Media Scan

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...

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...

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/ 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 handout...