Tailor-made tours: tourism for dissable people

This time I will ask you something actually challenging to you! You will need to design a cultural trip for a group of 20 middle-aged people to an European city of your choice. Try to choose an accesible city if you can. You will also need to think about a real accesible hotel, museums, streets for walk in a wheelchair, etc.

ready?... go!

Talking about the weather. Vocabulary 2.

Internet is full of software applications dealing with weather either to use in your computer or to bring with you in your tablet or even your smartphone. Have a look at some of them before answering to the following task.

http://www.weatherscreen.com/
http://imobile.us/Mobile_Weather_Forecast_Application
http://communities.cisco.com/thread/11522http://www.apple.com/webapps/weather/

You have been told to prepare the launching of a new product in New Zealand for next January 30th. Try to install of of these applications and explain breafly to you colleage what kind of clothes wil you pack in your luggage.

How do I find complex expressions in a dictionary?

You may have experienced how difficult is trying to find out the meaning of a whole expression in a common dictionary. Most of the times, what you have came across is an idiom. On of the most complete dictionaries of idioms on the internet is Cambridge International Dictionary:

The Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms explains over 7,000 idioms current in British, American and Australian English, helping learners to understand them and use them with confidence. The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms, based on the 200 million words of American English text in the Cambridge International Corpus, unlocks the meaning of more than 5,000 idiomatic phrases used in contemporary American English. Full-sentence examples show how idioms are really used.

The Cambridge University Press is respected worldwide for its commitment to advancing knowledge, education, learning, and research. It was founded on a royal charter granted to the University by Henry VIII in 1534 and has been operating continuously as a printer and publisher since the first Press book was printed in 1584.

The free dictionary by Fairlex (http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/)

Your could access to part of the listed idioms either in the url mentioned or directly from the CUP website: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/results.asp?searchword=idioms&dict=I&sourceid=Mozilla-search

Remember that if you are using Firefox as default browser, you can also have it always on the upper right corner (http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=dictionaries). Just click on it and you'll have it as one of your firefox search engine extensions.

Here you are are a very useful website to help you finding out some fixed expressions and other idioms:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/53/index.html



I hope this could help you to go on studying this subject!

Preparing flight meals

Watch the following video and answer the following questions by using the comments option.

1. Do you like eating on board?

2. Could you explain any difference between preparing food to be eaten in a restaurant and to consumed on board?

3. Did you know all of the process told in the video? Have anything called your attention?

Presentation skills

After reading pages 132 and 133 from your textbooks, visit this website with more ideas about speaking in public. There, you will find information about how to deal with visual presentations projected with the help of a computer.

There are many places found in the Internet to host your presentation in order to be share with other people. One of the most famous ones is called Slideshare. Try to upload yours, using the exercise done in the mentioned pages and paste its url using the comments option of this entry in you wish.

Redes Project Invitation

Intonation and accents

As you may have read in page 25 in your textbooks, in order to sound "English", not only pronunciation is important, but also intonation. The best way to achieve this is practicing by listening lots of English conversations, no matter if they are American or British English, Autralian or Irish. Here you are some links for you to practice at the same time you will have the opportunity to try some of the Internet audio sites suggested on the left corner of this blog.

http://www.trainyouraccent.com./  (some tips to sound "more American")
http://www.ezslang.com/ (with some sections dealing with tourism)
http://www.gazzaro.it/accents/files/accents2.html (different kind of accents)
http://members.multimania.co.uk/mdmorrissey/phonlinks.htm (some links on English dialects and accents)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/feature2_4.shtml (a very good but not very updated resource on different kinds of British accents)
http://www.wikihow.com/Speak-in-a-British-Accent (How to sound British)

After having a look at all of this, comment here you experience. Have you learned anything new on intonation? Did you know about the importance of having a good intonation?

Now, remember, listen and learn as much as you can...(You can listen to some English radio station while reading this blog. Look at your right)

Organizing a wedding abroad

After reading pages 23 and 24 from your textbook, write a brief composition about your own wedding experience, either if you have been married abroad or not. Comment if you actually needed all the documents detailed in your book, the places you visited during your honeymoon, the restaurant or catering services hired for the event, etc.
Use the "comments" option to do this activity.
Remember to use your Google Account identification in order to take part in our "Redes Project". If you don't wish to do it so, you could sign as anonymous.
You could get and practice more vocabulary about wedding in the following external links:

Bilingual & learning ESL purposes
http://www.lingolex.com/swom/wom-weddings.htm
http://www.english-at-home.com/vocabulary/marriage-and-wedding-vocabulary/
http://www.drlemon.com/Grammar/family/wedding.html


http://womens-dossier.webs.com/weddingsspecialvocabulary.htm
http://www.learnamericanenglishonline.com/images/Vocabulary%20Images/Wedding/Wedding_Vocabulary.html

Monolingual
http://www.foreverwed.com/grooms/Groom%27s%20Wedding%20Vocabulary%20Guide.htm (for Natives)
http://englishwebmarks.blogspot.com/2009/09/short-wedding-vocabulary.html

Audio
http://www.ivoox.com/lesson-14-wedding-vocabulary-audios-mp3_rf_184478_1.html

Some reading
http://www.officialroyalwedding2011.org/

How many different kinds of letters could you write?

Did you know that we have different rules to write business letters in English depending on the person person are you are addressing? In this post I suggest you to have a look at this website (mainly for native speakers, but also useful for us : http://www.writing-business-letters.com/). You could find on the Internet even templates like the very practical ones at Microsoft: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/CT101485751033.aspx (Just download and edit) .

Try to have a look and read them! After that, tell you about them here! Did you find them interesting? Did you know of their existance before? Have you ever used a template?

After this, go to pages 50-51 from your books and try to think about differences and similarities about writting emails and business letter, it there are any. Write your answers using the comments option. 


Have a nice writing...;)