Weekend with Music: Just Like You (Louis Tomlinson)

Engramme's Weekend with Music #16: Just Like You (Louis Tomlinson) (Listening A2-B1)

Once again, its Saturday, Song Day on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme. And this weekend, we are introducing you to Louis Tomlinson's hot new single:"Just Like You". We hope you'll enjoy both the song and the lesson.

Song Lyrics

Let's play a little guessing game: below are the song lyrics for "Just Like You". Can you supply the missing words based on the rhyme?

It's the guy from the one band Cigarette in my left hand Whole world in my ______  ______ 25 and it's all planned Night out and it's 10 grand Headlines that I can't ______ But you only get half of the story The cash, and the cars, and the ______ No sleep and we party 'till morning 'Cause nobody cares when you're ______ I'm just like you, Even though my problems look nothing like yours _____ Yeah, I get sad too, And when I'm down I need somebody to talk ____ Yeah, I feel the same as you would do Same stress, same sh*t to go ______ I'm just like you If you only _____ If I had it my way, Pub lunch every ______ Cheap beer and it's okay I wanna lay where she lays I wanna stay in these ______ Gonna smoke and it's okay … Every heartbreak’s the same Every tear leaves a stain Can't I just be ___  _____? …

Watch, Listen & Enjoy

Now watch the music video: How many of the missing words above did you correctly guess?

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Have a Great Weekend! You can see a list of all our previous lesson posts at this link in case you missed any of them.

Weekend with TV: Fringe (TV Series)

Engramme's Weekend with TV #16: Fringe (Listening A1-B1)

Friday is here again and we are back on Engramme with a new edition of A Scene from a TV Series. And this week's choice is, of course, "Fringe". So sit back, relax, enjoy and learn.

Watch, Listen & Enjoy

Fringe is the story of Olivia Dunham, an FBI agent, who has to work with a brilliant (but mad) scientist, Dr. Walter Bishop, his son Peter, and an FBI junior agent, Astrid, in order to investigate a few unusual crime cases.

Watch the Video: Can you describe what is happening in this scene? What is unusual about Olivia's experience?

Let's Learn

The activity below aims to give elementary/pre-intermediate-level learners practice with (primary and modal) "auxiliary verbs" that are used in the formation of "questions" and "negatives" in English.

Watch & Listen Again: Note down the 'auxiliary verb' that you hear (note the sentence structure in which the verb is used)

(mouse over the colored words to see their meaning)

Olivia: I don't know where I am. Dr. Bishop: Stand by. Anything now? What ____ you see? Olivia: Nothing. Wait. There's a door. Dr. Bishop: Good! Walk through it. Tell me where you end up. Olivia: I'm in a restaurant. Dr. Bishop: _____ it look familiar? Olivia: Sort of. But I _____ know why. This is where we had our first date. And there we are. This is our first date. Dr. Bishop: _____ you see yourself and John? Peter: What ___ going on? Dr. Bishop: She's gone back in. Peter: What?! Dr. Bishop: Olivia went back in the tank. Peter: Why? Dr. Bishop: Son, I need your help. Peter: Walter, you said that this was dangerous! Dr. Bishop: Oh it is. Very. Astrid: She thinks John Scott had information about the man who killed himself. Peter: So what? She went back in the tank to talk to John Scott? Astrid: To see his memories. Olivia: Look at him. He looks so alive. So real. Dr. Bishop: I need you to adjust the drugs. Peter: What ____ you give her this time? Dr. Bishop: Drugs I'd rather be taking myself. Set the I.V. to ten drips per. Peter, please. Olivia: I'm getting up! What ______ I do? Dr. Bishop: Fear not. This is just a memory. You're just visiting. They ______ see you. Olivia: He's alone. John? Dr. Bishop: He ______ hear you or speak with you. You're in a memory. He ______ interact with you. Olivia, I'm going to take you elsewhere. Olivia: I loved you. Tonight. During dinner. I loved you. But you were lying to me about who you were. ____ you ever have any feelings for me at all? Or was it all just...Mark Young killed himself yesterday. He sees me! Dr. Bishop: No, Olivia. He definitely _____  ___ see you.

