grammar and summarising

21 Feb 2014

The past and perfect tenses in English

We reviewed the various past tenses and their roles in English and noted how:


“Corpus spots”

There are yellow sections in the text book called Corpus spots and they are analyses of the text corpus that Cambridge English holds about of the answers candidates have given in exam questions over the years.
The book uses these to show common mistakes that students make in the CPE exam. I do not find these as helpful as the writers seem to do so I will ignore them in the book.

Adjective formation

Making adjectives out of nouns and nouns out of verbs etc. is part of the everyday bread and butter of the CPE student’s life and is especially important in paper 1 part 3 where there is a word formation cloze test.

I will try and bring a hand-out on this subject matter to the next lesson on 27 March 2014.

Summarising

First you should watch the Monty Python Summarizing Proust Competition

Summarising is a skill that is is required in paper 2 part 1 the compulsory writing activity where you are given two “short” texts and are asked to summarise and comment on them.
Key ideas that are important in this task are:


Homework (for 27 February 2014)

The homework task you need to carry out are:


Room on 27 February 2014

I have booked room 257 again for that session but it will be our last in that room as another course arrives there in March. Still check the notices though.