Real English® News # 1

I spend a lot of time reading and watching the news. I thougt it would be a good idea to share my favorite reports, while providing some vocabulary interruptions for students. This is for Upper Intermediate and Advanced levels.

This the first paragraph of the article:

New York Times - Published: March 27, 2011
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and KAREEM FAHIM

TRIPOLI, Libya — American and European bombs battered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s most important bastion of support in his tribal homeland of Surt on Sunday night, as rebels seeking his ouster capitalized on the damage from the Western airstrikes to erase their recent losses and return to the city’s doorstep.
batter has a few definitions as a verb and a noun.
In this case, it is a verb of course: "to hit heavily and repeatedly with violent blows."
bastion: " A well-fortified position." is the best of several definitons in this case.

ouster:  "removal" is a good synonym in this case.

A New Lesson for Beginners: Spelling Test

The new spelling test for beginners starts here:

 http://www.real-english.com/reo/3b/3b-1.htm

The other 2011 lessons recently added include

"Dream Job" and "Describe Your Loved Ones".
These two are for intermediate students.

In Search of the Perfect Lesson

I just finished a new Real English lesson - 40b, about how we describe other people, beginning with our loved ones.

http://www.real-english.com/reo/40b/unit40b.html

The videos in each exercise are even shorter than usual, and highly specific for the needs of the exercises, and correspond to very small parts of conversations. There are 27 exercises, many with several questions.
I hope you like these,
Mike

The First 2011 Clips - # 3: Dream Job

I recently finished lesson 24b. It's called "Dream Job".

I experiment a lot with exercise techniques. In this case, I wanted to make a relatively difficult lesson easy enough for pre-intermediate students and not just for the upper intermediate levels.

So, as an exception, I used subtitles in some of the short exercise videos for this experiment. The design of the exercise dictates the nature of the clip.

Let's look at Exercise 2 an example. I give the subtitles for the question, which are difficult for the "pre-intermediate" student. So they have a chance to read the question while they listen to it.

Then in the next exercise (3a),

How to train your dog

I learned how important I was at the Mike & Val Marzio house in Carro in terms of basic dog responsibilities and behavior. If you are on vacation, the dog forgets everything you taught him, out of spite, one reflects, after a certain length of absence... THEREFORE, due to dog destruction of home,  I WILL NEVER LEAVE HOME AGAIN until I am sure that Barack and his side-kick Emmy-Lou will never be such bad dogs ever again.

I am the only one who instructs basics to the dogs. The women are in a make-believe-land of dogs-without-discipline, which ia a big no-no !

On top of this, the dogs have now trained me not to leave them.

PS: no photos of dogs on purpose! I'll show photos of all the valuables which they destroyed instead.

Feb. 2011 Update: Instructions for Beginners in 30 languages

The instructions are simple but real beginners must understand them too!
Please contribute YOUR native language if you don't find it here:

http://the-original-real-english.blogspot.com/2010/02/instructions-for-beginners-for-using.html