Вживання прислів’їв та ідіом на уроках англійської мови

Перед нашою школою стоїть задача підготувати випускників середньої школи, які мають високий рівень знань іноземних мов. Отже, учні повинні оволодіти іншомовним між культурним спілкуванням шляхом формування і розвитку міжкультурної комунікативної компетенції. Вивчення на уроках фразеологізмів, прислів’їв сприяє частковому вирішенню цієї задачі.

Готуючи своїх учнів до олімпіад, навчая писати творчі роботи, я завжди знайомлю їх з вимогами щодо усного і письмового мовлення. Під час оцінки рівня мовленнєвої компетенції, враховуються знання і уміння вживати розмовні формули, епітети, порівняння, метафори, прислів’я, приказки ідіоми. До того ж у тестах для вступу до вищих навчальних закладів і у тестах на перевірку знань англійської мови як іноземної (TOEFL) часто включаються завдання на перевірку знань  англійських  прислів’їв та ідіом.

Подборка интересных фактов об английском языке

Выражение «меньше знаешь – крепче спишь» отлично подходит для нас – англоманов и просто влюбленных в английский язык. Пока другие люди спокойно наслаждаются заслуженным бокалом чая перед сном, мы роемся в пучинах Интернета в поисках нужного перевода, фильма в оригинале, теста или вообще каких-нибудь упражнений для повышения своей грамотности.

А то и вовсе тихонько в ночи треплемся на форумах на никому не понятные темы про герундий или (того страшнее) дифтонги. И в суете иногда не замечаем удивительных вещей, которые касаются нашего любимого английского языка.

Интересные факты об английском языке

• Английский язык считают своим родным языком почти 400 миллионов человек, а в качестве второго языка им владеют более 1 миллиарда человека. Тем не менее, английский язык занимает только третье место в мире по распространенности после китайского и испанского языков.
• Старейшим словам из английского языка почти 14 000 лет и они происходят из ностратических языков индоевропейской семьи. К таким словам относятся слова apple (apal), bad (bad), gold (gold).
• Словарный состав английского языка является самым большим в мире и насчитывает около 800000 слов. При этом словарный запас большинства носителей английского языка составляет 12000 – 20000 слов, а для того, чтобы объясняться на английском языке, достаточно выучить 1500 – 2000 слов.

WRITING A LETTER

WRITING A LETTER

     1.      The parts of a letter

     Every well-constructed letter is made up of six essential parts. All letters –

friendly, social and business-conform to this basic outline.

     1)      The heading

     2)      The salutation

     3)      The body of the letter

     4)      The complimentary close

     5)      The signature

     6)      The superscription (envelope address)

Business English/Topics/American Business Culture

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

When in Rome, do as American tourists do everywhere – American proverb
Sometimes etiquette is easily explained to the non-native in a clear set of rules that any decent member of the culture follows. For example, in Japan it is considered impolite to show the soles of one’s shoes toward another person. However, sometimes the rules are not clear, and the polite person has to improvise to figure out the most polite thing to do. An example of this might be when the elder President Bush ducked below the table before vomiting at a state dinner. No book about culture or etiquette would have prepared him for that one, although now all American presidents place a strategically sited bowl beneath their chair at official events.
That said, the following is a simple explanation of the basic points of American Business Etiquette. This is a tool aimed at helping you do as Americans do when working with them on their own soil, in a secret detention camp, over the telephone or even by email.

Listening Comprehension Test for 11th Form Students

                                       ( from “Muddy Waters” by Tim Cahill)

Sharecropper – спільник, пайовик

            It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That is pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well. I remember hearing Muddy Waters play, but in the mid –‘60s,  during a blues revival. I was a college student and unaware of the fact that the blues were being revived or that they needed to be. The music and the lyrics moved me. They still do.

            Muddy Waters grew up on the Stovall Plantation, not far from Clarksdale, Mississippi. The house where he lived is gone now, rebuilt in the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. The idea was to preserve the structure, a humble rough-cut cedar building of the type that housed sharecroppers. There was only a depression in the grass where Muddy’s childhood home had been. A plaque nearby identified the site and included a quote from Eric Clapton : “Muddy Waters’ music changed my life, and whether you know it or not, and like it or not, it probably changed yours too”.

