Thursday, May 31, 2012

Practising for reading exams

Here you have some cloze tests to work with:

For the exercise of True and False you have this one:
To practise with reading tests in general here you have a page with graded exercises:

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Improving your speaking

To improve the way you speak you should practise as much as possible but we can't count on native speakers to work with so try to do it with your mates, friends and so on. The other way is to practise on your own; in that case use a recorder and speak for at least 3 minutes about the topic. Once you've finished, listen to what you've just done and then correct your performance by yourself: entonation, speed, blanks, vocabuary, structures, richeness and variety and so on.

Monday, May 28, 2012

Improving your writing

Here you have some links to improve your writing. The most typical mistakes are connected to spelling, structures and even the lay-out:




Tuesday, May 22, 2012

A video about pronunciation

In this domestic video you can see a girl who "teaches" tyou haow to sound British. Quite interesting but a bit long but it deals wth the principal differences comparing English accents. Go to this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI2m1CXCwQY&feature=g-vrec

Preparing the certificate exmans


Here you have all the sites you can use to prepare the exams. You should look for the language and your level within the page. I hope this will help you a little:


Web pages for learning or practising English

The following are some websites that may help you with your process of learning English in a more autonomous manner. I found them at EOI Salamanca and I think they could be useful for you. Let me encourage to check them out in order to see which ones are best for you, althoygh there are many you've already known because we've use them in class or on the blog.
National Public Radio (US) http://www.npr.org
BBC (UK) http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/index.shtml
CBC (Canada) http://www.cbc.ca
Dave’s ESL Café http://eslcafe.com/
English for Internet  http://www.study.com/
The Internet Public Library http://ipl.org/
Grammar and Writing http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
Agenda Web http://www.agendaweb.org
English at Home http://www.english-at-home.com
E.L. Easton’s Page http://eleaston.com
Learn English – British Council http://britishcouncil.org/learnenglish
BBC Skills Wise http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise
Curso inglés http://www.curso-ingles.com
World English  http://www.world-english.org
English learner http://www.englishlearner.com
Auto English http://autoenglish.org
English exercises online http://www.smic.be/smic5022
Vaughan radio station http://www.vaughanradio.com
Online dictionary http://www.wordreference.com
Videos and games http://www.eslvideo.com
Others:
http://www.learning.english.com
http://better-english.com
http://manythings.org
http://mansioningles.com
http://englishclub.com
http://a4esl.org
http://englishaquarium
http://letssingit.com
http://www.stuff.co.uk/english.htm
http://www.esl-lab.com

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Revision of prepositions + ---ing form

Here you have some exercises to work with preposition  + -ing form:

If you want to revise more prepositions, go to these links which work on adjective + preposition:

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Official exams in Asturias

These are the certificate exams of Asturias. Have a look and try to practise with them but remember they could be differente from the ones we've got in Madrid.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Relative clauses

It's very important for intermediate students to use relative clauses properly so here you have some links to help you to revise this grammar point. You can go to:

See you in class

Crime and punishment

Here you have some exercises to work with this topic, just in case you want to practise some more:
Let me remind you the vocabulary you have in your own textbook and about the grammar point of this lesson you can use th entry of gerund and infinitive.

Indirect speech

This is a point of grammar that many students understand as an exercise to translate direct speech into indirect speech. Although this is a good way of learning I must say it's useless if you don't understand that it's much more frequent in our common language than we could think and not just a grammar exercise.
We use indirect speech to rephrase what you or other people have said before, especially in sentences or situations such as this one:
Yesterday I phoned my mother to ask her what she wanted to do for her birthday and she said she didn't fancy doing anything special but I suggested going to a new African restaurant. She accepted the suggestion and asked me if I could organise everything and I said I'd do it as soon as I could. She reminded me to call my brother Peter but I asked her to do it herself. She agreed and said she'd do it that afternoon. 
If you want to work with this grammar point you can use these websites:



Remember you can find some more exercises on your own on the internet. See you in class.

Thursday, May 10, 2012

Complaining about shopping - complaint letters

When you go shopping sometimes you've got problems what you've bought so you should complain about your purchase. Here you have a video explaining what you should do in Great Britain:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=cz4ThDI0Qu8 : a listening about what to do when you buy something and you have a problem: how to complain, what to do, etc.


A very common way of complaining is by writing a letter or sending an email. Here you have very good pages to teach you how to write it with templates or samples:


How to write a complaint letter: very good page with the structure of the letter and some examples of each part and of the whole letter. http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/eiw/complaint_letter_constructor.htm
Official complaint letter: page of the USA government to help you to write a complaint letter. Quite interesting but you should take into account this is target to American people. http://www.usa.gov/topics/consumer/complaint/complaint-letter.shtml
The Australian complaint letter simple: the same as the previous one but related to Australia. http://www.accc.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/815324
Printable complaint letter: this page is a page where you can subscribe for free to get models of complaint letters depending on the topic (buying, restaurant, holidays, services, etc.) The problem is you have to subscribe but it’s supposed to be free. http://www.complaintletter.net/
Curso de escritura en inglés - cartas de queja: this is a course to learn how to write in English. The problem (or not) is, it’s in Spanish but it has quite a lot of useful sentences and some examples. It helps pretty well. http://www.ompersonal.com.ar/OMWRITE/personal/unit49.htm
Complaint letter templates: this is a British page to show you templates to write a complaint letter. The problem is, it’s very difficult to read unless you do a couple of examples but it’s quite useful. http://www.howtocomplain.com/info/cl-template.shtml