My Personal Favourite Posts on the Blog So Far...

As you might notice, I've started to post again.  I've also noticed that there are a few more people visiting the blog.  So to all the new readers - welcome!

If you are new to this blog and you don’t know where to start then I would like to recommend these 10 posts that are my personal favourites.  I think these 10 posts are the most useful and most helpful articles for learners of English.

1. What is Cohesion & Coherence? (Cambridge Testing Explained)

This is a very popular post which explains one of the things that Cambridge examiners are looking for in your speaking and writing.

2. Accent vs Pronunciation

This looks at the difference between the two and provides some advice and links to a wonderful resource for listening.

3. Cudunagonbeda

If you are having problems understanding native speakers with their fast talking, or you would like to improve your speaking, this might be of interest to you.

4. How much time do I need?

How long does it take to learn a language and how much effort do you need to be successful?  It is different for each person, but there are a few general rules here.

5. Anybody having problems with the Present Perfect?

This takes a poem/song to provide a little exercise for listening to examples of the present perfect tense.  You might find it useful, but I've added it here because it was fun to make!

6. Thinking about Superman a.k.a. Imaginary Situations (Conditionals)

Talking about things we wish were true makes up a lot of our conversations, so these grammar points are explained clearly and with lots of written and picture examples.

7. How Green is your Internet (Working with Numbers in English)

This is another very popular post that takes a two minute video and gives you a small listening task to help you practise listening to English numbers.

8. Learning and Forgetting Vocabulary & No Magic Please

Did you know that forgetting vocabulary is actually a very important part of building your vocabulary?  These two posts explain one of the best ways I know to improve vocabulary quickly!

9. Using Tongue Twisters for Your Pronunciation

I honestly feel that practising little tongue twisters is a great way to improve pronunciation in another language.  It is also very impressive to people when you get it right!

10. How Useful is Translation? (University Preparation Tip #1)

I love Google Translate and I think it had become a very useful tool to help language learners.  But it can't replace learning a language.  This article shows the problems of using too much translation.

How do you approach an IELTS Writing Task 2 question? (guest post by Stephanie Furness-Barr)

‘Approach? What Approach?’ vs ‘Approach? Definitely!’

Here’s what my students say they do when they’re writing an IELTS Writing Task 2 essay. Which way do you think is best? Why?

1. "Approach? What approach? I only have 40 minutes to write a task 2 so I don’t waste any time. I read the question and just start writing what’s in my head. I have a general plan, like I do when I'm giving the answer to a question. I stop writing when the 40 minutes is done."
2. "Approach? Definitely! I only have 40 minutes to write so I don’t waste any time. I read and analyse the question, jot down some of my ideas, write a plan then check if the plan is going to help me answer the question. I check the question a lot because it’s so easy to answer it the wrong way. Then I write the answer, paying attention to grammar and vocabulary. If there’s time, I check the writing for spelling and punctuation mistakes."

Have you guessed which way is best?

Let’s look at the first approach. If you think about what you’re going to write and try to write with good grammar and vocabulary at the same time, you’re asking your brain to do too many things at once. This is often unsuccessful, even for native speakers. Why?

Your essay...

...might be ‘stream of consciousness’, in other words, unorganised and incoherent, and possibly repetitive.
...may not answer the question.
...may be too short
...may have a lot of unnecessary grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation mistakes
...might look really messy. This shouldn’t matter to an examiner – unless your handwriting is so bad he or she can’t read it - but you want to ‘put your best foot forward’* don’t you?

*do and look your best

If you said the second approach is better, you’re right! Here’s why:

1. Read and analyse the question	In these two stages you focus on WHAT you’re going to write
2. Brainstorm – write down any ideas (in notes – sentences take too long to write) you have about the topic and question.
3. Plan your essay – write a structure.	WHAT (ideas) AND HOW (organisation)
4. Write your answer.	In these stages you focus on HOW you’re going to write it. (e.g. grammar and vocabulary, spelling and punctuation)
5. Proofread your answer.

If you think about WHAT to write first then your brain will be able to concentrate on HOW to say it afterwards. This is more likely to result in an essay that...

...answers the question.
...is 250 words.
...is finished.
...is well organised.
...is written with the best grammar and vocabulary you can manage in the time limit

This is formally called the Process Approach to writing.

