Under the Weather

Sorry for the lack of posts this last week. I've been under the weather. I caught a bug and have had a temperature. This may surprise those of you are unfamiliar with these idioms who may be thinking that all of us live beneath the sky, chasing insects successfully is no excuse for not blogging and we all have temperatures, usually 37 degrees or thereabouts. What I mean to say is, I have been ill. Not sick, an Americanism often confused with illness but which means, in British English at least, to vomit, but ill. Some ill-defined virus brought in by my resident plague carrier (read my two year old daughter, continually snotty and prone to wipe said snot all over the place). So, no point to this short blog except to perhaps say that idioms are important and it is worth studying the more commonly occurring ones, so that you are at least familiar with them in a passive sense. This is increasingly important as you go up the levels and essential if you hope to get a decent grade at CPE level.
By the way guys (and now I am referring to my students who took the mock last Saturday), some of you did very well, some not so. You know which group you yourself belong to. General advice is to check out the different categories of writing you might be expected to produce and get a better feel for the layout and style needed. The Expert series which you are all using has some very useful examples in its back pages.
Where are those strepsils?

Saturday Mocks

I spent my Saturday invigilating and correcting exams, our Mock-Cambridge exams which we use to see if students are ready for June. The results were pretty good, though I kept seeing the same errors again and again. Exam technique and attention to detail are worth between 5 and 10% in these exams to my mind. I have seen the usual mistakes... I'll list them here so you can shake your head in wonder that students still make them and nod sagely and think 'I would never do that' (but someone ALWAYS does).

1) Bad copying on to the answer sheet. One poor girl had the correct answers, just one exam question late. She got a couple of marks simply because there we a couple of times when there were two in a row with the same answer. Fail.

2) No name on the paper. I mean, really! Fail.

3) Simple spelling errors. Marks thrown away.

4) Poor hand-writing. Marks abandoned to the abyss.

5) A poor understanding of the question. Fail (well, banded 2.2 in the writing section) because he didn't read it properly.

Also, to those students who didn't bring pens or pencils... c'mon! You know better!
Still, that's why we do mocks.

Doh!

I am a dope. I have been teaching this exam so long that I should be used to this now, but the FCE exam no longer has the exercise in the Use of English paper where the student is required to find the extra word in a line. I was told this, but forgot and kept using my favourite old books and kept making the students do similar practice exercises. It is good training, but is no longer pertinent to the exam. Doh! Advice therefore today is to keep up to date with the shape and the form of the exams. And by the way, my FCE guys taking the mock on Saturday had better finish on time. It's England vs Wales on in the afternoon and if you are late I will miss the beginning of the game.

Ken Robinson Link

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

A good link this. I don't agree with all of it but it makes you think and laugh as well.

Way with Wordle

Teachers looking to invent games and activities for vocab could do a lot worse than visit this site. http://wordle.net/
Wordle is a site that randomises the key words in a text and changes the size of the word to reflect the frequency it's used. It can also be used for enliving phrasal verbs or specific collocations, all the things we need to be good at to pass the Cambridge exams!