The English Blog

OUP Student Sites

A number of Oxford University Press titles have accompanying websites. You can access them from this page. The materials are divided into Primary, Secondary and Adult. Many of the activities and exercises can be used independently of the course book so this is a great resource for any learner.

St. George's Day

Today is St. George's Day. St. George is the patron saint of England. According to the article on the BBC site: "He’s popularly identified with England and English ideals of honour, bravery and gallantry—but actually he wasn’t English at all." For a more detailed discussion, see this article from Britannia.com. BBC's Today programme has an Englishness quiz to test how well you know England.

Getting Through Customs

Getting Through Customs is a site dedicated to inter-cultural communication. The article library has articles on a wide range of cultural topics and there are around fifty quizzes on cultural matters.

The Advert Channel

The Advert Channel is a satellite TV channel "dedicated to bringing you the best TV Adverts from around the globe". You don't have to have satellite TV to view ads, however. Once you have registered (it's free), you can download ads from their site in streaming video. There are currently 79 ads available for download. My favourite is the HSBC Chinese restaurant ad, which I shall be using in my next Cultural Issues class.

Student List Project

I got an e-mail today from Thomas Robb of Kyoto Sangyo University in Tokyo. He runs a discussion forum known as the Student List Project. Here's how he describes it:

The Student List Project now has had over 1500 participants. Essentially, the SL Project provides a way for your students to discuss topics of mutual interest in a 1-to-many situation rather than the normal penpal 1-on-1. Your students can join any of the forums listed below, read what has already been posted and reply to whatever postings stir their imagination. They receive copies of all postings for the forums that they subscribe to by e-mail, but can also view all previous postings via the web interface. Recent discussions, all student initiated, include topics such as the use of mobile phones, smoking in public, one's ideal partner, blind dates, baseball, current movie hits, and more! The project uses Moodle, an innovative student management system. This allows you, as an instructor, to view all of your own students' postings so that you can give timely advice to them as needed. Currently we have the following topic areas, each with its own ESL professional as a facilitator: For University and Adult Learners: *General Chat *Business English *Culture & Society *Current events *Learning English *Movies *Music *Sports For Immigrants & new residents: *Living in a New Country For Secondary School Learners: *Teen Talk

To participate in the forums you'll need to create an account. This is very easy to do and just takes a couple of minutes.

English-Blogs.com

English-Blogs.com is a collection of blogs about England written by "people with a connection to England" (no mention of Scotland, Wales or Ireland). It's a new blog so there's not a lot to read at the moment but it'll be interesting to see how it develops. Hopefully, it will provide some useful first-hand insights into life in England.

Trip to Toulouse

I've been in Toulouse for the last few days recording dialogues for the ESC entrance exam. This is something I've done for longer than I care to remember (OK, about fifteen years, if you really must know). The dialogues are written by teachers from the ESCs and usually based on news stories from the past year. When they come for their English oral exam in June/July, students have to summarise the dialogue and answer questions from the examiner. Each dialogue lasts around three and a half minutes and we recorded around 80 in four days. The 'actors' were all English teachers from Toulouse (apart from me, that is). It was good fun but after four days in the recording studio, I was ready to return to Le Havre.

April Fool's Day

April 1st is April Fool's Day when people in many countries play jokes on each other. In my English for Marketing class, we looked at some of the ways in which companies have fooled their customers. For instance, in 1998 Burger King announced it was introducing a left-handed Whopper. BMW has a tradition of producing April Fool's Day ads. These appear in the press on April 1st only. You can find some examples of these on the BMW website. The Museum of Hoaxes has a list of the Top 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes. BBC Online, has some good stuff on the origins of April Fool's Day and a video of the famous spaghetti harvest hoax.