I’ve just finished watching the BBC Three programme ‘Young, Foreign and Over Here‘. If you can access it, it is available on BBC iPlayer until Wednesday 2nd November 2011. This is the description from the BBC Three webpage: Five young Eastern Europeans reveal the harsh realities and culture shocks of life as an immigrant coming [...]
I wrote this worksheet based on problems my students have been having with the FCE Writing Part 2 essay-writing task. Feel free to download it, use it with your own students and let me know what I need to change / improve. It fit onto five pages on my computer, but has expanded to six [...]
This post has been a very long time coming. Back in July, my students spend a week on a news project. Every afternoon they worked in groups with the aim of producing a news bulletin to ‘broadcast’ on Friday afternoon. We did some brainstorming based on what was in the news on Monday, and after [...]
We’ve been studying modals of speculation and deduction in class today. They are very often included in FCE Part 4 (Key Word Transformations). I couldn’t find any examples of this exercise which only tested these modals, so I made my own. If you have a link to a similar exercise, please let me know. Also, [...]
The Vicar of Dibley is one of my all-time favourite comedies. I prepared this vocabulary worksheet for a short episode made for Red Nose Day featuring Johnny Depp. I’m just using it as a bit of Friday afternoon fun, since the students have been working hard all week. If anyone wants to write comprehension questions, [...]
One of my students left the room this morning, then called me a couple of minutes later. She was in the toilets crying her eyes out because she believes she is going to fail the FCE exam. She is one of eleven students who I currently teach full-time (25 hours a week) ready for the [...]
On Thursday I introduced my students to Speaking Part 3 of the FCE paper. In this section of the exam, two students have about three minutes to discuss a set of 5-7 pictures and answer two questions. The first question involves some kind of scenario where they have to refer to every picture, and the [...]
Last week we looked at the FCE Use of English Part 2 Open Cloze for the first time. I wanted to help the students become aware of the kind of words that are usually missing from the texts in this part of the exam. We had been looking at housework vocabulary, so I went on [...]
This is my 100th blog post I started my blog back in October last year, but I only wrote a couple of posts before it got forgotten. At the end of December I took part in my first #eltchat on Twiiter, then preceded to have ten days off work with no voice and a bad [...]
This is my contribution to Brad Patterson‘s Compare and Contrast Photo Challenge. I chose to share with you pictures of two of my favourite cities. The first is Durham, UK. This view was taken from the railway station, where many people get their first view of the city. This includes Bill Bryson, who became Chancellor [...]
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