Back from Alcalá, a name change and gearing up for seminars and YLE.

As you will have seen from my previous two posts, last weekend nearly everyone involved in running the Cambridge exams in Spain and Portugal (Centre Managers, Inspectors, Presenters, Team Leaders, the people who work in the Madrid office...) met together in Alcalá de Henares to find out about developments taking place or in the pipeline.

At the gala dinner, I was extremely proud to be given an award - a silver plaque 'For continual support of Cambridge English activities in Spain as Senior Presenter and the development of the 'Teaching Together' Blog!

One of the biggest changes we learnt about and one which will affect all of us immediately is the change in the name of the organisation we work for.  We no longer represent Cambridge ESOL.  The name has changed to Cambridge English Language Assessment.

You can read about the change and the reasons for it here.

We will be receiving information about other developments, like the revision of the Cambridge English: First and Cambridge English:Advanced exams and the trialling of Computer Based Young Learners Tests over the next few months.  I will cover them on this blog as we get details of these.

Myself, well I'm gearing up to some busy months ahead.

Tomorrow, I'll be in Santurzi giving a seminar on Cambridge English: First for Schools and Cambridge English: Preliminary for Schools.  Then, for the next five weeks, I'll be jumping in the car and driving to many more Centres in the north of Spain.  The rest of the seminar team is going to be very busy too.  You can find out more about where we'll be, click here to find out.

And I'll also be setting up the Young Learners Tests here in Cantabria for the Centre where I work.

There are lots of useful resources and also news to share about the YLE tests.  My next post will look at some of these.  Speak to you soon about these!

Cambridge monitor

Hello again from Alcalá de Henares!

(note: I'm not in the above photo because I'm taking the picture of our lunch table at the beautiful Parador!)

In one of our sessions today, the Cambridge Monitor was mentioned.

I received an email about the Cambridge Monitor just over a week ago.

What is the Cambridge monitor?

It's basically a survey of 1,700 Spanish speakers and their attitudes to English, their level of English and learning English.

There are 98 infographics, tagged with one of 19 labels (false friends, apps, errors, celebrities, etc.)

Here's one of the infographics you can find on the site:

It makes me think of some years back when I was in a village in Cantabria, listening to three 8 year old girls singing a Spice Girls song.  They had no idea what they were singing (I'll tell you what I want, what I really really want...) but were making a very good job of imitating the Spice Girls!!!

Check out the infographics on Cambridge Monitor - some interesting and amusing facts are reported!

Hello from Alcalá de Henares!

Just a quick hello from Alcalá de Henares, where centre managers, seminar presenters, inspectors, team leaders and many others are gathered for the Centenary CEM Cambridge English conference.

As I walked from my hotel to the Parador, I was intrigued to see so many storks nesting on the top of so many buildings.

This afternoon, the conference was officially opened in a beautiful setting: in the Paraninfo Universitario Colegio de San Ildefonso of the Universidad de Alcalá.

Then, Mike Milanovic shared many amusing and intriguing facts about the history of the Cambridge exams.
And after that, we enjoyed some great food, music and company in the Parador.

Tomorrow will be a busy day.  Time to turn off the computer and the light!

American English

Another day with a few minutes spare to try and clean out and organise my email inbox.  (Some days because of (lack of) time, all I can do is read the emails that come in.)  

While re-reading one email, I checked out a useful resource I'd been sent by the local Teachers' Centre.

http://www.americanenglish.state.gov/

I haven't had time to try out all the resources yet, but I did download the Sing Out Loud Traditional Songs mp3 file and liked what I heard (and sang along!).

I have also downloaded the pdf. document of the book:

I shall continue to check out more resources, but thought I would make a move and share this site with you asap.

Tomorrow, I'm off to Alcalá de Henares, to the

4th Cambridge English Iberian CEM Conference, Centenary Reunion, 2013

I'll be meeting up with my seminar presenter team, with centre managers, team leaders, inspectors, people from the Cambridge ESOL Madrid office and from Cambridge ESOL UK too.  I hope to come back with lots of ideas and inspiration!!

Speak to you next week!

Inspiration from TED and Jarrett

I was clearing up the mailbox for one of my email accounts, and decided that I had time to watch a video recommended in the This week on TED.com email.

I clicked on the first link and liked the start of the talk When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? 
But then I decided that right now, the likelihood of me having 10 minutes to do absolutely nothing is very zero, so I then clicked on the fourth link.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka: How a boy became an artist

http://on.ted.com/Krosoczka

I watched Jarrett for the full 18 minutes of his talk and found myself laughing and nodding at several of the anecdotes and things he said.

After it had finished, I clicked on a button: Rate  

From the adjectives I could choose from, I selected Inspiring and Funny.  

I thought I'd write a post about it.  If you have 20 minutes this weekend, maybe, you might laugh and be inspired too.

