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[Daniel]

Hi Torsten,

I don't want ot be too much of a pain in the neck. Question 7 still reads, ... usedto say... is notavailable. But that's it then.
Thanks again for the good suggestions and the changes you made.

Regards,
Daniel

[Torsten]

Hi Daniel,

It should be OK now.
Thanks,
Torsten
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[Roberto]

Hi, Torsten,

I hope you are enjoying your weekend, not only as a father. I am only joking a bit, because I have spent the last days with my son here in Connewitz. Well, I am writing this e-mail, specially to give you a report on what we did in the "Geithainer" school.
As I informed you by phone, we repeated some of the topics Marisa had tackled on Tuesday, i.e., signs of the Zodiac, then I made a kind of small talk with each one in the class: age, birthday, hobbies, favourite dish, favourite colour, origin, religion etc. We spoke about countries: not only English-speaking countries, but also places where French, Spanish, Russian etc. are spoken. Alex from Moscow would have preferred to have geography lessons instead of pure English.
- We read different articles: "Alva Edison's life", his inventions: Grammar past tenses. "Origin of coffee", we discussed this topic, then we treated some grammar points such as: Word derivation (- ion, -er, -etc), vocab topics: drinks, food, meals, go shopping, routine activities.
- Telephone phrases, active exercises in the class. Discussion of some important grammar points: comparative/superlative; numbers
- We played cards (different topics: questions- answers; exercises to test pupils' spontaneity skills, communication skills)
- We played with Monopoly banknotes/bills with the purpose to practice prices, paying a bill, invitation etc...Use of conditional forms: would, should
- I explained the origin of the days of the week and words such as coffee, the numbers from one- twelve, among other things.

The class consisted of a mixture of three- four classes put together. The group was kind of heterogeneous, some of them lacked motivation (Some of them did not listen to the class, they preferred to read a newspaper or play with the mobile phone instead).

By the way, next week Tuesday and Wednesday will be o.k.

Talk to you soon,

Roberto
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[Roberto]

Hi, Torsten,

the "mixed/heteregeneous" class I had last week doesn't have to learn English this week, as far as I know. So, tomorrow you will teach a different class. I suppose it is the class I had at the very beginning. If it is so, they should repeat/brush up some grammar aspects such as comparatives/superlatives, irregular verbs in the past tense/past participles, the use of the ing-form etc. Regarding vocab, we often did brainstorming exercises about different topics such as: countries, signs of the zodiac, the house, living in a city/ a village, food, hobbies etc. . We played monopoly cards and answered the question: what would you do if you had "10,000" Euros, or we imagined different situations in our routine: going to the cinema, to the theatre, to the restaurant: How much money would you need then? Would you go alone or would you invite a friend or relative?
We talked about personal interests, about feelings, "how do you feel today" was a copy where they learned a lot of adjectives regarding feelings (embarrassed, enthusiastic, bored, alone, demure, sad etc..). Here is the link:

"How Do You Feel Today?"

"You can check your mood on the complete map (hi res 1400x2200).

You can download the single moods for you homepage:

A Big Thank You to Jürgen for the scan and to my sister Stefanie for the poster!"

Keep in touch!

Roberto

P. S As I wrote before, it is a pity that a great part of the students are not aware of the importance of learning English at all.
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[Torsten]

Hi Roberto,

Thanks a lot for doing such a great job with these young people. It seems you used the right mix of playing games and doing some more serious work such as reviewing grammar and vocabulary. Yes, you right -- some the group members are still looking for reasons to learn English and all we can do at this point is try and steer them in the right direction.

As far as I understand I'll have a new group tomorrow, this means I haven't worked with this group before so I'll have everyone introduce one of the group members. Then I'll introduce some materials and activities we are going to do together.

More on that tomorrow.
Regards,
Torsten
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[Torsten]

Hi Roberto,

Your group tomorrow will consist of about 6 people I had in my group today and the rest I have not worked with before. We started by explaining words in English -- everyone had to draw a card with three words on it which they had to explain to the group. They liked this quite a lot and even tried to help each other. Then we read A day in the life of a flat hunter answering the questions and completing the exercises.

We finished by doing a TOEFL Bridge listening comprehension exercise.

We also reviewed the conditionals and simple present vs. simple past. Tomorrow it would be great if you could read and translate the article you mentioned and you can also take a look British cabbies failing English exam? to discuss the story.

