BEFORE AVATAR.... A CURIOUS BOY.

James Cameron is no doubt one of the most innovating director in nowadays cinema, and his films create new worlds all their own. If you want to know how he gets inspirired, watch this video.

Remember, you can have the transcription while you are listening to it.

Post a comment on it later on.

Cheers

FARM LIFE

Lets do some listening practice
Visit this webpage:http://www.elllo.org/
Click on 994FARM LIFE. Then, on the right menu, click on Audio Slide Quizz. Play the listening (twice or three times) and try to answer the 5 questions below. Check your answers by clicking on "show score". If you find some part dificult, click on "Show text/hide text" and read the transcript while listening. Once this is over, click on VIDEO RESPONSE and watch the video. Do the quiz. Feel free to explore this web page. When you finish, come back to our blog and write a comment on it.Thank you!

AUSTRALIA

What do you know about Australia? Are "boomerang" or "kangaroo" the first words that come to your mind when you think of Australia? What is its capital? What interesting places can you visit there? Who was Captain Cook?
Well, if you don't know the answers, don't worry. In the link below you can find a listening about Australia which includes all the answers for those questions and much more information about the country.
You are given the whole text you have to listen to with a lot of gaps and, obviously, you have to complete the text.
After doing this listening activity and checking your answers, read aloud the whole text yourself. Listen to it as many times as you need, paying attention to how words are pronounced. Then record it and seng it to me.

Here you have the link:
http://www.members.iinet.net.au/~adelegc/listening/Australia/Australia.html

Cheers

English festivals and festivitie

Watch the following presentation and do the sugested task in pairs; remember that later you will have to make an oral presentation to the rest of the class with the power point material as a support.

English Festivals

View more presentations from agafe2.

This is an example of a video you can embed within the presentation; Jennifer has several similar videos on different cultural aspects you may use.





Try to choose those festivities which you are less familiar with, so all of us can learn something new.

Oral exams and how to mark them

One of the most difficult issues of this subject is how to evaluate our students’ oral productive skill.

First of all, I`d like to point out that I am going to use different types of oral activities: recordings in class both of prepared and spontaneous speech given a certain topic ot deal wih, and recodings the students are going to prepare at home and send via email, video or mp3. I think it's important to take into account all these aspects so student can gain confidence and increase fluency and accuracy little by little.

Talking about the marking of oral exams, I firstly thought of using a single mark to evaluate every student, but I realized that it wasn’t fair. Finally, I decided to mark five different aspects:

1. Pronunciation and intelligibility
2. Fluency
3. language: appropriate grammar and vocabulary
4. The project and its content
5. Accuracy (errors and mistakes)

At the end of each project students get 5 different marks (the final mark comes from finding the average) and that helps them to know which parts they have done well and which areas need to improve.