One of the most curious and unique aspects of London's linguistic culture is the Cockney Rhyming Slang: not properly a dialect, but more than just a set of fixed expressions, it consists in substituting a word with an expression that rhymes with it – for example, instead of saying “stairs”, you would say “apples and pears”. Sometimes, to make it even harder, the second part of the expression is dropped, so that only those who know the slang can understand.

According to the Cockney Rhyming Slang website, a Cockney is someone “born within the sound of Bow Bells”, that is, in the vicinity of the church of St Mary-le-Bow, in East London.

The church of St. Mary-le-Bow in 1837.

Apart from its East London origins, not much is known about the Cockney Rhyming Slang: did it start as a game, as a series of code-words for criminals, as a community tradition?

Whichever the reason why it was invented, the slang is still used today: so much so, that some rhyming-slang ATM machines have recently been installed in East London!

Using the website, you can play with your students and see whether you can guess the meanings of the various expressions – or even come up with your own.

The Spelling Bee is a competition in which students, usually children, are challenged to spell some of the most difficult English words correctly. It originated in the United States, where it still takes place today as the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a real media event sponsored by newspapers and educational foundations and broadcast on ESPN.

In the last few years, Spelling Bee competitions have become increasingly popular and can now also be found, for example, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and in the United Kingdom, where the first Times Spelling Bee  ended in June with the victory of St Martin's School from Norwood.

While the Spelling Bee was conceived for Anglophone children, you can also use it with your students to test and improve their knowledge of English words.

The website of the Times Spelling Bee is packed with resources that can encourage your students to practise: have a look at the Training Area, where students can play alone against the computer but also compete with each other with the Head to Head game, which comes at the three different levels - easy, medium and hard.

Less confident students might want to try the multiple choice spelling game, or guess the missing letters in the Word Workout game.

Be warned, though: your students might get very enthusiastic!

Call to protect rare Himalayan species

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about the WWF's call to protect species that have been discovered in the Eastern Himalayas over the last 10 years.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.

If you teach your students about countries and nationalities, English for Academic Purposes courses or you are doing business courses have a look in the Faux pas section on Wikipedia.  It gives you a summary of culturally accepted norms around the world.

Langwich Scool is a site full of cartoon strips. They have been published in English Teaching Professional magazine since 1999. On the Langwich Scool website you can find a selection of the most recent strips, which are organized around a few categories such as: Kids, Teens, Adults, Teachers, English and Methodology.

These cartoon strips can be used as a warm-up activity or a filler. At the same time, you may use them for grammar activities or to start a discussion lesson.

Organic food not healthier, says report

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about a report that says organic food provides no significant nutritional benefit compared with conventionally produced food.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.

Click here to find a new social networking site dedicated to teachers and learners. It's called LearnCentral and is free to sign up to.

Once you've registered you can share material with other teachers, attend live webinars and best of all you have a free virtual classroom. You can use it with up to three people so if you teach a distance learning course this is ideal for catching up with your students.

Shanghai star

This week's news item is our monthly news item for teens. It is about an American teenager who speaks Chinese and has also acted in a Chinese film.

You can find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area screen.

You can also find longer versions of the news item with extension activities by logging in to our teachers' support area here.

August word games

This month's Witch's Pot topics are 'words related to fairy tales' (Easy), 'adjectives whose opposite starts with ''im-''' (Average) and 'nouns connected with natural disasters'(Difficult.  

The Swamp Disaster topics are 'verbs of movement' (Easy), 'travelling by car' (Average) and 'relationships' (Difficult).

The Wordsearch topics are 'words connected with books' (Easy), 'periods' (Average) and 'adjectives expressing ''interest'' or ''no interest''' (Difficult).

There are new Crosswords and Bridge Builders at all levels too.

Visit the Word Games area to find them all.

We would like to invite you to the next two MEC online clinics.

The first MEC clinic hosted by Joanna will take place on the 20^th August at 10am and 4pm UK time and it will be giving ideas on how to use Wordnik to help your students extend their vocabulary. The session will focus on:

-         Showing what Wordnik is 

-         Giving ideas on how to use Wordnik with MEC 

-      Going through two demo lessons using Wordnik

Bigger, taller, stronger, faster

This week's news item, adapted for MEC from a news article originally published in the Guardian Weekly, is about new research that suggests reasons for elite athletes performing better than they did 100 years ago.

You'll find this story in the News Items section on your Work Area.