The Ghost of the Green Lady

The Ghost of the Green Lady tells the  mysterious story of a teenager who goes to live and study at a boarding school and there is this legend about a Lady with a green glow that appears in the lake nearby. It is well written and keeps the attention up till the end.

This reader will help my students of 3rd of ESO develop their reading comprehension and improve their vocabulary. As a teacher, I really like Burlington Books readers because of the stories they choose -normally they are close to my students likes- and because of the materials they offer to the teachers. If you want to listen to the book as you read it, you can do it in this link to their page.

I hope my students like it and I hope you leave your comments if you have read it.

A FOREIGNER IN AUSTRALIA by Fiona Smith (Ed. Burlington Books)

Burlington Books

This reader is a good way to get to know Australian major touristic highlights through the eyes of two youngsters, one of them Spanish. In the book, we learn about a new form of volunteer work called Wwoofing (this organization also exists in Spain) and, in this way, the two teenagers are able to discover different places and people.

Places so different as Ayers Rock or the Great Barrier Reef or the Daintree Forest and towns such as Seal Rocks or Byron Bay and then, the capital city, Melbourne; apart from the native people, the Aborigines. This is a very special trip for its protagonists, who at the end of the book, decide to go further in their relationship. Will you read their next adventures?

You can listen to all the chapters at Burlington Books website.

So, do you have any questions? Have you already finished reading it? Tell us, did you like it?

Victoria Connelly's "A Weekend with Mr Darcy".

This is a great book to read during the holidays: nice, easy, comfortable and cozy if you are a fan of Jane Austen. This book is what they call "fan fiction", and this means that it is fiction based on the fiction of a very famous author, in this case Jane Austen which is one of the greatest female novelists in the United Kingdom. In this type of fiction, the novel recreates the characters or the places and what could have happened to them or has new characters who are fans of the books or the famous writer whose relationships depend on the fiction of the famous writer.
 This is the case of this book, it takes place during a Jane Austen weekend conference and two female characters who love Jane Austen's fiction and think about the world in terms of what  Austen's characters would do or say. Jane Austen is famous for being able to show how the society of her time (end of 18th century) acted and how the love relationships were established. She usually wrote happy endings though it took their time to the couple to eventually get to understand they were the right couple.
 Many films and books have been filmed and written after her work, to just get a glimpse of that, go to the Jane Austen Centre page. If you browse around the Austen world in the Internet, you find that there are still places in which there are recreations of the Regency period balls and manners, just have a look at the blog The Secret Dreamworld of a Jane Austen Fan. This is what Victoria Connelly also does in this novel, in fact, the book is part of a trilogy.
The truth is that, although I enjoyed the book, I do not think very highly of it, it is just (and that is a lot) a good romantic novel; the good thing is that I have started to feel like reading more of Jane Austen's novels (she only wrote six because she died very young), so I am going to start reading Persuasion.

Did you know Jane Austen? What do you think of "fan fiction"? Do you have a favourite writer or novel? Tell us about it!!!!

How to improve listening comprehension

Oxford's Owl

These days, finishing the second term, we have been talking in class about how to improve the listening and reading comprehension skills. In order to improve listening, we have said that we could try to listen to songs in English, and, if possible, try to look for videos in the Internet (You Tube, Vimeo...) which have the subtitles of the song in English, so that we can sing at the same time that we read them. Another good way to improve both listening and reading comprehension is to read audio books in English, above you have a link to an ebook library which has free audio ebooks for native speakers of English starting with 3 or 4 years up to 9 to 11 years old. You will have a permanent link to this library at the bottom of the blog, as you can see in the picture.

Summing up:

• Listen to songs in English.
• Watch for English karaoke version videos.
• Read audiobooks while listening to them.

 Have you tried any of these? 

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole by Sue Townsend.

Burlington Books

This is an adaptation of the funny and entertaining novel by Sue Townsend, a British writer who knows and depicts very well the British society and institutions. Adrian Mole is one of her best known characters and has featured many of her novels. In this one, we learn to know him at the age of 13 and 3/4. It starts at the beginning of the year with his New Year Resolutions and a complicated family life.

I hope one of your New Year Resolutions is to read this short and funny book for your English class;  to get the most of it remember that you can download the mp3 recordings of the reading of the book at Burlington Books; you can also answer the questions at the end of the book and send here any comments or questions.

Happy New Year!!!!!

Improving reading comprehension in secondary education(ESL)

@AnaGarciaTeacha

We are having our Reading Comprehension tests next week, I know, it is such a pain!!! But I am going to give you some tips to work on them.

What should you do first?PREDICTING!!!
Have a look at the title and any pictures that accompany the text, also count the paragraphs. The title normally tells you the topic of the text, pictures give a lot of information which is not in English!!!! Each paragraphs brings up a new idea on the main topic. Now that you have some information, think about what ideas will come up and better than this, what words, expressions, even grammar and textual features...

What should you do next? UNDERSTANDING!!!
Read the text one paragraph by one and try to understand the main idea of each one and how it relates to the main topic (understanding a text has a lot to do with understanding what it is talking about, that is the world to which it makes reference). Don't worry about the words you don't understand, try to figure them out; two good ways are: trying to relate it to a word you know (whether in English or Spanish) or trying to fill the meaning gap - this can be fun, teachers should practise this in their classes more often. It is also important to take into account textual references such as those of personal pronouns and others.

