Category Archives: Writing skill

Confusing Words

Speaking, The English language, Vocabulary, Word of the Day, Writing skill

Can you tell the difference between  farther and further or especially and specially? Do you know for certain when to use arrive in or arrive at?  Which one is American English at the weekend or on the weekend, math or maths? Is it think of, about, in or on?? Do you have problems using and/or pronouncing weigh, weighed and weight? You are pretty certain you know how to use boring and bored, but  does it work the same for stressed and stressing?  If these questions have raised serious doubts, then this post is for you. 🙂

Click on the picture if you want to go straight to the section

I sometimes have to remind my students  I’m not a walking dictionary !!  I honestly believe what makes a good teacher is not how many words  he knows in the dictionary or whether he knows a  given idiomatic expression. I don’t  think knowing what “stuck in a rut” means makes you a good  or a bad teacher. I firmly believe a good teacher is the one who loves his work and is able to transmit his love for what he does to  his students  and  is able to keep them motivated  whenever  they want to give up. I  have learned that being a good teacher is not teaching to those who want but to those who don’t.

Although initially English is not such a difficult  language to learn, it cannot be argued that for some students it is easier than for others. Take for example , a native speaker of Dutch or German  and a native speaker of Japanese or Russian. Obviously, German and Russian are closely related to English whereas  Japanese or Russian are completely unrelated so I’m sure   you can draw your  own conclusions in this matter.

Very often students tend to systematically makes mistakes with a given word either in its pronunciation or in the way it collocates with certain prepositions, adjectives …etc and we cannot forget here the issue of false friends which causes so many problems and, trust me,  sometimes funny misunderstandings, like in Spanish, the false friend “embarrassed ” and “pregnant”.

To help my students and readers of this blog overcome  these difficulties, I have created a new section in this bog called CONFUSING WORDS. I hope it’s helpful!

Six Wonderful Sites to Help you Write, Speak and Sound Better

Dictionaries, Phonetics, Resources, Speaking, Writing, Writing skill, , , ,

I’m not a native speaker. Even though I read, write, work and I would almost dare say live  and dream in  English, I haven’t learned the language from birth and sometimes have moments of self-doubt. These websites I am going to share in this post have been an invaluable help.

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♥Howjsay  and Forvo: The world’s largest dictionaries of English Pronunciation

How often have you come across a proper name you had no clue how to pronounce and you desperately needed to know the  correct standard  pronunciation of or perhaps  a variant pronunciation of this word?  Let’s say you want to know the pronunciation of the word “selion”. You go to the most important online dictionaries offering pronunciation, but the word you’re looking up is not there and you suddenly begin to panic. At this stage you can do three things: panic, pretend you know how to pronounce it ( you just know how to sound British, no problem there) or look up the word in any of these two amazing sites that have saved my skin countless times.

♥Linguee

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context

♥Phraseup

Sometimes we know what we want to write, the sentence is phrased in our mind, but we can’t figure out some of the words we need. This is where phraseup*comes in. It assists you with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words you can’t remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and translations to other languages.
Imagine you know there is an expression containing the words ” take” and “granted” but you have forgotten what goes in the middle, PhraseUp can help you here, too. Just type the words that you remember and put an asterisk * where you want the application to insert something. Very useful, isn’t it?

Or maybe  you want to use the verb+preposition combination “cope with” but you are just not sure which words it collocates with, just type it in PhraseUp and options will be provided.

♥Ozdic.com

I have been using ozdic.com for years and this is a dictionary I cannot live without. It is not any dictionary, it also help you to sound more natural when speaking or writing in English. Let’s  say you don’t know the preposition that collocates with the verb “insist”, or which adverbs sound  more natural with this verb; let’s imagine you need to use the word “idea” but you have no clue what adjective to use  apart from the overused “good “. Go to the dictionary now, this is just a sample of what you’ll find : bright, brilliant, clever, excellent,, marvellous | valuable, worthwhile | exciting, inspirational, interesting, stimulating | constructive, positive | absurd, bad, mistaken, ridiculous | , crazy, mad, outlandish, wild | half-baked | ambitious, big, grand.

The dictionary contains over 150,000 collocations for nearly 9,000 headwords and it is based on the 100 million word British National Corpus.

♥Text2Phonetics 

It is a wonderful tool that can save a lot of time if you need to transcribe something. I have tried it with small texts (two or three lines) and it’s incredible! You will be able to  pronounce a whole text perfectly .
Just paste the text you want to transcribe and click the Transcribe Button to get the transcription.

Both, None, Either and Neither

A word on Grammar, Grammar and Exercises, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Writing skill, , , , , , , ,

You know how it is. Once I start surfing the net I need to remind myself that I need to get some sleep. So, just last night I was about to call it a night when blog hopping, I “bumped into” this new tool which, though still in their beta version, has a lot of potential. Slidebean is a cloud-based platform that lets you create presentations for free, you only need to register and explore a bit.

