Language: grammar, vocabulary and the grammar of vocabulary

verb tense in the news; which vs what in questions; invece vs instead; acronyms and abbreviations in IR and how they behave in the grammar

Presented Thursday 18th October 2018

We can only speculate about the future, and English like other languages has developed many ways to express degrees of certainty when talking about it. A range of these expressions are presented here in isolation. This is followed by some reading practice of the language for talking about the future in the form of a news report on world predictions for 2030 made by a World Economic Forum panel of experts from different fields. The 'future in the past' - which is particularly problematic for native Italian speakers and the future perfect ('past in the future') are also presented and practised, and the future continuous is explained.

Some of this language may be useful for your first essay assignment. 

This presents the main forms of compounds and provides some activities for practice also. There is a note about the use of hyphens. 

This is a summary of the presentation of language for reporting speech and ideas, given in class on 13/11/2018. It is meant to give you an overview of the range of expressions and structures you can use to bring other points of view into your essay writing. 

The paragraph-writing task set on 13/11/2018 was to describe the views of the 'for' and the 'against' camp towards the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, in two paragraphs, using the contents of the two in-class listenings about Soros - a 14' audio profile of his life and a 5' video profile of his standing in the global community - which I have posted in the 'listening' section here. (Of course, you can also find plenty of audio, video and verbal material about Soros online for your paragraphs.) 

Class presentation 19/11/2018. In preparation for the second essay assignment: comparison and contrast.

Class presentations and practice 28th+29th November 2018

Practice only

A list of words commonly confused because of formal similarities between them in the two languages.

Notes on some of the common pitfalls. Pdf of class presentation on 13th December with some extra slides added. This issue is best tackled through translation. We all use translation when we are speaking a language that is not our mother tongue, which has its pros and cons.