A report on two minority languages in Europe

Changing countries

A follow-up to the last post

Past times? Or not so "past"? What is this woman doing?

Hi everyone,

just a quick update for the benefit of those of you who have not been ablle to attend any of the last few classes.

We have virtually finished Unit 2, except for the review.

The focus of Unit to was PAST TIMES. Among other things, we did a reading comprehension based on famous walls.

The main homework that I set was to write a formal letter based on the information on pages 21 and 22. The sample letter in the book is in completely the wrong register. Your challenge is to "repair" it, and make it suitable for publication as a letter to a newspaper.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I would also like you to do the language work on page 27 and the Review on pp 28 to 29.

Bye for now

Roger

An inspiring interview

Just thought you might be interested in reading and viewing this interview from Chile. I wasn't planning to talk about this, but on the basis of this story we could discuss issues like health and safety for workers in dangerous working conditions, or on whether what Manuel Gonzales says about desiny at the end of the interview could actually be true.

Thursday October 14th

Hi everyone,

This week he have only had one class if you come on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In today's class we started by reviewing the grammar and vocabulary homework. The vocabulary homework (from the book) mainly consisted of WORD FORMATION exercises. One of the things we noticed about word formation is the way in which the WORD STRESS often changes, depending on whether the word is a verb, adjective, noun or adverb, and in some cases which noun, verb or adjective it is, as some root words have several. Take RESPOND for example. How many diffirent words can you form from this root?

Then we looked at some photocopies I had made from the workbook. We did a couple of collocation exercises and a word building exercise. I suggested that you do the rest for homework.

After that we worked on the preparation work for the second of the two compositions from unit 1. This time it is a composition based on the CAE range of possible composition types, in this case a COMPETITION ENTRY. I suggested that you do either the one in the book or the one in the set of photocopies that I gave you: page 10 in the workbook.

More about word formation in a laterr post. In the meantime, have a good weekend.

How should student education be financed?

Mary Byrne climbs a step higher

Class work so far

Hi everyone,

Just a quick review of what we have done so far in the first week of the course.

We started looking at the book READY FOR CAE on the first day of class last Tuesday.

Within the topic "Aiming High", which is the name of the first unit in the book, we have been looking at vocabulary associated with challenges, ambitions, success and failure. We have also explored some of the vocabulary used for expressing the emotions we feel before embarking on an ambition and then after either succeeding or failing.


We then looked at the story of Laura Dekker, the 14 year-old Dutch girl who was forbidden (and then later permitted) to pursue her lifelong ambition to be the youngest ever single-handed round the world sailor.

We read the text on pages 8 to 9 of the book and looked at the procedure for CAE reading comprehension. Then we did some vocabulary work, and then some more language work from pages 10 and 11.

We also did the listening on page 12, and we then listened to a youtube clip showing an Irish woman (or an English man) who are on their way to fulfilling their dreams.

Homework or the week was the language work on pages 11 and 12, and on pages 13 and 14. I also asked you to write a letter to a newspaper expressing your opinion about whether Laura Dekker should have been allowed or forbidden to "follow her dream" at the age of 14, and about the implications of that decision for "age-limits" in general.

Our Advanced course

Hi everyone,

I am going to be your teacher on this course, hopefully until you take the exam in June. It is my intention to make all the technological and practical resources that I can available to you during the course of the year so that you stand the best possible chance of passing the exam, whenever you decide to do it. I thought that it might be fun, and helpful, to create a blog for our course. This blog will conceivably fulfil a number of purposes:

• suggesting possible discussion topics for class and making resources available to the others to "gem up" a bit on the subject before the discussion starts
• continuing discussions that we have started in class but haven't been able to finish because of time constraints
• I can use it to post messages to the whole class and information concerning what was covered in the last class.
• Sometimes students send me links to grammar resources, youtube clips, relevant websites which I then send to the rest of the class. The blog will be a quick and easy way of delivering these links.
• Etc. etc.

Obviously this will only work if there are at least a few people in the class who are putting things into it. I suggest that we try it out for a few weeks. If after that it dies a natural death, so be it. Your interest and needs are the only reason for keeping it going.

Do let me know what you think!

Roger