Demonstration

A question for the IELTS exam might look like this:

‘In some school systems, it is normal for students to have a sports lesson during the week. Some people say that this is a waste of time, while others say it is an important part of education. Discuss both these views and give your opinion.’

Below is a possible response to the question from a writer that didn’t follow the process approach to writing. What do you think of it?

• Does it answer the question?
• Is it 250 words?
• Is it organised?
• How much variety of grammar and vocabulary do you see?

Sports are really important. They are important because they keep us healthy and happy. Everyone should do sport in school, even though there’s not enough time to do them. If we don’t have sport we’ll get bored, and then we can’t get concentrated in classes because we want to go out and play all the time. Everyone knows that sports are good for you. The experts say this is important especially for boys. Girls don’t need to sport so much because they are better at their studies. Teachers should organize teams to play football. My school teacher was terrible at football but everyone loved him anyway.

Of course, school subjects are important too and we need to spend time with maths, language and science, sure but it is really good to be exercised and get fresh air. This is my opinion.

Now you try writing an answer to the question using the Process Approach!

Developing Your English through Poetry (guest post by Allan Kennedy)

Here are two poems I wrote. The first poem is called 'My Love for Dreams' and the second poem is called 'Breathless'.

My Love for Dreams

My love for dreams is so great,

my heart melts for them 'til the dusk of day.

The night runs when they're away,

helps, loses 'til day's dawn.

Their beauty is so great,

Wondering mind 'til they see,

ending is all I do,

While waiting for the moment, for them to say "I do."

Breathless

Breathless

in the evening

waiting in the rain

Breathless

at the station

running for the train

Breathless

when I see you

Breathless

when you leave

You're all I ever dream of and

you're all I ever need and

You're all I ever think of and

you’re all I ever

Breathe

To tell the truth, I told a 'white' lie (meaning a small lie); really I only wrote one of the poems. For the other poem I simply thought of a few key words and then used a poetry generator. All I did was choose a noun, a pronoun and four verbs (one end 'ing') and the poetry generator wrote 'my' poem.

For example: http://www.poemofquotes.com/tools/poetry-generator.php

Poetry generators are a useful and fun way of introducing English language and literature students to poetry – that is both reading and writing poetry – and for helping English foreign language students improve their English in a number of ways.

Put very simply, poetry helps us to:

a) organise our thinking
b) choose exactly the right word for the right occasion
c) increase our vocabulary
d) to play with metaphors and figurative speech
e) to play with rhyme
f) to think about the sound of a word as much as its meaning or part of speech (verb, noun, adjective and so on)
g) to play with synonyms (words with similar meanings) and antonyms (words with opposite meanings) – and even homonyms (words that sound like each other but are different).
h) to say more with less (being concise)
i) and much more...for example, (The Four Benefits of Poetry, What Use is Poetry?)

So let's write a poem. At the moment in the northern hemisphere it’s winter and in the southern hemisphere it’s summer. Here in the north we're looking forward to the spring. In the south, autumn (or 'fall' in American English) isn't far away. So let's write a poem about the seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.

Four Seasons by Haluk Ozcan

To get us going here's part of a poem about the seasons by poet Arlene Smith.

Springtime filled with baby's breath,

stretching forth, rising tall.

Unconfined from east to west,

breaking free from every fall.

Summer's heat can't be denied;

playful and unencumbered.

Passion swells as ocean tide;

basking tho days be numbered.

Now let's write (or create) a poem using a poetry generator. For this exercise I'm choosing Spring, so the poem is called 'Here Comes Spring'. I'm using the poetic forms generator found at this site: http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/seasons.htm (for more opportunities to make poems, take a look at other topics on their list - http://ettcweb.lr.k12.nj.us/forms/newpoem.htm)

There are just three stages:

For the first one, I chose “Budding trees, April showers”
For the second, I chose “New leaves, May flowers”
For the third, I chose “Energised, hopeful”

And here’s the poem:

Here comes spring,

Here comes spring,

Budding trees, April showers

Here comes spring,

Here comes spring,

New leaves, May flowers

Here comes spring,

Here comes spring-

Energised, hopeful there it goes

Okay, it’s not Shakespeare, it looks fairly simple and to a certain extent it is. But even in this very quick example there’s quite a lot going on. Here are a few questions for you to think about.

Question 1: In what season does it seem that this poem has been written?

