Week of January 31 – February 3rd

This week I handed back corrections on any CVs I received, printed or e-mailed. I gave some feed-back based on common mistakes I saw on Tuesday. I then reviewed some basic grammar on the past tense, in the simple and continuous form. The problem is there are many irregular verbs which do not follow a specific rule for conjugation in the past. For a more complete list of frequently used irregular verbs, check out this list.

I then assigned each student to write me a story of at least 10 sentences in length. The subject of the story was to be about a time you encountered a problem at work or while traveling. This was to help you prepare for the question in an English interview of, "Tell me about a time you solved a problem at work and how you did it." Also, many of us enjoy telling stories about a time when something went wrong for us, and so it's good practice to tell stories you frequently tell in your native language in English. I gave the rest of the class to work on this.

Today, we read those stories out loud. I finished the class with a a short exercise on the comparative and superlative adjective forms. Some adjectives use the word 'more' in front of them in the comparative, while others use the ending '-er' or '-ier' if the adjective finished with a 'y'. In general, the superlative follows the comparative model, but uses 'most', '-est', and '-iest' instead. I asked each student to pick three examples from each of the following topics- Cities, Music, Books, Films, Food, Sports, etc. Each student was to come up with comparative and superlative sentences talking about each topic.

Example: Music - David Guetta, Johnny Hallyday, and Serge Gainsbourg.

David Guetta is more popular than Johnny Hallyday (comparative), but Serge Gainsbourg is the best French music icon. (superlative)