Boost your vocabulary in 5 minutes a day!

This is a really cool website for boosting your vocabulary in a few minutes a day by reading interesting short stories taken from the press. In each story key words are highlighted and defined under the text.There's also an option for listening to the text read by a native speaker.

http://tinytexts.wordpress.com/

Great video website for developing your listening skills

I've just hit upon this cool website for practising your listening using authentic video clips - well worth checking out. They've got tonnes of great video content (songs, film trailers, educational talks and more), all organised by level. As you can see from the screen shot below, each clip comes with a series of questions to test your understanding as you watch. Have a go and post a comment to let me know what you think!

http://www.eslvideo.com/

Quick quiz to test you on 'most' and 'almost'

      How many of the following sentences are grammatically accurate? Post a comment saying which ones are good and correcting the wrong ones - first three correct posts will get three House Points : )

Some of my students were having problems with 'most' and 'almost'...

Both of these come from Practical English Usage by Michael Swan

Another quick quiz

Complete the adjectives in these questions with either '-ed' or 'ing'. The first person to post a comment with all 10 correct can collect 4 House Points from me next week.

1. What's the most interest.... city you've ever visited?

2. What's the most bor.... film you've ever seen?

3. What's the most terrify.... thing you've ever done?

4. Are you tir.... at the moment?

5. What's the most shock.... news you've heard in the last few days?

6. What's the most disgust.... thing you've ever eaten?

7. At which time of day do you generally feel most relax....?

8. What's the most embarrass.... thing you've ever done?

9. When was the last time you felt excit....about something?

10. What's the most worry.... thing about being a teenager?

Also, anyone who sends me a 20+ second 'Jing' clip of themselves answering one of the questions can get an extra 4 House Points for doing that!

Have a good weekend! 

Don't 'Google' it - 'Buzzle' it!

Have you ever been asked to research something by one of your teachers and when you put the topic into Google, what you get back is pages and pages of stuff that's really hard to understand? Well, here's an alternative you might find much more user-friendly.

It's called 'Buzzle'... and it has more than 5000 articles

but they're all neatly organised into just 18 categories:

the search engine on the site is powered by Google, so it works really well.  The articles are relatively short, normally very well-written and often come with pictures or other graphics so the results you get back from searches are easier to read than what Google would give you. 

www.buzzle.com 

Commonly confused words no.3: 'forget' and 'leave'

So from now on tell me 'I've left my book at home'! not 'I've forgotten...' or better still- bring your book! ; )

For 7V (or anyone interested in zoos)

A really well-written piece here about the pros and cons of zoos- could be very useful for your essays!

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-zoos.html

Don't forget to leave a comment to let me know what you think (or just to tell me you've read it!)

A quick quiz....

I'll give 3 House Points to the first person to 'comment' with the correct answer to this:

How many of the 10 verbs below can be followed by the preposition about (and you have to way which ones they are too)

e.g. we say we talked about the problem but we don't say we understand about  the problem (we say we understand the problem - no preposition)

1. discuss
2. consider
3. debate
4. think
5. revise
6. review
7. gossip
8. (dis)agree
9. introduce
10. argue

The correct answers were: 
-think
-gossip
-(dis)agree
-argue

Congratulations to Minh Anh in 9I for being the first one with the right answers - see me for your House Points!

Here's another pair of words I often see / hear mixed up

How do I know what vocabulary to learn?

The short answer to this question is 'it depends what you want to do'. For most of you, one of the main reasons (if not the main reason) for learning English is to be able to study effectively in your second language at school, college and university. And your studies will naturally require you to read, write and listen to a lot of 'academic language'. But what is academic English? It's partly about the grammar we use in essays and textbooks, and partly about how we organise our writing. But it's also very much about the vocabulary we use in this kind of writing.


What would really help would be if someone could tell us what the most common words found in academic English are.... Luckily for us, someone has done exactly that!


The list is called the 'Academic Word List' and I think it might be one of the most important resources you'll ever find for helping you get on in your studies.


Watch this video for more info:


http://screencast.com/t/csn3WjGBH9Ed

Alternatively, follow this link straight to the list:

•http://www.englishvocabularyexercises.com/AWL/#what