Question 2: What are the obvious relationships between ‘trees’, ‘leaves’, ‘showers’ and ‘flowers’?

Question 3: Why did the poet chose the words ‘energised’ and hopeful’ to finish the poem?

Question 4: Identify one particular feature of this poem?

Think about these questions and then scroll down to see the answers below...

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Answer 1: Winter – the poem starts “Here comes spring,” which means spring hasn’t arrived yet, but that ‘it’s just around the corner’ (meaning it is coming very soon). However, at the moment it’s winter.

Answer 2:

1. There’s a physical relationship (trees have leaves and showers are rain and flowers and trees/leaves need rain)
2. There’s also a rhyming relationship in that the words sound similar: trees/leaves, showers/flowers

Answer 3: These words identify some of the poet’s feelings at the time of writing, about how spring with the ideas of new birth and creation can fill people with both energy and hope for the rest of the year and beyond.

Answer: Repetition. The phrase ‘Here comes spring’ is repeated six times. This is a very familiar poetic device which in this case gives the poem the feel of a song, straight away I'm reminded of George Harrison’s ‘Here come the sun...here comes the sun... an’ it’s all right...'

Repetition is only one of many, many poetic devices. A few other examples could be:

a) alliteration – where the same sound is repeated at the beginning of words,

e.g. she sells sea shells on the seashore

b) hyperbole - extreme exaggeration,

e.g. a thousand wild horses could not move me...so hungry I could eat a horse...

c) personification – human/personal characteristics to animals or objects,

e.g. The sea had climbed the mountain peaks, and shouted to the stars o come to play: and down they came splashing in happy waves

For those of you who want to find out more about poetic devices here’s a useful pdf list: http://www.chaparralpoets.org/devices.pdf

So if you’re an EFL student or a teacher and you are interested in poetry, ‘give it a go’ (meaning ‘try it’); you won’t be disappointed. All aspects of your language learning/teaching will be better for the experience – listening, speaking, reading and writing, improving grammar, extending vocabulary and, importantly, thinking and expressing yourself clearly.

Here’s a little poem to finish. Oh, and if you’re wondering which of the two poems at the start of this article was actually mine, well, take a guess.

Friendship

You are friendly, kind and caring

Sensitive, loyal and understanding

Humorous, fun, secure and true

Always there... yes that's you.

Special, accepting, exciting and wise

Truthful and helpful, with honest blue eyes

Confiding, forgiving, cheerful and bright

Yes that's you... not one bit of spite.

You're one of a kind, different from others

Generous, charming, but not one that smothers

Optimistic, thoughtful, happy and game

But not just another... in the long chain.

Appreciative, warm and precious like gold

Our friendship won't tarnish or ever grow old

You'll always be there, I know that is true

I'll always be here... always for you.

Homophones... What's a homophone and why is it important for learning English?

This is a picture I shared on Facebook a few months ago (thanks to Memrise).  It is a message from a secondary school teacher to her class about the need for checking written work for mistakes.  This is called proofreading.  The mistakes that the teacher talks about here are incorrect homophones.  If you don’t know what a homophone is, read the teacher's message again and see if you can find any mistakes (there are lots of them).  Here is the text:

Deer students,

Win you are righting something four my class, bee shore that you are using the write homophones.  Eye cannot tale you enough how unintelligent you look win you use the wrong word.  Their are know excuses four using the wrong words cause you have the education too no better.  Your smart enough to no the differences butt you rush threw you’re work and mess up.

Love, you’re concerned teacher lady, Ms Jenkins ;-)

Do you see what a homophone is now?  I hope you see that it is a word that has the same sound as another word.

When you are doing any sort of writing (emails, exams, essays, etc.) incorrect homophones are just one of the things you should take the time and proofread for when you are finished.  But be careful, don’t rely on Microsoft Word to find all the mistakes for you.  Here are the mistakes that Word 2013 found…

… I promise you there are many more mistakes than those.  How many deliberate mistakes can you find in this message?

Scroll down the page when you are ready to check…

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ORIGINAL TEXT (21 homophone mistakes)

Deer students,

Win you are righting something four my class, bee shore that you are using the write homophones.  Eye cannot tale you enough how unintelligent you look win you use the wrong word.  Their are know excuses four using the wrong words cause you have the education too no better.  Your smart enough to no the differences butt you rush threw you’re work and mess up.

