More on personality

Contributive and collaborative: that's the standard for the 21st century student. Is it the end of the rat race? Or is it just that today's winner is the one who shares the most? Anyway, here's a new piece of work from  a classmate, and quite a long and thorough one, by the way. However, lists are lists... Could you try and arrange those lists in a different way. Creativity is but another way of learning!

Students HandOuts: 1B Personallity 2  

Expressing (dis)agreement

One of the most frequent things we do in life is to express our opinion about practically everything, whether it is clothes, food, way of driving, politics, third age, family business, employment, nationality, tv, or any issue, no matter how weird, unusual of distant it may be. Whenever there's a fact, there's always a say.

Make sure you remember the most frequent and natural ways of expressing your view. And, most important, try to incorporate them into your daily speech strategies. Mind the degree of formality and the value of intonation...

Handout: Dis-Agreement

HAVE - Use & revision

Check the handout if you have any difficulty with HAVE.
Handout: 1B - HAVE

Emotions & Personality

Hand-outs supplied by María and Belén with plenty of vocabulary on emotions and personality. Can you try and rearrange these items using different criteria?

• Students' HandOut1a: Click to download: Emotions
• Students' HandOut1b: Click to download: Personality

Revision Exercises

Here you have some revision exercises for the grammar and vocabulary on lesson 1A.

CLICK TO OPEN 1A HOMEWORK

Facing a job interview

Have you ever had to convince your prospective employer? Just have a look at this short job interview where a man introduces himself and tries to convince two employers, one taking the role of the nice lady, while the other sits back and plays de baddie...  Job Interview.

WORK VOCABULARY

Even for advanced students, it is rather usual to record new vocabulary in lists and hope that these lists help remember all the new words. However, lists don’t work for everyone... mostly for nobody. One alternative is to make a mind map, a picture which links together the ideas in a topic. At the centre you set the main idea, and all the related ideas lead from it, springing as branches, just like a map. This way, you integrate the most effective ways of recording vocabulary (lexical sets, word families, collocations, useful chunks, similar types of words, etc) into one productive and visual item.

As we've been working with this topic, WORK, you could try and create a map for the topic. I offer you a lead in, so that you can continue exploring and widening this idea. Once you have done, I'll provide a complete map as an example.

Please, check if this kind of maps works and, if so, try doing this with every lexical area. You could build up a nice set of vocabulary maps to help you improve your English.

Click to open the WORK diagram.

Then only (and I mean only) once you have finished building your own diagram, check the one I propose...

Class HandOuts: 1A Work in Full  

Discourse markers

UNIT 1A - Discourse connectors are particles that help us build a meaningful text. They are significantly valuable when we want to write long, complex texts, as they provide a logical structure. Please feel free to download the following card with the most relevant structures denoting RESULT-CAUSE-CONTRAST

FURTHER READING:

Even though it is intended for academic writing, the following page designed by the University of Warwick is worth visiting. Its second section offers an interesting approach to style and register: DISCOURSE MARKERS - UNIV. OF WARWICK

Happiness at work

Are you happy with your job? 

Up to what extent? 

What makes you feel happy? 

...unhappy? 

Consider what you value the most about a job (or your present job). Can you name the three most outstanding factors to feel happy, contented at work? Can you explain why they make a difference?

In late 2006, British human resources consultant Chiumento carried out a survey offering a picture of the average worker in Britain as regards their well being at work. All around the UK, 1063 respondents (547 men and 516 women) aged from 18-65 years old, employed full or part-time in organisations of 20 staff or more, measured their level of satisfaction at work. The results were conclusive: One in four people describe themselves as “very happy” at work.

If you want to learn about that, the five-page-long briefing of the report's findings will give you an overview of a social side of work: Chiumento's Happiness at Work Index. 

You might also want to watch the following videocasts:

• Chiumento's Happiness at Work Index
• Motivate your life

Written assignment

Needless to say you must write, write and write. But there's no point in wasting class time in doing writing, when you can do that at home.

Here's the proposal: a diary. I don't mind whether it is paper or digital, but do please keep a diary and make an effort to write at least three entries a week. The topics are free, anything that catches your interest: daily news, thoughts, dissertation on common topics, further debate after topics seen in class, etc. It should NOT necessarily something intimate or personal... feel free to lie (as long as you keep writing)

I will start collecting the diaries a month from now, thre or four a week, so I can check and correct, and return them in time to get the following bunch.