This is the video for lesson eight of my Everyday English for ESL course, which is available on Udemy. In this lesson a couple order a meal at a restaurant. You can see the course description below, and find the previous seven videos on my Animated English YouTube channel.
COURSE DESCRIPTION Do you already have a basic knowledge of English, but want to improve your ability to communicate in real-life situations? And do so in a fun, enjoyable way? Then Everyday English for ESL is just the course for you!
Each lesson begins with a fully-animated dialogue, which presents the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions you need to know in order to communicate successfully in English in a wide range of everyday situations.
The situations include:
• ordering food in a fast food restaurant • checking-in at the airport • making an appointment on the phone • returning goods to a shop
The dialogue is presented with and without speech bubbles, and is followed by:
• a listen and repeat activity to help you improve your pronunciation and intonation • a listening comprehension passage related to the topic of the lesson • a series of questions for you to answer about the lesson topic
All the audio material has been recorded by professional voice actors with British or American accents, and each lesson comes with a ten-page downloadable PDF, which contains:
• a full transcript of the lesson • language notes, explaining key grammar and vocabulary points • a word list • a series of language exercises • a crossword, • a word search puzzle
Several of these activities can also be done online, and the extra resources include Quizlet flashcard sets featuring the vocabulary used in each lesson.
At the end of the course, there’s a Final Quiz, to test what you have learnt.
The Times in Plain English is a free online newspaper that features stories based on articles from the New York Times and other top American newspapers. 'Plain' here means 'easy to understand', and the stories are freshly written to reflect the original article as opposed to being an edited version. You can find articles in categories such as Health and Education, Money and Work, Immigration, and Law. The archives go back to February 2011, so there's a wealth of reading material here. A couple of additional features that should be of interest to learners are Translate This Page, and Hear This Page, where you click on highlighted text to hear it read aloud (text-to-speech not real voices, obviously).
COMMENTS A very useful site for learners who find it difficult to read 'real' newspapers and would like something a bit more accessible. The About Us page on the site says that the content "may be reproduced and distributed by all", which is good news for teachers worried about copyright issues (some are!).
This is lesson seven of my Everyday English for ESL course, which is available on Udemy. In this lesson two work colleagues discuss what they did at the weekend. You can see the course description below, and find the previous six videos on my Animated English YouTube channel.
COURSE DESCRIPTION Do you already have a basic knowledge of English, but want to improve your ability to communicate in real-life situations? And do so in a fun, enjoyable way? Then Everyday English for ESL is just the course for you!
Each lesson begins with a fully-animated dialogue, which presents the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions you need to know in order to communicate successfully in English in a wide range of everyday situations.
The situations include:
• ordering food in a fast food restaurant • checking-in at the airport • making an appointment on the phone • returning goods to a shop
The dialogue is presented with and without speech bubbles, and is followed by:
• a listen and repeat activity to help you improve your pronunciation and intonation • a listening comprehension passage related to the topic of the lesson • a series of questions for you to answer about the lesson topic
All the audio material has been recorded by professional voice actors with British or American accents, and each lesson comes with a ten-page downloadable PDF, which contains:
• a full transcript of the lesson • language notes, explaining key grammar and vocabulary points • a word list • a series of language exercises • a crossword, • a word search puzzle
Several of these activities can also be done online, and the extra resources include Quizlet flashcard sets featuring the vocabulary used in each lesson.
At the end of the course, there’s a Final Quiz, to test what you have learnt.
There are lots of TOEIC preparation resources available for free on the internet (you can see my own list here), but there's only one official practice test, and that's the one from ETS, the organization behind the TOEIC.
This is good news for TOEIC takers, since the third party practice tests available online or in books do not always reflect the actual level of the real TOEIC, even if the format is the same.
You'll have to create an account to take the test, but it's a small price to pay (in fact, it's free!), to be able to take a full-length TOEIC test and get an accurate idea of your TOEIC level.
If you are not already familiar with the TOEIC, the site also has an overview of the test, and some sample questions so you can familiarize yourself with the format before doing the full-length test.
COURSE DESCRIPTION Do you already have a basic knowledge of English, but want to improve your ability to communicate in real-life situations? And do so in a fun, enjoyable way? Then Everyday English for ESL is just the course for you!
Each lesson begins with a fully-animated dialogue, which presents the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions you need to know in order to communicate successfully in English in a wide range of everyday situations.