EDITED* Slidebean is no longer free. The presentation is now displayed with Genial.ly

And as I was preparing a lesson for the Intermediate level about Conjunctions I decided to give it a go and  I don’t regret it. I think it has created a beautiful presentation out of a boring point of grammar. What do you think?

 

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A Formal Email

Grammar, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Vocabulary, Writing, Writing skill, , , , ,

I know it might be a tiny bit too late to be posting this but I’ve  just come across it and given that we are having the test on Monday/Tuesday I sort of hope the idea of visiting the blog crossed your mind and you are one of the lucky  who will be reading and doing the interactive exercises on the website where these snapshots have been taken from:      http://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/.

Scroll down their  page and make sure you do the following exercises

  • ♥Check your writing: indirect questions
  • ♥Check your writing . gap fill: Useful Phrases

Writing : A Narrative

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Students' Corner, Writing skill, , ,

I am sorry dear students. I know this post is long due, but as the saying goes ” better late than never”.

This is an activity I did with my intermediate classes  to do some writing practice in class. The activity was a tad demanding  because students needed to do some collaborative work, something they don’t very often do, and they also needed to include quite a few of the connectors displayed on the board ( picture below) and as many as possible of the pictures in the collage , also below, and all these ingredients put together  were supposed to produce a beautiful story to be  later displayed on the walls of the classroom for the students to read and vote for the best. The exercise was not an easy thing to do but they came up with some very funny stories, some of which  you’ll also find below.

TASK:

WRITING : A NARRATIVE

You are going to write a story beginning with sentence It was three o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. Look at the word cloud below and try to use most of the words in it. Then look at the collage of thirty pictures and include, at least, half the pictures in the collage

and these are some of their stories.

THE FAKE PRIEST

It was three o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. Immediately I got up and went to the police station because I work as a police officer.

Unfortunately, a young man dressed as a priest, with a large black cotton cassock had robbed a bank where two stunning tattooed punky girls had put the money they had obtained from a blackmail. On the other hand, the same fake priest had stolen a gold and diamond one-million-dollar ring. Fortunately, although he had a gun, nobody was injured.

The thief escaped in a cheap white Italian car. Yet, while he was in the runaway the car broke down so it was our opportunity to catch him. He was taken to the police station and he confessed he wanted the money to take a plane to a paradise island .Despite his confession, he was sentenced to do community service helping the elderly.

Finally it was 10 a.m. when I arrived home. In spite of the robbery it was a funny situation.


by Eloy, Paula and Estibaliz

A LONG NIGHT

It was three o’clock in the morning when the phone rang. My brother was calling me to tell me that his car had broken down and he was very nervous because the night was getting very dark and there was a heavy storm. Immediately, I woke up and dressed quickly. When I left the garage with my car, the street was very foggy and I had to drive very slowly, but fortunately soon the fog dissipated in the air and then I could drive calmly. Half an hour later l saw my brother’s car and the storm. He was inside the car and I asked him If he had called the police and in spite of the fact that his car had stopped one hour and a half before he hadn’t called the police yet. While my brother was talking with them I heard a strange sound but I did not worry about this yet.

Suddenly a few excited dogs appeared in the middle of the road. I managed to get into the car. On the contrary, my brother didn’t and he was bitten by one of the dogs. In this moment, the police´s car arrived and when they saw the condition my brother was in , they decided to carry him to hospital. When I arrived there and my brother was being treated. A few hours later I took him to his house and I went to mine. Nevertheless, the drama had not finished yet, because the door was open and there was a light on the second floor. I was scared and called the police… again. “It´s going to be a long night”. I thought.

By Sonia and Laura


and finally


IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

It was three o’ clock in the morning when the phone rang. It was my brother. He looked very worried. I asked him what was wrong and he answered that our father was in hospital and I had to come as fast as possible, so I called a taxi and when I arrived the doctor told me that, fortunately, he wasn’t injured at all, so he was OK.

Immediately, I met my brother and I asked him what had happened.

“I was having dinner with my fiancée, in fact, we were making plans about our wedding trip. However, the restaurant was very busy, so we decided to go for a walk. It was a warm night, yet it was cloudy and a bit rainy. Suddenly, we heard a gunshot, and dogs barking in front of the cinema. In spite of the fact that we were scared, we went to see what was wrong and we saw one person with an object (I don’t know what it was, I think it was a knife) in his hand and another person who was lying down in the street: daddy! Although the mugger could hear us, we called the police. We couldn’t see the criminal very well, but I believe he looked like a punk. Even though the police and the ambulance came very fast, the mugger disappeared and at the moment, he’s being sought. We carried our father to the ambulance. On the one hand, the ambulance was quick; on the other hand, there was a big traffic jam. And that’s all.”

At the end, our father stayed in hospital two days and now he’s like he was before the mugging… What a night!

By Alba and Noelia.

Thank you guys. Nice stories!