Consultation Feedback

There were a lot of great ideas and resources shared during today’s consultations. Here are several suggested resources and tasks for students to improve their reading and writing. Of course, choose the practice that will improve your target weakness!

On Friday, we’ll share more practices and resources, and discuss further the kinds and formats of evidence that I expect in the completed portfolio. Perhaps we’ll also create a Facebook discussion thread so new practices and resources can be posted easily.

Resources

New York Times newspaper
Past IELTS papers
Past UE: Written Language papers
Grammar books
National Geographic magazine
Time magazine
Readers

Practices

• Past IELTS writing papers:  write strong, clear topic sentences
• Past IELTS writing papers:  organize a problem-solution essay
• Past IELTS reading papers:  highlight sentences which reveal main ideas
• Read more grammar books for a variety of structures
• Read academic essays (law) for coherence:  outline scope, topic sentences, concluding sentences; and linking words and signposts
• Read newspapers and highlight complex sentences that use collocations, adverbs and conjunctions; try writing argumentative essays using a more complex style
• Read some authentic texts and pay attention to gerunds and to-infinitives; that is, which verbs do they follow and which situations are appropriate for their use
• Past UE: Written Language papers: write problem-solution essays with focus on grammar points
• Read local news articles and summarize them
• Read problem-solution essays article:  outline them
• Write a reaction to a newspaper article using new vocabulary from that article
• Complete reading worksheets which focus on identifying main/specific ideas
• Read a storybook and outline the main points
• Read an English newspaper and write down the main ideas; check the main ideas against a Chinese text on the same topic

Online documentation can be put on a blog.