            These words ring true. I could see it all over the Mississippi Delta region, where the music we call the blues was born. The blues wandered off down south, where it influenced the sound of the jazz that was springing up in different forms in New Orleans. But most of the blues travelled with itinerant blues men, and it moved north. Memphis, the capital of the mid-South, only a few hundred miles north of the Delta, was a natural destination for a musically talented and ambitious man.

            But the blues weren’t done travelling. Chicago was a destination for Delta blacks, many of whom were out at work due to new mechanized cotton sowing and picking machines. Chicago was seen as a sort of Utopia. There were jobs for the taking, and there was no lingering heritage of slavery.

            Afro-Americans in the Delta had seen Chicago through rose-colored glasses for many decades. In the mid-1930s, “Sweet Home Chicago” was a famous song. Chicago hired men to work in steel mills and foundries and in the stockyards and meat-packing houses. The black-owned and operated newspaper The Chicago Defender encouraged migration to Chicago. It told people that there were more jobs than men in the big city up north. It was true. There is a statue of a weary black traveler with a broken suitcase near the old station, at Martin Luther King and 28^th Street, on the South Side of Chicago. There is no plaque, and I assume the monument is meant to immortalize the “Great Migration North”.

            When Muddy Waters took the Illinois Central to Chicago in 1943, he asked a few questions at Union Station, found a relative’s apartment without any trouble, and got a job at a container factory that day, a Saturday. Muddy, who’d quit a 22.5-cent-per-hour job driving a tractor at the Stovall Plantation in the Delta, had been told by Chicago friends that he’d never make it with his guitar in the big city. Muddy was told, “They don’t listen to that kind of old blues you’re doing now, nobody listens to that, not in Chicago”.

            But Muddy pressed on, playing in little clubs for $5 a night. By the next year, 1944, he had enough money to buy his first electric guitar. The idea was to cut through the sound of the noisy South Side clubs, where most blacks had settled. But the amplification of the slide guitar Muddy played, of the harmonica played by his longtime collaborator, they sounded like voices. And the voices rocked. Did half the rock artists to follow take ideas from Muddy Waters and his band? They surely did. Muddy himself said, “the blues had a baby, and they called it rock ’n’ roll”.   

In 1952 Muddy wrote the song “Rollin’ Stone”. It was a nation-wide success, and the song echoes down through rock ‘n’ roll history. Bob Dylan wrote a tribute song by the same name, an English band decided to call themselves the Rolling Stones, and the magazine that first embraced music as a serious cultural phenomenon was itself called Rolling Stone.

            And this is where I came in, a white college student driving down from the University of Wisconsin to hear Muddy Waters and the great musicians of that time. And they changed my life.

 The blues wrapped me in an aural web, and I was never the same. Indeed, I ended up working for that music magazine, Rolling Stone, which was named after a Muddy Waters song. In fact, I still work there and have, on and off, for over 30 years. Whether he knew it or not – and he surely did not – Muddy Waters started changing my life in 1963, and I have a feeling he still isn’t done with me.

Listening Comprehension Test for 10th Form Students

Pre-listening Activity: Make sure you know the following words

adjacent –суміжний, прилеглий, сусідній

Looking for a Sign (from The Economist, Nov. 2005)

            The birth of a new language is such a rare event that scientists who want to watch it happen generally have to make due with computer simulations. Bruno Galantucci, a cognitive scientist at Yale University in America, has developed a human alternative, based on the necessity is the mother of invention. He asks pair of strangers to play a computer game in which they have to find one another in a virtual bungalow. This requires them to communicate but the    only way they can do so is by inventing a language. The game is revealing some of the secrets of successful communication

The two players cannot see or hear each other, but they are seated at connected computers. In the simplest version of the game, each player is located. in one of four rooms and the players must find each other in one move each. These rooms are arranged in a square, and each pair of adjacent rooms is connected by a doorway. On the floor of each room is an icon – a circle, a hexagon, a flower – and, prior to the start of the game, the players have a short time to explore their surroundings. (Sometimes, a player with good spatial awareness can move quickly through all four rooms and understand the layout but others do not grasp it at this stage.)