Jarrett stresses the important role that teachers played in his education and career.  I agree totally!

Here are some of the covers from Jarrett's books.  I will definitely look out for them on my next visit to a bookshop.

New YLE Handbook

Great news!

As well as the new handbooks for other exams like Cambridge English: First or Cambridge English: Advanced, Cambridge ESOL has published a new set of Sample Papers for the Cambridge English: YLE Tests.
You can access these on the Cambridge English Teacher Support Website.

Here is the link to the Starters Sample Papers (Sample Paper B is the new one)

And the even better news is that on the same site, you can find the audio files for the listening tasks!


In addition to the new Sample Papers, there is also a new Handbook.

https://www.teachers.cambridgeesol.org/ts/digitalAssets/117422_Young_Learners_English_Handbook.pdf

I wanted to point out that there have been some adjustments and additions to the wordlists for the three different levels.

You can read about this topic in Issue 46 of the Cambridge ESOL Research Notes.  Some (but not all) of the modifications and additions are mentioned on page 20:

As usual, I found myself nodding in agreement at the changes and additions and the justification for making them.

While I write this post, I am listening to the news.  They have just said that today is apparently the most depressing day of the year because it's post-Christmas and the mornings are so dark at this time of the year (and it's Monday of course!)  They suggest going out for a walk - I won't be doing that just yet as we are in the middle of a storm here!

Have a great week!

Unusual words

As some of my previous posts have probably shown, I love facts about words!

Recently I was looking something up on an online thesaurus  (Isn't 'thesaurus' an intriguing word?  If you look it up, you'll discover that it is used to name:

a book of words or of information about a particular field or set of concepts; especially : a book of words and their synonyms

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesaurus

and that it started being used with this meaning around 1823 :

thesaurus (n.) 

 "treasury, storehouse," from L. thesaurus "treasury, treasure," from Gk. thesauros "a treasure, treasury, storehouse, chest," from root of tithenai "to put, to place." The meaning "encyclopedia filled with information" is from 1840, but existed earlier as thesaurarie (1590s), used as a title by early dictionary compilers. Meaning "collection of words arranged according to sense" is first attested 1852 in Roget's title. Thesaur is attested in Middle English with the meaning "treasure" (15c.-16c.).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=thesaurus

Back to the point, Anne!  

While I was looking on the reference.com website, I came across an intriguing slideshow:  

Five English words that are utterly unique.    http://dict.reference.com/slideshow/unique_words)

I learnt a new word from this slideshow:

http://nicolaarmsterdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/tmesis.jpg

 The sole term in the English language to begin with Tm- has an unusual meaning to match. Tmesis is the insertion of one or more words between the words that make up a compound phrase. For example: "what-so-ever" inserted in the middle of "whatever.

This then inspired me to find more examples of tmesis.

Representative English examples of the use of tmesis for added emphasis include:

• Wh-words, words usually beginning with wh- that can be used as interrogative words, can also be used as subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns. When they express indefiniteness using the suffix -ever they can have the intensifier so inserted between the two parts (the base word and the indefinitizer ever) to emphasize the indefiniteness: whatsoever, whosoever, whomsoever, whosesoever, wheresoever, whensoever, howsoever. Unlike the following examples, these are considered standard words in the language.
• "Abso-fuckin-lutely" in which an expletive or profanity is inserted.
• "Guaran-damn-tee" in which an expletive or profanity is inserted for humor and/or emphasis.
• "La-dee-freakin'-da", a variation of the above in which a less offensive infix is substituted.
• "Wel-diddly-elcome", a signature phrase of fictional character Ned Flanders', where a nonsense word is inserted. Note the reduplication of part of the host word (as opposed to "wel-diddly-come").
• "Any-old-how", in which the divisibility of "anything" (as in "any old thing") is mimicked with the usually indivisible "anyhow".
• "A-whole-nother", in which another (an+other) is reanalyzed as a+nother.
• "Legen-wait for it-dary", in which the phrase "wait for it" is inserted into the word Legendary.
• "Abso-bloody-exactly", a humorous misuse of infixation.
• "Ri-goddamn-diculous", as pronounced by John Wayne, drunkenly addressing a college R.O.T.C. group on the subject of patriotism, and later by Frank Vitchard (Luke Wilson) in Anchorman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmesis

Any-old-way, that's the end of this post!  

A repost of a reblog about Changes to CPE in 2013

I received an email about a post on the Cambridge ESOL South East Europe blog.

The post is reblogged from another blog (TEFL Geek) and concerns the changes that will appear in the Cambridge English: Proficiency exam as from March 2013.

http://teflgeek.net/2011/10/31/changes-to-cpe-in-2013/

The changes are very clearly explained with the help of flow charts.  You can also download a document about the changes to keep.

http://teflgeek.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/changes-to-the-cpe-2013-a-teflgeek-guide.pdf