(turn on the video subtitles to check your answers)

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Wish You a Great Weekend Ahead! If you missed any of this week's lessons (Week #16), click here to access them all.

Review the Vocabulary (underlined/colored) in this post HERE

Download a pdf Copy of this lesson at this link (teachers' version)

English Daily: History of the Spanish Empire

Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #63: History of the Spanish Empire (Listening B2-C1)

Think Before You Listen

Do you know which country is represented in the picture below? What do you know about this country & its history?

On October 19, 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabella I of Castile: a marriage that paved the way for the unification of Aragon and Castile into a single country, Spain¹.

Watch and Listen

Watch the Video: How did Spain succeed in establishing one of the largest empires in the world?

Let's Practice

Some structures in language keep recurring time and again, making many language researchers, such as Michael Lewis, believe that language is no more than recurring patterns of lexical chunks. The activity below is meant to give more advanced learners of English a view into a few of these chunks of language.

Watch & Listen Again: A few commonly used patterns of words in English historical texts have been highlighted in the following transcript. Listen & find the missing word in each group:

(mouse over the colored words to see their meaning)

With the help of Christopher Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic in 1492, Spain went on to establish one of the largest empires the world ____  ____ seen. Hi! I'm Rebecca Braden and welcome to watchmojo.com. And today we'll be _______ the rise, dominance, and fall of this one-time world empire. After the Union of Castile and Aragon effectively created Spain, the ________ new kingdom quickly began to commission overseas explorations. Under the Spanish flag, it was Christopher Columbus who accidentally discovered the Americas while attempting to ______ Asia via the Atlantic. This began Spain's colonization of the Americas, with countries like Portugal, England, France and others not ____  ______. In 1510, Spain was finally successful in creating the first permanent European settlement in what is now Colombia. The Year 1513 saw Spain's Vasco Núñez de Balboa become the first European to _____ an expedition to the Pacific Ocean when he crossed present-day Panama. Groups of warrior explorers called conquistadors began colonizing the Caribbean islands and areas of South America. Despite resistance by the indigenous population, the conquistadors used rival native tribes against each other in order to _____ an advantage. Spain's expansion did not stop at the Americas. After finding the westward route to the Far East that Columbus had been searching for years earlier, Spain established colonies in Guam, the Philippines, and other nearby islands. At the ______ of the Spanish Empire in the 17th century, the kingdom controlled much of the Americas, territories in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and large portions of Europe. In _____, they controlled approximately 13% of the world's total land area. Continuing war with various countries throughout Europe meant trouble for Spain's economy. By the end of the 17th century, France had emerged as Europe's superpower marking the beginning of the _____ for Spain's Empire. In the 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence and the Spanish-American war saw Spain lose all of its territories throughout the Americas and Asia. Even after its fall as a dominant world power, Spain's ______ remains evident. The Spanish dollar was the world's first global currency because of the country's role in the foundations of global trade. This trade would see the ________ of things like horses, apples and even wheat to the new world from Europe. The Spanish language and Roman Catholic faith were also spread ________ the world, both still dominant in most of its former colonies even centuries later.

(turn on the video subtitles to compare your answers)

Over to You

What is the history of your country like? Was it a big empire sometime in its history? How did it evolve into what it is today? (let us know in the comments below)

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Well Done! You've succeeded in completing yet another lesson in our series of English Daily lessons. Hit the buttons below to share this content with your friends and fellow learners.

Practice the (Underlined/Colored) Vocabulary from this post at this link

Teachers can Download a Copy (pdf) of this lesson HERE

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1 Taken from www.onthisday.com^↩

English Daily: How to Enjoy Learning

Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #62: How to Make Learning Fun (Listening B1-C1)

Think Before You Listen

What is "learning"? Do you enjoy learning? How can learning be made fun?