Love, you’re concerned teacher lady, Ms Jenkins ;-)

CORRECTED TEXT

Dear students,

When you are writing something for my class, be sure that you are using the right homophones.  I cannot tell you enough how unintelligent you look when you use the wrong word.  There are no excuses for using the wrong words cause you have the education to know better.  You’re smart enough to know the differences but you rush through your work and mess up.

Love, your concerned teacher lady, Ms Jenkins ;-)

Hope this helps some of you reading this. If you are a teacher and would like to use this example to help your students practise proofreading, then I’ve made a PDF here.

Finally, here are a few funny cartoons that might help you remember some of these homophones (click on the cartoons to see a bigger version).

‘Words are Fun - Chapter 1: Homophones’

Help with Writing Practice (Website Recommendation)

If you want some practice writing, then short stories are definitely something you should try. Not all writing has to be marked by a teacher to be useful. Your teacher isn't with you all the time to check your reading, speaking or listening.

One of the problems that some people have is getting ideas about what to write about. This is certainly true for me. However, I've found it just takes one little piece of help, a ‘prompt’ (something which helps you to think about other things).

So try this little webpage – Prompt Generator. It will give you the first sentence of your story and then you just need to continue your story from there.  Just remember that a short story doesn't need to be a book.

Here’s an idea for you:

Write a different short story each day for two weeks. Use the Prompt Generator for help if you need it. At the end of your two weeks you should have 10 stories - you don't need to write at the weekend. :-)

Now, take a look at your first story again. I'm sure you will see some mistakes in it that you can now fix. Maybe there will be some new vocabulary or more details you want to add. For the next two weeks, take a look at one of your stories each day and see if you can improve it. For 10 minutes a day (just over 3 hours in one month) I'm sure you will be impressed with how much you improve.

Let me know how you do with your writing.

Help with Grammar & Academic Writing (Website Recommendation)

If you like grammar to be explained to you very clearly then you probably want to take a look at this website. 

The Lecturette is a website with short, simple slideshows (like Powerpoints) about grammar and academic writing. Just click on something you want more explanation about and the slideshow in the middle of the page will try to explain it. It looks like the website has most of grammar points that you would find in a grammar book. However, what I really like are the extra slideshows about academic writing. Definitely worth looking at if you are preparing for university courses in English.

If you are on Twitter you can also get updates about new lessons from Piet.

Coherence in Academic Writing (University Preparation Tip #3)

Here is a short comic.  The hairy character is called Irwin and the woman he's telling his story to is Broom-Hilda.

Broom-Hilda by Russell Myers

I hope you see there is a problem with Irwin's story, specifically about the structure and about the topic of the story. If you don’t see the problem, read the story again. Look at each picture and try to answer this question: What is the main focus of the story in part 1, in part 2, in part 3, etc?

Do you see the problem now?

Part 1 is about the Young Princess, whereas Part 2 is about Uncle Hernando and Part 3 is about the Great Depression. The story has no focus... no coherence.

Make sure you don’t have this problem in your writing by:

1. Deciding on one specific topic. 
2. Making sure the topic and conclusion sentences of each paragraph tries to connect the paragraph’s idea to your essay topic. 
3. Re-reading your work several times to make sure you have clear coherence in your writing. 
4. Getting a friend/colleague to read your essay and asking their opinion about the coherence of the work. 

If you want a bit more help understanding this topic, you might want to take a look at an earlier article I wrote - Cohesion and Coherence.

Enjoy,

Gordon

Plagiarism – So What? (University Preparation Tip #2)

Plagiarism is stealing ideas from other writers without explaining in your text that these ideas belong to another person. It can be a whole chapter, a section, a paragraph, a sentence, maybe only part of a sentence. It is a BIG academic culture shock to many students and probably one of the most complicated academic ideas to completely understand.

I will probably write more about plagiarism in the future but this is a short post to say this: Plagiarism is a serious problem in many countries. Here is my evidence:

Pál Schmitt (Picture from BBC)

This is Pál Schmitt. He was the President of Hungary from 2010 to 2012. In April 2012, Schmitt had to resign as president of the country because it was discovered that his Ph.D. was mostly plagiarised from Bulgarian and German sources. You can listen to the story from the BBC or click here to listen and read it.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (Picture from Wikipedia)

This is Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg. He was the German Defence Minister and many people believed that he would be the next Chancellor of Germany. Unfortunately, in March 2011, Guttenberg was forced to resign when it was discovered that he had copied more than half of his 475-page Ph.D. thesis from other sources.

