Tuesday Recap

Guest post by our classmate Marina Barbosa - Thanks Marina - Liam.

Hello Guys!

Today we started the class practicing some listening and spelling skills. Liam dictated some words and asked us to put them in the right column with the correct spelling. For me it wasn't easy… some words I didn't know the meaning of, and others I didn't know how to spell, but it was a good exercise to realise that we have to pay attention to the places around us and think if we know the names of all of them.

Here's the picture of the board:

A good way to practice is paying attention to the places while you walk down the street and thinking if you know what the places are called. If you don't have any idea, take a picture and show it to Liam, he said he will be pleased to help us! hehehe 

The next subject was Word Formation. 

Word Formation is the creation of a new word based in another word.

So our first example was how we can transform a verb into a noun. In this situation the words will normally end up with ment, tion or ation. We can also transform an adjective into a noun. In this case the words will normally end up with ity, ness or ence.

Unfortunately this is not a general rule, so we have to pay attention to the different ways that we can make these words.

This picture of the board shows the examples that Liam gave us:

Page 89 of the book has some exercises, but maybe it's not enough, so I found this website, which is not the greatest, but you can do some exercises to practice: http://www.autoenglish.org/FCEUse/FCEUsePart3.htm

And the last topic was about countable and uncountable nouns.

We can find the explanation on page 142 of the book, but as Liam said, sometimes we just have to accept that this is the way to do it, because eventually we're not going to see some logic in this subject.

Anyway, to help us a bit I found this website that gives some tips for knowing (or at least giving us an idea) if the noun is uncountable: http://www.englishpage.com/minitutorials/countable-uncountable-nouns.htm

That's all folks :p