seminars and shared it with colleagues and friends.  Now, I'm mentioning it to YOU!

I hope you and your students find it useful and if you know of any other sites like this one, please share them with the rest of us!

English Profile

Today, Monday, as usual, I received an email from English Profile.

I hope that many of you are already familiar with this project and with the website.  If you aren't, I strongly recommend a visit.

Back in 2006, I was in Harrogate for the IATEFL conference, and was present at the cocktail launch to the teaching community of the English Profile project.  I have followed the developments and advances of the project ever since.  Various organisations are involved:  Cambridge ESOL, Cambridge University Press, the British Council, the University of Bedfordshire.


I have been subscribed to the  Word of the Week since it started.  As you can probably tell from my previous entry, I find the way language is used and how it changes fascinating.

Today's email brought an analysis of the word lead.

I always challenge myself to see what I can think of related to the Word of the Week before I click on the hyperlink to read about the word on the English Profile page.

Leap as a verb sprang to mind first - eg  He leapt at the chance to go and study abroad.

Also a noun - as in:  "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." 




As an image, being a dog owner, the following came to mind:



















When I checked and compared, I noticed that I hadn't thought of the adjective.

There was the adjective,  illustrated with both a dictionary example and an example by a student taking the Cambridge English: Preliminary exam.

 Learner example: It was Dave Grohl, the lead singer of Foo Fighters! Preliminary English Test; B1; Spanish




I thoroughly recommend you to subscribe to Word of the Week and to take advantage of this opportunity:

Subscribe for free to the A1-B2 version of the English Vocabulary Profile (for a limited time only)


If you do, you can search the database to find out about lots more words.


Enjoy!

Thank you?

Even after more than twenty years living in Spain, I still get told that I say 'thank you' when I shouldn't and that I say it too often.

Maybe then what appeared last week in several UK newspapers is yet another sign of me losing touch with what's happening in the country where I was born.

Apparently, according to the reports in the newspapers, the average person will say thank you nearly 5,000 times a year.

But not if they are in a bad mood!

1 in 10 people who took part in the survey, carried out by the Food Network UK among 2,000 people, said that being angry made them refuse to say thank you.

And 1 in 20 stated that they did not consider the use of the words 'thank you' necessary in everyday conversation.

Nowadays, people seem to be saying thanks in other ways - texting or emailing their gratitude or via social networks.

But is it the case that people no longer appreciate things other people do for them?

Or is it the case that people are using other terms to express their gratitude?  'Cheers!', 'ta', 'Cool!', 'Fab' are all being used instead of thank you.


And could the fact that 'merci' and 'gracias' were mentioned as preferred choices for some of the people interviewed be a sign that Britons are developing their proficiency in foreign languages?  I hope so!

Well - thanks - I mean fab, cheers, cool, ta - for reading to the end of this!

newspapermap.com

How did we ever exist before the internet? I’ve been having tremendous problems with my internet connection. Among other things, it has meant that I haven’t been able to add any new entries to this blog for over a week.

And I was itching to share newspapermap.com with you.

As so often happens, I can’t remember where I first heard about newspapermaps – maybe I stumbled upon it on one of those days when I had time to look through the ‘for later’ bookmarks on my computer.

Anyway, it is a gem! It works like google maps in that the start up page shows you a world map with pins pointing to the location of the newspapers. The pins are colour coded showing the language the newspapers are written in. There are nine different languages labelled separately. English has by far the largest share of newspapers, with Spanish, French, Portuguese and German following on.

The reason I like this site is like many other websites for a mixture of personal and professional reasons. I was delighted to be able to take a quick look at the Sunderland Echo – my local newspaper where I grew up. I hadn’t seen it for years.

And for classes, it could have endless uses – accessing articles on the same theme and comparing how the story is treated or focused. At lower levels, this could be in terms of how much space the story is given on a page and whether photos are used or not. At higher levels, the actual language used (for example, level of formality, use of passives, use of nouns versus verbs….)

And I have just tried out the translation tool on the Sunderland echo (by clicking on ‘español’ in the translation option)

Artista Sunderland en Londres llamando al

ARTISTA Alison Barratt ha conseguido un papel de trabajo para la ciruela, el alcalde de Londres.

I deliberately hadn’t looked at the newspaper in English first, so didn’t have a clue what was meant by ‘working for the plum’.

Compare this to the original headline and first sentence:

Sunderland artist’s London calling

ARTIST Alison Barratt has landed a plum role working for the Lord Mayor of London.

Thank goodness that we still need humans to translate and to teach!

Hope you enjoy this link and why not share your ideas for using it with students?

Blog challenge:compare and contrast photo

In a previous entry, I talked about elt pics: a wonderful resource for teachers created by teachers.

While I was looking at this resource, I also came across an interesting blog challenge: Compare and Contrast Photo.

The idea is to choose two different but similar photos and compare and contrast them. To those of us who prepare students for the Cambridge ESOL speaking tests (and examine students too in my case!) the idea of comparing and contrasting two photos will ring lots of bells!

I checked out a few of the blogs from people who had taken up this challenge and share here a link to one of my favourites by Tyson Seburn.

Tyson Seburn has also provided a worksheet for students to collect and note down useful expressions for comparing and contrasting and some sentences written by students – some of them contain mistakes and need correcting.