Watch and Listen

Watch the Video: What did Mike Boyd (the presenter) try to learn? Does he think it was a complete waste of time? Why (not)? (Type your answers in the comments below and get feedback)

Let's Practice

This video presents one of the best examples of a Scottish accent of English. It is true that the accent may not make it easy for the learner to understand the English being spoken; nevertheless, it is considered one of the major accents of English. This lesson aims to give you a chance to practice listening to this accent.

Listen Again: There are 13 mistakes in the video transcript below. Can you find and correct them?

This is my summer 2006 copy of guitarist magazine. I bought this when I was 16 years old probably because of the clickbait tie-all “world's greatest guitarist”. The guy featured on the front cover of this magazine is called Derek Trucks. One in-terrace thing about Derek is that he doesn't play guitar using his fingers. He plays guitar using a piece of glass known as a slide. Upon reading this article, I went out and bought Derek's CD’s song lines, and I remember listening to it for the farce time. It was like nothing I've ever heard before. I remember thinking to myself, “I'm gonna learn how to do that”. I got myself a slide and started practicing. Slide guitar is hard: for one, there are no discrete distinct notes anymore. It's just a bake sliding scale of infinite possibility, which means it's really easy to go out of tube. I remember spending hours at just the simple thing. It was like learning guitar all over again. I would spend huge amounts of time just trying to play a single clean note. After days of painstaking practice, I began to get somewhere with it and I got really enter this new style of playing guitar. I went down the rabbit hole. I got so into this I ended up modifying my electric guitar to suit slide better. These pickups here give a really fast tone and all the electronics in here are suited to slide, and to put all this in, I had to learn how to solder. And then after that, I ended up saving up and buying this fender amp which has valves in it which gives me an even nicer, warmer toe with a slide. I got really into this for, like, a year, just listening to, playing, writing, and recording slide guitar music. And I look back at that period of my life, that period of just absorbing and learning information, with such fondness and sentiment and nostalgia. But why? Why do this? Why invest such a huge amount of time learning to play slide? It's not like I found a band where I play slide guitar, and 99% of the time now I'm just playing regular old fingertip tile guitar. It's not really the outcome of your learning that is the prize; it's the process itself that is the most rewarding. It might seem like blood, swear, and tears at the time; but looking back, it's the process of learning that I reminisce about as opposed to the outcome of my practice. It's fun to go down the rabbit hole of learning, to research techniques and treat yourself to new equipment, and be a beggar all over again. I guess the point of this video is that when learning something, you went embarking on a new challenge to understand that those crappy moments of struggle and album grease, those are the ones that you will reminisce about later; those are the ones that you will cherish, and knowing that makes it easier to put in the hours. So, enjoy the grind!

(compare your answers with the ones in the first comment below)

Over to You

Have you ever had a similar experience: making a lot of effort to learn something, "a lot of blood, sweat, and tears" (as the presenter mentioned)? What was it and why was it so hard? Did you later reminisce about the process of learning itself and realize how rewarding/fun it was?

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Here You Are at the end of another lesson on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme.

Review the Vocabulary from this post HERE

Teachers can download a Print-Friendly Version (pdf) of this lesson at this link

English Daily: Poverty

Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #61: Poverty (Listening B1-C1)

October 17 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Think Before You Listen

1. How do you define "poverty"? Does poverty mean "a lack of money"? What problems do poor people have?

2. Do you think it is possible to eradicate poverty in the world? If yes, how? If no, then why not?

3. Which of the following, in your opinion, are the main causes of poverty:

• inadequate food
• limited access to education
• disability
• living in a war zone
• spatial inequality
• poor infrastructure and/or investment opportunities
• vulnerability to disease
• low income/wages

(move your mouse over the words above to see their meaning)

Watch and Listen

Watch the first 1-minute of the video: How is this question answered in the video: "People living in poverty have described poverty as..."?

