Expresing opinion

• Congratulations, Lei! You were the first one to find out the name of these native flowers. They are known as flannel flowers (Actinotis helianthii is their scientific name). I have seen them amongst eucalyptus trees in Sydney reserves and national parks in sandstone areas. One was never able to enjoy them at home before. As you know, you are not allowed to pick wild flowers from the bush, but now they are growing them commercially and are found in flower shops in spring.
  
  I'm preparing an interview with a young Sydneysider, Nikki, who is involved in many things. As fashion is one of them, I would like you to give your opinion about fashion and other topics related to it in this week's forum.
• If you didn't have time to listen to Vukosava's podcast in Splendid Speaking last week, do it now. We will be working on it later on.
• Listen to another movie review from Time4English. You can start a list of verbs and adjectives used in these reviews. It will help you with your own review writing and it will help you with your spoken activities and radio programs.
• Also in Time4English, in the grammar book, go to the letter i and do the ED / -ING exercise. You will find a list of adjectives useful for your movie review.
• Then go to the letter p, do the exercises for plenty of, a lot of , a little, a few. It will reinforce what we did in class last Tuesday.
• Finally in English Lessons - Upper Intermediate / Advanced do the first Tenses quiz.

Welcome back!

Hi again and I hope you all had a great break. I spent last weekend in a beautiful part of New South Wales, the south coast. The place where we were staying was visited every day by lots of kangaroos, galahs, rosellas and other Australian birds. Have a look at some of the photos I took there.

To prepare for your radio programs, go to Time4English and then Movie Reviews. Choose one movie you have already seen and listen to the review, do the exercises and study the vocabulary to be able to talk about it. Write your own review in your blog.
When recording our radio programs, often we will be expressing our opinion on different topics. Listen to this episode of Splendid Speaking, Expressing and justifying opinions, where Vukosava talks about the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Listen to it a first time to get the gist of it (the main idea, a general impression). Listen to it a second time with the script in front of you (ask me for it).
Print this worksheet about expressing opinions and we will work on it this afternoon.
Highlight the language that Vukosava uses to express her opinion and to introduce examples that help her justify her opinion. Prepare a short talk about the same topic. Record it in Audacity.
Remember I told you about lists of common words in English. Go to Time4 English and you'll find the 100 most common words in the main menu. Do you know all of them? I bet you do! Copy them and make sure you know them all and their spelling.

IF you thought that is too easy... here are the 1000 most common English words. The good thing about this list is that you have explanations about how to use prepositions and articles, which always give us trouble. Put this website in your favourites at home and visit it regularly. You can write 5 sentences each day using words from this list until you have used all of them!

Our Class 2007 (bis)

I had lots of problems using the new blogger (with Google account) at home, so I had to create another blog to prepare for our class today. I've put a permanent link on the right sidebar, below Our Forum & Our podcasts. If blogger is not working, I will prepare the class there!