I guess culture shock is part of our everyday lives… glad to be part of this group:)

I have lived in the Philippines for 6 months now, and I constantly get culture shock every day still now lol!

Hi all
I am pleased to be a member of “Cultural Shock”.
Cheers
Ian

Hi Everybody:

My english and spanish 1:m groups will begin next week. Check them here. http://edufire.com/classes

I will also hold a free class on the weekend!

YES! I have definitely experienced making a mistake and saying the wrong thing. BUT, those have been some of the funniest memories. Maybe, I’ll share one of those stories when other people in the group are online. Cheers…And I’m glad this group was created!

Just been reading through this whole thread and found it really interesting, especially Alaia’s point about the shifting stress depending on the part of speech. When teaching pronunciation I think it’s useful to make students aware of these patterns as they can be generalised. In most two syllable noun/verbs pairs the stress shifts from the first syllable in a noun to the second syllable in a verb e.g.

a record to record
an import to import
refuse to refuse

If you come across it a great book on teaching pronuncation is Sound Foundations: Learning and Teaching Pronunciation by Adrian Underhill

Fikry
Sorry if my reply sounded a little strong. However, I think grammar rules can be misleading and do not always relate to what people actually say. This is one of these cases. In the Uk it is normal nowadays to use, ‘they’ to refer to a singular person when the gender of the person is not specified, as in the example above. In speech it is used all the time and sounds completely normal.

As you said, ‘one of….’ and ‘one’ and ‘ones’ are still used as pronouns. this is completely normal and is different to the usage described above.

I’m sorry to disagree but 1b is not correct. I would never ever use this. I’ve never heard anyone in the UK use it and would correct any of my students who said it.

The use of ‘one’ in the UK is seen as rather archaic and is only used by a very small number of people nowadays. Usually older upper class people. Other people only use it for comedy value and do not use it seriously.

In conversation and informal writing ‘they’ is now used in place of ‘one’. I’d be interested to know if this is the same in the US.

In modern English we use ‘they’ to refer to a person whose gender hasn’t been specified. As the question is very general and it isn’t clear whether the friend is male or female we would actually say:

One of my friends didn’t come to the party, did they?

If you say, ‘did he?’ the speakers are talking about a male person only.

in my country we never celebrate halloween but i’d love to celebrated with you guys am sure it’s gonna be awesome party

u need to practice on ur accent alot

Hi, is your english British accented? or……..

Hi

Sandra – I’ll be happy to join the general information class to help give advice about the exams. But, I’m going on holiday for about 2 weeks from 11 October and am really busy getting ready for it at the moment so don’t have much time until after I get back on 25th.

Geology – yet another science!

Hi,

I think it’s a great idea too. I enjoy teaching exam classes and I’ve done lots of classroom teaching for PET, FCE and CAE but haven’t taught them online yet.

Corina