L / R: Useful Lang

Listening/Reading: Useful Language

Please, share some of the useful phrases (chunks of sentences) or sentences you jot down from your listening work! Remember to share in class, too! Everybody should share one sentence at least every day, OK? 🙂

Here are the Projects 2016-17 C1 students worked on. Thanks so much for sharing this good work!

Post where you will find all the projects people worked on in October 2016

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From Oct to December 2016

Based on listening work. Every month students bring a list of their highlights of what they learned/learnt from listening to English outside the classroom, which should include language they fished from TV series, movies, documentaries, podcasts, old textbook audios, conversations…

Optional: Students create scripts of Useful Language for podcast episodes for the segment called “Everyday Language” at the Talking People Podcast. Another option is for different teams of students to prepare the acting out of a scene each month.

See Course Basics in About this course, Listening log

Short stories

• October: The Debutante, by Leonora Carrington (TP Podcast)
• November: A PRIVATE EXPERIENCE in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing around Your Neck”

Based on listening and reading work. Each student or group of students should prepare an activity about a story they read every month. Check out the Talking People Podcast to listen to a few. Don’t read them till you listen first, to develop your listening skill. Then read and listen to the one you choose to learn. You have to listen to the story every day and learn it by ear by heart if you like!

• Each student needs to be able to re-tell the story: plot summary +
• give their opinion about it (feelings, ideas, reasons) and
• share vocabulary work
• EXTRA: learning about the author, her country, or the events narrated in her stories when non-fictional

But students can work in groups, to maximize the importance of individual work and use that to construct a large whole. So after you’ve read the stories, ask in class who wants to work on which and form teams.

The News Project. From January 2017 on

Every month some students will share with us an article or piece of news from TV, radio, or the press, and then we will hold a classroom discussion or create activities based on that material (designing a Reading or Listening Comprehension exercise, or a Speaking or Writing exercise).

LANGUAGE FROM LITERATURE. EXAMPLES HOW TO WORK ON VOCABULARY & EXPRESSIONS IN OUR READING MATERIALS

Don’t look up all of the words, if you don’t understand many. Select a few and work like this: word + definition + example of its use in the text.

Example: Vocabulary from an excerpt from “Americanah” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

1. stately – impressive in appearance
   Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
2. abiding – unceasing
   Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.
3. musty – covered with or smelling of mold
   Philadelphia had the musty scent of history.

• Orange is the New Black (ideas for exploiting work on the memoir)
• OITNB_01 Learning from Books (4 pdf pages) – OITNB_01 (word)
• Learning Language from Literature – Calpurnia
• langfromlit_pif (this is now a card in the C1 Resource Pack)
• lit_pif_00_01 (this is now a card in the C1 Resource Pack)
• lit_WorksheetPayItForward
• USEFULVOCABULARY_DISABILITY by Cristina (C1, 2015-16)