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European Language Portfolio

European language portfolio

View more presentations from Judith Borràs Andrés

Improve your listening!

You wanna be a good listener? Pay attention to it:

- Listen will take you time.
- You have to give visual and oral encouragement to the speaker.
- Don't interrupt.
- Don't rush to fill a silence.
- Listen with an open mind and an open heart.
- Concentrate totally on the speaker and what is being said.
- You can ask some open questions, so the person who is talking  can be more relaxed.

You can practice this skills when you are listening an oral presentation but you can practice it when you are listening to a friend too, because your friend will feel that you want to hear his problems and he will be happier.


Appart from this, listening in class can be boring because you the person who is talking maybe is talking about something that doesn't belongs to you and you may think: "what the fuck?"
Now, I'm going to say some different kind of thinks you can do to improve your listening and you may will like it a lot.

1. Listen to songs: You can start listening songs in another language and then look for the letter from that song and understand that a little bit more.

2.Watch a film: Watching a film is another good idea to improve your listening, because you while you are seeing some actions you'll be hearing some words which you'll probably won't understand but you'll can relate the actions with the words and you'll undersand something. Sometimes subtitles can be usefull, too. You can start by watching films with subtitles and then you can try to make it without them.

Now, if you want to practice your english you can go to this famous webpage:

www.youtube.es

and look for some songs or some pieces of films. Now it is Christmas time so I recomend you to watch this funny vidio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkJ2n5vkoG4&feature=fvst

Haven't you laught? It the best!!!


Judith Borràs Andrés

Improve your speaking!

I'm going to focus in English to talk about this strategy.
English is talked by a lot of people, there are countries in which English is the official language like in the Unit States, or in London, Manchester....but English is important everywhere!
So for example, here in Spain the official language is Spanish but we know that as a second language (appart of Catalan) there is English, because it is the international language.

English has different accents and dialects. Two of the most important English spoken are American English and British English, but we can find Irish English, Indian English, etc.
However there's the standard English which I was talking about, the international English. And if we want to talk that English well we have to pay attention to:

- The accent, the pronuntiation, the stress in syllables, the stress in sentences and the intonation.


Now, I'm going to give you some Speaking strategies so that you can make a perfect oral presentation.

You need to:

-Be prepared.
-Research your subject to be sure that you know a lot about it.
-Practice your presentation.
-Know your audience.
-Be positive (what is really difficult)
-Don't read, explain it.
-Maintain eye contact with your audience, be sure they like the way you are doing your presentation.
-Involve your audience.
-Use your voice actively.

You'll do a perfect oral presentation if you follow this steps.

Speaking is different than writing, and it has good characteristics but it has bad ones , too.

Good characteristics about speaking:

It is better for auditory learners.
Is is not permanent.

Bad characteristics about speaking:

You cannot rewrite, so if you say something you don't wanna say you can't do anything about that.
Normally you are nervous (if you are given an oral presentation) and you use simple English.


If you leave me to say something, I'll say you that the best way of learning to speak very well a language is to go to a country where that language is spoken and practice, practice a lot. If you go there alone, you'll have to eat, you'll have to relieve yourselve. So you would learn a lot because you are in their country, they probably won't understand you but it won't be their problem.

In conclusion, going abroad is the best!!!! If it wasn't so expensive I be every month in a different country learning and visiting things. :)

Improve your writing!

Normally, people use the writing strategies to comunicate with other people. In my case I do it too. But you can write to commnicate with other people or for your own personal use.

If you would like to communicate to other people you would use:

-Letters
-Memos
-Messages
-Reports
-Instructions
-Forms
-Fórums
-Etc.


But if you wanna write for your personal use you would use:

-Study notes
-A personal diary
-Lists
-Adress books
-Probably a blog, like mine.
-Etc.



Now, we use a lot of technolgy to communicate ourselves with other people but years ago they use papers and their hands.

Characteristics of written texts:

Good characteristics:

You have time to think, you can rewrite what you want, it can be more elavorated, you can look up what you don't know.

Bad characteristics:

It will be permanent!!!!


I said before that now we use the modern technology to communicate our selves with each others, we use:

-The mobil phone
-E-mails
-Some forums like facebook, twitter...

And using this new technologies we write very different than we use to, and that's why we don't write like we should, we write like we talk.
For example:

How are you? would be: How are u?
Today I love you more than yesterday. would be: 2day I love u + than yesteday.

Or if you want to say that you are laghting you would say: jajaja or hahaha!

Some characteristics of this modern technology would be to write a lot of question marks, a lots of exclamation marks. Or to write it (if you can) with a lot of colours!



Now if you want to write a perfect text you should:

Look at the layout: It is important to write a text in the formal way it should be written. For example if you were doing a discursive composition you'll have to write using paragraphs and if you were writing a letter you would leave space to say who you are,where are you from...(at the head of the page) and you would have to leave some space at the end to say goodbye.

Look at the style: Differents types of writing have different types of style. If you are reading a text you would know if this text is conversational and chatty or if it comes from a writer who uses formal grammar and vocabulary.

Know what is your writing purpose: You have to know what's your purpose and what you are going to talk about if you want to catch the attention of the reader, to present the information clearly, etc.

