A Message to Students

Dear students

There were a number of absentees in the lesson last night.
We discussed how your writing would be graded according to the marking scheme. Please refer to the marking scheme you will see at the link: http://www.istudy.com.hk/wr_marking.htm .
I've also demonstrated ways to improve your writing and introduced ways to ensure that you will get a D grade for your writing tasks.

I'd like to remind you that you need to submit your writing and will give you a grade for your writing. You must make sure that you attain a D grade for all the writing tasks you submit to me. In other words, if you get back your writing task with a grade lower than D, you must resubmit your writing to me.

I've distributed another reading task for you last night. Please work on them for discussion next Tuesday. You will now start writing Task 2 with about 250 words on ONE of the following topics:

Task A
It is more important to be clever than beautiful or handsome." Do you agree?
Write a letter to the editor of the Young Post giving your opinions. Start your letter "Dear Editor", and sign it "Chris Wong." Do not write an address.

Task B
Most overseas visitors think of Hong Kong as only being a busy city. However, it has some beautiful country parks. Some people think the government should do more to promote these parks to visitors who ome to Hong Kong. Discuss the arguments for and against this, and then your your own view.

Task C
Last summer you were a tourist visiting Hong Kong for the first time. One weekend you went swimming and had a horrible experience. You are now back in your own country and are writing an account of your experience for your school magazine. Say what happened and how you felt about it.



Enjoy your study!

Best Wishes
Terri

ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE YOUR READING

• Open your eyes- Try to boost your awareness of the reading you do all around you. Pay attention to English on billboards, advertisements, leaflets, food packages, etc.
• Identify your reading problems by writing a summary- Find a short newspaper article which interests you and read it once quickly to get the main ideas. Then cover it up and try to write a brief summary of the main points. Finally, compare the summary with the article to see how many main points you have got. If you find the result unsatisfactory, try to identify your problem. Do you have problems with sentence structures, vocabulary, etc ? If you can identify your reading problem, focus on it.
• Time your reading- Look for the main ideas of an article for a limited time. Don’t bother about the details. This is a method to enhance your speed of reading. Keep a log of the amount of time it takes. If the time decreases, then you should be getting more information more quickly.
• Make cloze exercises- Make a cloze exercise, either for yourself or a friend. Photocopy the text and use correction fluid to white out some words. You can focus on any aspect of language you wish, for example, nouns, verbs, prepositions, or whatever you find difficult. Fill in the blanks. Check your answer with the original texts. Think about the words you used and the words in the original text. This method can enhance your awareness of using different terms in different contexts.
• Read the Chinese version in advance- Read texts in Chinese first before you read the English texts. After getting the main ideas from Chinese materials, reading the English ones becomes easier. You will realise how some Chinese expressions are expressed in English.
• Follow the instructions for various reading materials- Try to follow the instructions of manuals or guidebooks for any electrical appliance, e.g. computer, mini hi-fi, recording machines. Does the machine perform the function you wish? If not, try to decide what went wrong in your reading. Alternatively, you can read a cook book and test your comprehension by preparing the food correctly.
• Guess meaning from context - While reading, people are usually discouraged by unfamiliar words or phrases. An inefficient reader looks up every unknown word/phrase in a dictionary but an efficient one doesn’t. Why ? Because the efficient reader guesses meaning from the context of the text. When you come across new words from an article, don’t check the dictionary immediately! Try to guess the meaning of the words first. A more interesting way of doing this is to try to get one or two friends to read the same article. If there are any common unknown words/phrases, compete with your friends to guess the correct meaning. Look the words/phrases up in the dictionary for the correct definition. The one who gets the closest meaning wins.
• Keep a resource bank of similar reading items- You can divide items into several categories such as finance, education, accidents, fashion or housing. Add new articles according to these categories. Arrange them nicely in a book. Frequently read the materials and you will develop a large vocabulary on a particular item. Alternatively, you can find some listening materials, videos and television programmes, on the same or similar topics and compare them with the written topics. Your knowledge of words/phrases/grammatical structures will consolidate if you can see the same language several times in different contexts.
  Read for pleasure- Research has shown that reading consistently for pleasure boosts comprehension and vocabulary. Try popular books, comics, books about the films you have seen. It is NOT necessary to understand every word, just keep reading.
• Read with a grammar focus- Look at a reading passage and see how the grammatical structures are used. Try to classify them under different headings like relative clauses, present tense, passive voice etc. Being able to identify different grammatical structures of a passage boosts your reading speed. If you have trouble classifying the grammatical structures, you may have to consult a grammar book or teacher.
• Create your own comprehension questions- Often you have a lot of materials to read but you do not have a specific task to test your understanding. If this is the case, write your own comprehension questions to an article to test a friend. You and your friend can take turns preparing comprehension questions for other articles. Don’t forget that you have to prepare the answers before you test each other.

