Gerald Fitch, Nicoloz Tskitishvili and Chris Thomas interviews

After having interviewed three basketball players who play for Ayuda en Acción Fuenlabrada, we have finally published them in a newspaper written for El País de los Estudiantes. Here you have the whole newspaper. Notice that the first pages are written in Spanish, but the last section, which includes the interviews with the basketball players, are written in English. It is also worth reading the article about London: don't miss the picture of the foggy view of the Thames from the London Eye; it was taken by Marta.

ENGLISH BOX 2010 EL PAÍS DE LOS ESTUDIANTES

"It's worth keeping an eye on that blog"

Our blog has been included in the Top 10 of a blog called English without end by teacher at EOI Alcalá de Henares (Madrid) called Laura. We really appreciate that! This Top 10 is part of an initiative called Vale a pena ficar de olho nesse blog ("It's worth keeping an eye on that blog"). So, according to her opinion, our blog is worth visiting. Now, I must point out 10 blogs I value. I've been thinking about my Top 10 and it is a hard task to elect just 10. But here we go (notice, no ranking is intended, just alphabetical order):

Alpozo's Phonetic Blog
Batxillerat Collaborative Class
Bibloranca
Ciencias Naturales
English in Brunete
English without end
My English Printable Worksheets
Shakespeare in love
Sing your English
Tecnoloranca

LA LENTE or our newspaper at El País de los Estudiantes

IMPORTANT: THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED: now you can read the whole newspaper here.
LA LENTE de LORANCA has just published their newspaper. This is the third newspaper published by a group of students of our school. We have participated in the programme El País de los Estudiantes, organized by El País, for three academic years. Here you have just the cover but if you want to have a look at all the sections you can visit http://estudiantes.elpais.com/, choose Madrid (or any other region) > PERIÓDICOS > VISUALIZA OTROS PERIÓDICOS > MADRID > IES BARRIO LORANCA (1A).
Cheers!

Nikoloz Tskitishvili - Ayuda en Acción Fuenlabrada

Here you have the first part of the interview with Nikoloz Tskitishvili. When you finish the listening questions, please report your mark to me (use this information: teacher code: alberto; class id: none). Finally, write a comment on this post explaining how difficult it was. Hope you enjoy it!!



Video edited by Daniel Tierno

Interviewing ACB basketball players

We have just done the most motiviting activity I have ever been involved in. We have interviewed three ACB basketball players who play for Ayuda en Acción Fuenlabrada: Gerald Fitch, who is the leader of the ACB top scorers classification, Chris Thomas and Nicoloz Tskitishvili, who has played in the NBA and Chris Thomas. This has been done thanks to the cooperation of Ayuda en Acción Fuenlabrada basketball club. They allowed us not only to interviewed them, but also use Fernando Martín Sports Center, mainly the court and the press room. We are really grateful for that.

This activity has provided real oral practice, both speaking and listening. It was necessary to practice and review all the sounds we have seen so far this year and to practice falling intonation in questions. Although most part of the interviews was controlled practice (the questions we had practiced in class), there was also open conversation (introductions, giving personal/group information, asking for pictures, autographs...).

Confidence has played an important part: students do not only have to speak in English but they have to do it with a famous basketball player whom they have seen on TV, newspapers or magazines. So, in order to be successful in the interview they must have confidence on themselves.

Motivation has been another important aspect as a result of having done this activity. There is an after and a before this activity. I know it has been incredible for most of you to have been understood in English and being able to have a short conversation in English.

In future posts, we are going to do some listening practice using the audio recordings of these interviews. But before that, and although we have done an evaluation sheet on the activity in class, I would like you to write a comment on this activity explaining what you have learnt and how you felt and referring to confidence and motivation.

Thank you.

Pictures taken by Alberto Hidalgo

CONFIDENCE is one key to learn a language

There are many key aspects when learning a language that students must bear in mind and teachers must help to accomplish. One of them is confidence. When learning a language a student must be aware of what they CAN communicate (and not of what they can´t communicate). So, it is important to learn in an atmosphere of confidence, making students feel what they know and pushing them a step forward.

Developing confidence is more important than learning new vocabulary or using a determined grammatical structure. It is the basis for a longlife language learning. It is the key to use one's knowledge of a language, making mistakes and learning from them, and also to build bridges towards new unknown areas. It is a necessary tool at any stage in the process of speaking a second language.

Confidence has played an important part in the out-of-school activity we have just done. I will comment on this activity in the following post and I will refer to confidence in it.

Australia

What do you know about Australia? Is "kangaroo" the first word that comes to your mind when you think of Australia? 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.

This is a different listening activity from those we have done in this blog before. 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, try to read aloud the whole text yourself. Listen to it as many times as you need, paying attention to how words are pronounced. Then repeat it several times (three times or more).

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

Comfortably Numb by PINK FLOYD

Maybe you already know Pink Floyd, but maybe you don't. In any case, it is worth visiting this web about the band.
This song is taken from the record "The Wall". All the songs in this album tell the story of a boy who builds a wall around him to be protected against the outer world. Each bad experience in his life means a new brick in the wall. When he grows up, he becomes a singer and in the video we have him just before giving a concert. Well, this is not really a video, this is part of the film "The Wall", which was made after the album. The film deals with the story of this man following the lyrics of the songs, because there are no dialogues, but just songs. Here you have just a little bit of the story. If you want to know the whole story you will have to watch the film...

I hope you enjoy this song and do the quizz well. Please, add a comment on your results.

Greetings

A new blog in the school

We welcome the students of 3º Diversificación who have just created a new blog and are posting pictures and comments on our school. They are the ones who take the pictures, write the comments and posts. They say it is easy and that they enjoy a lot. Long live their blog!
You can visit it at:
http://divloranca.blogspot.com

/i:/ vs /I/

Here you have a webpage to practice these two sounds, firstly in single words (minimal pairs), and then in a sentence. Listen and repeat the words and practice the sentence several times.

PS: don't forget writing a comment on this post telling us if you find these exercises helpful.

Of oral exams and how to mark them

One of the most difficult issues of this brand-new subject is how to evaluate our students’ oral productive skill. When taking oral exams, we have to face two problems:
a) Oral exams take a long time (and our groups are quite large)
b) How do I mark my students? What´s the criteria?

a) Well, that’s a fact. If we have a group of 20 students, let’s give them about 5 minutes each student. That makes 100 minutes plus the necessary time between every student’s turn: 3 lessons. However, what if we make our students examine in groups of 2 or 3 people? In fact, that’s what I have just done in the first term. I asked my students to make groups and hand in a project containing oral texts recorded in any type of files they liked. All of them (the group is made of 17 students) decided to make a video. We watched all the videos in class, which took us two lessons (100 minutes).
b) 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 four different aspects:
1. Pronunciation
2. Fluency
3. Intelligibility
4. The project
Points 1-3 evaluate their speech and point 4 does the video. So students get 4 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 more practicing.

Well, I haven’t written all this for my students, but for any teacher who may read it and wishes to comment on it. I would really appreciate if you post a message talking about your experience on doing and marking oral exams. Thank you very much!

Tongue Twisters

Time for speaking practice. Watch the video and try to repeat the tongue twisters... as fast as you can... ;) This exercise will help you improve your fluency, which is very important if we don't want our listeners to fall asleep.




more about "Tongue Twisters", posted with vodpod