TEAM LinG in .NET

Integrating UPC-A Supplement 2 in .NET TEAM LinG

Authentic materials are so of the moment that you need some knowledge of current affairs and culture to really appreciate them and they soon become out of date. It takes time to select, adapt and/or prepare them. However, using authentic materials really motivates students because it gives them a glimpse of what they ll be able to access in English when their language skills improve. In my case, I learned a foreign language with the help of children s programmes. They were authentic shows at the right level for me and they actually gave me an insight into the culture. I gradually moved on to daytime TV and finally the news. I found that, unlike the lessons in my student s books, the language I learned from TV shows was exactly what real people said. My expressions and pronunciation were not as dry and stilted as friends who d only studied in the classroom. I m not suggesting that you take recordings of children s TV shows into your classroom but the principle remains that if your students want to learn to speak like natives, expose them to authentic speech and texts.

The CDO described in this example is set up as follows: There are 100 mortgages that pay $1 or $0. They are pooled and 100 $1 tranches are issued; tranche 1 defaults if any mortgage defaults, tranche 100 defaults only if all 100 mortgages default. If the tranches all have default probability of 5 percent and defaults are independent, tranche 10 will have a default probability of 2.82 percent. Now suppose we take tranche 10 from 100 of these pools, repool these 100 tranches, and issue 100 new prioritized claims. This is effectively a CDO. Tranche 10 of the CDO will have a default probability of 0.05 percent. Tranche 10 defaults every 10,000 years and gets rated AAA . If, however, the default probability on the original mortgage pool turns out to be 6 percent instead of 5 percent, the default probability would jump to 7.75 percent on the 10th tranche of the mortgage-backed