Good luck,
Torsten
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[Roberto]

Hi, Torsten,

thank you for your update. As planned, we read and translated the article about the taxi driver (Taxi driver banned from driving), we discussed its vocab and some of the questions the taxi driver was asked (synonyms: deny, prevent, refuse, ban, disallow and antonyms: allow, permit...; else: expire, fail, come through, floor) and then we did exercises on the passive voice, the would-form of the verbs (conditional tenses), superlative adjectives in sentences such as: "this is the most + adj. /the -st + adj. I've ever (past participle)". We had a little quiz about happiness:"How happy are you?", using sentences introduced by conjunctions such as "if", ""when", "even if", "even though", negative sentences with don't, doesn't, the use of "rather" ... . Other aspects in the class:
- use of apostrophes: I'm, can't, we're etc.
- use of hyphens: 50-year-old grandfather, three-hour test etc.
- likes and dislikes (regarding food e.g.).
- what would you do if (quiz: e.g. if you found a bag with 100,000 EUR in the street? )
- irregular verbs in the text(s): run, fall, tell, know, speak, come, give; use of the verb "to drive": also in idioms: she drives me crazy.
- vocab regarding a football game: goalkeeper, game, match, ground, crowd, substitute for, second half time, season, fight, run, kick, shoot, score
- homophones: know and no; break and brake; die and dye
- American vs. British spelling: license, licence
- possessives his/her
- use of prepositions: under, with, against, around, on, below, over; prepositions + ing- form of the verbs (after failing the exam); because of (prep.) vs. because (conjunction)
- use of present perfect with since, for
- use of simple past with ago, yesterday etc.
- dangerous or poisonous animals and plants: snakes, spiders, jellyfish, stonefish, mushrooms (here we treated the false friend: gift = present and Gift = poison).
- brainstorming: weather; fun/party/social life
-tongue twisters: e.g. " I wish to wish the wish you wish to wish, but if you wish the wish the witch wishes, I won't wish the wish you wish to wish. .."
- The use of "I'm looking forward to" (everyone constructed a reasonable sentence).

We ended by doing an exercise where someone stood up and drew a picture on the board and the sitting studenst had to guess.

Regards and keep in touch,

Roberto
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[Roberto]

Hi, dear English teachers, hi Torsten,

my English lessons in the Geithainerstr. came to a happy end yesterday. These were the last topics we had in the class:
- Verbs, verbs and more verbs: irregular vs. regular forms, modal vs. normal, active form vs. passive form; -ing-continuous form; different tenses (past perfect, conditional, simple past, present perfect).
- Text reading: "Bored German teen takes grandmother's car for a spin – to Paris" (see below); rudimentary translation techniques (1:1 equivalence vs. 1-many or 1:0 equivalence).
- Review of some basic vocab: countries and their products, body, health, money/finance ("pay off a debt", "loan", "credit", "inherit", "charge", "down payment" etc.); opposite words: boring vs. interesting etc.
- phonetics exercises: th: think vs. this. Spelling exercises
- comparison of some sounds/letters in English with German (or other related languages):

> think, thing, that, the, this > denken, Ding, das(s), der/die/das, dies(e/r/s....):
th = d
> feather, leather, brother, mother, father> Feder, Leder, Bruder, Mutter, Vater:
th = d or tt/t.
> book, make, break, cake, cook > Buch, machen, brechen, Kuchen, Koch/kochen:
k = ch
> good, bed, do, deed, feed, blood > gut, Bett, tun, Tat, füttern, Blut
d = t/tt
> open, up, sleep, pan, grip, hip > offen, auf, schlafen, Pfanne, Griff, Hüfte
p > f/ff/pf

- Common blended words in not only English speaking-countries: smoke + fog = smog; breakfast + lunch = brunch
- Productive derivation of words in - holic: alcoholic, shopaholic, workaholic, chocoholic, foodaholic, bookaholic etc..
- Games, imitations of the animal world/famous persons, mime, pantomime learning theatre techniques to lose all sense of shame and communicate with the people, acknowledging the expressive character of body (body expression, body language)

Here is one of the texts read in the class:

"Bored German teen takes grandmother's car for a spin – to Paris

By Tony Paterson in Berlin
Saturday, 14 June 2008

A bored 13-year-old German schoolboy was believed to have completed one of the longest teenage joyrides on record after he took his grandmother's car and drove it more than 400 miles to Paris because he wanted to "experience something".

Police in the north German town of Leer in Lower Saxony said the boy, whose identity could not be revealed because he is a minor, snatched the keys of his grandmother's Hyundai from a hook in the hallway of his home in the nearby village of Rhauderfehn late last Sunday night.

Ernst Queder, one of the police officers investigating the incident said: "The grandmother was living with the boy and his parents in the same house. She did not realise that her car had been stolen until early the following morning."

He added: "The boy left a note telling his parents that they should not worry because he would phone in and tell them where he was. He told them he had driven off because he was bored stiff and finally wanted to experience something."

