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Blog criado por Bruno Coriolano de Almeida Costa, professor de Língua Inglesa desde 2002. Esse espaço surgiu em 2007 com o objetivo de unir alguns estudiosos e professores desse idioma. Abordamos, de forma rápida e simples, vários aspectos da Língua Inglesa e suas culturas. Agradeço a sua visita.

"Se tivesse perguntado ao cliente o que ele queria, ele teria dito: 'Um cavalo mais rápido!"

quinta-feira, 31 de março de 2016

[JOKE] The Toilet Seat




A man decides to take the opportunity while his wife is away to paint the toilet seat. The wife comes home sooner than expected, sits, and gets the seat stuck to her rear. She is understandably distraught about this and asks her husband to drive her to the doctor. She puts on a large overcoat so as to cover the stuck seat, and they go.

When they get to the doctor's, the man lifts his wife's coat to show their predicament.

The man asks, "Doctor, have you ever seen anything like this before?"
"Well, yes," the doctor replies, "but never framed."

By Rubens Queiroz de Almeida
VOCABULARY HELP

  • away - fora
  • cover - cobrir
  • distraught - aborrecida, chateada
  • framed - emoldurado
  • lift - levantar
  • overcoat - casaco
  • paint - pintar
  • predicament - situação dificil
  • rear - traseiro
  • reply - responder
  • show - mostrar
  • sit (sit, sat, sat) - sentar
  • stuck - entalar
  • toilet seat - tampa da privada
  • while - enquanto
  • wife - esposa

 Check this video
Very funny joke you take X Men Female Doctor Heart:

terça-feira, 29 de março de 2016

Danish girl talks about England, Ireland, Scotland... oh yes, and Canada.



I was surfing on the internet and I came across this incredible channel on YouTube. It’s Victoria Flamel’s channel, I’m talking about. She is a youtuber from Denmark. She makes videos “to make people laugh” (her words, not mine!).
Anyways… I’ve just chosen some nice videos of hers to share with you.
I hope you enjoy them just as much as I did (just as much as I DO).
Have fun! All videos are great!












PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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segunda-feira, 28 de março de 2016

Makela's story went viral when she couldn't flush the toilet on a date

Okay. Now I’ve seen everything! 

This should've been an ordinary date, but the whole thing turned out to be a real shit!

Check out the story of a woman who ended up with 'poop' in her bag. That’s right!
Let the woman herself tell you the story!



















Vocabulary: What's this? What do we use it for?





PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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ANSWER:

domingo, 27 de março de 2016

DICAS PARA PRENDER OUTRAS LÍNGUAS





Se você é daqueles que passa muitas horas na internet procurando por fórmulas mágicas para aprender inglês, então você veio ao local certo. Eu GARANTO que aqui você vai ler dicas que irão definitivamente lhe ajudar a aprender a falar inglês.

O primeiro passo é APRENDER A TER PACIÊNCIA. Todos nós aprendemos de forma diferente. Cada ser tem um estilo de aprendizado e, portanto, não adianta ficar querendo fazer igual ao seu vizinho. Vocês provavelmente tiveram experiências diferentes e aprenderão de forma diferente também.

Como no Brasil as escolas de idiomas viraram comércio, eu sugiro que você procure várias alternativas para aprender a falar inglês.  

Vou sugerir várias, mas uma por mês, ok?




ASSISTIR A SÉRIES DE TV

Isso mesmo. Se você tiver uma rotina para assistir a uma série de TV, você irá aprender rapidamente como a falar, isso ao mesmo tempo que se diverte.

A série que mais recomendo para quem está querendo aprender o mais rápido possível é LOST. Esta série tem a vantagem de repetir a mesma cena várias vezes, de pontos de vistas diferentes. Ou seja, em LOST você consegue ouvir as mesmas falas dos personagens várias vezes. A repetição vai fazer com que você se sinta familiarizado com a forma como os sons são produzidos.



