Cambridge First

Essay Writing: Writing a thesis statement

A look at how to write a thesis statement in the opening paragraph of an essay.

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Splendid Speaking podcast – ‘Reaching agreement’

Here is a recording from www.splendidspeaking.com which illustrates how to reach agreement in collaborative tasks:

http://www.splendid-speaking.com/learn/podcasts/int8.html

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100th Post

This is my 100th post on this blog, and I feel this is a good occasion to thank all the people who have visited this site and shown interest in what I have published here. I hope you have found it useful.

thank you for your attention

How to write a good essay

This is a video which explains how to write an essay one step at a time. Very useful for our students.

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The History of Valentine’s Day: FCE Word Formation Style!

Here’s a topical exercise for your FCE class this week:

http://busyteacher.org/14720-the-history-of-valentines-day-fce-word-formation.html

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Dominic Cole’s IELTS and Beyond | A blog to help self-access language learners

A very complete site, packed with information. Well worth a visit.

http://www.dcielts.com/

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Practise Your English Speaking Skills: Help with BEC, BULATS, CAE, CPE, IELTS and other English exams

http://www.splendid-speaking.com/

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Useful Speaking Activities for Advanced Students

Splendid Speaking gives the reader a wealth of speaking activities designed for the more advanced student.

For an example, click on the following link:

http://www.splendid-speaking.com/products/wotd/index.html

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This week’s speaking activity:Numbers biography

This is a useful activity to get the students practising asking questions.

The teacher writes five numbers on the board and explains that each number is related in some way to something significant in his / her life. The students have to find out what each number relates to by asking yes/ no questions to the teacher. If the question is correctly formed, the teacher answers, if not, the student is encouraged to try to correct the question with the help of the rest of the class.

Once the students have guessed the teacher’s numbers, each student takes a turn with a number related to their own life, which the other students try to guess.

To give an idea of the type of numbers you can use, here are the ones I usually give to my students:

1 – The number of sisters I have

2 – The date of my birthday (2nd December)

22 – The number of years I have been living in Madrid

33 – The number of my house

1989 – The year I graduated

(I include the year so that the students practise reading years)

A variation of this activity is the ‘Padlock combination’. In this game, you give the students three numbers, explaining that these form the combination of a padlock which protects a secret message for them (or some other form of prize). One of the numbers is an important number, as above, one is the number of times you do something in a week and the final one is the number of a certain thing you have. In this way the students not only practise yes / no questions, but also questions with ‘How often …’ and ‘How many…’

My thanks to Nina Lauder for these suggestions.