It's Christmas Day. A day to relax. Go and make a hot drink and read Danny's article. It was written a few weeks ago. How are you spending Christmas Day?
Next weekend, we’re going to put the Christmas tree up, which means that we’re going to surrender a quarter of our living-room space to a seven-foot jolly green giant with more twinkling lights than a clear night sky and more big red bows on it than...um...than something with lots of big red bows on it...
Every month we ask our newsletter readers to send in their questions to Tim, our English teacher at EC Brighton English language school, about the English language. Here are your questions:
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November's Star Question!
Thanks to Maria Aura for this question:
So how was your weekend? What did you do? Did you do anything nice? Here's something I did over the weekend.
I went out for a meal with my cousins on Saturday night.
I have a large family and we don't see each other as much as we would like so we decided to all _1_ up.
These days we only seem see each other at weddings or funerals. An informal get together was long _2_.
It took a lot of planning to find an evening when we were all available, that's for sure.
November's scholarhsip competition is now closed. Our monthly newsletter, called English in your inbox, runs a competition in which three readers win a 2-week General English course at an EC school.
The competition question was to tell us, using 20 words, why you learn English. Here are all the entries we received. If yours is not here, we didn't get it. Apologies.
I hope reading these will motivate and inspire you to keep on learning!
Did you know that the fourth Thursday of November is an important holiday in America? It's Thanksgiving! Here's some information on why and how Americans celebrate.
Reading the following news story then answer the questions to check your understanding.
Read through the paragraphs and complete them with the correct missing words. I recommend reading the whole paragrpah once, then reading it again while trying to choose the right vocabulary.
The last time you tested yourself here on AWL vocabulary, the focus was on 'F' words. This time you'll see if you recognize how to use some words beginning with G, H, and J. (NB: There are so many 'I' words on the AWL that they will be part of a separate vocabulary activity.)
So it seems that there is a little disapointment that yesterday's exercise on singing songs in English did not actually include a song for you to sing. Let's put that right. Here is a classic Beatles song, suggested to us by Grivna, a regular user of this site (thanks, Grivna). The lyrics are included in the video.
I studied Spanish in high school and Japanese in college, so I understand that learning a foreign language is not easy. One thing that has always helped me is to memorize song lyrics. That way, you can learn new vocabulary and practice grammar while having fun. If there is a good melody, I guarantee you will never forget what you learned! I know that I will never forget Shakira's "Estoy Aqui" or SMAP's "Sekai ni Hitotsu Dake no Hana". So be sure to find the lyrics online if there is something you don’t understand.