What should you then? GET DOWN TO WORK!!!
Now it is time to read the exercise you have to do in order to show that you have understood. What do you have to do? There are different types of exercises which go from the fill-in gaps to the question answering or from multiple choice questions to finding synomyms or opposites... Depending on your level, your teacher will ask you to do different tasks. Many teachers ask students to answer questions, so it is important that you know your wh-words!!! Go back to the text and look for the information you need.

You can get deeper information on how to develop reading skills in your own language and others if you go to How to improve reading comprension. You have many corrected instances at English for Everyone.

Will you follow these tips? 

Le premier jour by Marc Levy.

Ed. Planeta

Marc Levy is a French author, in fact, he is the most widely read French writer outside of France. A few years ago, I read Et si c'était vrai, a very interesting short novel by this same author and I must say I really liked it, it was quite emotional and innovative from my point of view because of its treatment of life and death. It became very famous and they even made a film of it starring Reese Witherspoon which was called Just like heaven.
So when my sister told me she was about to finish another book by him, I asked her to lend it to me when she finished it; so she did, and when I had some time  I started reading it, just a few days ago. That is one of its best things, it takes a short time to read its almost 500 pages. I liked the beginning because it started at two separate points in the world, two parts, a man and a woman, two scientists, obviously they would end up together...  then when they meet, they already knew each other from the past!!!

Nevertheless, the story is quite unbelievable. They start  looking for the solution to a mystery that the necklace she was offered by a little boy back in Ethiopia where she was working represents. Two scientists go through an adventure that would be difficult for mercenaries... and according to other blogs, the novel is full of inacuraccies. What is worst, at the end of the book, the mystery isn't solved!! You have to read the second part of the novel called La première nuit (The First Night)!!! I know I read it in Spanish, which is not the same as reading in the original language (French), but I was disappointed; nonetheless, I admit it is great summer reading, because of the love story which keeps the novel moving.

One good thing about the book is the fact that my sister lent it to me, I wanted to talk to you about the possibility of reading through lending the books you have already read; there are several pages in the web and different possibilities, that is, you can get points through giving your book like in BookMooch or you can get in contact with other people and agree on how to exchange the books like with Book to Book, or a similar web completely in Spanish called LibrosCompartidos.com or also there is a movement that consists in leaving the book in a public place so that others can read it, this is called Book Crossing.

Do you like reading books in the summer? Have you ever used any of these webs to read books?
Leave your comments and tell us your experience!!!

DAN BROWN'S THE LOST SYMBOL

I have just finished reading this long, long book (almost 700 pages) and I would like to write a little about it so that you can comment it with me.

 In the first part of the novel, we are introduced to the new characters (for this is part of a saga) and the magnificent scenery, Washington D.C. The beginning of the book pulls us into a world of intrigue and curiosity, setting the scene for what is about to happen: a vibrating, action-packed set of actions that evolve one into the next without giving us the time to breath, that is, to put down the book. Then, several adventures take place at the same time regarding the different characters in totally different places and fields of the story: science, hackers, the CIA and so on.

At the end of the novel when all the pressure has been released, this  well-known and best-selling American writer tries to give unity and truthfulness to what has been explained through the book about the masons and the  lost symbol not very convincingly from my point of view.

I enjoyed the reading even though I was a bit disappointed at the end, but there are two things I would like to point out from this book: the first one is its high filmability, that is, the capacity of this novel to be made into a film; and the second one is a quote about knowledge that I share with the author and hope my students will also share. It is on page 420 on my edition (Corgi Books, 2010) and says: "Knowledge grows exponentially. The more we know, the greater our ability to learn and the faster we expand our knowledge base".

To learn more about the symbology of the novel or what surrounds the book, you can have a look at Dan Brown's official site

CERVANTES MEETS SHAKESPEARE by Ramón Ybarra Rubio (Ed. Burlington Books)

In this book, an American girl moves to the UK and starts learning about Cervantes and Shakespeare to find out that they will be her guides to adapting herself to her new life by appearances through which they will give her interesting and useful tips making use of their own experiences in life.

Throughout the book we will also learn about how it is sometimes difficult to adapt to new circumstances and also about how important writers made their living in the 16th century, besides learning about the historical background of the time and puritanism in England.

You can get the audio to listen to this book as you read it at the Burlington Books website.

A SENSE OF DANGER by Tracy Simmonds (Ed. Burlington Books)

( Burlington Books)

This reader by Tracy Simmonds is an interesting story about a pair of Australian teenage twins that have to move to Spain because of their father's job. They don't know how to speak Spanish and they haven't got any friends in Spain. 

When they get to Spain, there is a mistery related to their father's job that they have to solve. Jonathan has special mental powers and always feels a sense of danger. Jody falls in love with a handsome Spaniard. Mistery and love at the Fallas in Valencia, I hope you like it.

You can download the complete reading aloud of the pages of this book at the Burlington Books' Student's Zone.

You can also tells us what you think about the book. LEAVE YOUR COMMENTS!!

The Borrowers by Mary Norton (Ed. Burlington Books)

Ed. Burlington Books

In the second term, we are going to read this book about a small family of three little people who live in a big house which doesn't belong to them and they take what they need from it, that is, they "borrow" things.

At Burlington Books Online, you can find a set of activities and games to review what you have read and also the complete listenings of the chapters in the book. You have to download and execute the link in Activities.