Congratulations on the great match we played last game! We were very good and we scored 4 goals!!! I knew we can play well and win.

We were regular and consistent all first half and for twenty minutes of the second half. Thanks to that effort, we created a lot goal chances, we got  4 great goals and most importantly, Navitas didn’t score.

We opened the match with the fantastic play of Jun, then we put things out of reach with Alan’s 2 goals. Finally, we closed the match with the penalty scored by Eddy in the second half.

Important things:

In the first half, we played with a lot of concentration and mantained our positions in the field. In this way, we created a lot of options to score and we didn’t give options to Navitas to create danger to our goal area. In particular, our transitions from attack to defence were very good.

In the second half, we continued well until after Eddy’s goal. After that, we started to lose our concentration in the field and everyone started to play individually instead of playing as a team. The result was 2 goals of Navitas in this period of the match.

The match was good, but if we want to win more games we can’t play like the last 25 five minutes of the match, we need to be consistent during the 90 minutes.

I think this game gave us a lot of confidence and showed us that if we play as a team, it will be very difficult for another team to beat us.

In my opinion, this week’s players of the match were CHACAS, KUN, RODRIGO AND ALAN

Don’t forget! TOMORROW WEDNESDAY IS OUR NEXT TRAINING SESSION¡¡¡

I hope to see all of you there to prepare FOR our next match.

As usual we will meet at reception at Greenwich at 3:15pm.

Thank you,

Jorge Castro

Team Coach

“EAP is a fantastic course for me because after I finished this course I
think my English skills have improved a lot. This course has been designed in
order to prepare students to attend a university but I think every student can
attend.

Although EAP is an intensive course as you have many assignments to do
such as current affairs, seminars, summaries and weekly tests, you will not feel
really stressed as Justin and Andrea, who are the teachers, have excellent skills
to teach us and both of them are very kind, empathetic and helpful. As a
result, three months of attending this course was very short.

I would highly recommend EAP for students who would like to improve their English skills, and especially for students who would like to study at a university. I hope you
will enjoy studying EAP as much as I did.”

Here are some tips to help you achieve the best score possible in the IELTS Reading test.

Read the questions first, underline the keywords and predict some possible answers. You need to know what information you are reading for when you start reading the text.

If you can’t find an answer, skip it and move on. However, save time at the end of the test to go back and guess an answer for those questions. This is particularly important to multiple choice questions.

Never leave an answer blank. If you leave it blank, it will be wrong. If you write something, you have a chance of being correct.

Learn the difference between No/False, and Not Given. If the answer is No/False there is information in the test that contradicts the statement in the question, so you must be able to find that information. If it’s Not Given, there is no information in the text that relates to that question.

Practise doing the test! Read over sample materials and do practice tests so you feel confident with the test structure.

Don’t be worried if you find the last section difficult, the test gets harder.

Good luck!

One of our teachers, Adina, describes how she uses the skills from her Master of Speech Language Pathology to help her students improve their pronunciation.

I have been teaching ESL at Greenwich since 2009. In 2010, I started a 2 year Master of Speech Language Pathology at Sydney University, which I recently finished. Speech pathologists (also called ‘speech therapists’) work with adults and children who have difficulty speaking for different reasons. For example, people who stutter (like the King in the movie The King’s Speech), children who have trouble learning their first language, adults who have had a stroke and ‘forget’ how to speak, and people who have trouble pronouncing sounds. As you can imagine, there are many skills from the degree which I use when I teach English. Ion particular, I use these skills during the weekly pronunciation classes.

As a final activity to finish my degree, I did an individual pronunciation class with an Upper-Intermediate student, Jaime (from Peru) and filmed it! We worked on the sounds /dʒ/ (like in the name ‘Jack’) and /j/ (like in the animal ‘yak’). The /dʒ/ sound can be quite hard for some Spanish speakers as it’s not used in Spanish. We did activities such as practicing basic syllables (e.g. /dʒa/, /ju/, /dʒo/), and reading minimal pair words (e.g. “jam, yam”, “juice, use”, “J, yay”).

I showed Jaime a computer program that I can use to ‘look’ at speech. This program, Praat, records your speech and turns it into a image which looks different for every sound you make. As you can see below, the image on the left (/dʒ/) looks different from the image for /j/ – it’s darker (the part circled in red). Jaime used the program to ‘see’ if he said the syllables and words correctly. ‘Seeing’ and hearing speech can help students become more accurate in learning new sounds.