The situations include:
• ordering food in a fast food restaurant • checking-in at the airport • making an appointment on the phone • returning goods to a shop
The dialogue is presented with and without speech bubbles, and is followed by:
• a listen and repeat activity to help you improve your pronunciation and intonation • a listening comprehension passage related to the topic of the lesson • a series of questions for you to answer about the lesson topic
All the audio material has been recorded by professional voice actors with British or American accents, and each lesson comes with a ten-page downloadable PDF, which contains:
• a full transcript of the lesson • language notes, explaining key grammar and vocabulary points • a word list • a series of language exercises • a crossword, • a word search puzzle
Several of these activities can also be done online, and the extra resources include Quizlet flashcard sets featuring the vocabulary used in each lesson.
At the end of the course, there’s a Final Quiz, to test what you have learnt.
With internet access becoming cheaper and more accessible, more and more students are turning to online English lessons with Skype to improve their English skills rather than signing up for courses in traditional academies. When considering which type is best for you, it’s important to think about when, where and how you prefer to study. Let’s look at how the experience of learning English on the internet can differ from a physical English classroom.
Location Of course the most obvious difference is the location: would you prefer to be in a school setting with desks, textbooks and a white board or in a virtual classroom via a webcam at home? If you need external motivation, you might feel more inspired to study English when you have to make the effort to go to a school building and work with other students. There can be lots of distractions at home - the TV, kids, pets or the telephone. But if you are quite self-disciplined, then interacting with your teacher on Skype should be motivating enough. Many students find studying from home much more comfortable and convenient because they don’t have to spend time getting to and from their lessons.
Timing The timing of lessons is another important consideration. If you book Skype English classes, you usually have the option of choosing how long you want your lessons to be and at what time of the day and week. This flexibility is particularly useful for people who work or have families and don’t want to study at a school in the evenings or at weekends. Classes can also be taken at any time of the year and are easier to reschedule if something comes up. Of course, if you want your children or teenagers to study English during school holidays according to a traditional set timetable, language schools can give them that sense of stability.
Interaction Depending on your personality, studying English in a conventional classroom with a group of other learners who have the same level as you could be an advantage or disadvantage. Some people thrive on the social aspect of working in groups, talking and interacting with new people. Speaking with people who have the same level of English as you can also help you build confidence. Although you can take group classes over Skype, it tends to be easier to study one-to-one with a teacher. You’ll have their full attention, rather than sharing their attention with classmates. This means a higher intensity of learning and lessons focused more on your individual needs.
Materials There are many different styles of learning; some people learn better through pictures and images, others with music, and even others who learn best with ‘kinaesthetic’, physical activities involving bodily movement. This is no different for learning English. Think about how you learn - do you learn by handling physical objects, drawing pictures or playing games? Then a normal classroom setting might suit you better. Some students like the feel of a physical textbook with pages they can turn and notebooks they can copy information into. Others, however, respond much better to computers and technology, preferring to type rather than write and to save lessons on their computer drive. Online teachers can utilise technology during a lesson by playing Youtube videos, podcasts, radio programmes and sharing a wealth of images from the web to enrich the learning experience. This style of learning may be more suitable for audio and visual learners.
So if you’re thinking about taking an English course, whether it is online or at a school, the most important thing is to choose the option which is the most suitable and motivating for you and your needs. Good luck!
This post was written by Hannah Yurk Hannah Yurk, Online Academy Manager and Administrator of Break Into English, a company that specializes in online English classes via Skype.
Here's lesson 5 of my Everyday English for ESL course. This lesson features a recipe for cookies. You can download a free ten-page PDF workbook for this lesson here.
COURSE DESCRIPTION Do you already have a basic knowledge of English, but want to improve your ability to communicate in real-life situations? And do so in a fun, enjoyable way? Then Everyday English for ESL is just the course for you!
Each lesson begins with a fully-animated dialogue, which presents the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions you need to know in order to communicate successfully in English in a wide range of everyday situations.
The situations include:
• ordering food in a fast food restaurant • checking-in at the airport • making an appointment on the phone • returning goods to a shop
The dialogue is presented with and without speech bubbles, and is followed by:
• a listen and repeat activity to help you improve your pronunciation and intonation • a listening comprehension passage related to the topic of the lesson • a series of questions for you to answer about the lesson topic
All the audio material has been recorded by professional voice actors with British or American accents, and each lesson comes with a ten-page downloadable PDF, which contains:
• a full transcript of the lesson • language notes, explaining key grammar and vocabulary points • a word list • a series of language exercises • a crossword, • a word search puzzle
Several of these activities can also be done online, and the extra resources include Quizlet flashcard sets featuring the vocabulary used in each lesson.
