biography british council

• Teaching primary

Working with biographies

The biography section of portfolios is a documentation of the learners' personal language learning history and can include, for example, a short narrative about the summer camp they attended and for which they may include a certificate of attendance in the passport section.

This biography lends itself well to ‘show and tell’ sessions when learners can talk to the class about their own experiences. In this section too, learners may include any plans they have for taking an English exam, visiting an English-speaking country, or having English-speaking visitors at home.

Age:  Older primary

The type of things which learners can include in their biography are:

• Learner checklist
• A narrative about a trip to an English-speaking country
• The day an English-speaking friend came to stay
• Plans for the future
• I start the class by putting some pictures on the board and tell the class I’m going to tell them about my trip to an English-speaking country. The pictures include some famous landmarks, photos of my friends there and a picture of myself on the trip.
• I ask the class to guess which country I visited and then brainstorm any information they know about the city. I put vocabulary on the board which will help in the following task. This activates top-down knowledge, personalizes the task and gives the group time to think about their own experiences.
• We then read the story of my trip to Liverpool together. At this stage I point out that the story is in the past, that it is divided into three parts and that each part is a paragraph.
• There are lots of ways to check comprehension, sometimes I ask questions as we go along, or ask the class to answer questions at the end of the reading task.
• Finally, using my story as a model I ask the group to write about their own trip.

Of course there are many children in the class who won’t have visited an English-speaking country or were too young to remember the trip. I tell them they can write about someone they know who went abroad or about an English-speaking visitor to their home.

One of the objectives of working with portfolios is to raise learners' awareness of the many different ways English can be learnt and practised. It tries to move away from the idea that it is a school subject and that it is useful and necessary outside the classroom.

Finally, it's always a good idea to put work up around the class for the group to read at the end of the activity. It’s a valuable activity for children to share their experiences and find out about what others do. Also, reading about their own classmates’ stories in English is useful for reviewing grammar and vocabulary.

Research and insight

Browse fascinating case studies, research papers, publications and books by researchers and ELT experts from around the world.

See our publications, research and insight

A personal profile

Learn how to write a personal profile for a social app or website.

Do the preparation task first. Then read the text and tips and do the exercises.

Preparation

MultipleSelection_MjI1OTQ=

By day I'm a regular guy and by night a superhero … How tiring is that?!

Just joking! I'm a regular guy all the time, good job, close to my family, just bought my own flat with a cat. Actually, my cat thinks I'm a hero because I saved her from the street. I'm a talkative person and I believe communication is the most important thing in a relationship.

Likes and dislikes

I love pizza if it's Italian, wine if it's white, and football if it's the World Cup. I read a lot, especially true life stories, but most of my books live on my phone.

1. Write about your good points, not your bad points.

2. Don’t include every single thing. Choose a few points and focus on them.

3. Don’t add your contact details (e.g. address, phone number). You could get unwanted messages.

4. Check your spelling and punctuation before you post.

Are dating apps a good way to meet people?

Language level

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Colm Tóibín

• Non-Fiction
• Wexford, Ireland
• Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd

Irish novelist and journalist Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English.

After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts.

His first novel, The South (1990), set in Spain and rural Ireland in the 1950s, is the story of an Irish woman who leaves her husband and starts a relationship with a Spanish painter. It was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. Eamon Redmond, the central character in The Heather Blazing (1992), is a judge in the Irish High Court, haunted by his own past and the history of modern Ireland. The book won the Encore Award for the best second novel of the year. His third novel, The Story of the Night (1996), is set in Argentina during the Falklands War, while The Blackwater Lightship (1999), describes the uneasy relationship between a grandmother, her daughter and granddaughter, brought together by a family tragedy. This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. The Master (2004) won and was shortlisted for several awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.His non-fiction includes The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1994) and The Irish Famine (1999) (with Diarmaid Ferriter). He is editor of The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999). Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar (2002), consists of a number of essays some of which had previously been published in the London Review of Books . In 2002 he became a Fellow at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library, enabling him to research the life of Irish dramatist Lady Augusta Gregory for his book Lady Gregory's Toothbrush (2002). All A Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James , a collection of critical essays, was published in 2010.

