4 Reading web page

Good afternoon!

With this freezing weather, maybe you want to stay at home this weekend, with a hot coffee sitting on the sofa of your cosy and warm living room.

Why don't you read in English while you are having your hot coffee? I have already told you in class the infinite advantages of reading if you want to improve your English production, that's why today I want to share with you a web page that would help you

Go to awesomestories.com to discover and love reading.

See you in class!

0 Future Part I

Hello!

As I promised, here you have some exercises to practice the future tense, but this is only the beginning, soon we will see some other structures to talk about future.
Remember to review theory and  check your email before you do the exercises.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

If you want to check different posts about future in this blog click here and here.

See you in class!

0 Developing pronunciation

When you work and revise at home is extremely important to check the pronunciation of the words and expressions that you are learning, so here you have some pages that could be useful

IVONA (there is also an app available for Android smartphones)

If you want to check phonetic transcription:
www.photransedit.com

Learn English!
Live in English!

0 Improve your writing

Good morning!

Writing is an important part of exams but sometimes is difficult to practice out of the classroom context, because you need some kind of feedback to keep on improving.

For this reason, I would like to talk today about a Cambridge web page that provides feedback for your writings.

Write & Improve is a Cambridge web page (still BETA version) mainly for B1 and B2 students, which provides immediate feedback for your writings. They provide different kinds of tasks that you may  find in a Cambridge exam and they don't just correct mistakes, but also make suggestions on how you could improve your writing.

Here you have a video that explains how it works.

No more excuses!Start today!

0 Present simple vs Present continuous

Hello!

To differentiate between present simple and present continuous you have to pay attention to adverbs (always, often, now etc.) because they help you to recognize the tense you need.

To review theory about this topic you can have a look at this page

Now, let's practice!This is the best way to learn!

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercises to practice present simple, past simple and present continuous.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

0 The history of the English language.

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



View Larger Image and Get the Embed Code to Add This Infographic to Your Site.

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.

2 Prepositions of time (AT, IN, ON)

Hi little monsters!

Prepositions are words that link or match nouns, pronouns or phrases to other words in a sentence. This

relation usually shows time, place, direction, instrument, etc.

Here you have a presentation to review prepositions of time (AT; IN; ON)

And some exercises to practice on this link.


See you ON Wednesday!

0 Present simple and frequency adverbs

Hello everyone!

Let's have a look at the present simple and frequency adverbs. Remember that we use frequency adverbs to say how often we do an activity and we use present simple to talk about habits and routines.

Here you can remember the theory and here you can practice.

And now a short video!

Hope you find it useful and good luck with your exams!

0 Another useful page?

Today I want to tell you about Postcrossing


This webpage is wonderful to practice your wrting skills in real situations because you can send and receive postcards from all over the world for free.

Register now and start meeting new people!

0 Useful pages

Hi!

Hoy os traigo dos paginas más que os pueden ser muy útiles.

La primera es Howjsay : Aunque en muchos diccionarios online podéis escuchar como se pronuncian las palabras que buscáis, este diccionario es exclusivo de pronunciación.

La segunda pagina de la que os quiero hablar es News in levels en la que podéis acceder a las mismas noticias con diferentes grados de dificultad. ¡Perfecto para practicar reading!

Os las dejo a la derecha en el apartado de Useful pages. ¡Espero que os sean útiles!

0 Present simple

Hello everyone!

Now you can use the present simple to talk about habits and general facts. Have a look at this video!

Remember how to form the 3rd person singular!

And now some exercises to practice!

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

See you in the Halloween party!

0 Friday I'm in love

Hello everyone!

Today you can listen to this beautiful song to review the days of the week. Enjoy!

(Si pinchais en review, os lleva a la traducción de la palabra ;) )

2 Back to work!

Hello!
 This is a special message for my 1NBD students: I am very happy to be with you this year, and I hope we all enjoy the lessons. In this blog you can find extra material if you have time.

It's time to start working, so here you have a song to remember the alphabet.

0 Important Information Certificate Exam

Hello

This message is for 3ºC!!
You can download the instructions for the certificate exam HERE. We will talk about this in class tomorrow, but please download the document "Guía del Candidato para las Pruebas Unificadas de Certificación" and read it.

0 Conditionals

Hello!

As I told you, you can now practice conditionals at home with some interesting links.

First, in this video you have a review and an exercise. You can download the exercise in this LINK if you prefer to print it.

HERE you have some theory comparing ZERO conditional, and 1st conditional, and a small introduction of  Second conditional that we will see tomorrow in class.

More theory

More exercises:
Statements

Negations

Multiple choice exercise

Fill in exercise


See you tomorrow!

0 EXAMS

Hello Everyone!


Click in this link to download the dates of the exam in June and in September

0 Learning with songs

Beautiful song to practice your English!

CLICK HERE to listen to the song and chose the level of dificulty

If you like practicing English with songs, with pages as Lyricstraining or Lyricsgaps as you already know, now you have an app for your Android Smartphone

Click HERE to download and install  LyricsTap (lite). Here you have the description (is in Spanish, sorry)

Descripción

Entrena tu cerebro con música para mejorar tus habilidades con otros idiomas.

LyricsTap es un juego muy sencillo que consiste en completar la letra de las canciones agudizando el oído para seleccionar en el orden correcto las palabras de cada frase según aparecen en pantalla, mientras que escuchas la canción y disfrutas del vídeo musical.

LyricsTap también tiene un modo especial KARAOKE que te permitirá cantar y disfrutar plenamente de la letra de tus canciones favoritas.

LYRICSTAP Y EL APRENDIZAJE DE IDIOMAS
LyricsTap es una manera ideal de aprender y mejorar tus habilidades con otros idiomas.

LyricsTap te ayuda a aprender nuevo vocabulario y expresiones, y a reforzar conceptos gramaticales por medio del ejercicio continuo de selección de palabras en el orden correcto.

Pero sobre todo, LyricsTap te ayudará a entrenar tu oído para mejorar drásticamente tu capacidad para reconocer los sonidos y palabras de una lengua extranjera en muy poco tiempo, capacitando casí de manera inconsciente a tu cerebro, da igual que conozcas o no el significado de todas las palabras.

Estudios recientes han demostrado que la simple exposición a los sonidos de otro idioma forma en nuestro cerebro las estructuras y conexiones necesarias para su aprendizaje.

La música además de ser un medio divertido de aprender, permite escuchar diferentes acentos y pronunciación lo que dará mayor flexibilidad a nuestra capacidad para reconocer los diferentes patrones sonoros de otra lengua.

Esto es muy diferente de los típicos ejercicios de listening de las clases de idiomas, donde la pronunciación es demasiado perfecta, lo que no es del todo práctico en un entorno real.

LyricsTap es también una manera entretenida de aprender la letra de tus canciones favoritas.

Los idiomas soportados en esta versión son: Inglés, Francés, Alemán, Italiano, Portugués y Holandés.

SOLO EN LA VERSIÓN GRATUITA
El tiempo de juego en la versión gratuita está limitado.

Comprando la versión completa contribuirá a mejorar el juego y ampliar nuestro catálogo de canciones.