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

Thursday Recap..

Well, there you have it, another week successfully navigated! What was your favourite part of this week? My favourite parts were all your wonderful presentations - I was very proud of you all. The saddest moment was when we said goodbye to Brito - it's always sad for me when people finish their courses, but we wish him the best of luck in the future, and I know there is no one I would rather have as the captain of my ship! Bon Voyage Brito! 

Now, to our recap. On Thursday we looked at formal letters of complaint, and we noted how there isn't really a culture of letter-writing as a means of complaining where you guys are from, but how here it's actually one of the most powerful consumer weapons. I remember we found a hair in a packet of biscuits once when we were kids. My mam took a photo and wrote a letter to the company and they sent us about 6 months' supply of chocolate biscuits. It was a wonderful day, but it resulted in my current biscuit addiction, so it wasn't all good news! Anyway, our homework is to write a letter of complaint based on the worst service we have ever experienced. You can find some good tips on this site and this one too! Remember, you can bring the letter to class on Monday in a handwritten form or you can email it to me.

Finally, we reviewed all of our vocabulary from the past 2 weeks' lessons and then played a game of SuperStop, where we needed to combine adjectives with our nouns and adverbs with our verbs. The review portion is useful because it shows you just how quickly new vocabulary can disappear if you don't review it every so often. At least once a week you should sit down and have a look through your notes, checking that you still remember all the new words. You also need to make an effort to use those words in a conversation - force your friends to talk about newspapers or music or whatever the topic of that week happens to be - the hardest part of practising is creating the opportunity to use the new language! Be selfish - talk about the things you want to practise, don't wait for someone to walk up to you and ask, "Hey, do you know the word for a large group of people who sing together?" It's very unlikely that will happen.


The game of SuperStop is designed to make you use adjectives and adverbs in combinations with nouns/verbs. This is something you need to pay attention to when you are speaking. You can improve your vocabulary more if you use more words on a daily basis - using more adjectives and adverbs when you are speaking - listen to natives and how they express themselves - they normally use 2 and 3 adjectives in combination. Take this example:

Teacher: Hi, what did you have for breakfast?

Student: An apple. 

...Hmm, there's not a lot of practising happening there... 

Student: Hi, what did you have for breakfast?
Teacher: Oh, Just an apple, but it was absolutely delicious! So ripe and very juicy. I love apples like that! 

There are 3 adjectives in the teacher's response, and none in the student's. You may think it's strange to speak that way, but that's really how it works. We speak in chunks of information, always doubling and sometimes tripling our adjectives. Try to use more adjectives in your daily conversations, and more adverbs too! 

That's it! Have a great weekend! And don't forget the small matter of Ireland -v- England on Saturday evening - here's a little video to catch you up on the history of the match: 

Tuesday's News

This just in.. Today's class was based on vocabulary for the media. HERE's a little quiz to help you revise. 

We talked a lot today about how to study and what to put in our notebooks. The whiteboard I've put up today shows you an example of noting common mistakes with a word, making verb-noun combinations, drawing pictures to help you remember differences, and of course, making your own, personal examples. Remember, my examples are good for me, they help me remember, they might not help you. You should make your own examples and try to make them personal so that you have a better chance of remembering them.


After the break we had a discussion on your media consumption habits and then we read some articles about the lives of a theatre critic and a sports journalist and listened to stories of the lives of a restaurant critic and a war reporter. 

Finally, we saw some uses of 'as' in English, a preposition that causes its fair share of problems. Remember that 'as' can mean many things and you should make examples for yourself showing each meaning clearly - if the examples apply to what you say on a day-to-day basis even better! If you want to practise try THIS EXERCISE!

That's what I remember from today, how about you? What was your big take-home point today? What do you really want to learn from all today's information? What was your favourite word or phrase? Let us know in the comments! 

Monday - I recommend reading it all!

Today we talked about reported speech and reporting verbs. Be careful about the difference between the two. 

Reported speech uses verbs 'say' 'tell' and 'ask' and has all kinds of rules attached to it. If you're not sure of the rules you can try this exercise to practise. 

Reporting verbs are those we put on the board - you don't need to shift your verbs in time or drop auxiliaries or change word order or anything like that with them, you just need to follow the pattern. 

We also talked about how we could practise this (pause your favourite TV show and report what the character just said) and we asked for examples for homework of suggestions, offers, invitations etc. so we can practise this tomorrow morning. 

Finally, we asked you all to get involved with this blog and talked about how we can use computers/technology to be prepared for class. We'll see how that goes, but remember, the better prepared you are for class, the greater the value our practise will have and the more time we can spend on the things that are problems for us, rather than spending massive amounts of time on things that we could do by ourselves at home. 

So that's what I remember about today, how about you? What do you remember? What did you learn? How did you learn it? Let me know in the comments!