(Avanzado 1) 78 differences

Scientists decoding the human genome have discovered that just 78 genes separate men from women. Only 78?
So Europe is a country and they speak French there, says the bimbo. No wonder then that women can’t read maps, or… can they? But, mind you, men can’t do two things at the same time, can we?
If you want to read a light-hearted research into the genetic differences between women and men make sure you check out this page, which features some brilliant entries by readers. Then send in your comment either saying which remark was the funniest or feel free to contribute by giving some other differences that you think haven’t been mentioned in the article.
For some fun, be sure to check out this video. It features some just slightly different habits when it comes to having a shower.

Are we really like that at all? Next time I have a shower I’ll refrain myself from doing those things I usually indulge in…and you’d better, too.
Bye, lads and lasses.

Posted in Avanzado 1, Gender, Men, Women | 29 Comments

(Avanzado 1) London Calling!

London Calling to the faraway towns…said The Clash. London is calling and we’re just going on a trip. Collect the few quid you managed to save the last time, rehearse your cockney accent, as we’re off.
The only thing we’re going to do today is plan our trip. Some of you will look for accomodation- What do students prefer? A hostel? A low-budget hotel? Some Bread & Breakfast?
Some will watch out for bargains so we can fly cheaper- Easy Jet? Ryanair? British Airways? Where from? And how are we going from Luton/Stansted/Heathrow to central London?
Some others will schedule-are we going sightseeing? Just go and hit the bars? Zoos? Museums? A musical perhaps? A stroll in a park? Shopping in a market? Or rather Harrod’s? Do you want to see David Beckham in wax at Madame Tussaud’s? The London Eye?
To make things easier, visit London.
To put things in common, we’re going to chat so you can make instant decisions. Don’t think it over and make up your mind, as we’re running out of time.
To finish today’s activity, this is the homework:
You have to answer a few questions and facts about London. Go to this webquest and follow the instructions. Who will manage to find all the answers? Solutions next day in class.

See you!

Posted in Avanzado 1, Chat, London, Webquest | 12 Comments

(Avanzado 2) I love to read


If you’re into reading (not much, I presume sadly…) one of the things that you might do to improve your skills is make the most of the possibilities that the Internet offers. Too skint to afford that thick book you were craving for, desperate to find out what happens? Not willing to waste any more money on books?
Well, you’re not likely then to read the latest fiction but if you just want to read for the sake of it, because it broadens your mind and to learn more English, these are a few websites where you can either download books in pdf. format or else read them online or even get them in e-format if you happen to be one of those early adopters who buy the latest gadget, the newest in-thing, and you have one of those e-book readers that -I foresee- one day will take over paper books, then a relic of the past.
Freebookspot is an online source of free e-books download. You can search and download free books in categories like scientific, engineering, programming, fiction and many other books. No registration is required to download free e-books.
Free-eBooks is an online source for free e-books, you also download free magazines or submit your own e-book. You need to become a Free-EBooks.Net member to access their library. Registration is free, though. You can read Moby Dick by Herman Melville or some Dickens too.
ManyBooks provides free ebooks for your PDA, iPod or eBook Reader. Why not read Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë? This novel is a must! Of course you can find Jane Austen too. And if you’re an anticapitalist you can handle The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels…
Planet PDF A small collection of classic novels all in PDF format. You’ve got some Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Oscar Wilde, D.H. Lawrence. Ever heard of them? Classics of British and American Literature they are!
Planet eBook -Free classic literature to download and share. You can read 1984 by George Orwell (Big Brother is watching you!) or Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (don’t even think for a second it’s a book for children, even though you probably read one adaptation when you were little.)

Scribd is just a bit different. It’s actually an online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats. You can download a document, a slideshow, a book or anything that someone has just uploaded to share with the rest of the world. You need to register to have access to the materials, but it’s free. Try typing down, for example, English Advanced Grammar in Use in the Search box and hey presto! What d’you get? 350 pages of free grammar practice.
You might also be interested in Audiobooks. If reading is such a drag just prick up your ears for the words of well-known fiction writers while you’re commuting or gone for a jog or a stroll down the park. I’ll be supplying you with some stuff next…
That’s all.

