Useful preparation resources for Advanced Speaking

A few years ago, I subscribed to a site called Splendid Speaking.

Every week,  I received an email with a link to some resources for working on areas to develop Advanced students' speaking skills.

On the site, you can find 26 Get Speaking Task Sheets, working on different topic and functional areas. (You only get access to the Task Sheet being emailed that particular week).  You can see some of the areas covered below:

I have saved all the task sheets on my computer.
In Task 5, as well as talking about role models, the task sheet suggests a range of expressions to agree and disagree.
In Task 6, expressions for thinking out loud are considered and provided.

So, when I received an email from Splendid Speaking on Saturday telling me about a new website  for IELTS Speaking, I clicked on the link and discovered some great stuff.

In the free Weekly Vocabulary Practice, holidays and relationships have been covered so far.

And the resource that I really liked and found quite novel is the Five Minute Functions.
To date, there are two videos - Using fillers and Expressing likes and dislikes.   You can watch them on the IELTS Speaking website or on Youtube.

I would say that it's definitely a site to bookmark and revisit.

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!