BARBA, CABELO E BIGODE

Em LOST, você vai encontrar várias referências sobre obras literárias. Se é amante da leitura, sugiro que procure os livros mencionados e os leia (pelo menos um em inglês). Existem vários livros adaptados para diversos níveis. Você pode escolher uns mais básicos e ir avançando com o tempo.





sábado, 26 de março de 2016

Noam Chomsky The theories of the world’s best-known linguist have become rather weird





FEW disciplines are so strongly associated with a single figure: Einstein in physics and Freud in psychology, perhaps. But Noam Chomsky is the man who revolutionised linguistics. Since he wrote “Syntactic Structures” in 1957, Mr Chomsky has argued that human language is fundamentally different from any other kind of communication, that a “linguist from Mars” would agree that all human languages are variations on a single language, and that children’s incredibly quick and successful learning (despite often messy and inattentive parental input) points to an innate language faculty in the brain. These ideas are now widely accepted.

Over the past 60 years, Mr Chomsky has repeatedly stripped down his theory. Some aspects of human language are shared with animals, and others are part of more general human thinking. He has focused ever more narrowly on the features of language that he reckons are unique to humans. All this has led to a remarkable little book, published late last year with Robert Berwick, a computer scientist. “Why Only Us” purports to explain the evolution of human language.

Other biologists, linguists and psychologists have probed the same question and have reached little consensus. But there is even less consensus around the world’s most eminent linguist’s idea: that a single genetic mutation created an ability called “Merge”, in a single human whom Mr Chomsky has called “Prometheus”, some time before the human exodus from Africa. That mutation was so advantageous that it survived and thrived, producing today’s 7,000 languages from Albanian to Zulu. But the vast differences among the world’s languages, Mr Chomsky argues, are mere differences in “externalisation”. The key is Merge.

But what is it? Merge simply says that two mental objects can be merged into a bigger one, and mental operations can be performed on that as if it were a single one. The can be merged with cat to give a noun phrase, which other grammar rules can operate on as if it were a bare noun like water. So can the and hat. Once there, you can further merge, making the cat in the hat. The cat in the hat can be merged with a verb phrase to create a new object, a sentence: The cat in the hat came back. And that sentence can be merged into bigger sentences: You think the cat in the hat came back. And so on.

Why would this be of any use? No one else had Merge. Whom did Prometheus talk to? Nobody, at least not using Merge. (Humans may already have been using cries and gestures, as many animals do.) But Merge-enabled, hierarchically structured language, according to Mr Chomsky, did not evolve for talking at all. Rather, it let Prometheus take simple concepts and combine them in sentence-like ways in his own head. The resulting complex thoughts gave him a survival advantage. If he then passed the mutant Merge gene on to several surviving children, who thrived and passed on the Merge gene to their children, Messrs Chomsky and Berwick believe that they must have then come to dominate the population of humans in Africa. Only later, as Merge came to work with the vocal and hearing organs, did human language emerge.

Many scholars find this to be somewhere between insufficient, improbable and preposterous. The emergence of a single mutation that gives such a big advantage is derided by biologists as a “hopeful monster” theory; most evolution is gradual, operating on many genes, not one. Some ability like Merge may exist, but this does not explain why some words may merge and others don’t, much less why the world’s languages merge so differently. (Not a single non-English example appears in “Why Only Us”, nor a single foreign language in its index.)

Mr Chomsky says those who disagree with his ever-more contentious ideas are either blind or hucksters. Critics refer to a “cult” of “acolytes” around a “Great Leader”, unwilling to challenge him or engage seriously with the work of non-Chomskyan scholars. (One critic has said “to be savaged by Chomsky is a badge of honour.”) Linguistics is now divided into a Chomskyan camp, a large number of critics and many more still for whom the founder of the modern discipline is simply irrelevant. He is unlikely to end up like Freud, a marginal figure in modern psychology whose lasting influence has been on the humanities. Mr Chomsky’s career is more likely to end up like Einstein’s—at least in the sense that his best and most influential work came early on.

