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...;)