Teachertone: Sharing English Learners online tasks

Leisure Leisure is a period of time spent out of work and fun activities. It’s very important to have free time because many people have a stressful routine and need some rest to carry on their activities. People prefer relaxing by doing simple things like reading good books, for example.Other ones like traveling, meeting new places and cultures. However, the important thing is to do something you like doing. People who live far from their family often prefer making anything since they are next to people who also miss, like parents, friends, brothers, husbands and wife. In this case, the companionship is more important than the activity. There are many types of leisure that involves activity and passive leisure. The first one refers to activities that involve the exertion of physical or mental energy like walking, doing yoga or some activities with more high-impact, such as football or boxing. On the other hand, the passive leisure concerns to activities which people do not exert any s

Along this text I am going to comment a little bit about my short experience in studies of language, namely English. The question is how to study English nowadays? There are many ways to learn languages. What are the easiest methods to learn them? Well, the big problem that many people face in learning a new language is their own fear. Sometimes we are shy to pronounce some words or we worry about saying them correctly. That may bring about some difficult to develop the language, but everybody agrees with some methods which help to improve a foreign language in a faster way. The first thing to do is to surround you with English. This is the best way to improve it. Read books, articles, magazines, newspapers and after that to take some notes in English, of course. Listening to radio or podcasting. Also, watching English news, movies and downloading videos from YouTube, for example. The import is that you will begin to think in English. What more, it is important to listen to native

How much do you want to pay? The british rock band Radiohead is one of the most acclaimed bands by the international critics since the 90’s. After their 2003 album, Hail To The Thief, they ended their contract with the music label EMI and spent more than 4 years to release new material. In 2007, they announced that they were going to release a new album, called “ In Rainbows”, by theirselves and through the internet, without any labels involved. That created a big buzz and anticipation on the media, but no one was expecting what they had in mind for the release. Only ten days after the announcement, anyone could buy In Rainbows through Radiohead’s official site, in the MP3 format. The surprise was in the payment area of the site. There was a blank field for the user to type, under the title of “You tell us how much it’s worth”. The user could pay whatever it wanted to pay, with credit card, including ZERO pounds. This was a bold movement by one of the biggest bands in the world, and

Which English do you speak? If a British person comes to an American store asking “Can you give me a rubber?”. What do you think the seller would offer to him? If he’s an American seller he will give the customer a condom. But if he is a British seller, he will give the costumer a material to erase pencil marks, that is what the British costumer really wanted. We have a funny situation like this one in the movie (or film as you wish) “Outsourced” at which an American manager of a call center needs to train a team of Indian workers who need to speak with American accent. Those are two situations where speakers have a misunderstanding because they use two different versions of the English language. They can’t communicate with the same language! How is this possible? Today we have millions of speakers worldwide which have English as a native or foreign language, and a huge variety of English Standards as shown in Fig. 1. But in 1900, the only Standard English was the so called Queen’s or

RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE WRITING OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS IN ENGLISH By CLEUMAR & DANIELSON English is the main communication language utilized by the international scientific community in conferences and journals. Nevertheless, it is not the native language for the majority of the researchers, and so they have many challenges to express their ideas in an intelligible English to their audience. One of the higher challenges is “to make the writing a pleasure to reader not a confusing slog for your readers”. This requires a good knowledge of grammar, orthography and vocabulary, and in consequence it is common to find who have any work refused for publication because the reviewers could not understand their manuscripts. The first step to write a good scientific paper is adequately to choose the conference or journal. A careful reading of their latest issues and objectives and verification of their relevance using, e.g., the impact factor (a citations measure of a journal), can help the ch