Collocations with the word conversation

Hi everyone!

I have been following this EFL (English as a Foreign Language) blog recently and I'd like to share with you a very good lesson the teacher has posted this week.

Her name is Shanti Cumaraswamy. She was born in England but grew up in Kuala Lumpur. Her posts are incredible and of very good quality. So, it is also further reference for your studies.

This week she started a series on collocations. I usually define collocations as very good combinations of words. Good combinations are words that often come together. In Portuguese we can give a few examples like: colocar a mesa, passar um fax, mascar chiclete, chupar manga, tomate cereja, leite azedo. Collocations are usually combinations of verbs and nouns; or adjectives and nouns.

Teacher Santi writes a nice text about collocations with a valid dictionary definition. After that she shows tons of great examples.

So, without further ado, let's move to the link below and check out what she has in stock for us:

English With a Twist - Collocations

How did you like it?

Let's choose a few examples to practice ourselves?

Vocabulary for the elections part II

Hello guys... After I wrote the post about the elections and shared it with some of my students new words came up, so here we go for another edition of elections 2014:

During the months that lead up to the elections we are quite forced to listen to and watch political propaganda on the radio and TV... : ( not so pleasant...

Now, suppose you're not very happy with your candidates and you wish to protest while you're voting, so you may annul or spoil your vote (although some people might argue that spoiling your vote is a prejudiced term... since what you are doing is an act of protest... what do you think?). That means you are not voting for any valid candidate.

And how about those who also wish to protest by simply not writing anything on the ballot? That is a bit different, and in English we express it by saying to cast a blank vote. In Brazil, we use machines, not paper ballots anymore. So when we go to our polling booth, there is a special key for those who wish to cast a blank vote. Have you ever done that? What reasons led you to it? Do you regret it? Are you planning to do it this year?

And when you are away from your town? What can you do? You may cast an absentee vote!

But this year, for the first time we will be able to vote by post! Thanks to advances in technology if you are not near your polling station you'll be able to go to another polling station available in the city where you are and vote by post... Nice, isn't? I've often wondered why this was not yet possible, haven't you?

Well, I'd also like to say which political offices we are going to vote for in this edition of the elections:

• president
• governor
• senator
• federal deputy
• state deputy

And last but not least, at least for this edition of the elections posts, we have a difference in pronunciation guys:

politics x politician

got it?

Can we try one more time?

Thanks for the attention and see you soon!!!