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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Teacher's Portfolio. How To Stop Collecting Tons Of Photocopies.



Being a teacher means to be a collector. At one point in your career you understand that you store so much paper that you could easily wallpaper the whole school with it. And, the weirdest thing about that is your obsession with the stuff: you carefully sort out the copies every vacation, keep memories about each of them, where it was taken, in what class it was used, what students liked about it. It becomes your own memorabilia, thus, kills the sense of having a portfolio - easy and quick access to materials for extra practice. If you caught yourself on not using at least 30% of photocopies kept in your files, this post is for you.

So, here are my thoughts and the ways that let me get more sensible about my portfolio.

1. USE YOUR LAPTOP/PC.

You are sure to have a good library, and there is always a way to fit a little more into the bookcase, but let's be honest, technology really allows us to save space, effort and time. You download, store, if necessary - print out. A lot of apps help you out to cut out a smaller extract from books and Word. There is no need to use paper, a lot of files, and it's much faster to find something via Search on your computer than in the piles you have round your living space.

2. HAVE A DECENT NAVIGATION.

When you store on your computer, materials are easy to be lost or forgotten. Sometimes, it can take twice the time to find and print out the copy. The best way to avoid is to have a strict and comprehensible navigation. You need to choose categories (by level, by language aspect, by task types) and you need to sort out the downloads every time or, at least, once a week. The most important point here is for you to understand the storage system, I mean, even if it seems crazy to another person, for you it may be the most comfortable way to keep the data.



Vocabulary: What's this? What can you do with it?




PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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sexta-feira, 25 de março de 2016

[Warm up] Topic about criticism.


“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
 – Albert Einstein

I usually start my classes with warmers (or warm up). I think it is an efficient way to have students working on their English skills. I almost always, prioritize the oral skills in these kinds of warmers. No, I don’t think that the spoken language is more important than other skills (sub skills or whatever). I just like to give my students the opportunity to talk before we go into the lesson.

In this one, I would suggest you to give them (you may choose the resource - slides, piece of paper, write on the board, for instance) a question, or a quote, and let them reflect upon their answers before they share their viewpoints with the whole group.

I like when they work in pair (or groups) before talking to the other classmates. I would recommend you to do the same (if you feel like doing this activity at all, obviously).


My suggestion in this post is:

You’re having lunch with three people you respect and admire.  They all start criticizing a close friend of yours, not knowing she is your friend.  The criticism is distasteful and unjustified.  What do you do?
click image to enlarge

DIRECTIONS

Show your students the situation (above) and then ask them to work in groups (or pairs) and after that, ask them to talk about the situation.

ALTERNATIVE (to go beyond the warmer)


Would you be willing to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years to become extremely attractive or famous?







PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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Vocabulary: What are these? What do we use them for?


PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
Did you spot a typo?
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The answer:


30 Challenges for 30 Days of Growth WRITTEN by MARC CHERNOFF

Scientists have suggested that, with a little willpower, it takes roughly 30 days for a person to form a new habit.  As with mastering anything new, the act of starting and getting beyond the preliminary stage where everything feels awkward is 80% of the battle.  This is precisely why it’s important to make small, positive changes every day over the course of at least a 30 day period.


It’s like the old saying:  “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”  The same philosophy holds true for making changes in your life.  Trying to bite off more than you can chew will only make you choke.  But taking smaller, manageable bites, one at a time – eating a little healthier, exercising a little, creating some simple productive habits, for example – is an amazing way to make positive changes and get excited about life.
And when you start small like this, you won’t need a lot of motivation either.  The simple act of getting started and doing something will give you the momentum you need, and soon you’ll find yourself in a positive spiral of changes – one building on the other.  When I started doing this in my life, I was so excited about it that I started this blog to share it with the world.
Below you will find 30 challenges to be accomplished over the course of 30 days.  If carried out diligently each of them has the potential to create a new positive habit in your life.  Yes, there is some slight overlap between a few of them.  And no, you don’t have to attempt all at once.  Pick 2 to 5 and commit the next 30 days, wholeheartedly, to successfully completing the challenge.  Then once you feel comfortable with these habits, challenge yourself with a few more the following month.


quinta-feira, 24 de março de 2016

100 ways to say BAD!



