Including writing, reading, listening, and speaking!! You may download a WORD file here.
You are so welcome to have a talk over the tips with Lynn!!
Writing
Apart from Professor Hsieh’s guidelines,
here are some other suggestions:
l Try to do a plan with the main points first to avoid repetition and
ask yourself if what you are writing adds value to your paper
l When defining terms in the introduction, choose a definition that is
relevant to your topic
l After stating your main point in the topic sentence, it is important
to use conjunction words to relate the following supporting sentences
l Try to use transition words to emphasize certain key points or to
compare and contrast
l Keep the terms or sentence patterns consistent when making a list or
describing a series of steps
l Use a thesaurus to avoid
repeated words but don’t use words you don’t know just to make it sound better
l Use a collocations dictionary
or corpus to find out which words
collate together i.e. which nouns go together with which verbs like ‘commit a
crime’, ‘perform an operation’
l Read and learn from model articles but avoid copying as they might
not always be applicable
l Read up on expressing different levels of certainty, especially for
the discussion part
Reading
l Try to skim read the first time to get the general gist, you can
look up any vocabulary the second time
l Pay attention to the use of conjunction words in order to understand
the relationship between key words
l You do not need to read aloud when reading for information. It will
slow you down
l Reading aloud can be helpful for a presentation or related listening
tasks so that you can pick up on the words when you hear them
l After reading an article, practice writing a brief summary. This is
to see if you can catch the key points. You can do this in pairs for peer
evaluation and compare your work to see if you got the same key information.
Listening
l Try to listen to different types of OT/PT podcasts e.g. interviews,
seminar presentations, debates etc. This will help you to follow less
structured or more spontaneous speech.
l Apart from OPT podcasts, try to listen to speeches in other areas
such as world news, business, entertainment etc. to get a feel of how language
is used in different contexts.
l Try to let go of certain words you don’t understand and listen to
the speech as a whole. The key points will often be repeated or emphasized in
the speaker’s tone of voice.
l If you are unfamiliar with the topic, read some reference articles
beforehand to help you become familiar with the terms.
l If you get lost in the middle, try to use your logic and speculate
what they might be talking about and its relation to the topic, then go back
and listen to it again and check.
l Listen to a range of different accents and don’t assume that you
won’t be able to understand. After the first 5 minutes, you will get more used
to it.
l When asked to recall the information and you can’t remember or there
is too much, try to summarize and paraphrase. Remember you don’t need to repeat
exactly what the speaker said.
Speaking
l Don’t get stuck on certain words you can’t think of. Try using a
different way to express your thoughts. Eg. It is very efficient à It can save a lot of time.
l Grammar is not that important in speaking but pay attention to the
tense of verbs (past, present, future)
l Avoid too many fillers (um, ah) or laughing, and going around in
circles when you can’t think of what to say
l Try to write down certain phrases or expressions that you find
useful rather than single vocabulary words, or practice using the new words to
make your own sentences and have a native speaker check.
l Make sure you use coherent sentences when
speaking, don’t just say single words or fragments, your speech still has to
make sense. You can record yourself and listen back to it to see how to make it
better.
