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Here’s a David Bowie classic that my students have enjoyed – maybe yours will too.
The copyright on the music has been cleared by YouTube, so feel free to share it with your students.
RIP David Bowie – what a great story teller and what a great musician. Planet earth is blue without you.
It can be a verb, a conjunction, a noun, a preposition, an adjective, an adverb, and a discourse marker. No wonder students get confused! Here’s a video that aims to sort out a common misunderstanding.
They take place in boardrooms, offices, corridors, restaurants, dorm rooms, online, on trains, planes, busses… name a location and they’ve probably happened there.
They generally last somewhere between 3 minutes and several days.
Participants might stand up, sit down, wear suits, jeans, pajamas, baseball hats, piercings etc and they generally range in age from around 15 -100 or so.
Participants might have power and status rankings of 0-100 that don’t necessarily correlate with their age.
The answer is business meetings, of course. And something interesting that we know from speech data is that business meetings are generally littered with small talk at any stage of the discussion, which can be about… well, anything.
So all in all, business meetings are rather hard to pin down. But communicating successfully in meetings is crucial for most of my students so I wanted to have a stab at making a short series of ELT videos about them. I reasoned that there would probably be three things that would resonate with many learners…
Time would be limited
The discussion would be purposeful
Making yourself understood and understanding would be paramount.
We were able to shoot some of the scenes in the YouTube studios in NYC with a splendid cast of volunteers. I’m very grateful to them and here is the first in the series which is about time management…
And here’s the second one which is about making decisions:
And here’s the third and final one which is about understanding
Many thanks to our cast of stars: Michelle Kaplan, Breahne Dolan, Joy Chu and Kathy Fagan.
Check out more of their work here:
Michelle – All Ears English http://www.allearsenglish.com – a terrific podcast for English learners – great for advanced conversational English and IELTS preparation.
Kathy – English teachers will love Kathy’s reflections on ELT at her Free-Range ELT blog. Check it out here: http://www.freerangekef.blogspot.com
Breahne is model as well as an actress and you can find out more about her work here: https://www.facebook.com/BreahJadeModel
These words often come up in Business English classes, and I think they’re worth learning!
Here’s a video about them:
It’s available with a clickable transcript here.
Some possible discussion questions:
1. You need to sell your car. You might be able to get more money for it if you sell it privately, but is it worth the bother?
2. Is it worth paying more for vegetables that are labelled “organic”?
3. Which is more worthwhile:
a. learning the piano
b. learning a language
c. spending time with your family?
4. Your top sales person always arrives late and they’re disruptive in meetings. Is it worth making an issue over?
5. You’re buying a new washing machine/cell phone/car. Is it worth buying a service contract?
6. Your house is on fire and you can only save one thing. What’s worth most to you: your photographs, jewelry, pet? What?
7. Which is worth more? Time or money?
These verbs are always tricky for students so we made a video about them. But this video comes with a BIG BONUS! Over at Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat’s wonderful ‘English With A Twist’ blog she has taken our video, provided a text summary AND added more examples – really good illustrative examples.
As always, this video is available with a clickable transcript at our website but you’re going to want to check out Shanthi Cumaraswamy Streat’s ‘English With A Twist’ blog post too. My business English students love Shanthi‘s blog. Make sure yours subscribe!
Here’s our latest! You can also see it with a clickable transcript here And if you’d like to see the first one again, click here.
UPDATE: Also check out Shanthi Streat’s blog post to read more on these idioms here.