Germany's highway police say that even in a country which is famous for its autobahns, fast cars and lack of speed limits, teenage joyriders rarely manage to complete more than a few turns around the local housing estate before crashing the car or being caught by either their parents or the police.

However the 13-year-old proved to be an exception. He covered about 435 miles by driving non-stop towards Paris through Sunday night and the early hours of Monday morning. Police admitted they had no explanation for the boy's exceptional driving skills. It is against the law for people under the age of 18 to drive in Germany.

Police say he would have almost certainly reached the French capital had he not slipped up over an important detail concerning his stolen car's fuel consumption. The boy pulled into a service station near the town of Estrées-Saint-Denis outside Paris to fill up early on Monday. However he was not aware that his grandmother's Hyundai ran on super lead-free petrol.

"Staff at the service station grew suspicious when they saw him trying to fill up the car with diesel," said Mr Queder. "They called the French police and the boy's joyride came to rather an abrupt end."

The boy was held in police custody in France until Monday afternoon. "His parents had to drive the 700 kilometres to collect him and his grandmother's car," a Leer police spokesman said yesterday. "As far as we are aware he was not trying to win a place in the Guinness Book of Records. He was just bored."

Regards,

Roberto
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[Torsten]

Hi Rorberto,

Many thanks for your great work. Incidentally, we have a new forum member who wants to learn Norwegian. Maybe you can help them?

Regards,
Torsten
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[Roberto]

Hi, Torsten,

it was a pleasure to work with you, you know I love languages as an essential part of my life. By the way, a good friend of the family is coming from Norway tomorrow, only for one day (she is originally from Germany and is working and living there together with her French husband. Anyway, I would welcome the opportunity to gain experience working in this field. It would be great if it were successful and I am sure it is.
Regards,

Roberto
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[Daniel]

I'm glad you had fun working with the people at Geithainer Str. but I'm somewhat sad as well I could not try out working with them.
Anyhow my BZ courses are done now. Some of the students kind of surprised me this morning asking if they could continue English lessons agter summer. Okay, it were the ones who had been most eager to seize the opportunity over the whole term but I told them that it wouldn't be up to me to decide.
Have a good weekend everyone and keep on elevating.

Talk to you soon,
Daniel

[nomisyar]

Hello,
Tomorrow will conclude my Business Communication session with the OQC group from Jena. This group is consists, almost exclusively, of recent graduates, many of whom have never held a job before. It is difficult to practice English for Business when there isn’t any business experience, in German or English.
On the whole, the class’s English was fairly good, but still needed work. At the start of the class I sense a bit of reluctance towards the subject, most likely due to intimidation by the subject matter. I stressed that Business English is no different from regularly English. I explained that it is necessary to know how to express yourself and your thoughts. Specialized vocabulary can be practiced, but most importantly, one needs to have a certain comfort level with the language. The class sessions involved a lot of dialogue, conversation that demanded that people think and describe what they were thinking of. We played games that forced people to ask and answer questions in English.
There were some exercises to practice being in a work scenario, and participants were encouraged to think seriously about their future careers.

This same tact proved useful to me when teaching a group in Moenchen-Gladbach. This was another group of unemployed people, although this group did have work experience. They were preparing to take an English proficiency exam offered by the LCCI. They were determined at first to go strictly by the book, but I realized that with only three weeks to go before the exam, they could not hope to be prepared that way. Again I encouraged them to think of business English as being no different than regular every day speaking. As for their writing samples, I corrected them in a way that kept their original style and meaning. This gave them the encouragement they needed to know that they did in fact know enough to communicate through official correspondence.
This class, though only one week long really helped me in forming ideas and teaching strategies. There was a goal… the LCCI exam. I think that for these classes, especially the business English classes, that there should be some type of goal to reach. To teach “Business English” is too broad. The classes tend to be an introduction to business culture, and general vocabulary, but the title can be a little misleading.
On the whole, I feel good about these Business English classes, though they always, like any of these workshops, need to be tailored specifically to the needs, moods, and energy level of the groups.

Thanks,

[Ralf]

Hi Ray,

I'd love to sit in your classes one day! You're bang on target with your observations. Please allow me to quote you should I ever write a teacher's manual

"Specialized vocabulary can be practiced, but most importantly, one needs to have a certain comfort level with the language."

"I think that for these classes, especially the business English classes, that there should be some type of goal to reach."

"As for their writing samples, I corrected them in a way that kept their original style and meaning."

"On the whole, I feel good about these Business English classes, though they always, like any of these workshops, need to be tailored specifically to the needs, moods, and energy level of the groups."

Take care,

Ralf
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