‘I love to read’ photograph by Carlos Porto. See his gallery at flickr

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

(Avanzado 1) Elllo elllo, you say elllo I say goodbye…

Actually The Beatles said Hello, Goodbye, but they might as well wanted to use this terrific website that I came across a couple of years ago, just by chance, probably browsing through the web expecting to find something else.
The page is called elllo (it stands for English Language Listening Laboratory Online) and offers a wide array of listenings, ranging from interviews to listening games. It is probably the best website for improving your listening skills, in my opinion.
I have just prepared a screencast to show you about how it works and the contents you will find there. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I think you are clumsy when it comes to dealing with computers, it’s just in case you are one of those who say that computers ‘don’t love you’. If after watching the screencast you still don’t know how to use the page, you’re in for trouble in this increasingly technological world…
You’ll see a slideshow embedded below. Just watch it. You’d better change to the Full Screen mode so you can read my notes. Eer, yes, if you’re one of those the full screen is the icon with the arrows…
Then send a comment for feedback- what do you think about the page? Did you like it? Did you do a lot of listenings? You’ll have to anyway, as I’ll tell you to do some homework about it quite often from now on.

Clear? Then you know what to do next…
See you in class! You say elllo, I say goodbye, elllo elllo…

Posted in Avanzado 1, Listening | 7 Comments

(Avanzado 1) A turning point

For some gossip…ok, here’s my turning point (roughly): When I was living in England after university I broke up with my girlfriend, a girl I had been going out with for…wow, it must have been six years or so!!! I felt miserable, honest.
If I hadn’t broken up with that former girlfriend of mine I would probably have stayed in Britain longer. Not that I was having the best of times, broken-hearted as I was, but I’d probably tried to make up for the time I’d lost with some girls I had developed a crush for…Anyway, I decided to come back sooner than expected. If I hadn’t come back, I could have met someone back in England. If I’d fallen in love again, I might have looked for a job to earn my living. If I’d started working there, I’d have started looking for a flat to live and perhaps I would even have got married there, and my children would have had red hair and freckles.
But…well, I would never have met you! Sob, sob…
Can you send in a post about a turning point in your life which made it be different from what it used to be before? Something that make you start all over again?
Another thing to do is: There is an interesting dilemma faced by the main character in a film. There is a little girl who gets kidnapped, but she is taken to live in a much better home than her own (her mother is out doing drugs all the time). Patrick, the lead character, finds out about who took her and is the only who knows where she is. He then has to decide whether to turn the kidnapper in and get justice, or keep quite and give the girl what might be a better life. What would you have done?
That’s all. Send your comments!

Posted in (Avanzado 1) 3rd Conditional | 21 Comments

(Avanzado 2) The art of displacement

You might as well have been practicing the flip, the roll, the tuck and strange body movements. Not that free running is popular in Pamplona…yet, so you might become the pioneers.
As you noticed the other day in class, the DVD player was going a bit haywire. I’ve just been checking the DVD at home and it just worked great. That means it wasn’t really my fault (you know I’m a tech-freak). Just in case today 20/Jan we can’t possibly watch the video again, here’s the homework: just follow this link and then do the listening exercises that I gave you out the other day.
For some jaw-dropping, awesome performances, just watch this video.

Can you beat that?
See you in class…

Posted in (Avanzado 2) Freerunning, Listening | 2 Comments

(Avanzado 1 &2) I elfed myself

Cor Blimey, it’s Christmas again! Doesn’t time fly? Not that I like Christmas that much or I’m dying to get the tinsel or the mistletoe wreath, but just for a bit of fun and to wish you a merry Christmas and a Happy New Year you might as well have a laugh at these triplets on the dance floor. Mind you, one of them is more like the Grinch, what with that face…
Enjoy your holidays and I’ll see you after Christmas. Any New Year’s Resolutions, e.g. little lies, like “I’m going to study English!”?
See you!

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Posted in Avanzado 1, Avanzado 2, Christmas | 21 Comments

(Avanzado 1) Too old for rock'n'roll, too young to die

That’s the title of a song by Jethro Tull, a 70s group. Do you feel you’re too old for some things and too young for others?
Well, to know (roughly) how old you will be, this website has a life expectancy calculator that will work out yours after answering questions about your health and lifestyle. The vocabulary may be a bit difficult so if you need to, use a dictionary.When you get the results, check what the website suggests you could do to improve your life expectancy. Then, send a comment into the blog telling the others about how old you’re supposed to turn and some advice they gave you to live longer.
And going back to the title of the post, these people below are probably not too young to die, but they’re certainly not too old for rock’n’roll! Watch them sing a cover of The Who’s “My generation” and ask yourself if you expect you’ll be doing these things when you are their age!!! What do you think you are too old or too young to do? Dancing to pop music in public? Have babies? Start it all over again? Get drunk? Settle down? Watch or read comics? Do you feel a bit embarrassed because you like doing things which are not considered suitable for your age? Tell your partners.
See you after the loooooooooooooooong bank holidays, when we’ll all be a bit older.

