In this week I had two exams, writing essay and listening.
Firstly, I’ll write about writing exam. I’ve taught academic writing skills through this pre-sessional course and there are a lot of strategies. In this exam, we receive text beforehand, and we can prepare for it, for example, paraphrasing, summarising and understanding the text. Last time, I couldn’t prepare well so I tried to spend more time to it. So I could understand the contents better than before, but there was still a problem. During the exam, I spent much time to think structure and write introduction, and I couldn’t spare time to write main body and conclusion. Also I didn’t have time pay attention to write sentences accurately, so I think there are many mistakes. I thought that I need to get time management skill. To get this skill, I have to experience a lot of writing essay and practice more. In the next opportunity to write essay, I’ll mind these things and write better essay than this time.
Secondly, I’ll talk about listening exam.
In this exam , we have to watch the video first, and during listening, we take some notes, then we answer the question using our notes. So I think this test is required not only listening skill, but also making-note skill. In the bigening, I tried to write down everything that I heard and wrote down the copy of the slide so I concentrared on writing words and missed important things. I realized that this kind of things are not helpful for taking notes. So this time, I tried to write examples and main point. I could note examples, however, I couldn’t write important things. I think that it is because I didn’t understand the presentation well. So from now on, I’ll try to understand what speaker said first, and next, I’ll pay attention to the phrases such as “it is important~”. In addition, I’ll try to spare my time to watch TED as practice for listening.
Finally, I have reading and speaking exam next week. Last reading exam, I thought it was not so difficult but the score was not good. It may because of misunderstanding some words of question. There were many words that I didn’t know in both of text and question. If the word is in the text, I can guess the meaning from the context, but it is in the question, it lead to