Flight 001
a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
Welcome to the very first flight of StarlingESL! I hope the material will help you or your students with English language acquisition. The flights will have CEFR B2/C1 material on vocabulary, Use of English (including Advanced Grammar), listening, and speaking. I will also add study advice on how to improve learning. Finally, I will share some ideas on literature to get inspired to grab a book or read a poem and keep up your reading.
The main goal for the upcoming weeks is to keep to my publication schedule. It is busy time in the Netherlands with the national exams taking place, so if I can keep it up this period, I think I’ll manage for the rest of the year.
Don’t forget, all material is free and photocopiable for classroom use. It is available for download for 4 weeks. The material will be re-published annually. If you want to support me, share the word about StarlingESL, inform your (former) students and colleagues. Nothing inspires creators more than their work being appreciated.
You can download the complete Flight 001 here (zip-file in Dropbox):
Study Guide 001
Study Area
The first study guides will follow Marty Lobdell’s lecture “Study Less Study Smart” about studying well and also some other sources on meta-cognition.
Study Area
Where you study matters a lot. A dedicated study area is beneficial for learning. If you don’t have a room of your own, make use of a study lamp so others will know you are studying. Turn off your phone or use app-blockers and be critical about the music you are going to listen, if any.
OWL 001
Getting a wider range of vocabulary is done best by reading, by getting exposed to the language. However, the OWL lists will give you some extra supplemental words. Every week there are five words to study. There is also an Excel-file to upload to apps like Quizlet and StudyGo and study the words there.
The words of this week are: conspicuous, evoke, assert, awe, and conceal.
Use of English
Word Formation 001
Every four weeks there is a word formation assignment. Word formation is an easy way to extent your vocabulary without studying a lot of new words. It is how you turn nouns into adjectives, adjective into verbs, and verb into nouns. Word Formation makes your speaking and writing more versatile.
Word Formation is also part of the Cambridge for Advanced Certificate (CAE), paper 1 part 3.
Listening 001
For Listening I use BBC 5 minutes on. You can do this assignment in two ways. After the warming up, students answer the questions as they are listening. You can have them listen to the recording twice. This would be CEFR B1/B2 level.
The second method is having students take notes while they are listening and after the recording show them the questions. This would be CEFR B2 level. To my Dutch colleagues, this would also practise CITO listening: note-taking.
Speaking
Individual Long/Short Turn 001
This assignment practises Cambridge for Advanced Certificate (CAE) paper 4, part 2. The goal of this assignment is to describe, compare/contrast, and speculate about the the pictures by answering the two questions provided for 1 minute. After the long turn, another student answers the short turn question in 30 seconds.
Literature
This week I am finishing Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu, which is a beautiful book about loss, storytelling, and family bonds. It will definitely become a novel of the week in the future. It has good pacing, yet knows how to tell enough to feel dense and be captivating.
The Novel of the Week for this week will be an ever-green that is still read by many of my students: Lord of the Flies by William Golding. If you haven’t read this modern classic, you should make time to read it. It tells about the darkness within, destroying once noble ideas about society. And although criticized by Rutger Bregman in Humankind for its flawed premise, the book is insightful about how fear becomes our worst enemy.
This week Ben from Ben Reads Good has published his wonderful “Book News” on YouTube, a summary on anything connected to books, their authors, their prizes, and their publications. If haven’t got enough time to keep up with what’s going on in the world of English fiction, watch Ben.
Novel of the Week
Stranded on an uninhabited island, a group of boys grapples with survival and the unravelling of their civilized society. Their struggle for power and the erosion of morality exposes the primal instincts that lie within, unveiling a haunting exploration of human nature’s inherent darkness.
Author: William Golding
Year of publication: 1954
Pages (approximation): 208
CEFR: B2/C1
Plot Complexity: moderate
Language Complexity: moderate
Ideas Complexity: high
Lord of the Flies features a moderately complex plot with multiple story lines and a moderate number of characters. The language used in the novel is moderately complex, going beyond the basics and incorporating a range of vocabulary and sentence structures. The ideas explored in the novel delve deeper into certain themes and concepts, requiring some contemplation from readers but remaining relatively accessible to most.
You can find more novel ideas at www.rookreading.com.
Poem of the Week
At times we feel melancholic about the loss of beautiful or memorable events that fill our days. Life is only temporal and everything is bound to disappear. There are also choices to be made and regrets to be had, knowing what has not been picked, the roads that have not been taken, the could have beens.
We can worry about the feeling of loss we will feel tomorrow. We may cry over people we will miss, but man is not meant to live in the future, but in the present. It is in the now we enjoy life, live it to the lees, however dark or sad tomorrow will be.
The Point
Kae WestThe days, the days they break to fade.
What fills them I’ll forget.
Every touch and smell and taste.
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