New videos

We're finally there. The new videos are ready and we have uploaded all our new materials to the website. We've also made a DVD. Here is the cover, filmed in a carriage at the National Railway Museum in Port Adelaide. Our new materials cover conditionals, prepositions and tenses.

The conditionals materials are based on the Chinese dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao, known in English as "If You Are the One". In our version, we have one male contestant and three lovely ladies. The script uses all the different types of conditional forms in English and includes other types of conditional words, such as 'otherwise' and 'provided that'.



The materials for tenses in academic writing are based around a student writing an essay about talent contests. She has trouble with her verb tenses and consults Ms Parrot for help. Funnily enough, she and Ms Parrot had both been to a talent contest the week before.

 

Ms Parrot played in the Really Really Terrible Quartet (so terrible that there were only three players). 






After the quartet's dreadful performance it was no surprise that the show was won by Prince Wolfgang and the Medics.







The last of our new resources is based on the difficult area of prepositions. All the materials are based on words from Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List. The video story this time is a murder mystery. Watch it and find out what happens to the famous chef Harumi Kaga.

We hope you'll enjoy using the new resources. Whatever you think, please complete the short evaluation survey on the website to give us some feedback, as we really want to keep improving the site. You might even a $100 voucher for taking part in the survey!

The Ms Parrot DVD

I had no idea it was so difficult to 'author' a DVD! This technical process involves putting all our current videos onto a single DVD. The software to do this, though, is extremely expensive, and the whole process is very costly. That's why we've opted for a slightly lower resolution version that will allow all our videos to fit on one DVD. The result will be something like this:

Don't worry - the spelling mistake will be corrected! In fact 'Saving English Grammar' will also be renamed to 'Thanks a Million'.

What is really nice about this DVD is that the film maker has made a clever compilation of extracts from all six stories and put them in an opening screen that plays with the Ms Parrot theme. Viewers can then click on any of the titles below to play that particular video.

All these videos will be freely available online, and we will also upload them to Youku so our Chinese viewers can enjoy them. We're really hoping that our take on Fei Cheng Wu Rao will be big in China!

Interview with David Crystal

Ms Parrot and Harumi Kaga were lucky enough to talk to the famous linguist Professor David Crystal about the importance of grammar when they were all at the GAL 2014 Congress in Marburg. You can see the interview on the English for Uni website.