Nik's Daily English Activities: February 2009

Improve Your Pronunciation

Pronunciation is a vitally important aspect of learning any language. However good your grammar and vocabulary is, if you can't pronounce words and sentences well, then people will struggle to understand you. One aspect of pronunciation that people often forget is 'intonation'. Intonation refers to the rise and fall in pitch of the voice.

Today's activity uses a site with some interactive activities from CUP to help you improve your intonation.

Task:

Go to: http://tinyurl.com/4d59se click on 'intonation'. You can then listen to some short conversations. The conversations are animated so they show you where the intonation goes up or down.

Listen to them and then try to copy them. Pay careful attention to the intonation. You can get more practice at developing your intonation using clips from movies. Find a clip of a movie you like and try to copy the rises and falls in intonation of the speaker. You can find lots of film clips on YouTube.

You can also try some of the other activities on the site that deal with word stress and sentence stress and learning the phonemic alphabet.

Hope you enjoy these exercises and try some more EFL ESL activities tomorrow.

Try some more pronunciation activities.

Ice Breaking Skills

Making friends and socialising in English can be very challenging, so if you are going to parties or having English speaking friends around it's a good idea to start developing a few 'ice-breaking' social skills. A nice way to entertain people and get to know them better is to offer to do a Tarot reading for them.

Tarot cards have been around for centuries and have and still are used as a way to help people understand their problems and to think about their future. Most people think they are a harmless form of entertainment, but others do take them very seriously. There are also some people who due to their religious beliefs object to them, so never try to force someone to have a reading if they object.

Today's task is to learn a little about Tarot cards and how to read them. This is also a very good listening task to develop your ability to listen for specific information.

Task:

Get a pencil and some paper ready so that you can make notes. Then go to: http://www.monkeysee.com/play/1892-basic-tarot-card-reading here you will find a series of videos teaching you how to use Tarot cards.

This is the first of the videos telling you about the cards

Watch each video and make notes about the meaning of each card. At the end of the first video go to: http://www.paranormality.com/tarot_meanings.shtml where you can click on the cards that have been mentioned and check your notes. You'll need to work through all of the videos before you are able to do a complete reading.

It is better to watch one video each day than to try to watch them all at once. If you would like to get some idea of the kind of language used when giving a reading you could get your own reading from: http://www.facade.com/tarot/

I hope you enjoy this activity. You may not become a great Tarot card reader, but by doing the activity you will improve your listening and reading and learn a little more about a cultural phenomenon that has been around for over a thousand years.

Come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities or try another video based activity.

15 + Video related activities

Speed Up Your Memory

Good reading depends on your brain's ability to quickly and accurately recognise words. Today's activity tests your ability to recognise words by flashing quick phrases at you and then asking you to accurately reconstruct them.

The task uses a website called 'Games for the brain' which has a collection of mental challenges to help develop and test your IQ.

Task:

Go to: http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/game/speedread/

You will see a short phrase appear for a few seconds. Try to memorise the words you see.

The words will then disappear and you will have to type them into the answer field.

You get 10 points for a correct answer. You then have a tip on how to improve your memory and IQ. When you have read the tip click on continue and you'll see another phrase.

Keep playing the game until you score 100 points. I hope you enjoy this activity and be sure to come back tomorrow for more, or check the full list of EFL ESL activities here:

Daily English Activities

Word Puzzles

Connecting words to images can really help you to develop your vocabulary. That's why having access to an online visual dictionary is so useful.

Today's task is based around the Merriam Webster Visual Dictionary.

It has a lot of really valuable information about different topics and can really help to develop your vocabulary.

Today's task is based around the weekly labeling game. There is a new one of these each week, so be sure to check the site each week and try out each new game.

Task:

Go to the game of the week at: http://visual.merriam-webster.com/games_game-week.php
Then click on play to start the game

Drag the labels to to the appropriate place on the image. If you don't know then move forward to another word.

If you enjoy this activity, be sure to check the archive where you can find more games based around different topics. Games Archive

Come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

More vocabulary activities

Related links for teachers:

Best

Nik Peachey

Keeping a Learning Diary

One of the great challenges of learning a language is remembering all the new things you learn. One method that can help you remember new things is to keep a learning diary or journal of some kind, so in today's task you are going to create your own learning diary online using a tool called Penzu.

It's very quick and simple to use and it's also free. You can also share your learning diary with your tutor or other people so that they can see how hard you are working.

You can just add a title, an image and start to enter your text.

Task:

Go to the Penzu website at http://www.penzu.com and click on either 'Sign up' or 'Try it out'.

Once you have done that you should see what looks like a simple lined pad of paper. here you can type in a title ( My learning diary day 1) and start to write about what you have learned today.

Here are some things you could include each time you write in the diary.

New words you learned
Notes about any texts you read or listened too
Any new grammar points you studied
The scores for any tests you did
Questions about things you didn't understand
You can also add an image of yourself showing how you felt about learning that day, just record a quick image using your webcam if you have one, then upload it.
Add a note on how motivated or successful you think your learning was that day

Be sure to save your entry (you will have to sign up and register to do this). If you have a teacher you can offer to share your learning diary with them and then they will be able to see how you are doing and answer any of the questions you put in your diary.

As you add more and more entries each day, you will be able to look back and review what you have learned and remind yourself of anything your learned but forgot.

I hope you enjoy keeping your learning diary and don't forget to add a note to it if you do any of the activities from this site.

Come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

Related links for teachers:

Best

Nik Peachey

How To Tell If Someone Likes You

Part of understanding communication depends on being able to understand people's body language. When we learn a new language we can often focus too closely on the words they are saying and forget to understand what their body movements and gestures tell us.

Today's task is based around short video clip that is aimed at helping people to read body language

The video comes from the Howcast website which has lots of short instructional videos which can help you learn how to do things and help you to improve your English at the same time.

Task:

Watch the video below. It mentions a number of physical gestures that indicate that someone likes you. Count how many.

Now watch the video again and try to note down all the gestures. The video has text to hep you understand them, so make a note of any new vocabulary you learn.

You could use the activity Remember More Vocabulary to create a vocabulary record of body language.

I hope you enjoy this task and come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

Related links for teachers:

Best

Nik Peachey

Nik's Daily English Activities

Pages

Improve Your Pronunciation

Ice Breaking Skills

Speed Up Your Memory

Word Puzzles

Keeping a Learning Diary

How To Tell If Someone Likes You

For Teachers