“There are lots of ways to say bad, but they don’t all mean exactly the same thing.
Be sure you know the word well before you use it in your writing. If you are not sure, use a dictionary.”




PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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terça-feira, 22 de março de 2016

"10 ways to respond to THANK YOU!"



PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
Your feedback is welcome. Please direct comments and questions to me at bruno_coriolano@hotmail.com
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sexta-feira, 4 de março de 2016

HOW COULD DRILLS BE USED? WHY (NOT) USE THEM AFTER ALL?




TO DRILL OR NOT TO DRILL: IS IT NOT A MATTER OF PURPOSE?

EFL teacher Bruno Coriolano

Straight to the point: I do think that drills have a place in the teaching of English for speakers of other languages (TESOL) classes. Why is that? It is dead simple: I do not believe there is a perfect method that could be used in order to teach our students and because of that, I believe that teachers may (and should) use a variety of techniques in order to do so. Drills (why not?) could be used for different purposes in our classes, and in different moments. 

It is important to say that I am not stating here that drills have to be there, in all lessons, all the time. Otherwise, classes would become a real burden for both teachers and learners. So I wholeheartedly agree with those who constantly remind us that drills might be ‘boring’ if overused. However, we should constantly remember ourselves that anything – a lesson, an activity, tasks, and the like – overused during one’s classes may cause, among other things, boredom. It is undoubtedly the case of overdrilling (Harmer, 2011). 

    It seems interesting to mention that Communicative Language Teaching (henceforth CLT) arose when language teaching around the world was ready for (and in need of) a paradigm shift. That is, language teaching was no longer expected to be taught through the Audiolingualism perspective, for instance (Richards and Rogers, 2011). Needless to say, drills were (are) strongly associated to this particular method and they have been used for repetition, inflection, replacement, restatement, completion, transposition, expansion, contraction, transformation, integration, rejoinder, and restoration (for more details, please read Richards and Rogers, 2011, pp. 60-62).

In CLT, language input should be authentic as well as provide learners with opportunities “to listen to language as it is used in authentic communication” (Larsen-Freeman 2010, p. 128). Such paradigm shift in language teaching may have created the drill-and-kill kind of thought.

Knowing that language is supposed to be used (and taught) as communicatively authentic as possible within a CLT perspective (Almeida Filho, 1993), drills, as it seems, have been seen as a real villain in academia, for instance. I cannot deny that language teaching has changed the emphasis from drill-like, say, techniques to “communicative activities [and tasks] based on meaningful interaction which, if successful, direct learners’ attention away from language form and towards the messages they want to communicate” (Seidlhofer, 2001, p. 57).  

I hold the opinion that (language) teaching should not follow any particular orthodox method. On the contrary, we should bear in mind that we are in the so-called Postmethod Era (Brown, 2007). Moreover, teachers, in TESOL contexts nowadays, have opportunities to make choices about their own practices regarding English language teaching. Hence, teachers may make use of appropriate instruments in order to provide leaners with meaningful learning. Furthermore, teachers should take learners’ needs and interests into account while preparing their lessons. After all, the diversification of methodological options has also brought a diversification of learning goals.

Considering this scenario, I still insist on this debate: Isn’t the use of drills a matter of purpose(s)? If the teacher has a clear purpose (or objective) in mind, shouldn’t he/she consider using drills in his/her lesson?

HOW COULD DRILLS BE USED? WHY (NOT) USE THEM AFTER ALL?

EFL teacher Bruno Coriolano