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 :
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.
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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.
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!
October 31st is Halloween. Where does Halloween come from? The Celts lived in Britain, Ireland and parts of France over 2,000 years ago, and October 31st was the end of their year. The Celts believed that ghosts came back to earth on this day. Today many people around the world celebrate this old festival – but today people usually have parties, dress up, and tell spooky stories about witches, skeletons, bats and ghosts.
Sister Mary Dracula was created in the summer of 2001 and was selected for the San Diego Comic Con Independent Film Festival in 2004.
Watch this animation and have some Halloween fun! BOOOOO!!!
We were talking about accents in class. As you know, English is spoken by a large number of people around the world, so accents might be difficult to understand sometimes.
Now you can listen to native people around the globe reading the same text so that you can compare their accents . You can also go to the link to the atlas and click on the flag to listen to different varieties of English. I hope you find it useful.
In Unit 2A we are going to talk about national stereotypes. In the video below, people are asked to give their opinion about the Americans. Write the names of the people interviewed on a piece of paper, watch the first video as many times as necessary and write down the adjectives you hear. When you finish the exercise, watch the second video with subtitles to check your answers.
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Since we are going to deal with this topic, I am posting a very interesting documentary presented by James Randi, a master magician who uncovers the secrets about psychics. After you watch the video, I would like to know your opinion about psychics :
Do you believe they have special powers? Can they be able to move objects at will, read a person’s thoughts, or even cure physical illnesses with the power of the mind? Have you ever been to a psychic? Is psychics power real or fake?
This documentary is divided into 6 parts. This is the first part of the programme but you can watch the following episodes on YouTube if you want to know more about Randi’s investigations.
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Hi everybody,
As you know, I’m not keen on lists to lear vocabulary. This is especially true if we talk about phrasal verbs. If you want to learn phrasal verbs I recommend that you always learn them in context.
In this video Steve explains the meaning of common phrasal verbs with ‘get’. You can do a quiz at the end of the video.
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Watch the video and click the link below to do the exercises.
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