Prepare your job interview

You are preparing for a job interview, and most people forget that like with everything else practice makes perfect. So for a real interview you'd have to role play at home, and prepare as many questions as you could, write a list and add possible answers. After the interview add any complicated questions the interviewer asked you that weren't in your list.

The most important thing is to make sure that your answers are appropriate and prove to the company that you are articulate and can solve problems. If they ask you something such as what is your greatest weakness, be honest, but also add something good. If you are disorganised  what are you doing about it.

And always give examples, real things that happened to you and how you solved them.

For your homework choose three questions from this link

https://www.thebalance.com/job-interview-questions-and-answers-2061204


1 Take note of any interesting vocabulary that you could use

You can add them to your vocabulary notebook page on Jobs

2  Think about how you would answer them.

Remember you can take notes,  but don't write whole sentences just a bullet point diagram

We will do a fake interview on Thursday.

Students recommend: Downtown Abbey (TV series)

I'll be posting some recommendations from my students every week. They will be commenting on books, TV series and films, which they have watched and enjoyed in English. Belen, one of my CAE students at Paraninfo has kindly contributed this summary of the TV series Downtown Abbey: 

Downton Abbey is a period tv series about an aristocratic family and all their servants. During 1912, their lives were pretty uneventful, until the dramatical incident of the Titanic happened, where the heir of the fortune and the Dowton Abbey castle dies in the shipwreck. In that moment, the problem to find a new heir turns into the storyline of the drama. 

The earl and countess of Grantham do not have any sons, only three daughters, and they can’t inherit the fortune. The new heir is a distant cousin of the family who works as a lawyer. At first, he does not like the aristocratic family very much because of his modest origin of a middle class family. 

(Careful some spoilers ahead!)

Little by little they realize that he lives in a real world and they accept him. The sophisticated and classist customs of the aristocracy started to change with the arrival of the first world war. The war changes their lifes and their minds. Afterwards, the older daughter of the earl falls in love with the heir and they get married. 

 The tv series talks about the common problems of the society of this age, like the differences between the working class and the high class, the problems of the post war era, an antiquated mentality of the society and the right to vote of the women. 

 I specially recommend this tv series to women, because I think it is the target of a period movie. Also, those people who like stories about the world war and the early 20th centuy.

You can buy the first series here

All levels 2013-09: Learning phonetics (1) (Special guest Annie Bottle)

Are you worried about sounding like Annie bottle* on her famous hit "Relaxing cup of café con leche".



Don't panic! Here is the solution.

This is an excellent phonetics chart from the New English File student's book.

(*Note: To be completely fair with Ms Botella, at least she tried to speak English in public, and despite her strong accent she manages to pronounce most of the words correctly.)

Practice: Match the phonetic vowels to the following words using the pictures to help you. The first one is already done for you.

a) Horse- 6

b) clock

c) Bull

d) Egg

e) Phone

f)  Ear

g) Boy

h) Fish

i) Bike

j) Tree

k) Car
l) Computer
m) Cat
n) Tourist
o) Boot
p) Bird
q) owl
r) chair
s) train
t) up
u) clock

Use the OALD dictionary for any unknown sounds, it's got a phonetic transcription and a button to actually listen to the words.

 

horse

 NOUN

hɔːs ; hɔːrs 

CAE and FCE: What does the fox say?

One of my FCE students reminded me about this song "What does the fox say?" I thought it would be a good idea to use it for learning the sounds of the animals (By the way I think this was the original purpose of the song):

1-Listen to the song and fill in the gaps with the different sounds.
______________________________________________________________________________
ow     meow   toot   tweet   croak  woof  moo  blub  squeek  quack wapapapapow!
_____________________________________________________________________________

1-Dog goes _____
2-Cat goes _____
3-Bird goes _______
4-and mouse goes ______

5-Cow goes ______
6-Frog goes _______
7 and the elephant goes ______

8-Ducks say _______
9 and fish go ________
10 and the seal goes __________

11 the fox goes__________

So mouse goes squeek, but we can also say a mouse squeaks. 

Squeek (noun) to squeak (verb)

2-Listen to the song and fill in the gaps with the different sounds.

1- Mice    (d)              a)hiss
2-Snakes                    b) trumpet
3-Lions                       c) screech
4-Elephants                 d) squeak
5-Parrot                      e) bark
6-Dogs                        f) roar

CAE Intensive: Homework: 04/09/2013 and "Life extension is a pie in the sky"

Your homework for the weekend is:

1) Do the writing task on page 84 of the Expert coursebook. It's an article for a students' magazine so keep it informal, almost conversational, and remember to include all the points mentioned in the instructions. (220-260 words)

2) There was some controversy on an i09 article about life extension. This reminded me of the text we read today in class on how life might change in the following 100 years. 