Ioan Mang (Picture from Twittweb)

This is Ioan Mang. He was the Education Minister of Romania until May 2012 when he was forced to resign because of multiple counts of plagiarism in many of his academic papers.

There are other cases or plagiarism where the politicians still have their jobs but many people want them to resign; Romania’s Prime Minister Victor Ponta, Russia’s Cultural Minister Vladimir Medinsky and German Education Minister Annette Schavan.

Tony Blair (Picture from Wikipedia)

This is not only something that individual people do. Countries have also plagiarised. In 2003, the British Government, led by Tony Blair, copied the work of Dr. Ibrahim al-Marashi to make a document that Britain and America used to ‘prove’ that Saddam Hussein was making WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) in Iraq. Al-Marashi’s academic work was plagiarised and then used as military intelligence and this document helped to start the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

All of these cases of plagiarism have been found quite easily now with the latest plagiarism-checking software that nearly all universities use.

Plagiarism is becoming easier and easier to identify and it is causing big problems for very powerful people. So my advice to students from other countries is that this is important and you need to spend some time thinking about it and you need to make sure that you understand what it is 100%.  If you don't understand, you need to speak to your tutors/lecturers/supervisors/teachers and get them to explain it to you so you do understand.

Not understanding plagiarism is not an excuse for plagiarising.

Improve Your English, Edit a Wikipedia Page!

A few months ago I gave my students in Argentina a project and I think it worked very well.  We took the English Wikipedia page of the local city, Gualeguaychú, and we improved it.

How did the students do this?

My students looked at the Wikipedia article in the original language (Spanish) and then used this information to improve the English version.  Here is a comparison between the original Spanish and the English article before the students started the project.  As you can see the English article is MUCH smaller.

We copied the English article into Google Docs, shared the document with everybody and then the students started to work on building and improving the article.

Here is what they achieved.

As you can see, the English article is still shorter than the Spanish but it has significantly more information than it had.  This is okay, the English article doesn’t need to be as big as the original Spanish.

Click here to get higher resolution pictures of the Spanish, the old English article and the new English article.

What has this project done?

• The students worked together, learning from each other and improving each other’s English.
• The students have improved their vocabulary and their translation skills.
• The students have helped to advertise their home town.

See the Wikipedia pages here: Gualeguaychú (English) and Gualeguaychú (Spanish)

The Rules

If you want to improve your English with some friends or classmates then I think this type of project is a great way to do it.  However, if you want a project to succeed then you need to have rules.  These are the rules that we had.

1. Try to use the original Wikipedia article (if it exists) as a guide to help you build the English article but don’t worry if they are not exact translations.  Remember, good translations are often not exact translations.
2. Very Important - Don’t be afraid to make corrections of paragraphs that other people have written.  This is a collaborative piece of work.
3. Don’t invent information - everything in the article must be fact, not fiction.
4. You are not allowed to talk about personal opinions - these will be removed by Wikipedia.
5. Only do as much work as you want to do.  When it stops being fun, take a break!
6. If you are going to add photos, they need to be your photos or photos which are not copyright.  Copyrighted images cannot be used on Wikipedia.
7. Set a deadline and stick to it!  Give the project a week or a month.  Any more time than this will cause people to lose motivation.  At the end of the project deadline, take your work in Google Docs and update the Wikipedia page.  The article doesn't need to be perfect at the end - you can always continue to edit and improve it on Wikipedia.

Ideas

Writing about your hometown is a good topic.  Other topics you could work on might be famous local people (actors, authors, poets) or famous local people from history (inventors, military people, authors, etc.), maybe events in local history, or local buildings of historic significance.  If you don’t like history then you could important areas in the area (parks, theatres, museums, etc.).  Wikipedia doesn’t need to be your only source of information for your English article, if you do start doing some research you might learn something new about where you live.

Let me know how it goes!

Interview with Lewis Richards, teacher and co-author of IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills

Mr Lewis Richards!

Two good friends of mine have just published a book to help students improve their writing skills for the IELTS.  The book is called IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills and the authors are Richard Brown and Lewis Richards.

Lewis kindly agreed to a small interview, answering a few questions about himself and the book.

