Holiday Homework: Improve your speaking skills

Step One: Read through your notes for the presentation you gave or were supposed to give on the last day of the course.

Step Two: Record your approximately 1-2 minutes of your presentation.

Step Three: Transcribe your recording verbatim- the exact words your hear yourself saying on the recording.

Step Four: Try to correct the errors that you find.

You don't have to do all these steps at the same time, and in fact it's probably a good idea to leave a day, or at least a few hours between steps two and three.

Then you can repeat the task with other sections of your recording, or with other presentations that we have given over the term e.g an early memory, a product pitch for a civilisational advance, a social issue, something you think should be banned/legalised.

This task is designed to help in your awareness of how you speak, to identify and focus on the kind of errors you find difficult to eliminate from your spoken English.

Please post recordings and transcripts on dropbox.

Have a good holiday!

Icons 2

In our last class of the year I have asked you to give a short presentation on something or someone you consider iconic. I'd like you to talk about why this person, object or whatever it may be is considered is an icon, for who, and how they came to have this staus. Also consider if there are any criticisms of their iconic status.

Icons

A couple of pieces for you to look at about how things, people, images become iconic

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jun/03/art.art

http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2013/12/an-ode-to-the-red-plastic-party-cup/282207/

First memories...

It's hard to pin down exactly when an early memory comes from. There are things I think I remember, sounds, images and feelings, but there are no details to clearly place it. However, one thing I do remember that can be tentatively dated is when a silver double decker bus came to my neighbourhood.

As a child living in London I was fascinated by trains, buses and tubes. The buses were rumbling red monsters that dominated the city streets and I loved riding on the top deck looking down on all the cars and people- my dad would always take us up to the top deck anyway, because he wanted to smoke a cigarrette- this was the 70s, remember!

Anyway, the memory I have is of being desperate to go on the silver double decker, and being astounded by the fact that it had carpets! And why was there a silver double decker bus with carpets? Where was it going? I asked my mother years later, and she told me it was when there were celebrations for the Queen's silver jubillee, in the summer of 1977, when I was less than two years old. So there you have a typically British, happy first memory of a public event.