Colm Tóibín lives in Ireland. Recent books include the novels  Brooklyn (2009), winner of the 2009 Costa Novel Award; The Empty Family (2010), a collection of short stories; The Testament of Mary (2012), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Nora Webster (2014), and House of Names (2017). He has also published  New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012), a book of essays. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

Critical perspective

Colm tόibín grew up in enniscorthy, co. wexford, and attended university college, dublin, before moving to barcelona for three years in 1975. he is openly gay. his grandfather was actively involved in resistance to british rule in ireland, took part in the easter rising of 1916, and later became a political prisoner for the cause. his father was a member of fianna fáil, historically the dominant political party in ireland, founded by eamon de valera..

These apparently incidental details seem, however, to be profoundly important in shaping the work of this writer. His works of fiction often recount experiences that seem to build in unexpected ways from the author’s own. In The South , his first novel, published in 1990, an Irish protestant woman deserts her family and child and moves to Barcelona at the height of Franco’s rule, eventually settling with a new lover in the Pyrenees. His second novel, The Heather Blazing (1992), set largely in the author’s native Wexford (the novel’s title recalls a line in the Nationalist song ‘Boolavogue’, itself named for a Wexford village close to Enniscorthy), recounts the life of a High Court judge and charts the development of Fianna Fáil. In his third, The Blackwater Lightship (1999), the narrator, an Irish teacher, learns that her homosexual brother is an AIDS sufferer. The novel focuses on the resolution of deep-set family feuds, and the emotional lengths to which three women of different generations in the same family must go in the name of love and mutual understanding.

These books, together with The Story of the Night (1996), garnered much positive criticism – The Heather Blazing was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction – and marked Tόibín out as a writer with a distinctively muted, but natural, mode of narration. A personal closeness to many of the themes he explores is perhaps partly responsible for the striking realism and subtlety of his stories: they rely on the fascination of commonplaces. He is a master at exploring the mixed motives and tacit exchanges and torn senses of identity that make us who we are, hold things together, tear them apart. It has been said that not much happens in his fiction, and on one level this is often true, but his work is thick with human uncertainties, frailties, exploitations, love, carelessness and all of the multifarious things that make us what we are. He marries a sparseness of tone and narrative with a superabundance of suggestion and possibility. It is a compelling mixture. His most recent novels, The Master (2004) and Brooklyn (2009), are both, in a sense, historical. The former charts the life and inner turmoil of Henry James, fraught with tension at his sexuality and his limitations and his need to turn to writing. The latter focuses on a young Irish émigré to New York in the 1950s. After a repressive introduction to life and work in America, she falls in love with an Italian, whom she marries. However, when her sister dies in Ireland, she must go back to pay her respects. After returning from her new homeland, she falls immediately back into the routines of a familiar life – an experience much unlike the one she had faced after initially arriving in America. She does not tell anyone about her marriage and begins a relationship with a local man; her mother is desperate for her to marry him and settle back home. However, someone discovers the secret, and under the threat of it being uncovered she decides to bring everything out into the open herself and to return to New York. Thus, we are given the sense of a life moved around by a potent cocktail of destiny and will, of social propriety and needs that do not conform to it.Tόibín’s greatest achievement, perhaps, is his deftness at exploring fractured identities and loyalties, not least when they concern the particularly modern phenomenon of willed geographical deracination. Many of his characters have split identities, are distanced from all they think of as home but also know why they left in the first place. By belonging in two places they also belong nowhere. The past haunts them but they cannot escape either into it or from it. This is at the heart of Brooklyn , of course, at least up to a point. But in recent years Tόibín has published two collections of short stories, many of which are concentrated studies of identities fractured. Mothers and Sons (2006) explores aspects of the relationship suggested by the title, and includes meditations on the tensions between Catholicism and homosexuality. The Empty Family (2010) builds on this. The Irish narrator of ‘One Minus One’, for instance, remembers having to return from Manhattan because his mother is dying. It is a tale that recalls Brooklyn , but lacks the resolution. Paul, the middle-aged protagonist in ‘The Colour of Shadows’, a native of Enniscorthy now living in Dublin, is faced with stark reminders of how his family found his homosexuality hard to cope with. He returns to his hometown in order to put his aunt, who raised him after he was abandoned by his alcoholic mother, into sheltered accommodation. His bedroom in her house now seems ‘shabby and strange, almost unfamiliar’ and he cannot bear to stay there. All the same, he still regards the town as his home. The narrator of the title-story, another Enniscorthy native who has been living in San Francisco but who has now returned to Ireland, remembers driving to Point Reyes in California in order emotionally to return ‘home to my own forgiving sea’, but he now realises that home was little more than ‘some graves where my dead lay’ on the edge of his native town. In Ireland, he again finds himself looking at a wave: 'It had an elemental hold; it was something coming towards us as though to save us but it did nothing instead, it withdrew in a shrugging irony, as if to suggest that this is what the world is, and our time in it, all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing […].'The book is full of such quiet, vivid epiphanies of belonging and estrangement.Most widely recognised as a writer of novels and short stories, Tόibín is also a playwright, a memoirist, a critic and now a poet. In 2011, the Times Literary Supplement published ‘Cush Gap 2007’, named for a location in Wexford that is also found in some of Tόibín’s fiction. It draws on a familiar theme, evoking a house ravaged by indifferent ‘sea-wind’, ‘Whose foundations I will steer / Tomorrow on a different course’.

