C1- Improving your writing

On the British Council page for teenagers you can find this section for improving your writing: click here with different kinds of pieces of writing. To start with and as a revision, you can see what they have about a for and against essay: click here and pay attention to the exercises you find there.
In class, we've been working orally with this kind of topic when we were speaking about advantages and disadvantages of a certain age: childhood - teenager age - personhood - elderly age.

B2.1 - Unit 1A: Names - Pronouns and possessives

In this lesson we`ve been working with names and how much they can interfere in your life. This is a listening comprehesion about the topic: click here

The grammar point in this lesson is a revision of pronouns in English. To start wirh, let's see if you can find the mistakes in these sentences:

• My sister and me are fond of football
• I don't like theirs children too much
• I never go with they
• She´s a friend of him
• "Who is it?" "It's I" (Pay attention to the use of IT for people when you don't know the sex yet)

To be sure about the right pronoun or possessive is very important, as you can see in this example:

• Look at him (at Jonh)    but    Look at his (at John´s car, for example)   
• Look at her  but    Look at hers (this is NOT plural but the possessive pronoun)

A student in the class asked me the difference to use TO or FOR with complements. When you use TO is just direction while FOR is for purpose or instead of that person. To see this go to this link.

To finish with this is a video about the pronunciation of personal pronouns; it's American English but you can practise with it. And this other video about how to choose a name for a business, to work with the vocabulary of this lesson.

B2.1 - Leisure activities

We've been working about what you do in your free time and we saw you should keep in mind the typical questions which could help you to speak about it:

• what you do
• when you do it / how often
• where you do it
• if you do it alone or with other people
• when you started doing it
• why you do it

Although it's a very simple topic, it's very frequent to talk about this, especially when you meet people or when you introduce yourself.

Here are there some listening exercises to practise and to take ideas:

• Leisure activities: click here
• Activites to do on a ship: this one
• to hang out: click here

C1 - unit 1A: Uses of YET

In this lesson we've seen the use of YET in two sentences from the extracs of p.7:

• Alternating between Elisavyeta's and Pavel's competing YET complementary perspectives...
• Together we were earning around $100,000 and YET it just got frittered away in cabs and restaurants.

As you can see, YET can be used as:

• an adverb
• to discuss an additional idea
• to give emphasis
• as a conjunction

To see how to use it go to this link, or to this one. This last link is just to see good examples in which YET is used as a conjunction: click here.

To sum up, YET is an adverb that means the action is not finished or it's in progress ("todavía", "aún"). But as a conjunction the meaning is similar to "however" ("y aún así"). With superlatives the translation should be "hasta ahora".

Starting the New School Year!

Welcome to the new school year 2019-2020. Here are we to go on with English. This year there will be some changes but we'll be able to solve the problems we could have, you'll see.

The levels I teach are B2.1 and C1 so most of the activities will be oriented to these groups. Nevertheless, I'll include other levels if necessary.

To start with, let's see what these levels imply according to the CEFR:

• B2.1: the reference is B2, but this will be the level you'll have when you finish B2.2
• C1

It may help to check your own level if you try to do these tests:

• This is a test to know your level by Cambridge
• Another test: click here
• Or this one

See you in class!

Greetings from York!

Hi, everybody!
I'm in York, a beautiful city in the north of England. I'm in a course about intercultural communication but I also have time to do some sightseeing.
If you want to know what I'm doing here you can go to the blog we have at the school web page to follow what we do day by day referred to the Erasmus+ grant for our KA-1 project. It's in Spanish because It is for the while school. Just in case, this is the link.
Try to go on with your English practice. A little every day is a lot when you come back to class in September.
See you, guys (*_*).

We are on holiday!

Now it's time for relaxing, enjoying family, having fun, spending time on your hobbies... and time for English as well!
Let me suggest some links which could help you to improve your English during holiday time:

• Wrting: if you go to this link you have a tool to write a text and you are given a feedback of your performance; click here
• Speaking: although it's easy you could find foreign people to speak in English, you may improve your oral skills by recording your speech about a topic. If you want to find some as an example you could go to this link but there are many if you try to find them on your own. Go to any browser and search for speaking topics+B2.
• Reading: this is the perfect time for reading. Go to the links you have on the useful links that you can find on this blog. This is just an example: click here
• Listening: remember you can go to www.elllo.org and find the level you need. Another way is by searching on the internet listening comprehension+B2 and you'll be able to find many links.

Nevertheless, thanks to the internet you can find many tools for learning English and you can use some of these links:

• Cambridge University: this is just an example of all the activities you can do; click here
• Hilfen is a traditional German link with a lot of materials: click here
• Go to this article with 11 recommeded web pages to learn English: click here

I hope this post will be useful but not overwhelming; the last but not the least recommendation is: take it easy but don't give up; there's time for everything if you manage your time well. See you in September.

GOOD HOLIDAY FOR EVERYBODY!