If your students were to describe you with 3 adjectives, what would they be?  I hope they would say: fun, hard-working and passionate about teaching.  But some would say 'strict' as well, I think!

You’ve just finished writing a book together.  Why did you write it?  We've been teaching IELTS for about 15 years between us, and there are lots of good IELTS books available, but we couldn't find one book that had everything students need to pass the writing part of IELTS.  So we started writing our own exercises, and over the last few years we've written hundreds of exercises that we use in class to help our students get a good writing score.  We decided to put all our ideas into a book, and hopefully it will help lots of students to get at least 6.5 in writing.

Who is the book for?  Well, the idea of the book is to show students step-by-step how to get a good writing score, in particular 6.5 or above.  We wrote the book so that you can use it as a self-study book, or with a teacher in class.  We know that lots of people don't have time to go to a language school to study an IELTS course, so the book is designed so that you can study it by yourself if you want to.  For example, many nurses or doctors who want to work abroad need to get a 7.0 in IELTS, but maybe don't have time to go to a school because of their jobs.  This kind of student can use the book at home.  We think it's clear and easy to read, and helps you improve your writing step-by-step.   Of course, you can also use the book in a class with a teacher, and in fact this is one of the best things about the book - every exercise in it has been tried out in class by us many times, so we know that it works.  Hundreds of students in our classes have got high scores using our material, so we feel confident it can help many other students as well.

If you weren’t a teacher, what might your profession be?  It's hard to say, I've been a teacher for 13 years, and I love it, I can't imagine doing another job, but I really enjoy writing, so maybe journalism.

What was the last book/movie you read/saw, and what have you seen/read way too many times?  At the moment I'm reading a book called 'Solar' by Ian McEwan, which is fantastic, but the book I re-read all the time is 'Catch 22' by Joseph Heller.  It's the funniest book I've ever read.  If you haven't read it, I recommend it.

What do you like to do to unwind (relax)?  I play tennis a lot, which helps get rid of stress.  Drinking beer helps too!

Why are you an English language teacher?  I think learning a foreign language is a really beautiful thing, which helps you to understand other cultures and ideas, and also of course to be successful in your studies or job.   When I was 23, I lived in France for a year, and the experience of learning to speak in French was wonderful.  Also, I really enjoy working with people from different countries, and I feel really proud when my students improve their English, and do really well in IELTS, for example.

Final Questions

If there were one thing you could remove from the English language to make it easier for learners of English, what would it be?  Articles.  Most languages don't have articles, and you don't really need to use articles - people will understand you whether you use articles or not.

Where will students be able to buy your book?  In September it will be on Amazon.com and in all good bookshops, or you can look at the website of our publishers for more information about how to buy it in your country.

Thank you for the interview, Lewis.  I’m sure the book will be a great success and help many students around the world.  Here are the links to the various Amazon sites where the book is available now:

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon UK

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon France

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon Germany

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon Canada

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon Austria

IELTS Advantage: Writing Skills on Amazon Japan

For more information from Lewis about the book, watch this video:

Marcia Lima's "secret" to language learning

I just read this on Marcia Lima's blog and just had to share it with you:

"My secret to language learning was perspiration, really!"

Perspiration = sweating = hard work!

"I always had to be very systematic about what I was to learn: I diligently listened to audio cassettes in English and wrote down the tapescript (it must be said that this was not as fun as listening to songs and writing down the lyrics, but just as effective!)."

An excellent way to improve listening and writing skills and, as Marcia says, song lyrics are a fun option.

"I also wrote word lists and illustrated the meaning of the words with pictures and/or sentences and memorized loads of chunks of language. Yes, memorization!!! I memorized lists of vocabulary, phrasal verbs and even interviews in English: questions and looooong answers. I can’t say I enjoyed the memorization process, but when I succeeded, I felt really proud and challenged myself with further memorization. I wasn’t aware of the role of memorization in foreign language learning back then... I was just a teen, but I was able to enjoy its benefits anyway. Today, if asked for advice, I’d certainly say: be systematic about what you learn."

Memorization, memorization, memorization!  It's not the only thing you need to learn a language, but it would be impossible to learn a language without it.

Thanks Marcia, great advice!  Go visit her blog and leave a comment or send her a tweet!

