I hope a few people start using this and that I am not talking to myself here. It is a good habit for your English learning to start reading English articles from the Web and working with those articles. As I have said it is important to choose something that interests you and to print it. Then choose some useful phrases or chunks (see collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms and social formulas) and maybe some words that you want to make part of your speaking vocabulary. These should be collected in a separate note book. This note book should become your own dictionary where you store all the useful phrases and words that you want to make part of your speaking vocabulary. This is a life time process and not just a short term idea for this course. Then write a summary of the article in your own words, including those phrases and words that you have chosen. This then could be uploaded to this blog where I can give some feedback. Also include your list of chosen words for the same purpose. Others maybe can use the phrase and word lists to choose useful language.

Here is a list of what is needed for a learner to enable speech:

- a core grammar

- a core vocabulary of at least 1000 high-frequency items

- some common discourse markers

- a core 'phrasebook' of multi-work units (or chunks)

- formulaic ways of performing common speech acts (such as requesting or inviting)

- mastery of some features of pronunciation

As I said earlier you should now start work on making your own phrasebook which should include the core vocabulary, chunks and formulaic speech acts.

I'll be including some short 'motivational' texts now and again. I would also like you to use this blog to ask any questions that you have or anything else that you think would be helpful for all the students.

Enda