ACTIVITIES TO IMPROVE YOUR WRITING

You may want to try the following activities to improve your writing.

• Reconstruction: Collect examples of the types of writing you need/want to do (e.g. essays, newspaper articles. Read the examples and make notes on the content. Try to construct your writing with your notes. Then compare your version with the original version to see how well you have done. This method is especially beneficial for students who want to learn about specific written formats.

• Timed writing: One problem may be that you write slowly. Timed writing trains you to think briskly and write efficiently. Get at least two friends to write on the same topic for three minutes. Write as much as you can and ignore grammatical mistakes and spelling. If you can't think of a word or a phrase in English, either write in your language or just draw a picture. Look the word or phrase up in a dictionary later. Make sure your text makes sense. Alternatively, you can practise timed writing by yourself. Get a stop-watch and write as much as you can for three minutes. Keep a record of all your texts and see whether you write more ideas on the next topic. Improvement can be measured by counting the numbers of ideas you have created in each attempt.

• Brainstorming: Perhaps it takes you a lot of time to generate ideas for a piece of writing. Think quickly and without inhibition on a given topic; create as many ideas as possible. You should allow yourself to think of strange and unusual ideas. Then you should organise your ideas. This method is useful for generating ideas before actually writing.

• Write to pen pals: Make this a habit so that you can have constant writing practice. For example, you could contact International Pen Friends, P.O, BOX 340, Dublin, Ireland or by e-mail at neilodonnell@ipf.ie for details.

• Keep an English diary: Train yourself to use the English you already know while you are writing the diary. You can also deliberately use any new vocabulary/phrases in your diary. You will become a more efficient writer of English because you will be frequently activating your existing knowledge of English and spending less time looking in a dictionary.

• Write to newspapers:. You can write to newspapers to express your opinions or lodge complaints. Before the newspaper publishes your writing, the editor will proof-read your work. Then, you can compare the published version with your own version to see how your ideas can be better expressed. You have the chance to check your grammar, too. Write to any opinion column or the Letters to the Editor section in your local newspaper.

• Keep a writing resource bank: Collect examples of the types of writing you need/want to do and make reference to these frequently. Because relevant phrases and appropriate vocabulary are essential to good writing, you should mark down some useful expressions from your daily life for future use.

• Use the e-mail system: The most advanced way of communication today is writing through E-mail. You can write to people all over the world in English. You can also e-mail your writing to me at ecterri@gmail.com for feedback.

• Try self-evaluation: One of the criteria of good writing is that it is error-free. Proof-reading and editing are the final stages of tidying language and presentation before writing the last version. You should learn to evaluate your own writing.

• Keep all your written work: Keep copies of everything you write in English, especially those which bear your teacher's feedback. They serve two purposes. First, they can remind you of the mistakes you have made and therefore help reduce the chance of repeating the same mistakes. Second, some of your writing can be recycled.

Improving Your Intonation

• Use songs and karaoke to improve your pronunciation. Choose one of your favorite CDs and sing along with the melody. Accents are usually not heard when singing a foreign language.
• Learn poems to develop a feel for the rhyme and rhythm of the language and to become more aware of what really happens in normal speech.
• Listen and speak in English as often as you can. The more exposure you have to the language, the better your pronunciation will become.