Jake opened File 10C (“Murder in a Country House”). “Let’s do the speaking activity. ‘Look at the picture. Where is the woman? What is she holding?’”
Carol raised her soda can. “To File 1 ,” she said. “The most important file.”
Rob laughed. “You’re not going to fail. You know more English than most people born here.”
Jake put the sodas on the table. “So we have no internet. No streaming. No social media. No Duolingo. What do people do ?” american english file 1 third edition
“No,” Rob said. “I mean we go back to the old way . Page 4. ‘Getting to know you.’ We talk. Face to face. No screens.”
They played the game for an hour. They made silly guesses. Rob pretended to be the detective with a terrible British accent. Carol laughed so hard she spilled her soda. Jenny forgot about her test.
| File | Language point | Example from story | |------|----------------|---------------------| | 1A | Greetings & introductions | “Hello, what’s your name?” | | 2B | Present simple (he/she/it) | “She lives downstairs.” | | 5C | Can/can’t for ability | “I can’t do my grammar exercises.” | | 7C | Weather vocabulary | “Rainy, cloudy, windy, humid.” | | 8A | I’d like to… / Can I…? | “I’d like to speak to the manager.” | | 9A | Prepositions of time (at/in/on) | “At 10:47 PM, the Wi-Fi came back.” | | 10C | Past simple (regular/irregular) | “A truck hit a pole.” / “They sat in a circle.” | Jake opened File 10C (“Murder in a Country House”)
Rob stood up. “I know what we do. We go back to File 1 .”
Jenny sat at the small kitchen table. Her laptop was open to File 8A (“I’d like to speak to the manager”). She had a test tomorrow. But she wasn’t studying. She was staring at her phone.
And for the first time all week, nobody checked their phone for an hour. Where is the woman
“That’s not true,” Jenny said. But she smiled a little.
Would you like a worksheet, comprehension questions, or a role-play activity based on this story?
Rob was on the couch, holding his phone above his head like he was trying to catch a butterfly. “No. No Wi-Fi, no 5G, nothing. It’s like the whole building forgot to pay the internet bill.”