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This year has been particularly tough, but if you look back you will surely remember wonderful moments, lessons you had never learnt before, and, perhaps, a song, a book or a film that will stay with you long after 2020 has gone by. It's time to take stock, and here you can find several lists of the best in 2020:  the 100 Best Songs of 2020 by NPR ,with their official video and an extract from a review, and  NPR's Best Books of the Year 2020 , with a mini review at one click. The New York Times is another renowned and respected source of cultural information. Here you can find the Best Movies of 2020 , the 10 Best Books of 2020 and if you are into music, the Best Albums of 2020 . Finally, for a more European viewpoint, you can check the BBC's Best Albums and Songs of 2020 (text only, no direct links to the music, sorry!), the BBC's Best Films of 2020 and the BBC's Best Books of the Year 2020. The vocabulary of cultural reviews is incredibly rich: literary, technic

This is a lesson plan based on the Common European Framework of Reference and the European Language Portfolio , which can help students to reflect upon their history as language learners, their goals, beliefs and interests, and to do informal self-assessment of their language level using the Self-Assessment Grid of the CEFR .  It can be used the first or the second day of the course, before starting with the textbook, but it can also be used as distance conversation practice in the topic "Languages". The questionnaire is supposed to be for C1 students, but, with minimum changes, it can be adapted for B2 and even C2 learners. Here you can find a link to the Questionnaire "Language Learning Experiences and Beliefs" for conversation practice, again the Self-Assessment Grid of the CEFR and a lesson plan with suggestions for teachers. The less frequent vocabulary includes the following words and expressions: concening, current affairs, delivery, [to be] implied, pred

 by Andrew Glikson The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  -  Albert Einstein . As the world is trying to hopefully recover from the tragic effects of COVID-19, it is reminded there is no vaccine for the existential threat for its life support systems posed by global warming, nor for the looming threats of future wars and nuclear wars fueled by warmongers and $trillion preparations by military-industrial complexes. Between 1740 and 1897 some 230 wars and revolutions in Europe suggested war remained deeply ingrained in the human psyche and civilization. The question is whether the currently approaching catastrophes can be averted. No one wishes to believe in the projections made in the recent book ‘ The Uninhabitable Earth’ , except that these projections, made by David Wallace-Wells, are disturbingly consistent with the current shift in state of the climate toward +4 degrees and even +6 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial l

Christmas is a commercial and religious family holiday which is celebrated in many countries around the world, including Spain and the UK. It is also a school holiday and each student always has something to say about Christmas: whether they find it exciting and uplifting, or gloomy and depressing, Christmas is always a very productive conversation topic in EFL and there are so many carols and songs that is very easy to find some music to bring to class.  Here, you can find a lesson plan for a B1 conversation class which includes a Learn English with Ben video which compares British and Spanish Christmas , one of the most popular Christmas carols,  Silent Night, in Tori Kelly's a capella voice , with a fill-in the gap listening task and the full lyrics to serve as the key , this link to Dougie MacLean's version of Auld Lang Syne , which is mentioned in the video.  In addition, you can listen to this BBC 5 Live podcast with an exculsive interview to Father Christmas  (there is

Temperatures keep rising. Above image uses NASA data that are adjusted to reflect a 1750 baseline, ocean air temperatures and higher polar anomalies, while showing anomalies going back to September 2011, adding a blue trend going back to 1880 and a red trend going back to September 2011.  The map below also shows that in November 2020, especially the Arctic Ocean, again was very hot. Anomalies in the above NASA image are compared to 1951-1980, while NOAA's default baseline for temperature anomalies is the 20th century average. In the Copernicus image below anomalies are compared to the 1981-2010 average.  Using a different baseline can make a lot of difference. An earlier analysis  pointed out that, when using a 1750 baseline and when using ocean air temperatures and higher Arctic anomalies, we did already cross  2°C above pre-industrial in February 2020.   Above Copernicus image shows temperatures averaged over the twelve-month period from December 2019 to November 2020. The ima

by Andrew Glikson [ Oil and gas fracking pads in Texas. Photo: Dennis Dimick  ] It should raise people’s hopes to believe “ net zero emissions by 2050 ” will arrest or at least slow-down global warming, had it not been yet another cruel hoax perpetrated in the wake of more than 50 years of obfuscation and denial of environment and climate science. This is because: The proposed zero emission by 2050 overlooks the long term nature of ongoing investments, mining and drilling for carbohydrates, such as new oil fields as in the North Atlantic and the sub-Arctic, new coal fields such as in the Galilee Basin, or fracking for coal seam gas in North America and Australia . According to Columbia University, “The gas industry and investors have plans to build over $70 billion of new gas-fired power plants through 2025, according to two Rocky Mountain Institute reports ”. Thus it is reported “the State Bank of India might lend $1 billion to Bravus, the absurdly renamed Adani Mining, to financ

December is a good month for oral presentations. Students have a long bank holiday in Spain and not many university exams yet, so they can prepare a short, five-minute presentation about a topic of their choice. This activity takes only three lessons, one to give them encouragement and basic guidelines and two lessons for the presentations themselves, all in all, from 5 to 6:30 hours of classroom time and the results are always impressive. Here you can find a Lesson Plan for B2, C1 and C2 students which revolves around an Interactive Exercise that was originally published by Allyn & Bacon Public Speaking (www.abpublicspeaking.com, but this link is no longer available on the web), which has been adapted for B2, C1 and C2 students. You can also find the Key to the Interactive Exercise, which the teacher can use to give students the main guidelines for the task, and an Oral Presentation Checklist to help the teacher assess the presentations.  You can also find three more handouts:

by Andrew Glikson The concept of a global climate tipping point/s implies a confluence of climate change processes in several parts of the world where regional climate changes can combine as a runaway shifts to a new climate state. Conversely the shift of climate zones can constitute the underlying factor that triggers extreme weather events which culminate in tipping points. These shifts include the expansion of the tropics, tropical cyclones, mid-latitude storms and weakening of boundaries of the polar vortex, allowing breach of air masses of contrasting temperatures through the jet stream polar boundary, with ensuing snow storms and heatwaves. Figure 1.  Climate tipping points ( McSweeney 2020 ) The migration of climate zones toward the poles appears to constitute a major factor in triggering tipping points in the Earth system (Figures 1 and 2), including (from north to south): permafrost loss  expansion of the Boreal forest at the expense of the tundra disintegration of the Green