STOP SPANGLISH: The Seminar!

New Year! New English! New confidence! New abilities! Ladies and gentelmen (and everyone in between....) I proudly present to you....the FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO STOP SPANGLISH seminar, which will start on Friday, January 14th, 2011.

Instead of babbling on about what an amazing course it is, I've put all of the important information in a downloadable document that you can print out and refer to:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/45323270/Stop-Spanglish-Seminar-1

And, as always, if you have any questions, comments, doubts or requests, don't hesitate to send an e-mail.

FREE!! ESL Writing Checklist

In the time that I've been teaching English, both in Spain and in other countries, I've found that almost all of my students hate writing. It's easy to understand why. Effective writing (not just spelling, but constructing arguments and convincing people) isn't easy to do. Students also don't like to spend lots of time trying to write something that sounds intelligent...and then get a paper back that's full of mistakes.

One of the best ways you can avoid the disappointment of getting a (heavily) corrected essay back is to check for mistakes before you submit your text to your teacher. Many (if not almost all) mistakes are easily avoidable, and if you go back and look at the kind of corrections your teacher made on your essays, you'll probably find that you're not making a lot of different kinds of mistakes...you're making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

If this is the case, here's a downloadable writing checklist that can help you revise your writing before you submit it.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/35772510/Writing-Checklist

This isn't a list of every possible thing that students do wrong, but it does cover the most common (and the most easily prevented) mistakes that teachers tend to see. If you're writing the First Certificate exam, these are the kinds of silly mistakes that make students lose points and risk failing.

Tuesday's Word Challenge

Go get your dictionaries....here's a puzzle to keep your brain busy:

Which four-letter word can be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, a conjunction, a preposition AND an adverb?

I'll post the answer tonight.

Matthew WHO?

Have you ever wondered why English has those double letters (like double "T") in the middle, or at the ends, of words?

I was watching the Giro d'Italia today on VEO7, and one of the announcers kept mispronouncing the name of Matthew Lloyd, the Australian cyclist. "Lloyd" is one of several last names which begin with double "L" (almost all of them are from Wales), and one of the only cases when you would see a double consonant at the beginning of words in English. This is different from Spanish, where "LL" and "RR" aren't really common at the beginning of words, but you can see them in some words (like Lleida).

So why do we have double consonants in English, if they don't represent a different sound?

Double consonants that are in the middle of words are where you separate syllables. Think of these two-syllable adjectives: fun·ny, sil·ly, hap·py, Fin·nish, com·mon: In each case, you would break the word in between the double consonants.

The same is true if the word has more than two syllables. This is especially true of words that are formed with suffixes: hap·pi·ness, in·suf·fer·able, bar·ris·ter, con·som·mé (meat broth), cor·res·pon·dence.

Double consonants (especially -ss) also happen frequently at the ends of words: kiss, miss, bliss. They're also extremely common at the ends of surnames: Pratt, Raitt, Schnurr, Flynn, Dunn.

And don't forget that if you need to put a suffix on the end of a verb that ends in a noun/consonant combination, you need to double the final consonant, too:
stop: stopped, stopping
counsel: counselled, counselling
travel: travelled, travelling
kid (=joke with someone): kidded, kidding
(**Note that the double -l only happens in British spelling, not American spelling.)

So if you're pronouncing a name like "Lloyd" or "Llewellyn, it's pronounced "loid", not "zloid."