0 The history of the English language.

In this sunny Sunday afternoon a little bit of the History of the English Language.



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0 Apps to learn English

Good morning!

When you are learning a new language, it is extremely important to attend  lessons and study, but you have to take advantage of new technologies and be in touch with the language also when you are not studying or practicing with exercises.

Today I would like you to know three different applications for Android and Apple devices that will help you to improve your english:

English Conversation app
This application is for beginners and intermediate students. It is divided into different daily life conversation topics. Apart from this you can read the conversation at the same time if you want, so it is perfet to improve your listening skills, pronunciation and even vocabulary!.

English idioms and Business English idioms

Both apps are created to improve knowledge and use of idioms to sound more natural when speaking.

Fluent English

FluentEnglish will help you practice understanding native English speakers and increase your vocabulary. It works like an audio book reader and also provides translation for words that you don't understand. For better learning, it also provides pronunciations of each word in several different voices. To learn English with Fluentizer efficiently and to be able to use the dictionaries, your native language needs to be one of the following: Arabic, Armenian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, or Vietnamese. 
Note that some of the dictionaries and books are very large, so make sure you are on WiFi before downloading them.
We reserve the right to anonymously track and report a user's activity inside of our app, and technical parameters of the phone to help us fix the bugs. We don't collect any personal information.

0 FCE Exams I

Good morning!

Here we are again to keep improving and practicing the different skills needed to pass the first certificate exam.

Probably, the speaking test , together with the listening test are the hardest parts of the exam for most of the candidates, that's why today we are going to focus on these two papers first.

Speaking  

What’s in the Speaking paper?

The Cambridge English: First Speaking test has four parts and you take it together with another candidate. There are two examiners. One of the examiners conducts the test (asks you questions, gives you paper with things to talk about on it, and so on). The other examiner listens to what you say and takes notes.

Summary

Time allowed:	14 minutes per pair of candidates
Number of parts:	4
Marks:	20% total
You have to talk:	with the examiner with the other candidate on your own

Parts 1–4

Part 1 (Interview)

What's in Part 1?	Conversation with the examiner. The examiner asks questions and you may have to give information about yourself and talk about past experiences, present circumstances and future plans.
What do I have to practise?	Giving information about yourself and expressing your opinion about various topics.
How long do I have to speak?	3 minutes

Part 2 (Long turn)

What's in Part 2?	The examiner gives you a pair of photographs to talk about and you have to speak for 1 minute without interruption. As a reminder, the questions you have to answer about your photographs are written at the top of the page. When you have finished speaking, your partner has to answer a short question from the examiner about your photographs.
What do I have to practise?	Talking on your own about something: comparing, describing, expressing opinions.
How long do I have to speak?	1 minute per candidate

Part 3 (Collaborative task)

What's in Part 3?	Conversation with the other candidate. The examiner gives you some pictures and a decision-making task to do. You have to talk with the other candidate and make a decision.
What do I have to practise?	Exchanging ideas, expressing and justifying opinions, agreeing and/or disagreeing, suggesting, speculating, evaluating, reaching a decision through negotiation, etc.
How long do we have to speak?	3 minutes

Part 4 (Discussion)

What's in Part 4?	Further discussion with the other candidate about the same general topic area as the task in Part 3.
What do I have to practise?	Expressing and justifying opinions, agreeing and/or disagreeing.
How long do I have to speak?	4 minutes

(Information from www.cambridgeenglish.org)

Listening

In this part of the exam you have 4 different tasks. The Last one is a multiple choice exercise in which you will listen to a monologue or conversation of about three minutes. For each question, there will be three possible answers, but only one will be the correct.

Click HERE to practice.

Remember that the best is to practice with any type of exercise, not only with the kind of exercise it is found in the exam. So click HERE and HERE to practice wit two other exercises.ç


Use of English

One of the hardest parts of this paper is word formation. You can practice with the following exercises:

Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3

More exercises to practice soon!Keep "living in english"!!

0 FCE Exam

Good morning everyone

For those of you who are getting ready for the FCE exam, we will revise and practice today some of the

parts of the exam.

The more you practice, the sooner you will get used to the structure of the exam, but don't forget that the final aim is to be able to communicate!

The First Certificate of English exams consist of 5 parts, and you pass when you obtain the marks A, B or C.

The first part of the exam is Reading which is divided into three parts (30 questions) with different kinds of exercises for the texts. For the reading exercises you will have 60 minutes.

-Multiple choice text
-Gapped text: You have to fill in the gaps in a text with the given sentences. There is an extra sentence that you don't have to use.
-Multiple Matching.

Today you have here two examples of the "Gapped text" exercise:

Example 1 , Example 2.

Soon we will revise and practice the other two sections of the reading part.

For the Writing part you have 1 hour and 20 minutes to do the two tasks. The first one is a compulsory letter (formal or informal), whereas in the second part you choose from four options which may include: articles, reports, letters, application letters, stories, essays and reviews.

How is Writing assessed?
There are four assessment criteria for the writing tasks: Content, Communicative Achievement, 
Organisation and Language.
•Content focuses on how well you have completed the task, in other words, if you have 
 done what you were asked to do. 
•Communicative Achievement focuses on how appropriate the writing is for the task 
 (for example, is the style right for a magazine article?), and whether you have used the 
 right register, for example formal or informal.
•Organisation focuses on the way you put together the piece of writing, in other words, 
 if it’s logical and ordered.
•Language focuses on vocabulary and grammar. This includes the range of language as 
 well as how accurate it is.

Use of English

Tests your use of English with tasks that show how well you can control your grammar and vocabulary. You have 45 minutes to do the four different parts of this paper. (42 questions)

Parts 1 and 3 mainly test your  knowledge of vocabulary. Part 2 mainly tests your knowledge of grammar.  Part 4 tests both vocabulary and grammar, especially when paraphrasing.

Here you have two examples to practice two of the sections: Example


Keep an eye on our next posts  because we will keep revising and practicing the different parts of the exam.