At the end of the course, there’s a Final Quiz, to test what you have learnt.
Reading is one of the four main skills that learners of English need to improve (the others being Listening, Speaking, and Writing), but it's not always easy to find interesting reading material at the right level. Most of the main EFL publishers have a range of graded readers (see here and here, for example), but they are usually physical books and not available in digital form (plus you have to pay for them). Which is where Read Listen Learn comes in ...
Read Listen Learn is a free website that offers digital graded readers for English teachers and learners. There are currently over 180 readers and they come in two forms: short stories adapted from works by over 50 authors, and articles on history, science, crime, sport and more. The readers are graded at 5 different levels for English learners and they all come with audio versions so you can listen while you read. Each reader also has a glossary. And once you have registered (using Facebook), you can create you own personal library of readers.
MY THOUGHTS Read Listen Learn is a great resource for both teachers and learners. In fact, it's quite similar to the excellent Dreamreader.net website, which I reviewed here. The readers vary in length from 250 words to over 5,000 words, and the audio versions vary in speed according to the level. However, it would be nice to have some different voices, and comprehension questions would be a welcome addition (it's something that Dreamreader.net already has). The navigation could also be improved — to see a list of all the articles you currently have to click on the My Library button on the homepage, and then on Find Articles, which doesn't seem very logical. Co-founder Simon Dalton tells me that he's in the process of updating the software, so hopefully these minor problems will be ironed out soon. Apparently, an app is on the way too, which is good news for mobile learners. By the way, you can read an interview with the other co-founder Mark Bartholomew here. I'm adding Read Listen Learn to the Reading page on the Learn English Online website.
COURSE DESCRIPTION Do you already have a basic knowledge of English, but want to improve your ability to communicate in real-life situations? And do so in a fun, enjoyable way? Then Everyday English for ESL is just the course for you! Each lesson begins with a fully-animated dialogue, which presents the vocabulary, grammar, and expressions you need to know in order to communicate successfully in English in a wide range of everyday situations. The situations include:
• ordering food in a fast food restaurant • checking-in at the airport • making an appointment on the phone • returning goods to a shop
The dialogue is presented with and without speech bubbles, and is followed by: • a listen and repeat activity to help you improve your pronunciation and intonation • a listening comprehension passage related to the topic of the lesson • a series of questions for you to answer about the lesson topic
All the audio material has been recorded by professional voice actors with British or American accents, and each lesson comes with a ten-page downloadable PDF, which contains: • a full transcript of the lesson • language notes, explaining key grammar and vocabulary points • a word list • a series of language exercises • a crossword, • a word search puzzle
Several of these activities can also be done online, and the extra resources include Quizlet flashcard sets featuring the vocabulary used in each lesson.
At the end of the course, there’s a Final Quiz, to test what you have learnt.
This cartoon by Peter Brookes from The Times relates to the announcement that President Trump will visit France in July.
BACKGROUND Donald Trump will attend France’s Bastille Day celebrations in Paris on 14 July, after accepting an invitation from the French president, Emmanuel Macron. Macron’s office said on Wednesday that the US president would attend the traditional Paris military parade as part of the commemoration marking the 100th anniversary of the entry of the United States into the first world war. US troops will join French soldiers in the annual display of military might on the Champs Elysées. Trump’s Paris visit will be his first trip to France since he became US president. (Source: The Guardian)
THE CARTOON The cartoon harks back to the days of the French Revolution (1789-1799), when condemned prisoners were taken to the guillotine in a tumbril, a sort of open cart (you can see the guillotine in the background on the left). In this cartoon, the 'prisoners' in the tumbril are Donald and Melania Trump. The tumbril is being followed by French president Emmanuel Macron, who is smiling. He is carrying a Liberty Cap on a lance. Trump exclaims, "You call this a state coach?!!".
LANGUAGE The expression "You call this a XXXX" is used when the speaker is not impressed by the thing he is talking about. • You call this a bedroom? It's more like a wardrobe!"
