IMAGINE A SITUATION

IMAGINE A SITUATION

You're the head of a refugee camp somewhere in a poor, developing country. The annual crops have failed once again and thousand of people arrive at the camp seeking food and medical help. The problem is that you have supplies enough for, at most 5000 refugees, however another 15,000 have come. As the days pass the death rates, especially amongst the very young and the very old rise dramatically. Despite repeated calls to the international community the aid promised by western governments fails to appear.

At this point a local drugs baron/warlord appears on the scene and makes a proposal; in return for supplying food and medical supplies for the camp you must agree to let him use the place as a cover for his cocaine/heroin/etc production facilities.

Do you agree?

This is a moral dilemma exercise which I will do in my lesson this week. It was inspired by the movie Beyond Borders.

Doctors Without Borders

In today's lesson we heard about Doctor Without Borders. To hear more about what they do click here to listen to their podcasts.

Cheating in school

Last week we did a lesson on cheating in school. You might find this article interesting;

"Angelo Angelis, a professor at Hunter College in New York City, was recently grading some student papers on the story of Paul Revere when he noticed something strange.

A certain passage kept appearing in his students' work, he said."

For the rest of the ABC News article click here.

Welcome

This is a list of different things you can do to improve your English outside class.

1 Use the internet - How ?

a Surf the web on a regular basis - 10 to 15 minutes a day is enough.

b Use chat rooms - Mirc or Yahoo have easy to use (and FREE) chat services.

http://www.mirc.co.uk

http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/chat/chatbylycos.html

c Listen to radio or download podcasts from the net.

www.cnn.com/services/podcasting/
www.bbc.co.uk/radio/

Or download a book and listen to it. It costs nothing.

http://freeaudio.org
http://www.scottsigler.net
http://librivox.org

d Set up your own blog (web page). It's easy and costs nothing. Also it is a great way to practise your writing skills and come into contact with others

www.blogger.com
www.myspace.com

e Use Skype (www.skype.com), which allows you to make free phone calls over the internet in order to find speaking partners from all over the world. MSN and Yahoo also have similar services.

www.kantalk.com is a good place to start.

f Watch Youtube (www.youtube.com) in order to see clips in English. There are plenty of videos aimed at those learning English, e.g

http://thedailyenglishshow.blogspot.com/.

For longer programmes see;

Google Video (http://video.google.com)

2 Watch DVD's - without subtitles - at least once a week. This is a great way of preparing for the listening test.

3 Read something other than your course books. Literature, short stories, magazines, newspapers; In fact just about anything you can find in English. All reading is good practice for the Reading Comprehension part of the Cambridge exams. All these things can be found at the kiosks in Aristotelian square or in central bookshops.

4 Record yourself. If you have a cassette recorder, mobile phone that can record or a microphone for your PC, record yourself speaking. It's a great way of correcting errors in your spoken English. You can record part of a film you've seen, a page from an audio book, a listening exercise from the course book etc. Listen to the original and try to copy it as closely as possible.

5 Speak only English in class. This is probably the only chance you'll get to speak English before the exam so make the most of the opportunity.

Nobody expects students to do all of these things but if you try some of them during the course of the year then you'll see a great improvement in your language skills and of course you'll greatly increase your chances of getting a good grade in the exams.