One of the readers had an interesting point about death check it out and we will discuss it on Monday:

-Screw the rhetoric "death is a part of life". It's sour grapes "If I can't be immortal, at least I can take comfort in knowing no-one else will be either." It's little more than attempting to cope with the hopelessness of dying that terminal patients do.

The human race is a terminal patient. There is a possible cure. That cure could save everyone everywhere from the same inevitable fate of rotting in the ground.

I never said it was easy. I never said it was tomorrow. I said, quite truthfully, that the more funding research is given the greater the likelihood of a solution being found, and the sooner it will be found.

CAE Tuesday 01/10/2013. Open cloze

Today in class we made our own open cloze. Use of English Part 2. 

Fill in the gaps using only one word.

I cannot say (1)          am one of nature's born housewives. For a large part of my 20s and early 30s, I tackled housework the Joan Rivers way. "I hate housework," she once said. "You (2)          the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start (3) ______ over again."

I did no housework for weeks on end, followed by an exhausting two-day blitz. Then it was back to squalor. It was only (4)          I was sent to write an article on the National Trust (5)         I began to see the benefits, even pleasures, of housework applied consistently and professionally. I discovered that housework can bring its own satisfaction and I set about learning  (6)___          much as I could - not (7)             its own sake, but because I was working full-time and didn't have the time or inclination to devote my life to cleaning.

(8)           of this moment of personal revelation grew a column for Weekend that ran for over two years.

The Housewife's Handbook is the book of the column, but when it came to writing it, I realised that housework - surprisingly - had changed since the column ended in 2005. Housework seemed to be in the air to such an extent that it spawned a prime-time television show, How Clean Is Your House? In (9)          , housework, like everything else, had (10)____ green. It no longer means sloshing gallons of bleach about. People want to clean in a way that is going to do least damage to (11)         , their children and the environment.

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You can read the whole article here

As an extra task you can extract some more vocabulary from the article for your vocabulary notebook, such as:

Bananas go black/ bread goes stale etc.

TOEFL SPEAKING QUESTION 2: The silly Interview

When I was a child there was a game I'd play with my friends, it was a sort of interview to find out how much we had in common with each other. The questions were usually silly, such as, who do you prefer: Lennon or McCartney? or which do you prefer the transformers or the Xmen?

We had to answer using only one word. But as TOEFL students, you could think of as many silly questions as you can and actually give reasons and examples of why you prefer one or another.

Here are some other questions for you to start with.

Which do you prefer:

1) Coke or Pepsi?

2) Hamburger or Pizza?

3) Going to the cinema or to the theatre?

4) Rock or classical music?

5) cats or dogs

6) Tea or cofee?

7) Summer or winter?


Note: Just for fun here are my answers: (Paul McCartney, the X-men, Coke, hamburguer, cinema, rock,  dogs, tea (of course) and winter.

CAE Thursday 2013-9: English Sayings

Don't make a mountain out of a molehill

Today, those of you who finished your exam practice early, made up some endings for these sayings:

1) Rome wasn't...
2) Don't make a mountain out...
3)Once Bitten...
4) One man's meat...
5) Engage brain...
6) Better late...
7) Let's cross that bridge...
8) If you pay peanuts...
9) Why have a dog...

Now I'd like you to match them to their real endings, the first one is done for you:

a)....of a molehill.( 2 Don't make a mountain out...)
b)...built in a day.
c)...is another man's poison.
d)...when we come to it.
e)...than never.
f)...you get monkeys.
g)...and bark yourself?
h)...twice shy.
i)...before mouth.

Tomorrow, we will talk about the meaning of each and every one of these sayings. You might need to explain yourselves in different ways. The following exercise will help you to do precisely that:

EXPLAINING AND PARAPHRASING:

Put these words in the correct order to form ways of explaining and paraphrasing. The first one is done for you:

1 it/ way/ put/ to/ another - To put it another way...
2 is/ that/ say/ to
3 which/ by/ mean/ I
4 simply/ put /to /it
5 just/ which/ means
6 mean/ is/ I/ what/ that/ by
7 trying/ say/ I/ what/ to/ am/ is

And here is an example of what we will be doing in class as a speaking exercise:

-Don't make a mountain out of a molehill, or to put it another way, don't make a serious problem out of something that is not very important. You must never forget the rule "Don't worry, be happy"