Anna’s Blog

Learn about the difference between ‘tabloids’ and ‘broadsheets’ and have a look at the main online newspapers and magazines you will find in the following websites. Examine  and compare different articles and/or versions of an event from different newspapers.

Analysing Newspapers

The Press

Hi everybody,

If you want to practise your grammar and pronunciation skills, I strongly recommend you  visit  Jennifer’s site and watch any of the lessons displayed. Lessons 7-16 are devoted to Reported Speech, so you can revise what we have learnt in class. I hope you find it useful.

What are homophones?

Homophones are words that sound the same, but have different spellings and meanings, e.g.flower and flour.

Can you match the homophones – word pairs that sound the same, but have different meanings?
E.g: ‘two‘ and ‘too‘.

Click on the picture to play the game.

You will find an excellent explanation  at  BBC Learning English. You can either read it, or if you prefer, you can listen to the answer.

When you finish,  try the following  practice exercises  :

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

If you need extra practice, visit Caroline and Pearson Brown’s site, read the language reference and do the exercises.

Remember, practice makes perfect!

What is podcasting?

Podcasting lets you automatically receive the latest episode of  6 minute English as soon as it’s available. With BBC’s  podcasts you can learn and practise useful English language for everyday situations.

You can “subscribe” to receive a podcast, rather like you might subscribe to a magazine and get it delivered each week. All of the BBC’s podcasts are free, and you can stop receiving the files at any time.

Each programme is six minutes long and contains examples and explanations to help you improve your knowledge of the English language across a wide range of topics. Click here to listen to a podcast talking about sleep and answer the question.

Another great presentation to learn about verbs followed by the gerund or infinitive and verbs that can be followed by either gerund or infinitive with a change of meaning.

I hope you find it useful.

Sometimes you find wonderful teachers on the Net who don’t mind sharing their work. Carmen Torres, a teacher of English,  has designed a presentation to help ESL teachers in their class to present and develop the Passive voice. Thank you Carmen!

Have a look at Carmen’s  presentation. I hope it helps you  understand ‘the passive’!

Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr, Google and Yahoo images.  All you need to do is type in your vocabulary word and you get images from Flickr, Google and Yahoo plus a definition and example sentences from Wiktionary. If you want a better view of the images that   Shahi finds in relation to the word, then just click on the image and it enlarges.

This is an excellent tool  to memorise vocabulary. However, you might still need a written definition to understand abstract concepts.

Why don’t you try with the new vocabulary we are going to deal with in next lesson?

Look up : arsonist / witness / pickpocket / hijack / mugger / smuggling / defendant / barrister / attorney

Hope you find it interesting!   Let me know.

Hi everybody,

We have been recently working on pronunciation and some of you have asked me whether there was a site to check  how to pronounce words properly in English. Fortunately, we can almost find anything on the Net and thanks to Nik Peachey, a freelance learning technology consultant, I have just come across Forvo, which describes itself as “All the words in the world. Pronounced.”

The site allows users to request, and add audio clips of the pronunciation of different words from a huge  range of languages, so if you want to know how a word is pronounced you can either do a quick easy search for the word and then listen to it, or if the word isn’t already within the database, you can add it and request a pronunciation.

So, no more excuses for bad pronunciation.  If you are not sure how to pronounce a word, check Forvo!

Why don’t you get started with the following words ? :  ‘beer’,’ bird’, ‘beard’, ‘bear’  / ‘soup’, ‘soap’, ‘steak’, ‘dessert’ and ‘desert’

Did you find it useful?  Let me know!