And there is also a powerpoint presentation considering ways of comparing two job adverts.

Another post I liked is by Sandy Millin– maybe I was influenced by the first photo on her post – a picture of Durham near where I grew up – and also one of my favourite places!

So, I decided to share a couple of pictures of Durham with you - compare the weather and the angle the photos were taken from!

And so that you can see a bit of the inside of the Cathedral, here is a youtube video showing Sting performing there!

Education at a glance 2011

If, like me, you find statistics and figures fascinating, you will find this report will give you some useful information and food for thought:

www.oecd.org/dataoecd/61/2/48631582.pdf

Here’s the official description of the contents:

‘The 2011 edition of Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators enables countries to see themselves in the light of other countries’ performance. It provides a broad array of comparable indicators on education systems and represents the consensus of professional thinking on how to measure the current state of education internationally.

The indicators show who participates in education, how much is spent on it, and how education systems operate. They also illustrate a wide range of educational outcomes, comparing, for example, student performance in key subjects and the impact of education on earnings and on adults’ chances of employment.’

Chapter A6 looks very interesting.  It examines the issue of whether students who enjoy reading are better readers.  It looks at reading habits in countries around the world and specifically at what students read for enjoyment (eg fiction, comic books, newspapers, magazines, at how much time they spend reading for enjoyment, and at how these factors relate to their performance on PISA reading proficiency tests.

I think it will make interesting reading and I will certainly be looking at the results for Spain, the country where I teach!

A wonderful resource for teachers created by teachers

At the end of last week, I was finalising my preparation for a seminar on Bridging the gap from Cambridge English: Preliminary to First when I came across some fantastic news for teachers needing photos to use in class and to practise the photo parts of  Speaking Teachers.

This is a description of the site I’m referring to:

‘ Eltpics is an ever-growing gallery of creative commons licenced images for teachers and learners of languages.  It has its home on flickr.  For the last year it has been collecting photos by teachers for teachers for use in class, on blogs and wherever they fit in to learning and practising languages.’ Ceri Jones 

And here is a screenshot of the eltpics homepage on flickr.com:

 And once you’ve checked out these links, take a look at: http://takeaphotoand.wordpress.com/

This blog has weekly posts with ideas for using photos in our classrooms. 

Enjoy and use!

Anne

Word Clouds

On many blogs, you will see Word Clouds like the one below on many of them.

How do they work?

In blogs, the biggest words tell us that there are more entries on the blog with those labels.

In texts, the biggest words are the words that appear most times in the text.

Look at this word cloud made from a Cambridge English: First gapped text:

age anna arrive boy breakfast child 

chop cook cooked cooking course deep didn’t 

doesn’t drink eager egg eight evening farmhouse food four fruit 

girl hand hitting idea just  keen  kitchen later learn 

like lower make onion oven possible punch reluctant sausage start 

student  teach teaching ten way worked young 

What do you think the text is about?

How can YOU make a word cloud like this one?

Go to this website and paste your text into the box.In seconds, you will have your word cloud!

Did you know?

The middle gaps in the gapped texts tasks in Cambridge English: First and Advanced and Proficiency Reading papers are the ones that most candidates have problems with.

What kinds of texts are used in the Cambridge ESOL exams?

Texts are used right from the start!

At Starters, in Part 4 of the Reading and Writing Test, students read a text about an animal or a thing and have to choose 5 words to complete the 5 gaps in the text.  (The words all have pictures to show the meaning).

For example, in the text here, Starters candidates read a text about a horse.

How can we help students read texts?

We can show them a picture 

and ask them questions:

What’s this?  (a horse)

How many legs has a horse got?  (four)

Do horses live in houses?  (no!)

What do horses eat?   (grass, carrots, …)

What can horses do?  (run, jump)

Then, students can read the text through and find what it says about horses.

Why is this useful?

In real life, we use information like the title or pictures that appear with a text to predict what we are going to read about.

When we are looking through a newspaper or magazine, we might decide to read or not read an article because of these predictions.

As students move up the levels, the texts become longer and the tasks get more challenging.

This means that it is extremely important for our students to know the best way to start reading each text.  

 Watch this blog for ideas on encouraging students to use the best approach!

Did you know?

The way the text and the questions appear is a clue!  If the questions appear first (e.g. First Reading Part 3 or Advanced Reading Part 4), then students should glance through the questions BEFORE they read the text!

Welcome to the Teaching Together blog!

Welcome to this new and (hopefully!) inspiring blog.

I would like to tell you a little bit about me: my name is Anne Robinson and I was born in the  North-East of England; I now live just outside Santander.

I’m a teacher, materials writer (author of Fun for Starters, Movers and Flyers, published by Cambridge University Press) and teacher trainer.  I’m the Senior Presenter for  Cambridge ESOL in Spain and part of a very active Seminar team.  

Every year, we share our ideas and tips with teachers in around 100 seminars all over Spain.  This means we have the chance to meet lots of you in person!

The idea behind this blog is to increase our contact with you and to offer you support. 

We hope to continue the generation of ideas that starts at seminars. 

I feel very lucky to be a part of this blog and I hope that what you find here will help you and inspire you! 

Please feel free to contribute with comments and suggestions and any questions you might have!

I am looking forward to Teaching Together with you!