Food & Eating Habits/Meals - Oral Performances by Students - Speaking - Skills

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Talking about Food & Eating Habits/Meals, by Isabel (Intermedio 2, 2012-13)

Listen to the monolog (transcript after teacher's comment)

This monolog is amazing in its language range. Isabel has intended to show the hypothetical examiner all the kinds of language items she knows about. Notice this. She doesn't get nervous, she takes her time to show a bit of each: from nationalities, and vocabulary on food, dishes and meals, linking devices like "Personally," "In spite of this," "Fortunately,", time expressions, consolidated use of the verb "to be" with adjectives, clauses with "so", "because"..., modals like "can", "should", "had better" (!), and then "every", verbs of likes and dislikes + -ing, adj + "enough", "quite" + adj., present simple + frequency adverbs and time expressions to talk about routines, expressions like ", actually", "go out for a meal", "at all", "every single", "one more thing", "try" + full infinitive, "to be good at" + -ing, "know how to", partitives like "the rest of the weekdays", "all kinds of exotic restaurants"..., comparatives, a superlative with a present perfect, a "going to" future... phrasal verbs, too! like "put on", "eat out", a Saxon Genitive, possessives... (Isabel, you could have added an -ing and an -ed adjective! :D )

Her fluency is really good. And you can feel her English is well consolidated and above the level. She has tried to address many different issues around the topic of "Food," which is also impressive.

About mistakes, I have highlighted them in block letters, but I have to say they're minor. She doesn't make any of the common mistakes at the B1 level, and certainly not below that. Her mispronunciation of a few words does not hamper communication. Her level in this monolog is a B2 and her exam is meant to test a B1, so if she keeps this good work up, she's bound to get a very good mark!

Food

I'm going to speak about food. Nowadays lifestyleS ARE changing and people's dietS are getting worse and worse. We don't have the time or talent to cook full meals. Personally, I don't like cooking and I'm not good at cooking, I mean, I don't know how to cook traditional Spanish dishes. So I can JUST cook pasta, salad, rice, pizza /pítsa/, things like that. Anyway, I usually heat up a frozen meal or order A take-away. I know that my diet is not healthy. In spite of this, I'm quite traditional. I mean, I usually have three main meals a day. For breakfast I like orange juice and coffee. And NOTHING ELSE because I can't get up early ENOUGH /ináf/ to (BE ABLE TO) eat! Fortunately, I usually have lunch at THE school twice a week and I try to eat healthy food, like vegetables, fish, meat or fruit. The rest of the weekdays I try to survive /sErvaiv/, and I usually have pre-cooked food or fast food. For dinner, I'm a lucky /láki/ girl because my husband cookS for both. But I'm not sure when he's going to say "That is enough" and I hope (not: it'll be later) THIS DAY WILL NEVER COME! One more thing, every single day I eat chocolate because I love it. I know it's unhealthy but, you know, I think I don't put on weight and it doesn't worry me at all. And about THE weekend, I like eating out. On Saturday I usually go out for a meal with my husband and we love all kindS of exotic restaurantS, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, French, Italian... so we enjoy the VARIETY /varáiti/. On Sundays I always go to my mother'S house to eat home-made food. It's delicious! /delíshs/ because my mother is the best chef that I've ever known. And finally, I reckon that I should improve trying to CUT /kat/ down on the amount /amAunt/ of chocolate I eat. And of course I had better learn to cook!