What You Say in English‪!‬ Frank Carrizo Zirit

I met Ethan back when I worked for International House Madrid. He's the sort of person you'd love to work with: knowledgeable, experienced, and, most importantly, quite approachable whenever you had doubts about your teaching. Nowadays, he keeps quite busy writing materials for exam preparation, Teacher Training courses and is also quite active in delivering presentations at many teaching conventions. Macmillan Publishers called him to write the Teachers Books for the newest edition of their successful series for Cambridge exams, Ready For, originally written by Amanda French and Roy Norris. Here, we talked about his work as an author and what he thinks of the exam preparation market in general.

To learn more about the newest edition of Ready For click here (B2 First [https://www.macmillanenglish.com/es/catalogue/courses/exam-preparation/ready-for-b2-first-4th-edition/course-information] and C1 Advanced [https://www.macmillanenglish.com/es/catalogue/courses/exam-preparation/ready-for-c1-advanced-4th-edition/course-information])

To purchase the book he co-wrote with Riccardo Chiappini, Activities for Mediation, click here [https://www.deltapublishing.co.uk/book/activities-for-mediation-9783125017443/?page_id=17].

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This episode is devoted to explaining how students can ace the second part of the speaking test: The Long Turn. As I mention in the episode, you can prepare the way you wish to organize your discourse, but not what vocabulary or grammar you will use. You will listen to three students speaking about three sets of images. They all had time to prepare and even write down what they wanted to say. So, when preparing, this might be a good idea to get used to the structure of your answer. You'll see how it easy it becomes. That way, you'll only have to worry about the language output, accuracy and range of vocabulary and structure and not the organization.

The visuals can be downloaded from here [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yu904rChn3vLL_Is-cDeEoOHVnL2-3QK/view?usp=sharing].

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This idea of thinking of groups of words as one unit is nothing new, but it might help you think of different word categories (e.g., idioms, phrasal verbs, fixed phrases, binomials, among others) as having more things in common as you might have initially thought. They're Polywords.

I've prepared some activities that can help you understand polywords better:

1. Matching task [https://learningapps.org/watch?v=prt5e2d7j22]
2. Reading and Use of English part 1 (C1/C2) [https://learningapps.org/watch?v=poh8mse1a22]
3. Reading and Use of English part 2 (C1/C2) [https://learningapps.org/watch?v=pp7mq1edc22]

Answers can be found here [https://telegra.ph/Answers-to-activities-10-30].

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This is yet another C2 Speaking mock with two great students: Francisco and Maria. They'll soon take their exams and wanted to do one last mock speaking with me before their big day. The questions and the visuals can be downloaded from here:

* Examiner's questions [https://drive.google.com/file/d/11oYNuyuVSz74PzMLr_oPh2rI_UpinpZs/view?usp=sharing]
* Candidate Visuals part 2 [https://drive.google.com/file/d/11lISrHgrqnQkMdpESLOCkmkz-b4M1MK1/view?usp=sharing]
* Candidate Visuals part 3 [https://drive.google.com/file/d/11hk1a3pKdd274RSCpPU1ONDCbLHZxacA/view?usp=sharing]

I'm sharing the examiner's questions, as I know there are other teachers who would like to do the same exam with other students. I recycled some questions from other sources, but most of it was created by me.

Also, at the beginning I speak about Swell, a new collaborative social network where people share their voices with mini podcasts. Fantastic idea!

Follow me on Swell @wyse [https://www.swellcast.com/wyse] and check out my first swellcast here [https://www.swellcast.com/t/STMPXvG0K5bV1De]. Take part in the discussion.

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It's been some time since I haven't reacted to a celebrity's English. This time is Black Panther's Prince Namor, Tenoch Huerta. Personally, I don't know how long he's been learning English, but he behaved like a champion in this interview. You can listen to how he used natural fluency to overcome his lack of grammatical and phonological control. You too can deliver a successful interview for live TV without having to master English with the mastery of a C2 speaker. Tenoch is an excellent role model to follow.

The transcript with more comments can be downloaded from here [https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Sre5JHCAdZy-qdwN0AyrTJlYt3kqzH0/view?usp=sharing]. Make sure you use a good PDF reader to see the bubble notes. 

The TED talk I mentioned at the end, the one with Professor John McWhorter can be watched here: https://youtu.be/VQRjouwKDlU 

The podcast he conducts is called Lexicon Valley.

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The previous episode had a great reception. So much so that I decided to extend on how to improve your fluency and intelligibility by working on your consonant clusters. The five sample sentences are:

* O n my first trip, I traveled the length and breadth of Sri Lanka.
* Scientists say that humans' sixth sense can be explained.
* Last February, meteorologists measured the temperature in the forests in the Arctic circle.
* He asks exactly what we need to know about the nuclear program.
* She liked two different tasks: washing her clothes and resting in the summer months.

Follow the advice on how to produce these consonant clusters and improve your fluency skills. The two online resources I used to get sample sentences were https://youglish.com/ and https://www.playphrase.me/

If you wish to read more about consonant clusters, this PDF [https://drive.google.com/file/d/14dEVVOFAdGrKZgAiw5wQB48F1ZclhkHa/view?usp=sharing] would be very useful.

Thanks for your support! And if you wish to be showcased, send me a line to podcast@languageteaching.es

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