Humor4u

The British Museum has recently opened the exhibition "Female Power: the Divine to the Demonic" which shows how women have been represented throughout history in various mythologies around the world. Here you can find a 3 hour lesson plan about Art , which complements unit 7B of  English File C1.1 , O.U.P.  The first lesson includes some speaking activities to discuss Art, exhibitions and Public Art; a power point presentation of local Public Art in Zaragoza and an intensive listening comprehension task, based on a clip of  Today programme on BBC Radio 4 (17/05/22) , which is more suitable for C2 students.  The second lesson is focused on Street Art and it includes some conversation questions about Art, education etc., and another power point presentation about Street Art in Zaragoza . You can access the list of key words below in Word format here and  the 5' recording of the Today radio report here . Some of the key words you will come across in the recordin...

Journalist Oliver Bullough has recently published the book "Butler to the World" where he describes how the City of London has become a safe laundering machine for the Russian oligarchs, who stash their fortunes in "Londongrad" with the help of bankers, lawyers, accountants and public relations managers and with the complacency of the British "hilariously under-funded" law-enforcement agencies. In this 44-minute "Fresh Air" interview, Terry Gross discusses with Mr Bullough the ins and outs of the banking and legal system that allows the so-called Russian "kleptocrats" to enjoy a luxury life in the financial heart of Europe.   Although the interview can be followed with a full script, the description the financial and legal procedures to protect the oligarchs' dodgy business transactions from public scrutiny, will raise the level of this task to C2. An "extended listening" exercise can be set for homework with a simple spe...

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...

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 hando...

Elisabeth Moss plays the role of writer Shirley Jackson in the movie Shirley, which began to stream on virtual cinema platforms on June 5th.  Here you can read and listen to a 7 minute review of the film by Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang, broadcast on NPR's Fresh Air . Film reviews are usually very rich in language, and when they are broadcast on the radio, they are particularly difficult to understand for the density of information, as they are usually literary essays read out loud, so both the audio and the text are classified as C2.  You will come across words like bond, fraught, glimpse, to chime, to deserve, script, loosely, insight, bout, to pursue, chore, vicious, to thrive, to get back on track, to root, wrinkle, muse, stand-in, layers, dizzyingly, jagged, close-up, to swerve, handheld, score, to pulse, to grapple with, conundrums, to blur, uncannily, to excel at, exertion, to tease out, odd, tenderness, prickly, to awe, to bind, to cheat on somebody, to endur...

Understanding a poem like Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is a tremendous achievement for any learner of English, and a considerable challenge for the EFL teacher. The topic is hard and the syntax is disjointed by the metric of the poem, a villanelle, but the pathos of the poem can be felt, if not understood, when you first watch these Welsh actors reciting the poem for BBC Cymru Wales: It is fascinating to hear the sounds and the words of a foreign language and to understand almost nothing, just like when you first started learning English a long time ago.  Reading poetry or song lyrics has a power, it can take you back to that initial stage when English had the magic of unintelligibility.  Yet, we want to know, we want to understand. This lesson shows how I tackled the challenge for a B2+ class, but, this class is problably more suitable for C2 students. The plan starts with some simple warm-up questions to get the attention of the students.  The ...

Are there gender differences between men and women or are we just talking about sterotypes? Are there biological differences between men's and women's brains or are the differences social and cultural? Many English coursebooks for adults use this topic to raise debate in the classroom:  Gender or individual differences? Nature or nurture? Here you can find a selection of materials to teach a lesson about gender issues, which I have used to expand the reading " How Men and Women Argue " on p. 64 of Christina Latham-Koenig's & Clive Oxenden's, English File Upper-Intermediate, 3rd Edition , Oxford University Press: "Men & Women", a set of controversial statements which students can discuss, first in pairs and then, as a class. Some links to TED Talks videos that could be given for listening/oral homework (students are assigned one video, they watch it at home, take notes and in the first 15 minutes of the next class they share the information in...

The Purkinje cell in the cerebellum The Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota mounted an exhibition of Santiago Ramón y Cajal's drawings, which has been touring several univeristy art museums in the USA and Canada since 2017. Here you can find a link to the exhibition calendar note. A resource kit for elementary and secondary education teachers and students was published in pdf and here you can see the reproductions of some of the original drawings by Cajal as well as lesson plans to use in the classroom (C2 Level). Cajal's drawings inspired artists like Dalí, Miró or Tanguy.  Santiago Ramón y Cajal is considered the father of neuroscience, he was awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine in 1906, and he was a fine artist too.  Here you can find a link to Cajal's Wikipedia page.