John Gordon’s English Weblog

Below is a recording of me reading a piece of news from WikiNews. The original article is here.

Let me know what you think of this. You can use it to practice your listening or imitation.

hurricane.mp3

Ray posted a great link on our forums to this site, which is a great resource for learning how to describe graphs.

Ever wonder what the difference is between a “marked fall” and a “moderate fall” on a graph? This site provides pictures and examples to make help you understand. Just click on the links to the right.

image from popinfo.org

Thanks to Ray’s hard work, we now have innovations band samples up here. Click on the 耳机 to listen to a sample from each letter. We’d still prefer that you come in for a free placement test, but these samples can give you something to compare yourself to.

Just a reminder that a new round of our 创新口语 classes start this weekend. They meet each Saturday and Sunday for four hours each day for five weeks. Small classes with a foreign teacher and lots of chances to practice your speaking in a systematic way. For more information, click here.

Harvey (刘洪波), Kajia (徐卡嘉), Zhang Hong (张宏) and I filmed a show called 成长 for Liaoning TV a while back, and it’s apparently going to air tomorrow (see the link). The topic was life while studying abroad.

爱毓毛 posted a link to this site on our forums. It’s a great site with all sorts of interesting information about American culture. I haven’t had time to look at all of it yet, but most of it looks quite accurate.

Thanks, 爱毓毛!

It’s finally out! My handbook on practicing spoken English arrived today. The book describes a simple and effective way to practice your spoken English.

Thanks so much to 胡老师，蔡菁，and 郭霞 for all their help and support. Also thanks to David Hull, Connie Wu, Rob Neal, and Eric Jenican for allowing their articles to be included as practice materials.

(I’ll post a picture of the book once I can find one.)

Update: Thanks to Eric for finding a link to the book. I’ve posted a photo above. Eric also asked if I could provide a more detailed description of the book, which I will do soon.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m hooked on 超级女声. Oh, and I’m definitely a 玉米.

Actually, even the international media has picked up on the phenomenon. Here’s an article from USA Today.

Last Saturday I had the opportunity to be a special guest BTV’s Common Ground (国际双行线) program. Three other guests and I talked about being foreign teachers in China.

The most exciting part of the program was that several of the students from my Culture Class had the chance to attend the filming. Did you guys have a good time? Victor (李鑫) from New Channel was also there. Thanks, Victor!

The show should be broadcast on or around September 10th, which is Teacher’s day in China. I’ll post the exact date and time here when I find out.

This man is walking across the United States in order to lose weight.

Take a look at the sight. Rather than a site devoted to making fun of people for being obese, it tells the story of a man who has decided to take control of his life.

It’s taken me a while to take note of this, but Harvey (刘洪波), Larry(张皓), Victor (李鑫) and I went to Sina.com last week to answer questions about the newly released detailed band descriptors for the IELTS.

You can read the transcript here.

My favorite part was when I was talking about the importance of paraphrase in the interview but couldn’t think of the Chinese word for “paraphrase”!

Update: Here’s a transcript of the interview on our site, with a few more photos.