Let's Practice

Watch the video from 00:58 to 2:15: Find the words in the listening passage that fit in the blanks below:

(mouse over the colored words to see their meaning)

If you're a girl, have a disability, or live in a war zone, you're more ______ to live in poverty. There are a range of economic, social, technological, political, and environmental causes for poverty and spatial inequality. Some of Australia's neighbors live in nations that are stuck in a ______ of poor infrastructure, low investment, and low trade. Some are particularly vulnerable to climate change and geographic isolation, especially in ______ areas. If countries are poor, that means governments struggle to provide _______  ________ or opportunities for all of their people. Good schools, hospitals, safe water and roads take a lot of money to build and ________. If communities are poor, isolated, or vulnerable to environmental disasters, it's difficult for families to thrive, it's hard to find employment, ______ health services, and build safe homes and a better future for children. If parents are poor, they can't ______ to send their children to school, or get them immunized, or provide them with enough food to eat. When generation after generation _______ from sickness, lack of education, and opportunities to earn a fair wage, the cycle of poverty threatens to ______ itself again and again and again.

(turn on the video subtitles to check your answers)

Over to You

Watch the last part of the video (2:15 to the end): Do you agree that poverty has halved in the last 20 years? What are the signs that this has happened? (type your answers in the comments' section below and receive feedback from us)

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Congratulations! You have covered a very common and important topic of discussion in many ESL textbooks and examinations. The vocabulary you learned will also help you express yourself better when it comes to poverty, lifestyle, and essential needs. Good luck!

Would you like to Review the Vocabulary from this lesson? Please click here.

Would you like to use this content in your classes as a teacher? Download a Print-Friendly Copy at this link.

English Daily: The Vatican Pope

Engramme: Your Daily English Programme #60: The Vatican Pope (Listening B2-C1)

Welcome to Week #16 lessons on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme. Today, we'll be looking at how a new pope is chosen to lead the Catholic Church. Interesting topic? Let's find out!

Think Before You Listen

What do you see in these pictures? What is special about the person and the place?

The pope is the leader of the worldwide Catholic Church. To this day, 266 cardinals have been appointed 'pope' in the Catholic Church. The current pope is Pope Francis who was chosen in 2013, after the unexpected resignation of his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. Before that, it was Pope Saint John Paul II who was elected on October 16, 1978.

Watch and Listen

Watch the Video: What color smoke signifies that a new pope has been chosen?

Let's Practice

It may happen in your first language too: you may be listening to the news and there might be something, the words, environmental noise, or some other factor preventing you from understanding every single word. But, you still manage to get "the message". How? By focusing on the words that you hear, the key words, and/or other audiovisual clues that help you recognize the subject.

These conditions may also occur when you are listening in a foreign language: you may not know all the words, e.g. in a news broadcast (like the one above), the topic may be rather unfamiliar, or you might be under exam conditions¹ where you are not allowed to use a dictionary or other resources to help you with unknown words and/or difficult structures. But still, you need to understand as much as you can to be able to answer the questions. This lesson is designed so as to help you practice this skill in English.

Watch & Listen Again: Try and find the answers to the following general comprehension questions(you may need to listen more than once):

(compare your answers to the ones in the first comment)

Over to You

What is the journey to becoming a pope? Do you think anyone can become a pope? Why (not)?

This video from CGP Grey helps you answer the above questions.

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Well Done! You've successfully completed another lesson on Engramme: Your Daily English Programme. If you liked this lesson, hit the buttons below to share it with your friends and fellow English learners.

Review the Vocabulary underlined in this post at this link.

Teachers can Download a pdf Copy of this lesson for classroom use at this link.

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1 Listening comprehension questions are a regular part of many standardized exams, including the TOEFL test.^↩