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About the Class
www.jones-english.com
Headline English is a conversation course for English language students who want to discuss the news. In addition to discussion and debate, participants learn new vocabulary and grammar combined with listening and reading exercises. A one-hour conversation is divided into approximately twelve sections, each one concentrating on a specific language skill. From Barack Obama to Winnie the Pooh, aromatherapy to Cuban homes and Michael Jackson, students can enjoy speaking in English about a different topic every day.
Prerequisites: The ability to speak English at intermediate level (or higher)
Target audience: Intermediate students of English who wish to improve their English communication skills in a structured environment.
Why attend?
- 1. Increase Range: It is important to learn to speak beyond your so-called ''comfort zone''. If real learning is to take place, participants need to express ideas they would not normally talk about. Headline English develops range while also preparing participants for the vocabulary in the article.
2. Learn Real English: Newspaper articles are full of collocates. A collocate is a term used to describe words that often go together (e.g. airport lounge, taxi driver, fire engine). When learning to speak a language, it is important to learn collocates. Headline English makes students use collocates in a variety of contexts.
3. Develop Confidence: In the discussion section, participants are put under pressure to express a point of view. Speaking under pressure is an excellent exercise because this is where most mistakes appear, which can then be corrected.
- 4. Stimulate your Subconscious: A key concept of the Stephen Jones approach in Headline English is meta-learning, or acquiring language indirectly through various stimuli: text, pictures, listening etc. The Headline English course is rich in meta-learning techniques so that participants learn English effortlessly.
- 5. Boost Vocabulary: Vocabulary learning and memory recall are most effective when associations are made. The more associations a learner makes with a word, the more likely he/she is likely to remember that word (or related words). The brainstorm section of the Headline English course aims to boost associative learning and recall, as does the entire lesson.
- 6. Learn Faster: before reading the article, participants predict its contents. This raises curiosity, resulting in a higher level of concentration during reading, and therefore more effective and faster learning.
- 7. Acquire Linguistic Flexibility: keywords from the text are given synonyms which participants are required to pair together. The synonyms are slightly ''off-centre'', which forces students to stretch their linguistic flexibility.
- 8. Develop Intuition: When learning a foreign language, there is a need to develop an intuitive sense for what sounds right and what sounds wrong. Headline English has a section specifically aimed at developing linguistic intuition.
- 9. Improve Reading/Video Comprehension: By the time participants come to the reading section of the lesson, they have already done an enormous amount of work on the article. They have studied its vocabulary, discussed its various themes, made associations, given their opinions, and gone beyond the scope of the article to discuss related themes. The result is that participants have a keen interest in reading the article, perhaps to find the answers to issues discussed during the meeting, or maybe to confirm their ideas. With such high motivation to find information, most of what they read will not be forgotten (resulting in real learning), and the article itself will seem relat
Language of instruction:
Keywords: reading, listening, english speaking, english, english, language learning - spoken english, english grammar, brainstorming
