Sunday, January 16, 2011

Last week, and next ...

Good evening everyone,

Last week the first exam focus was the first part of the Reading paper. This is the exercise consisting of three texts (in the exam the texts will be completely unrelated). We did some work from some worksheets which I gave you and also from the first two pages of chapter 5 in the book. We also did the vocabulary work on these texts on page 68.

The second exam focus was the first part of the Use of English paper, the open cloze, as it is sometimes called. We used another worksheet for this, based on a cloze passage that had been used in a CPE exam. We noticed that the main difference between the gaps in the first part of the reading, and the first part of the U of E is that the former is mainly LEXICAL while the latter is GRAMMATICAL.

For homework I asked you to do the cloze text on page 69 in the book.

The topic we began to look at last week was the environment, a topic which often appears in the CPE exam. As well as the texts I have already mentioned, we also watched the video which I have already uploaded on the blog.

Tomorrow we are going to focus on ways of talking about the future. We will use some of these forms to talk about what changes we anticipate in different areas of life during the next 50 years or so.

I will be giving you the first composition topic of this term either on Wednesday or Friday. It will be an ESSAY. In the meantime, think about different aspects of essay writing. Think about these questions:

  • What are some of the differences between an essay and an article, report, proposal or letter?
  • Who is an ESSAY usually addressed to? Who is the target reader?
  • Is it more important to organise an essay into paragraphs than any other writing-task format?
  • In preparation for writing a good essay, find examples of good writing practice in (short) articles about the environment in magazines like THE ECONOMIST. Letters to the editor in magazines and good newspapers are often good sources of fairly short texts with good vocabulary and useful expressions.

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