Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Great game for practising compound words

I just received an email with some great online games and resources from Teach them English, a blog written by Adam Simpson that I mentioned in September.

I've been playing Word Vine,

a fascinating and challenging game where you have to drag and drop words onto vine leaves to form compound words.

This would be a great way of learning and practising compound words. It gets very difficult as you progress through the levels.

Will definitely be bookmarking this game (and playing it when I have time!!)

Enjoy!

Monday, October 28, 2013

Teaching English posters

You may have noticed that I haven't written anything on this blog for several days. I'm currently packing up the contents of our house - we're going to have some serious work done to it so we're moving out for a few months!!! After 22 years of living in the same house, we have accumulated rather a lot of stuff. I wanted to take advantage of the situation to have a sort-out/clear-out! It's nearly done, but has taken up rather a lot of time and energy over the past two weeks!!!

While I was going through my papers - a neverending task! - I came across a note to myself to look again at TeachingEnglish.com posters.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/posters

There are 7 'posters' - more than 'posters', they are corkboards with ideas for teaching writing, reading, vocabulary, pronunciation, listening, grammar, speaking.

You can find some good ideas on the boards - maybe some ideas that you haven't used for a while.

So, I thought I'd share the link with you via this blog. I hope to get back to writing regular posts!

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Revised Cambridge English: First and Advanced from 2015

I am busy preparing seminars for various sessions in Bilbao (at the British Council) 30th October, 13th and 20th November and in San Sebastian (Lacunza-ih), 15th November.

All of these seminars are related to Cambridge English: First and/or Cambridge English: Advanced, so I thought I'd better check out the revised formats of these two exams. (The seminars I'm giving are not about the changes but I try and make sure I'm informed in case anyone asks!)

As from January 2015, both exams will change. Very obvious changes are:

- Candidates will take 4 papers instead of 5. (The Reading and Use of English papers have been combined into a single paper.)

- Both exams will be shorter in total - Cambridge English: First will take 30 minutes less and Cambridge English: Advanced will be 45 minutes shorter.

You can access the Specifications and Sample Papers for both exams: