Saturday, February 28, 2015

Martha Payne and the debate about school lunches

The conversation topic of today's class was school lunches around the world.


We also discussed how traditions in Spain have changed for younger generations, specifically talking about how, in Spain, the norm used to be that the majority of all primary and secondary school students used to go home every day for a lunch prepared by their moms.


Next, students read this article from a British newspaper about how Jamie Oliver gave Martha a very prestigious award. Students had to identify new vocabulary they found in the article and try to come up with a definition as a group. Here are the words, phrasal verbs, and idioms they identified:
burst in
top bird
to rub shoulders with someone
turn (something) round
mind-boggling
sum
to go without
awesome
leftovers
rolled in

What are your thoughts on the topic? Feel free to leave your comments below.

Saturday, February 14, 2015

Video Project: Final Product

Here is the final product of our student video project for the winter 2014-15 trimester, a culmination of our students progress throughout the trimester. 

Areas we work on in our conversation classes include pronunciation, listening comprehension, public speaking skills, developing confidence, expanding vocabulary, understanding and using idioms, and a variety of other oral expression skills.


In today's class we will discuss the outcomes of these areas. Lets watch the video again and identify a) strengths in these areas and b) what can be improved upon in these areas.

Part 1
pronunciation
public speaking skills
other oral expression skills

Part 2
pronunciation
public speaking skills
developing confidence
other oral expression skills

Part 3
listening comprehension
expanding vocabulary
understanding and using idioms
other oral expression skills

Have you read part one and part two of the making of our student video project? To see how the whole process works, click here.

Once again, a huge thanks to the talented Mr. Diego Cerezo for his camera work and post-production editing skills!

Friday, February 6, 2015

The making of our Student Video Project, part 2: lights, camera, action!

Stage, check. Cameraman, check. Preparation, check. Lights, camera, action!


Part two of our video project consisted of an individual pronunciation challenge. Each of the conversation class students had to choose a tongue twister poem at random and recited it on the spot in order to showcase some of the oral expression skills that they have attained throughout the trimester. 

One important lesson that students observed in this activity was that sometimes confidence can be just as important as practice when it comes to speaking skills. While some of the students became understandably nervous in part two, classmates helped calm their nerves in front of the camera, reminding each other to focus on body language, smiling and posture. 


When you watch the video, try to see if all our students stuck to the script, or if you can say these tough alliterations with such finesse. The lyrics have been included as subtitles in the video so that you can follow along.

The final chapter of the video project is the Remember that! quiz show. Here students prepared trivia questions for their classmates to answer. The content came directly from the topics covered in previous classes, i.e. oral presentations, expressions, idioms and vocabulary. Only the person asking the questions knew the correct answers, so the conversation and banter in this portion of the video is totally spontaneous and unrehearsed. 

This "raw material" gives a lot of insight into what each individual´s strengths and weaknesses are. In the next post we will see the finished product of the video project and look more in depth at what each student can improve, patterns of mistakes and overall intelligibility.


Stay tuned!