Last week I went to two really cool gigs, one of them was in a basement bar that used to be a public toilet in West London! The band I went to see is called ‘Empire of Lights‘ and they are a very cool Indie band that has a single coming out. The word Indie means independent and not so commercial sounding. Other famous Indie bands include The Smiths, Nirvana and the Klaxons. For more information about Indie music click here.

The other band that I went to see are a soul band with 12 people in it ! They had great energy and fantastic voices.  My friends and I danced all night and had a wonderful time as one of the singers is my friend! The band is called Hula Groove – check our their video.

Make some sentences about you favourite kinds of music:

1. classical
2. concert
3. country
4. dance
5. disco
6. download music
7. good beat
8. heavy metal
9. jazz
10. lyrics
11. mp3 player
12. music
13. pop
14. radio
15. rap
16. rock
17. stereo
18. punk
19. opera
20. hip-hop/ rap

• be crazy about / love / like
• dislike / hate / can’t stand

See you soon !

Jessie Teacher

Chris Teacher (a.k.a 'The Captain')

Do you like music? What kind of music do you listen to? How often do you listen to music? Here at LanguageLab one of our City People, Griffin Morrisey is a musician and composer.

Griffin does lots of activities which students trying to learn English find really helpful. Firstly, there is his regular sing along. Students who attend this activity find themselves learning new vocabulary and practicing their intonation by memorizing the words to a song and trying to sing along with it. People can be a little shy about singing in front of others at first. The shyness soon goes away though, because Griffin never forces anyone to sing if they don’t want to. Usually by the end of the session everyone is having such fun that they forget about their shyness and are happily ‘crooning’ away with the rest of the group. As you have probably already guessed, it’s also a great way to improve self-confidence.

When hanging out with Griffin you can also participate in his ‘learning about music’ activities. In these activities students learn how to read music and name and recognise different instruments from the orchestra. If you are wondering how this can help you improve your English, don’t forget that everything he does, he does in English and that sometimes the best way to learn a language is simply by learning about something in that language. Not to mention the fact that learning to recognize the sounds of different instruments is fantastic ear training, which in turn can really help with listening and pronunciation skills.

Finally, just like our resident actress Pebbles Kronfeld, Griffin does script reading activities with the students. To read more about how these activities can help people wanting to practice English click here.