Daily Writing Tips (Blog Recommendation #5)

I think most of us have a secret desire to write novel.  If you think about it, a lot of our lives and conversations are spent telling stories: what you did last night, a funny incident when you were 8 years old, how you met your husband/wife, saying what you bought at the supermarket.  They are not all good or interesting stories but they are all stories.  So I think that most of us have the desire to write a whole novel, a big long story that we hope will become world famous.

If you are one of these people, then the next time you decide to try and do some writing you should take a look at this website.

www.dailywritingtips.com

Oh, and if you want to know how to start and complete a novel then you might want to try Matt Cutts's suggestion.  I showed this video in a previous post but I've put it here again, in case you missed it the first time.

What is Cohesion & Coherence? (Cambridge Testing Explained)

This post explains an important aspect of the marking structure of the IELTS exams.  Cambridge exams like IELTS, FCE, CAE and many others have strict guidelines about what makes a 5.5 or a 60%.  Here are the guidelines for marking/assessing IELTS Task 1 and IELTS Task 2 writing.

One of the columns is labelled Cohesion & Coherence.  This is one of the ways the writing is assessed: is the composition cohesive, is the composition coherent?  (Cohesion is the noun, cohesive is the adjective; coherence is the noun, coherent is the adjective.)  This is the focus on this post.

What is Cohesion & Coherence?

Cohesion and coherence aren't too difficult to explain.  Cohesion refers to connectivity in a text.  Coherence refers to how easy it is to understand the writing.

Cohesion & Coherence

"My favourite colour is blue.  I like it because it is calming and it relaxes me.  I often go outside in the summer and lie on the grass and look into the clear sky when I am stressed.  For this reason, I'd have to say my favourite colour is blue."

Cohesive AND coherent: Blue > Relaxes > Clear Sky > Blue (Photos from Flickr)

This sentence is both coherent and cohesive, but let's focus on the cohesion first.  I've highlighted the ways that each sentence is connected to the sentence before.

Cohesion with NO Coherence

Now, here is a sentence that has cohesion but is not coherent.

"My favourite colour is blue.  Blue sports cars go very fast.  Driving in this way is dangerous and can cause many car crashes.  I had a car accident once and broke my leg.  I was very sad because I had to miss a holiday in Europe because of the injury."

Cohesive NOT coherent: Blue > Sports Car > Fast Driving > Car Crashes > Broken Leg > Holiday in Europe (Photos from Flickr)

As you can see, there is plenty of cohesion here.  The sentences connect clearly together but if you read the paragraph, it really makes no sense - I start talking about blue and I finish talking about a holiday in Europe.  There is no coherence in this sentence.

Coherence with NO Cohesion

Now, let's take a look at a sentence that is coherent but not cohesive.

"My favourite colour is blue.  I'm calm and relaxed.  In the summer I lie on the grass and look up."

Coherent NOT cohesive: Blue - Calm & Relaxed - Looking Up (Photos from Flickr)

This is more difficult to understand but basically this lack of cohesion means a lack of sufficient connectors to join the ideas together.  If I try hard I can understand what the person is saying: a short answer, an explanation, an example; however the sentences don't fit together.

Cohesion & Coherence in Conversation

Are your conversations coherent?  Are they cohesive?

Now, in spoken discourse, the easiest example I can think of is a Cambridge First Certificate speaking exam, part 3: the students' conversation.  Two students are asked to talk about some pictures but if they do not respond to what each other is saying and make no attempt to reference each other then the conversation can be coherent but can completely lack cohesion.  For example:

A. "I think these people are having a good time."

B. "It appears these people are enjoying themselves."

A. "They seem to be on holiday."

B. "It looks like they are on vacation."

Obviously there is no connection between A and B in this conversation.  We understand them and they are coherent.  What is missing is cohesion.  They are not connected.  A is not listening to B and B is not listening to A.

On the other hand, take a look at this example:

A. "I think these people are having a good time."

B. "Time is difficult to manage.  I am always late for my social appointments like when I have a date with a girl."

A. "I like girls with long, dark hair and brown eyes."

B. "My dog has brown eyes and a long tail."

etc, etc.

This example shows that there is cohesion but the conversation makes no sense and therefore it is missing coherence.

Next time you are looking at a piece of writing; a newspaper, an essay you wrote, another student's essay, a web article like this one, you should consider the cohesion and coherence of the composition.  It is worth 25% of your IELTS mark and it is an important factor in the other Cambridge exams as well.

Hope this helps you.  Comments are welcome.