Diego's Quintos

  CONTROLLED SPEAKING   Only two ways of improving your pronunciation and accuracy in a short period of time:                                             1) phonetics                                                                                                           OR                                            2) What we have here. You choose  Forget about living in an English speaking country: it takes longer, if you are lucky to pick up the accent. This is absolutely necessary because most likely you must improve pronunciation and accuracy, or you wouldn't be taking this course. Material : intermediate graded reader with CD (see there are not many dialogues).One speaker: ideal The level of the graded depends on your level: it should always be a little below your level so that you needn't look up words and can read fluently Procedure : THE FIRST TIME a)   Choose one paragraph or two (some 10 to 15 lines). b) Don ' t re

POSITION PREPOSITIONS English prepositions are famous for being difficult. In fact, they are, but prepositions are difficult in all languages. The reason is that they are linking words and they have several meanings. Their use, in any case, is not completely capricious, and if it is, we’ll find the same in other languages. Students of English, for example, complain about “ somebody being on the phone ”, but we must remember that in Spanish “ alguien está al teléphono ” must sound terrible to an English speaker. In this particular case, English favours a preposition that takes into account position on a surface, while Spanish favours one that points at the location of something or somebody (meaning 7 in in the RAE dictionary –Real Academia Española de la Lengua). So far, there is no problem. The problem comes when the prepositions have other meanings. For instance, in Spanish “ a ” is also used to show direction or destination, which implies a verb of movement and