Rory Waterman, 2012

Bibliography

Related links:.

• http://www.colmtoibin.com

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Shakespeare

He was the greatest writer in the English language and is known around the world. But how much do you really know about William Shakespeare and his life?

Instructions

Do the preparation task first. Then read the article and do the exercises to check your understanding.

Preparation

William Shakespeare was a poet and a playwright and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, in central England, in 1564 and he died in 1616. His surviving work consists of 38 plays, 154 sonnets and some other poems. He is best known for his plays, which have been translated into every major language and are performed more than those of any other playwright in the world.

When William Shakespeare was 18 years old he married Anne Hathaway, and they had three children. Shakespeare went to London to work as an actor and a writer. In 1599 the Globe Theatre was built in London and it was in this theatre, situated on the banks of the River Thames, that some of Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. In 1613 the theatre was destroyed by a fire. However, a modern reconstruction of the theatre was built near the original site in 1997 so even today you can go to the Globe Theatre to see one of Shakespeare's plays.

Shakespeare’s work is still very popular today. But why do we like these old plays? Perhaps it is because they all contain fantastic stories. His characters suffer bloody battles, deaths by poison, huge family fights, problems between brothers and sisters, problems between parents and children ... The plays are also full of parties, weddings and funerals. They are quite simply action-packed.

Here is a selection of Shakespeare’s plays. Maybe you’ve seen some of them.

The Merchant of Venice

This play is about the idea that people usually get what they deserve in the end, good or bad. Antonio, a businessman, borrows money from Shylock, a money lender. If he doesn’t pay back this money in time, Shylock will cut off a piece of his body. Antonio loses all his business and must pay this terrible price … but is saved by love.

This play is about revenge and also about how difficult it is to take action sometimes, even when it is important. Hamlet’s father is murdered by another man, who then marries Hamlet’s mother. Everybody wants to see Hamlet dead. Hamlet must take revenge, but will he be able to? The famous quotation ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ comes from this play.

As You Like It

This play is a comedy about romantic love. There is a battle between two evil brothers and two good brothers. People hide in a beautiful forest. They fall in love, women disguise themselves as men, and there are many jokes, songs and games.

This is a history play about a famous English king, and a famous battle, Agincourt. We watch the preparations for the battle, the fighting and the results. There are questions in this play: why do men fight? What are wars? Are they glorious or terrible?

Which play would you like to see?

Check your understanding: multiple choice

Check your grammar: gap fill, worksheets and downloads.

What do you think about Shakespeare? Which of his plays would you most like to see in the theatre?

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Isaac Newton

Who was Isaac Newton? Watch this story, one of our 'British tales' videos about characters and people from British history, to find out!

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Preparation

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A mathematician is someone who studies, teaches, or is an expert in maths.

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