English workshop/Meetings

Meetings

2013-01-16

We went through many examples of active and passive voice working our way through “The cat in the hat” book. We intend to continue and repeat this exercise in future meetings. To increase interaction we did this exercise in pairs. We played a round of Pepi's game that uses the words from this book where each player gets a random word from the book and has to explain this word to the group. This turned out to be both fun and surprisingly hard to formally explain words.

Homework

Prepare an example of correct and incorrect use of active and passive voice that you've encountered recently.

2013-01-08

Around ten people join the meeting. Jay introduces himself as a native English speaker who lives in Europe since ten years. He has some great ideas about what we can do within the workshops: He addresses some common mistakes German-speaking people make when they speak English and offers to help with that. For improving vocabulary, he suggests reading dictionaries.

We make a list of books we intend to read. See also Literature. Jay also suggests that watching films with subtitles can improve language skills.

Jasmin says that she has some material and knows exercises for better pronunciation.

Pepi suggests that playing some games could be helpful, and also there should be some kind of challenge. For example, naming things with their English names when you are out (like in the tram) will improve vocabulary.

We decide to meet again in one week and schedule the next meeting for 2013-01-15 19:00