When Saturday comes . . .

No escape from your housebound tutor who has been confined to 'barracks' for most of this wonderfully wet weekend.

What have you been up to? 11 of you, yes unbelievably, over 2/3 of the class have NOT replied to my invitation to join the weblog. HELLO? "Houston, we appear to have a problem!" You are missing out a golden opportunity to participate in a great learning experience, what a pity...

Anyway, I have corrected, highlighted mistakes and marked your Task 2 essays. Some of you are on track, a couple of band 6.0 for the full-time students who should be doing even better than that. The rest are between 6.0, 5.0 and 4.0. There is hope, but a lot of hard work lies ahead. We shall have a dictation tomorrow on 12 common spelling mistakes and a big session on what I expect for Task 2 essay writing (by the way, if you had had to write such an essay in your FIRST language would you have struggled as well?).
What else is cooking for tomorrow, I hear you ask?

1. We shall do a session on READING - looking at matching headings to paragraphs and get some more reading tips
2. We can look through that Sydney Opera House reading homework - I'll give you the answers...
3. We can recap on the Writing Task 1 handouts I gave you
4. I'd like to do some SPEAKING work on Section 2 of the IELTS interview [what about Ahmed Ali's super write up (Ibtissam/Jwan please note!!!) of his speaking test from Thursday?]
5. There is the first DEBATE when Mustapha/Jwan/Pathiran will argue with Ahmed/Rasmieh/Aswan on whether we need to have a university degree to get a good job and to perform effectively in one's chosen career. Everyone should try to read that KT article and think about the issues it raises.
6. Also it's time to swap your National Geographic magazines -only after you've told us in the class or on the weblog what you have learned.
7. Also it's time to have a report from one of the 2005 weblog greats, Yasmeen, and her advice as to how to tackle the IELTS - she got band 8.0 in the Academic IELTS in April 2005
8. We shall continue with the next two mock speaking interviews, Rasmieh and Pathiran, while the rest have another LISTENING (don't forget your purple Cambridge Practice Tests Book 1!!!)

See you there in Room 4, stand by for any news of relocating to Room 7, but for the moment assume we'll still be in Room 4.

The 11 silent ones have been warned, so come on, wakey wakey and get your acts together! You have NO excuse, do you?

Blogging out for the evening and will have a quick peek before I hit the pit!

Don't lose heart!

Tony