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The Landlady

The Landlady
About this BritLit kit Billy Weaver, a young man visiting the City of Bath for the first time, is looking for accommodation. He is inexplicably drawn to a house where the landlady seems to be expecting him. The house and the landlady seem friendly and welcoming, and he looks forward to staying there. Signing the guest book, two names disturb him. Where has he heard them before? Why aren't there any other guests? The themes drawn from this story include poisoning, embalming and taxidermy as well as a look at witches. The kit, originally written in 2003, was updated in 2007 and 2013. The materials in this BritLit Kit are available to download in the Attachments box below. You can also listen to the audio included in the attachments below. How to use this BritLit kit The material is divided into three sections: Pre-reading, After reading, and Word Work. Related:  Reading

Teens and reading skills Here are some activities you can use with students before, while and after reading a text. Before reading There are lots of activities you can do before students read a text to help enhance their comprehension, such as ones that activate the students’ schemata or background knowledge, arouse their interest in the topic or prepare them linguistically. 1. Before Ss read a text, choose four topics that relate to the text that would be useful for Ss to think about before reading. Take a large piece of paper and divide it into four triangles by drawing diagonal lines from opposite corners. Four students sit around the piece of paper and are given a time limit e.g. one minute. 2. Draw a horizontal line on the board. The teacher says topics or ideas that relate to the text. 3. Alternatively you could show students a few key words from the text, headings and accompanying visuals and they guess their relevance in the text. 4. 5. A: Scan Reading 1. 2. B: Skim Reading 1. 2. 1. 2. 3. 4. After reading

Evidence Explained | QuickLesson 20: Research Reports for Research Success Elizabeth Shown Mills The research process has three basic steps: preparation, performance, and reporting. If we use database management software or spread sheets, we add a fourth: data entry. In a soundly executed project, a block of research begins when we have defined an objective—not when we have a few spare minutes to spend surfing the web. We have found, in published government documents, a 1769 petition from Anson County, North Carolina—a precursor to the unrest that spawned the Revolutionary War; we wonder whether the signer John Watts is (as some allege) the same John Watts who in 1789 signed the constitution of the new state of Georgia.Or, we have noticed numerous published references to an African-American freed slave of the Early Federal period named Marie Louise Mariotte, about whom the authors seem to know little; we would like to identify her and determine how she navigated her life as a freed woman of color in a slave regime. How do we begin our project? Background data

Fall in Love with This Teacher’s Text-Marking Activity | Scope Ideabook Editor’s Note: Kim O’Bray’s colorful text marking activity is a key part of her close-reading process. Students engage deeply with the text by using colored pencils to mark everything from figurative language and unfamiliar vocabulary to central ideas and text structures. I really like this text-marking approach because it gets everyone on the same page and encourages students to ask questions and make their own connections. What you’ll need: Any Scope nonfiction article. Key skills:finding text evidence, central ideas, text structure, figurative language, vocabulary, synthesizing, summarizing Time:Three, 45-minute class periods Day 1: Preview and summarize Preview the vocabulary that appears in the article by distributing the vocabulary words and definitions handout. Set a purpose for reading. Have students read the text for the first time, either as a class or independently. Have students summarize the text and share it with a partner verbally. Day 2: Text mark and discuss

The non-western books that every student should read | Education The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon I teach it to my first years and return to the book through their degree. It is the perfect introduction to complex ideas: oppressive socio-economic political structures, forms of resistance and defiance, and the point at which violence becomes justifiable. Students always find the book challenging, disturbing and thought provoking. Sunny Singh, lecturer at London Metropolitan University and author of Hotel Arcadia Malgudi Omnibus by R K Narayan Every literature student should have space on her shelf for the complete works of R K Narayan. Monica Ali, author of Brick Lane, which was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize Flowers in the Mirror by Li Ruzhen This Chinese novel from 1827 is a fantasy classic of the Qing Dynasty period, full of sophisticated philosophy, tense quest plot-lines and one of the most wonderful explorations of feminism I have ever read. Sabrina Mahfouz, playwright, poet and screenwriter Samskara by U R Ananthamurthy

6 Excellent Free Sites to Practise Reading Comprehension It’s been too long since I’ve written about improving reading skills. Last time I posted about sites to help you practise reading comprehension was in May last year. Way too long. The truth is that doing reading comprehension activities in class takes time, especially if we are talking about long texts with an amount of difficulty, and very often this is one of the tasks we give students as homework. On the other hand, I am one of those teachers who think reading aloud in class is a good exercise. Reading aloud fluently not only helps to improve the reading ability, but also oral expression.It gives students a chance to focus only on fluency, pronunciation and intonation as they don’t need to worry about grammatical accuracy.It gives teachers a nice opportunity to correct pronunciation mistakes.It helps students enhance comprehension as pauses should be made in the correct places.Reading aloud is especially good for students who don’t feel very confident speaking English in public. 1.

