Oral Presentations

One of the skills you need to work on a bit more is "public speaking". To improve your public speaking abilities it is essential that you feel more confident and that is something you gain with some practice. These are some rules:

- Decide what you want to say. Plan your speech well, organise it in logical order.
- Take notes to remember everything you need to say, but don´t read because you will sound boring.
- When you give your presentation, be as spontaneous as you can be.

- Rehearse your speech at home. You are performing as an actor/actress on a stage.
- Speak loud and clear. Speak slowly.
- Make eye contact with your audience. Look at each person in turn in a natural way.
- Body language is also important. You can stand, walk or move about.

The oral practice for this term will be to prepare a speech on one of the following topics:

My favourite book.
My treasured possession.
My favourite pop star.
My favourite film.
What I will be for Carnival.
My favourite sport.
My mobile.
My favourite game.
My life in Mieres.
My school.
This is the magazine that I read.
What I did on my last holiday.
A funny story.
A ghost story.
Your own suggestions.

Four students will present every week. At the end of the presentation you will ask the audience: "Questions or comments?"You choose two students. These will ask you questions about something mentioned in the speech itself, so the rest of the students have to listen carefully.
We will start in February right after St. Valentine.

Writing stories

Writing is quite a difficult task. It certainly takes time to do it well. Do not write just the first thing it crosses your mind. The best thing is to plan your writing. First, write a draft and make sure you include an introduction, a body and a conclusion.

Introduction: set the scene properly (who-where-when-what), mention or describe the people involved, choose a place, a time and the action taking place.

Body: Describe the incidents which lead up to the main event and the main event in detail.

Conclusion: End the story. Refer to the moods, consequences, people´s reactions, feelings, comments..

Something you must never do. Don´t think in Spanish when you are writing in English or you will get something like this:

_The people was very worry with the terrible success. The next day was spoken for every
Mieres.

Here is a short composition of a student who did not follow the steps decribed above when asked to write about an event. Read it, say why it is wrong and rewrite it.

_It was a dark night. It was raining heavily when the murder was killing the girl. I saw the face of the murder, but he didn´t see me.

Next day I went to the police, I told an agent what happened. The police was sending the murder for long time but he is very intelligent. Next week the police trapped the murder in his house. Now the people of the town is very happy.

Correcting errors

The English teachers often ask the students to write in English about many different topics. The students usually complain a lot, but it is something you just have to do, in order to improve your writing skills. One of the most important thing is to recognize the type of mistakes that you make, as most of them are very recurrent, so that you don´t make them again. Some can be the following: spelling, vocabulary, subject-verb agreement, punctuation, word order, tense, content, grammar mistakes.....

Here is a list of some of the latest errors in your exercises. Find, classify and correct them.

1. The kitchen is very desordened.
2. Her eyes are brilliants.
3. She in a normally day gets up at seven.
4. She worried is stay in home alone.
5. She go to buy the food.
6. She does her bed.
7. She went early to bed.
8. She go to buy the food and preparing the lunch when I stay in her house I like very much because when I get up I have old breakfast on the table.
9. She goes everyday walking.
10. She didn´t go to school but is very intelligent.
11. I love she very much.
12. She expent there all the time.
13. My granfather death very young.
14. She phone her sister every Sunday.
15. She likes a lot watching TV.
16. She do a lot of exercise.
17. She likes too cooking.
18. They lived in the same place with she.
19. In front of her house there are a garden.
20. She walked for an hour all the days.
21. Her eyes are brown like my.
22. She haves dinner at 10.
23. She prepare delicius food.
24. She work a lot in all of her life.
25. She never can saw she.
26. A year later she have another baby.
27. She haven´t got a father.
28. She have got a healthy diet.
29. Shes appearance is very yought.
30. Her kitchen didn´t was an example..
31. My grandmother go to the church all the sundays.
32. One day I was in the park with my friends when come a man very strange.