COMMENTARY Although Macron has invited Trump to Paris, there's no love lost between the two presidents. Who can forget the famous handshake battles during the recent G7 summit or Macron's apparent snub of Trump at the same event? And Macron was disappointed with Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
HISTORICAL NOTE In revolutionary France, the cap or bonnet rouge was first seen publicly in May 1790, at a festival in Troyes adorning a statue representing the nation, and at Lyon, on a lance carried by the goddess Libertas. To this day the national emblem of France, Marianne, is shown wearing a Phrygian cap. The caps were often knitted by women known as Tricoteuses who sat beside the guillotine during public executions in Paris in the French Revolution, supposedly continuing to knit in between executions. (Source: WIkipedia)
Everyone is familiar with GIFs. A GIF is basically an image file format that is animated by combining several other images or frames into a single file. GIFs are all over the Internet on blogs and social media, and are part of what makes news and entertainment sites like Buzzfeed very popular. And now they are also being used in language learning by Gif Lingua. Gif Lingua is a site created by David Deubelbeiss, who is also a key person behind the excellent English Central. Gif Lingua has over 3,000 'books' at different levels, although they aren't books in the traditional sense, or even e-books. A Gif Lingua book consists of a number of pages (usually 20 or fewer), each with a sentence in written and audio form, illustrated by a GIF. The site has tons more features, including quizzes and videos, and works on any device. There's even a web app. New books are added every day, and users can create their own books too. Teachers can also download worksheets and track student learning with the LMS.
VERDICT Gif Lingua is a really original site that makes reading fun. Definitely worth checking out!
Photos are a great way for promoting discussion in the ESL classroom, and here's a selection I put together for my EM Normandie students. The original idea was to use the photos to practise Part One of the TOEIC Listening and Reading exam, where candidates see a photo, hear four statements about it, and have to choose the one that best describes the picture. However, there are many other ways in which they can be used, depending on the content of the photo. I've listed a few ideas below.
1. Display the photo on a screen for the whole class. Put class into groups and see how many vocabulary items they can come up with relating to the photo. 2. Get students to write four statements about the photo, only one of which is true (like in the TOEIC exam). 3. Students work in pairs. One closes their eyes and the other has to describe the photo displayed on the screen. 4. Show students a photo and get them to speculate about what's happening, what happened before, and what's going to happen (good for practising tenses). 5. Get students to find their own photos and talk about them to the class. 6. Print a selection of photos in colour on A4 sheets and laminate them. You can then do without the videoprojector and get students working in pairs or groups.
I could go on but there are literally dozens of other ways you could use these or other photos. In fact, Jamie Keddie has written a whole book about using images, appropriately called 'Images'.
NOTE You can download the original PowerPoint presentation, in which I've added explanatory notes for some of the photos, here.
This is the official video for the Artists For Grenfell's charity single "Bridge Over Troubled Water". You can find a full list of all the artists involved here.
DESCRIPTION Write & Improve is a free service from Cambridge English for learners to practise their written English. Submit your written work and receive feedback in seconds, covering spelling, vocabulary, grammar and general style. There are a number of free writing tasks at Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced level, as well as an IELTS workbook. You can create a profile to see many more tasks.
COMMENTS Automatic correction of written work sounds like a teacher's dream, so I decided to test the site. The task I chose was to write a postcard to a friend about a holiday. Of course, I made some deliberate mistakes (click here for a larger image).
In fact, the feedback you get is in two stages. First, any text where there's a mistake is highlighted. You then have to make changes and resubmit your text. After that, you get the final feedback as above. As you can see, the mistakes I corrected myself (I'd put "at London" and "See you latest" in the original text) were confirmed, but the other mistakes ("on holidays" and "I go to visit" instead of "on holiday" and "I'm going to visit") were not identified.
As the results were mixed at Beginner level, I decided to have a go at an Intermediate task. Here's the result (click here for larger image).
As you can see, the feedback is much more detailed, and would certainly be useful for a student working without the aid of a teacher.
VERDICT Although automatic correction seems to have a way to go before it can totally replace a teacher, this site does allow students to improve their written work. For teachers, there's a wide variety of writing tasks that could be given as homework, self-corrected by the student using the site, and then submitted to the teacher for final correction.
DESCRIPTION Learn English Online (http://www.learnenglishonline.net) is a directory of the best resources available on the internet for learning English as a second or foreign language. You will find over 700 annotated links listed in 34 categories, as well as tips and advice on how to improve your English. But that's not all. For news and reviews, check out the LEO Blog. And visit the Store to find out about my publications. To receive regular updates, free learning materials, and lots more, sign up for the LEO newsletter. As a special welcome gift, you will receive a free copy of Learning English Online, a 45-page PDF ebook version of the site!
