Vocabulary to speak about studying abroad (StudyStack)

Gerund or Infinitive? (Online Test Pad)

Diigo My library

Talkgroup » Integration or diversity? (Voxopop)

William Somerset Maugham - The Escape

British political system

Queen Victoria was queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 1832 to 1901 - the second longest reign of any other British monarch in history.

Why did tea become so popular there?

Listen to the episode and fill in the gaps in the sentences below.

1. What could be more ___ , more unremarkable, more British, than a nice cup of tea?
2. In eighteen hundreds Britain was becoming an ___ nation.
3. ___ was used to help change the workers.
4. Of course, these days coffee is an ___ to tea.
5. The workers were required to be as ___ as possible.
6. Tea became Britain's favourite national drink in the ___ period.
7. Wow, that's a ___ number!

Magnificent Scottish Castles with the help of Glogster

A very short story about William Shakespeare with the help of Prezi

Something about accents

English in Scotland

The type of English spoken in Scotland is more difficult to define than elsewhere in the UK. From the time of the Union of Parliaments in 1707, the official written language of Scotland became aligned with that of England. As such, Standard English has been used as the language of religion, education and government and so it became the socially prestigious form adopted by the aspiring middle classes. Unlike in England, however, Standard English continued to be spoken with a variety of local accents.

RP — the regionally non-specific accent of the upper middle classes in England — has a negligible presence in Scotland (unlike Wales, for example, where it retains a certain degree of prestige in some areas). This means that even the most socially prestigious forms of English spoken in Scotland contain elements that are characteristically Scottish. The variety of speech we might recognise as educated Scottish English contains the occasional word — outwith for ‘outside’ — or grammatical structure — I’ve not heard for ‘I haven’t heard’ — that is distinctively Scottish.

Above all, though, Scottish English is recognisable by its pronunciation: speakers do not make the same distinctions in vowel length made by speakers with other English accents and the vast majority of speakers in Scotland are rhotic — that is, they pronounce the <r> sound after a vowel in words like farm, first and better.