BEST OF LUCK

Hello everybody! As they say "time surely flies when you're having fun". Once again I find myself bidding you all farewell. The course is effectively over. We're all preparing for the upcoming exams, aren't we?

My biggest concern revolves around your writing exercise. Time and again the writing part proves to be the toughest one (even harder to pass than the oral exam). That's why I've decided to remind you of the different areas we examiners will be looking at.

The structure of your essays is fundamental. Make sure your text is well organized. You will have time to think and rethink and even overthink everything you decide to write out. And don't forget you should show that your vocabulary is relevant to the subject matter. Also try not to make obvious grammar mistakes and watch out for those spelling errors. The guy (or gal) that got the unfortunate tattoo in the photo below is not exactly what I would call a good speller. Still, spelling accounts for one out ten points in each writing exercise.

One more thing, if you know somebody who might be interested in improving their English this summer you may want to let them know about this intensive five-day English course that Marta Miguel and I are going to be teaching in Laredo. The level will be B2. I promise it will be fun.

Anyway, best of luck to you all. I'm sure I'll see you around!

How to tell a story

Today I'd like to share a story with you but not one of my personal anecdotes (I do enough  of that in the classroom, don't I?) No... I've decided to let you see an actual master: Mr. Tom Hanks, arguably the most likable human being on the planet.

In the video below you will see how he manages to transform an insignificant tiny detail (he was given a crappy bicycle) into a hilarious story. The narration, by the way, starts at 06:10 and ends at 10:10. All you need to know is that Tom Hanks spent some quality time with a group of friends which included TV personality Oprah Winfrey, rock star Bruce Springsteen as well as former president Barack and his wife Michelle Obama. All of them agreed to hang out in media mogul and billionaire David Geffen's yacht in French Polynesia.

C1 students should get the ironic remark about the state of the world. You can all enjoy the detail he goes into when he describes the bike he was riding, the onomatopoeias, the way he uses the present simple tense, the unnecessary expressions (I'm gonna tell you right now), the delightfully colorful vocabulary (piece of junk hunk a junk bike), the accurate descriptions of the bicycles, the analogies... It's just an impressive masterclass. Enjoy!

Describing places

As I have often pointed out in our classes one of the skills that we have worked on both in our B2 and C1 is descriptions. Yes. Descriptions of people, descriptions of objects and, of course, descriptions of places.

The C1 students may be expected to mention quaint villages whose cobbled streets are teeming with visitors. That sentence alone would almost certainly guarantee a passing grade in an exam. The B2 level, which is obviously less demanding, still requires students to be able to come up with specific descriptions, i. e. words that can only be applied to places. Beautiful and amazing are a bit too broad. However if you say that bohemian artists used to hang out in a cafe you're using specific terms that can only be used to refer to a place (a cafe in this case).

I have recently visited Oxford and thought of you all, my dear Avanzado 2 students. There's a lot to be said about Oxford University and his many illustrious residents. J.R.R. Tolkien, for instance, was a professor at Merton College when he wrote "The Lord of the Rings". Another prominent Oxfordian author is Lewis Carroll, who wrote "Alice in Wonderland" while lecturing precisely at Christ Church College. As a matter of fact he named the Alice character after Alice Liddell, daughter of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church. If you're interested in any of this you may want to watch this BBC documentary.

The video below is just a little reminder that I've edited together to somehow let you know that the material we cover in the book is real and the conversations we have are real. At school I'll be happy to answer your questions regarding Oxford and listen to your thoughts. So consider this clip as a conversation starter.

N.B. Technically the British Library is the largest and therefore the most important in the United Kingdom but the Bodleian Library has that literary aura of mystique that no other library has. My beloved Jorge Luis Borges spent days in its famous reading room that's why I have always regarded it as "the most important" on British soil.