Posted in (Avanzado 1) Getting old | 19 Comments

(Avanzado 1& 2) Like peas in a pod…cast

If you missed one of the Friday classes (you probably did, as only a few of you turned up) you didn’t hear about podcasts, a portmanteau -some people think- of the words Ipod (Apple’s sleek mp3 player) and broadcast. Some others, however, claim that’s wrong and podcast comes from the acronym p.o.d. (public on demand) + cast. A podcast is…well, you’d rather watch this video to find out.

Where can you find the podcasts? Probably the best way to download, subscribe to and manage episodes is iTunes. If you haven’t got it yet and want to download it you can do it here.
If you are experiencing problems or you’re not exactly what I’d call tech-freak, watch this video for troubleshooting.
If you want to browse through the wide array of podcasts available to you, you can either-

1.Once you’ve downloaded and installed iTunes, go to the Podcasts directory and search for the category you’re after. Choose one episode of a podcast to download the programme or, if you really like it so much, subscribe. Problems? If so, watch this video. Otherwise, you might as well skip it.
2.You can also go to some websites which function as search engines for podcasts. Take, for example, Podcast Alley. You can also go to the site and listen to it online, with streamed audio and/or video if you’re not interested in subscribing yet.
3.There are also some directories with podcasts specially created for teaching English as a second language. Probably the best is Englishcaster. The good thing here is that you can choose the contents and they’re sorted out by levels, target audience, type of accent…

Even though your teacher’s explanation has been outstanding -or… hasn’t?, do not hesitate to ask him if you can’t make head or tail of it and you’re stuck.
What do you have to do? Homework (or rather, not more homework, this is fun) for next week is- choose only one of the podcasts you’ve been listening to and fill in the questions in the file I should already have given out. Do not feel disappointed if you find it difficult, think that some of the podcasts are programmes for native speakers! Choose one that you find suitable, prick up your ears and enjoy yourself.

To finish, why don’t you give this one a listen (I’ll be watching out for giggles, I’m warning you) then think it over and come to class with a few tips or suggestions?

If you want to check how this audio file looks on a website, you might want to check it here.

That’s all, peas in the pod.

Posted in Avanzado 1, Avanzado 2, Podcasts | 5 Comments

(Avanzado 1 & 2) Sing along, it's the jukebox!


If you’re a teacher, it’s always difficult to choose which song it is that you students will listen to and some of you, barely a few maybe, will even like it!!! You know that I play some music in the background while you’re doing some of the activities (for details look out for information and the regular update on the sidebar, at the bottom of the blog-What was the music in last week’s class? section), but I’ll also play some songs throughout the year because:
a-They’re in the book (don’t expect much, though, be warned)
b-I can exploit the lyrics to practise vocabulary or grammar we’re dealing with in the lesson. Not easy but sometimes a song is clearly about crime, fashion, or whatever, or else there is a lot of passive sentences or phrasal verbs or 2nd conditionals and teachers can use it in class for practice.
But have another look at the title of the post-What is a jukebox, anyway? An old-fashioned gadget that allows to choose with a flick of the finger what to listen to next. Like every year, I’ve made up my mind that we’re going to listen to some songs just for fun, for the sake of listening to songs in English, and that… is your part.
You have to choose the song (if possible) and/or artist (if you just can’t decide, you like so much all of his/her/their stuff) you want to listen to in classes. You will have to write a post into the blog about your suggestions. I will check for feedback so that by the end of next week, hopefully, I should have a whole lot of ideas and songs you want me to play.
That’s the homework- a collection of students’ all-time favourites, that catchy tune you have never been able to get out of your head, that song they were playing when you were lucky to pick up a girl/boy, those lyrics that your poor English prevented you from understanding and always wanted to know what they were saying… Just anything.
Bear i
n mind, though, that we’ll be playing one song every other week or so, that makes a total of about 12 songs altogether. That means you’ll have to make up your mind which your definite request is going to be, as only those songs/artists which are most valued by the other students will go into the final selection and be played in class.
Do not forget to write your name (complete with the surname, please), level, and this time the group you belong to, because it might happen that one group chooses different songs from another. Your post should resemble something like this: your name, level Avanzado 1, Group M., my song for the jukebox is…If you want to tell the others why that song is so special, please do.
And that’s it. DJ Carl is ready to play your tunes.

Posted in Avanzado 1, Avanzado 2, Songs | 38 Comments