The players know there is another player in another one of the rooms, and that they must both end up in the same room, but they can only ever see the room they are in. To help them guide each other to a rendezvous, they have a device on which they can draw or write symbols that appear on the other’s screen.  But a device works like a roll of paper that constantly scrolls downward, preventing them from writing letters, numbers or any other commonly recognizable symbols.

The first thing Dr. Galantucci discovered was how quickly reliable symbolic systems emerged. Nine out of ten pairs solved the game in three hours, having agreed on a set of three or four symbols.

The languages were also very different. Dr.Galantucci had expected that the pairs would build their language on elements of the icons that that appear on the floors of the rooms. A few did so, but they used different features of the icons – the numbers of vertices, say, or some linear abstraction of its shape. Others adopted a numbering system for the rooms – such as one slanting line for the first room and two for the second, moving clockwise or anticlockwise through the four rooms.

Having observed winning pairs at play, Dr. Galantucci says that communication is established as soon as one player decides to copy the symbols proposed by his co-player, rather than impose his own. At that point the pair’s chances of finding each other jump. As soon as there is imitation, he says, there is a common currency.

One strength of Dr. Galantucci’s experiment that does not exist in the real world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards. What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player – as long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.

Listening Comprehension Test for 9th Form Students

Pre-listening Activity: Make sure you know the following words

      hammock   -       гамак, підвісне ліжко

Love Letters Marketing

            One day last summer, I was lying in my hammock, drinking a beer and relaxing. I was starting to nod off, when I heard a quiet “ahem”.

            I opened my eyes and sported my young neighbor, Jeremy, who had just started the 6^th grade a couple weeks earlier.

            : Hey, Mr. Deckers”, he said, “Taking a nap, huh?”

            I congratulated the lad on his keen powers of observation, although I wished he had a better sense of timing.

            “What services may I bestow upon you, young Jeremy?” I inquired.

            “Huh?”

            “What do you want?”

            “I need some advice. Mrs.Deckers said you were pathetic with girls when

 you were my age”.

            “Oh she did, did she?”

            “Yeah. She said you were pretty hopeless until you met her. I figured that if you were as dorky as she said, but you still got married, you must have done something right. So I thought you were probably the best person to help me?.

            I could not fault the little blighter for his logic, but felt I should have a word with Mrs.Deckers later.

            “So what do you need?”

            “I need some help with a love letter. I am trying to get Susie Capstone to like me”. He held out a neatly folded piece of paper. I looked it over and immediately identified his problem.

It looked like what I would have written when I was his age: “Dear Susie, I like you. Do you like me? Sincerely,  Jeremy”.

            I turned it over. “Where is the rest of it?”

            “That is it. It is short and to the point”.

            “It needs serious help. It needs the delicate touch of a marketer”.

            I grabbed a pen from my pen case (we writers are always prepared) – and started scribbling notes on his paper.

            “First you need a U.S.P.”.

            “What is that?”

            “Universal Selling Propositions. It is what sets you apart from your competitors”.

            “My what?”

            “Your competitors. Let me ask you this, is Susie pretty?”

            “Yeah, I guess”.

            “Do other boys like her too?”

            “Yeah”.

            “yes, lad, say yes. Speak clearly. Now, these other boys are your competitors. Your U.S.P.  tells Susie why she should pick you over them”. I scribbled a few more notes.

            “Now what about an Attention Getter and Benefit Statement?”

            Jeremy’s glazed look told me he had no clue what this was.

            “What is one positive thing that Susie would get by choosing you?”

            “I have my own bike. It is a ten speed”.

            “Good, but that is a feature. A benefit is what she gets. So how does your bike help her?”

            “I could give her a ride somewhere”.

            “Excellent”. I scribbled a few more notes. “Now we need a call to action, something for her to do. Research shows that giving a respondent a call to action increases your response rate”.

            Jeremy could only nod silently. I wrote down one last thing:

            “What do you think of this?”