At the end of the 1 hour lesson, Jaime was much better at correctly using  the /dʒ/ and /j/ sounds. It takes a lot of practice to use the sounds correctly in everyday speaking situations, but using them correctly in words is a great start!

Adina

Our General English students can now attend HELP Club every Thursday afternoon from 3pm to 4pm. During HELP Club our teachers are available for all General English students who might be having difficulties with the grammar point discussed during the week. Students can discuss the structure, uses and examples of that particular grammar point and also revise any difficulties they would have experienced during class activities or even the test. So remember, if you are having trouble with the new language point this week, go to HELP Club!

In March, our General English students participated in a Scavenger Hunt around Sydney. Each group consisted of around 4 members, who had to take photos of landmarks around Sydney CBD in the morning session and Darling Harbour in the afternoon session.

However, it wasn’t that simple! Not only did they have to take photos, but they also had to do so creatively while following specific rules. Some of the landmarks in Sydney were Queen Victoria Building, Town Hall, the Harbour Bridge and Manly ferries in Circular Quay. In Darling Harbour students went to Pyrmont Bridge, the Powerhouse Museum, the Aquarium and other exciting venues. All the General English teachers were at different locations to help out the students and sign off each task.

There were some great photos to choose from and it was really hard to pick a winner! After hours of debate we finally made up our minds and the winners are Karyn, Sumumu and their other two team members. Congratulations – you took some really amazing photos! We hope you enjoy your $100 food voucher together and don’t forget to take some more creative and funny photos for us

Check out some of the best photos of our Scavenger Hunt on Facebook and in the Greenwich College Student Newsletter – pick up a copy from reception!

Ian’s TESOL group (Marietta, Alejandra, Carla and Rodrigo) finished the 10-week intensive course last Thursday. The previous two and a half months have been demanding but equally rewarding. This is especially true for the girls who came from Chile to do the TESOL course at Greenwich. The significance of their time at Greenwich was illustrated in each of their mini graduation speeches last Thursday. They mentioned how they rekindled their passion for teaching during the TESOL course. Unlike the girls, I began the course without any prior experience as a teacher. It was both challenging but incredibly fulfilling. The skills and knowledge I have gained as a TESOL student will undoubtedly be useful in whichever professional field I find myself in the future.

A big thank you to all Greenwich staff: from Sylvia and Sophie at the front-desk, to the teachers we watched during our observations classes, to our supervisors in English Club and to the students who I found to be very helpful and patient when I taught English Club. An extra big thank goes to Patricia and Vici for taking the majority of our lectures and of course to our TESOL teacher, Ian, who proved to be an invaluable asset to us all with his generous support and guidance throughout our time as TESOL students.

Rod

Planning one of the most important travels of your life is not a piece of cake, especially when the chosen destination is 16.000 kilometres away and is called Australia. However, what you definitely can’t plan is the multitude of experiences that are waiting for you.

After having visited Australia for the first time in 2003 as a tourist, I decided that I’d be back here one day, and it happened. For all of the last year I’d been brainwashing my parents until they understood that I was a lost cause. As a result, on the 28^th of September 2012 the airplane landed Down Under. Once I arrived, I needed to look around and organize myself in a new situation: different people, cultural background and, as a cherry on the cake, a different language as well. Even if I had been studying English for several years, I had never had the possibility to practice it in daily life. For this reason I was quite scared. First of all, I had to open a bank account and deal with stuff like rent for my new house.

How could I do that? I wasn’t so confident with my English, so I had a daily “Gaffe of the day”! However, thanks to my mistakes and my willingness to talk as much as I could, I met many people like me in search of their own “Aussie-selves”. Clearly, they weren’t all from San Marino. In addition, when I traveled around the South of Australia and Tasmania too, Brazilian, French, Spanish, German and Asian people surrounded me, and the only way to communicate with them was using the English language.

Fortunately, it wasn’t as hard as expected! Now, only after having attended IELTS and CAE courses at Greenwich College, I recognize a huge improvement in my language skills. Moreover, to cope with normal things that happen during a typical day like having a beer with my new friends, sharing interests with someone from the other part of the world, or simply planning a trip is more natural than before. I definitely feel more confident about my English. Don’t worry about making mistakes because they are useful to break the ice – everything is part of this beautiful experience!

Loris De Angelis aka “San Marino”