Making reading communicative And these reactions are from my adult students. My young learners' reactions may be even more extreme. "I can read at home, I come to lessons to speak!" Can reading be communicative? Can reading be communicative? Strategies I use for communicative reading One of the things to bear in mind when lesson planning is that classroom reading is not the same as real reading. Pre-reading tasks Pre-reading tasks often aim to raise the readers' knowledge of what they are about to read (their schematic knowledge) as this knowledge will help them to understand the text. Tell your partner what you know about the topic Do a quiz in pairs to find out what you know about the topic Look at some pictures related to the topic Skimming the first paragraph for gist and then predicting. When reading in our L1 we are constantly using our schematic and linguistic knowledge to predict content (both related to the topic and the language itself). Divide the class into student A and student B pairs.

Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming It’s important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members’ interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I’m an author, often an author of fiction. So I’m biased as a writer. And I’m here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. And it’s that change, and that act of reading that I’m here to talk about tonight. I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons – a huge growth industry in America. It’s not one to one: you can’t say that a literate society has no criminality. It’s tosh.

Macmillan Readers Level Test Macmillan Readers Level Test What reading level are you? Use the Macmillan Readers level test to help find your reading level. Choose the right answer to each question and use each image as a clue. Welcome to the Macmillan Readers Level Test. Are you ready to begin? Start Back to Macmillan Readers Back to the eBook store The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce their material: Brand X, Comstock Images, Corbis, Getty Images, Imagesource, Macmillan Publishers, Photodisc, Purestock, Punchstock, Thinkstock, Thinkstock/ Kagnaz / George Tsartsianidis / Ken Tannenbaum How to use newspaper articles in language class How should teachers use 'authentic' texts in class? Author, trainer and teacher Rachael Roberts gives valuable advice on the example of newspapers. She will also be delivering a live-streamed presentation Opens in a new tab or window. from Belfast on writing effective classroom materials, 11 March 2014. Back in 1981, Vivian Cook Opens in a new tab or window. wrote: ‘One of the words that has been creeping into English teaching in the past few years is 'authentic'. It has a kind of magic ring to it: who after all would want to be inauthentic?’ Teachers and students are naturally attracted to authentic texts (by which I mean any text which has not been produced for the purpose of language learning). But, as Cook goes on to say, we also need to consider just how helpful the authentic text we choose actually is for our students. First challenge: Text organisation For example, how clearly is the text organised? Second challenge: Headlines Newspaper headlines can also be hard to decipher.

Project Gutenberg Australia Fiction Archives Our privacy promise The New Yorker's Strongbox is designed to let you communicate with our writers and editors with greater anonymity and security than afforded by conventional e-mail. When you visit or use our public Strongbox server at The New Yorker and our parent company, Condé Nast, will not record your I.P. address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will we embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser. Strongbox servers are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast. Strongbox is designed to be accessed only through a “hidden service” on the Tor anonymity network, which is set up to conceal both your online and physical location from us and to offer full end-to-end encryption for your communications with us. The system is provided on an “as is” basis, with no warranties or representations, and any use of it is at the user's own risk.

Scientists: Earth Endangered by New Strain of Fact-Resistant Humans MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—Scientists have discovered a powerful new strain of fact-resistant humans who are threatening the ability of Earth to sustain life, a sobering new study reports. The research, conducted by the University of Minnesota, identifies a virulent strain of humans who are virtually immune to any form of verifiable knowledge, leaving scientists at a loss as to how to combat them. “These humans appear to have all the faculties necessary to receive and process information,” Davis Logsdon, one of the scientists who contributed to the study, said. More worryingly, Logsdon said, “As facts have multiplied, their defenses against those facts have only grown more powerful.” While scientists have no clear understanding of the mechanisms that prevent the fact-resistant humans from absorbing data, they theorize that the strain may have developed the ability to intercept and discard information en route from the auditory nerve to the brain.

Ten weird and terrifying medical instruments from the past The UK’s largest medical charity, the Wellcome Trust, has made its vast database of images freely available to all. The collection holds photos of hundreds of years worth of medicine, instruments and scientific culture. For me, the progress of science best described by advances in medicine and the instruments used to practice it. Here is a list of a few of my favourites. Nothing quite says medicine like a syringe. And this collection has plenty, from the 17th century brass or 18th century ivory enema syringes, to the 20th century’s glass and stainless steel ones, all clearly made to last much longer than our modern disposable versions. 17th Century French Brass Syringe Science Museum, London 18th Century Sri Lankan Ivory Enema Syringe 19th Century Japanese Self-Administering Enema Syringe With A Piston And Reservoir Then there are the surgical instruments, like the 16th century tools below. Wellcome Library Wellcome Library London Wellcome Library, London Model eye by W. and S.

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