Class work 5/12/2015

Basically by now you should have covered everything up to the end of unit 4 in your class book and workbook. In class on Friday we looked at pages 36 and 37, and set writing homework form pages 38-39, as well as revising the use of past tenses and the vocabulary from page 35.

Writing Homework: A review

As we discussed in class, you can do either of the review tasks on pages 38-39 of your class book, or this task.

• A local newspaper has asked for people to seend in reviews of 'special occasion' restaurants. Write a review of a restaurant that you went to for a celebration or special event recently. Say whether the restaurant was a good choice for this particular event, and describe how the service, atmosphere and décor contributed to the experience.

Progress Test: Dates

We will do a progress test based on real CPE exam material on Friday 13 February 2015. It is necessary for everyone to attend that day.

Invitations to the blog

I've just sent invitations out to you all to be 'authors' of the blog. This means that you can post directly onto the blog with any ideas, questions or comments.

If you didn't get the email, please tell me in a comment to this post, with your email address. Or send me an email to driscoll.eli@gmail.com, and I'll make sure I resend you an invitation.

Using commas

The Oxford Dictionaries website has a good, simple guide to comma use in English.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/comma

Class 28/11

In class on Friday we looked at the use of past tenses, an area which can be surprisingly tricky.

For homework you need to complete exercise 5 on page 35 of your students' book. This was part of last week´s homework but not completed by most of those in attendance.

We did the reading on page 32.33 of the students' book, and the listening on page 16 of the workbook as assessed exercises. Most of you did pretty well on both exercises.

And don't forget today's joke:      
                
                          waɪ dɪd ðə flaɪ flaɪ ?                                                                                                    bɪˈkʌz ðə spaɪdə spaɪd ə !

Class 21/11

read In Friday's class we focused on Key Word Transformations. We looked at those on page 27 (ex 6, all conditional sentences) and then p40, and we did the task on page 31 as an assessed activity.

We heard the poem 'If' by Rudyard Kipling- a nice reading of this poem is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drBIhnATwuc

by Michael Caine, one of my favourite actors!

For homework you should do pages 34 and 35 of your class book.

Class: 7/11/2014

Yesterday we had a writing intensive. We looked at how to approach Writing Part 1, the compulsory essay.

If you missed class you should write either the essay based on the two texts about museums on page 22

or the essay about music based on the two texts on page 56.

Remember:

• structure your essay carefully into 3-5 coherent and discrete paragraphs
• to achieve a good mark for 'content', you should identify, summarise and evaluate two or three key points in each text, make some comment about similarities and differences between the texts, and add some relevant content of your own
• this is homework, not an exam- I expect some people to use spell-checkers and dictionaries, so YOU might as well too. Check your work and rewrite as often as you like. I will be more strict about correctable errors (spelling, low-level grammar mistakes, incorrectly used vocabulary) than if it were a timed writing

Halloween 2014

In yesterday's halloween special we.....

• Spoke about holiday preferences, and tried to discover whether our classmates would be good people to go on holiday with;
• Looked at Paper 1 Part 7 (Reading, multiple matching) on page 17;
• Revised our knowledge of future forms on page 18;
• Spoke about photography and
• Did Paper 1 Part 2 (Use of English, Open Cloze) on page 30

If you missed the class you can do any of these exercises. Everyone should try to do as much of the workbook as possible, plus the Vocabulary on page 17, and the exercises on page 18

Flo-Joe: quality exam practice

For those who don't know about it already, http://www.flo-joe.co.uk/cpe/students/ provides an excellent bank of preparation materials for Cambridge exams.

23 October 2015

Today in class we looked at word transformation, and did the exercises on  pages 12, 14 and 15.

We also did the Listening on page 20, so if you missed the class you should do those exercises at home and check your answers.

For homework you should complete Unit 1 in your workbook.

Follow me on Twitter driscool@e_d_driscoll

The books you need to buy are

Cambridge English Objective Proficiency Student's Book 
ISBN: 9781447937593

Sudent's Resource Book
ISBN: 9781408299005

For in depth information on the CPE exam, have a look at the Cambridge website

http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams/proficiency/