            “Dearest Susie, You have captivated my heart with your eyes that sparkle like dew on a red rose in the early dawn. Come be my love and we can fly anywhere your heart desires. If you will be mine, please respond with a resounding yes, and pass this note back to Gretchen. I yearn for you, Jeremy”.

            He looked at me suspiciously. “Are you sure about this?”

            “Absolutely”.

            “Is this how you got Mrs.Deckers?”

            “No, that is a whole different story. Now rewrite this in your own handwriting and give it to Susie”.

            Jeremy still looked unsure, so I started to launch into a lecture about the importance of word of mouth marketing when he said he heard his mother calling and ran off.

            A few days later, Jeremy interrupted another nap.

            “So what was the final return?” I asked. “Did it work?”

            “Well, yes and no. No, Susie is already going with Tyler Marlowe and he nearly beat me up”.

            I started to offer my condolences, but he held up his hand.

            “But”, he continued, “she showed it to her friends, and now three girls like me”.

            “Wow, Referral Marketing. That is really great. I’ll bet you are pretty excited about that, huh?”

            Jeremy whipped out a pair of sunglasses and struck them on his face. “You bet. Now I want to create a few different versions of the letter so I can start testing them on different markets. I figure I can improve my customer retention rate by 20% if I pump up the copy and leverage my brand buzz in other schools. Do you know any good freelance copywriters?”

            I think I have created a monster.

Listening Comprehension Test for 8th Form Students

Great- Granddad’s Last Battle by Robert Froman

            I will never forget the Saturday I took my great-grandfather to his first movie. I was nine. Granddad was over 90 years old.

            The movie was a Wild West show. And that Saturday afternoon in 1920 turned out to be

a wild one too!

            We were a little late when we got to the movie. The lights were already turned low. The girl at the piano had started to play. In those days, the movies had no sound. The only sounds that went with them came from a piano. I helped Granddad find a seat in the first row. He sat back just as Hoot Gibson came riding across the screen on his horse. I looked at Granddad. His eyes were fixed on the screen and his lips were moving. I saw that he was riding right along with Hoot Gibson!

            Hoot was running away from outlaws. Faster and faster the horses ran. The girl at the piano played louder and louder.  Suddenly Granddad jumped to his feet and yelled at Hoot. “Look out!” he cried. “Run for it, Hoot! They are getting closer!”

            The girl at the piano turned around. Right behind her she saw a tall old man with arms stretched wide. It was my granddad. She thought he had gone crazy. With a scream she climbed to the top of the piano. Then she jumped through the movie screen, making a big hole in it. She ran out the back door of the movie, yelling.

            There were about 40 people at the movie that afternoon. Granddad was the only one there over 12 years old. All the excitement made us boys feel we should do something. But what? Hoot showed us! He was shot from his house right into the hole in the screen!

            A friend of mine named Sammy climbed up to see what had become of Hoot. Three or four others followed Sammy. Soon about 12 yelling boys were crowded around the screen. What noise! The ticket-taker came running. “Stop the show!” he yelled. “Turn on the lights!” But no one seemed to hear him. At that moment, Sammy shot his cap gun. Someone saw the smoke from the cap gun and screamed “Fire!”

            Granddad was still standing. He called out, “Get the firemen! Where is the fire?”

Just then several men came in through the back door. The girl who played the piano had told them about the crazy man. They were coming to get Granddad!

            Before they got to him, a fireman came in the front door. He was carrying a hose. “Water!” he shouted to the firemen behind him. Then he turned his hose on the screen full force. The hole in the screen became larger and larger. Now we could see only the top of Hoot’s head and his horse’s tail.

            “I’m getting out of here!” Granddad said to me. “I’ve been in many a battle, but this is the worst of all.” We pushed past the firemen and got to the street at last. By this time there was a big crowd of people. “What’s happened? Where’s the fire?” everyone wanted to know.

            But we did not wait to talk. Granddad took me to his little house and gave me some ice-cream. “I am sorry you didn’t get to see the whole show, Granddad,” I said. “Will you go with me next Saturday?” Granddad shook his head. “No, Robert,” he said. “I don’t like movies. They are too noisy. My first movie will be my last!”