Improve your reading

In my opinion the best way to improve your reading is to have a good dictionary behind the book you are going to read. Because I'm sure that there will be a lot of words which you'll probably don't know and you won't undersand the book if you don't undersand the words there are written. But that will be only the first days, you cannot read a book and look at the dictionary every minute. You have to read and while you will read you'll know what they will be talking about and there will be no importance on if you understand one word or not, you have to focus on the principal phrase.

There are different reading strategies:

Skimming is when you are reading a text quickly just to understand the main ideas

Scanning is when you have a specific point in mind and looking for it quickly in a text.

Reading for detail is when you are readint the whole text very carefully for specific information.

When you read a newspaper you skim because you are looking for the main ideas not reading all the news.

When you read a newspaper and there's a new which interest you, you would read for a detail.

And if you have a newspaper but you only want to know about sports, you would scan all the newspaper searching the sports part.

Then we have two more strategies:

PREDICTING:

Ii is when you are reading something and you can usually predict what comes next. There are many things which can help you to predict while you read:

- How much do you know about this language

- How much do you know about the topic it is talking about

-The layout

-The grammar

-The punctuation

-Etc.

and finally...

GUESSING

You can try to guess the meanings of words you don't know. Good readers depend more on themselves than on dictionaries. There are some clues that would help you to know the word:

-What the word is like

-The context

-Etc.

Improve your grammar and vocabulary

Some language learners feel very nervous when grammar or vocabulary is mentioned. Others aren't exactly sure when they are learning grammar and feel worried that they aren't learning enogh.

But we like it or not, in my opinion it is essential to study the grammar and the vocabulary of the language we want do study.

If you want to improve your grammar you have to practice a lot because but is the heaviest part about English, so... don't worry!!!

You can buy one book, read a lot and try to memorize vocabulary and It will help you with your grammar too, but it would be very boring...so you can try to go classes and be with other people trying to study the same things as you.

It doesn't matter at what level do you are, or if you don't know anything about english because there's a lot of books with different levels and there's a lot of schools that teach English.

I started learning English when I was very young and I think that's what I like it, but I know people who like it too and they don't start learning English since they were older. So in my opinion there's no ages to learn a language, you have to do it when you want and when you can!


Here there's a web which will give you an score so you can probably know what's your level:


http://www.anglolang.co.uk/cgi-bin/web_test.cgi/grammar.html



 Test your grammar and see that you can be a good learner!!!





Judith Borràs Andrés

I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!!

Listening resources

Firstly I search in this web:
http://www.learnenglishfeelgood.com/eslvideo/index.html

and there were lots of videos which you have to look at and listen and then complete some questions. I watched the one which was "Mean girls" and my score was 5 out of 5, so perfect; then I made another one which was "Congeniality girl" and my score in that one was 4 out of 5. I think this webpage is not difficult, so it is not useful for me but it could be useful to people who starts learning english.


The second one was:

http://www.englishpond.com/listening/index.html

this webpage has a very difficult quiz, and harder to understand if you compare those ones with the firts webpage. I made "listening 1 - death of a hero" and my score was 40%, so I did not pass. I like this webpage because it is more my level and I can learn a lot by practising with this listenings. So I will do more listenings and I will be better in english tomorrow!!!!



Judith Borràs Andrés

Writing resources

I choose:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/writing/

and I think it is a very good webpage because you can practice everything, including writing, listening... I've chosen writing and then when I had to choose a topic I've chosen "typing". I've watched a vidio, then I had to choose a level and I chose level 3 (which is the most harder there was) but it were only explanations it weren't any type of quiz.

So I went to another web which was:

http://eolf.univ-fcomte.fr/index.php?page=constructing-the-paragraph

then I chose the topic: "Using transitions" and I answer some questions (exactly 5) and my score was 80% because I failed the first question.
Finally I chose another topic: "Ordering principles" and my score was 85%, questions answered correctly first time: 6/7.

This webpage is not as beautiful as the first one but it is better if you want to
do some practise.


Judith Borràs Andrés.

Reading resources

Here I have five webs which can help you with your reading strategies, have a look and look for something that can help you!
The firts web :
http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~lfried/stories/stories.html

is a very interesting page and it is very beautiful so it catch your eye and it works good.

The second one: http://www.miguelmllop.com/practice/intermediate/readingcomprehension/readingcompindex.htm

is worse than the first because it is not interesting and you may not like it but there is lots of text so it can be helpfull.

Third: http://www.angelfire.com/wi3/englishcorner/reading/reading.html

is not very beatiful but it can be helpful like the second one because in this page you can find lots of things about adverbs, the passive, adjectives ...

The fourth one :
 http://iteslj.org/links/ESL/Reading

has lots of errors, like if you want to go to a link and that link is not working. In this case, if you find a link that works it can be useful but if it don't works it can be a waste of time.

And the last one :
 http://bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/reading

is very funny and beautiful. I liked it a lot! And it can be helpful too so I think this is the best one. But, from this five webpages I think the best can be the last one or the first one if you are looking for funny webpages but if you are a serious person and you need to look for information the best one is the second.

I hope I had helped you!!!


Judith Borràs Andrés