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english standard (1 Viewer)

Danger

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how hard will it be to achieve 80% or more for eng standard (HSC)? english is obviously my weakest subject and i want to know how much time i should spend on english. im aiming for uai 95+ with subjects maths ext1, ext2, english std, chemistry and physics
 

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Only 700 people in Standard English, 2005, got Band 5.
They're fairly articulate people.

English is my weakest area too :( ... generally, if you need more time spend as much as you can without having a great impact on other subjects ...
 

Danger

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also, whats the best way to study for english anyway?
 

hopeles5ly

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Danger said:
also, whats the best way to study for english anyway?
Memorize Essays. As long as you can answer every single question thrown at you, then a band 5 shouldn't be that hard.
 

jemsta

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band 5 is 80-90%
to OP, since all your subjects are high scaling subjects bar english, then a band 4 should be sufficient provided you get at least 3 out of 4 band 6s for either maths ext 1, maths ext 2, phys or chem
have a play around with SAM or juai and see what you get
 

Sukey

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I say the best way to study for English is to prepare a generic essay and practice applying it to different questions. You also need to pratice writing as fast as you can.

For Module B though, it's really hard to memorise an essay as the questions are so unpredictable. so I guess for that one, you should just do a lot of dot points and apply them to different questions.

Standard English is quite low scaling, however, they have been improving in the past years. You must also notice as well, the standards of the essays have been rising. If you read the sample papers they release every year, you can see significant improvement. You read the 2004 papers and they are soooo bad!
 

Beege

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Sukey said:
I say the best way to study for English is to prepare a generic essay and practice applying it to different questions. You also need to pratice writing as fast as you can.

For Module B though, it's really hard to memorise an essay as the questions are so unpredictable. so I guess for that one, you should just do a lot of dot points and apply them to different questions.

Standard English is quite low scaling, however, they have been improving in the past years. You must also notice as well, the standards of the essays have been rising. If you read the sample papers they release every year, you can see significant improvement. You read the 2004 papers and they are soooo bad!
I have just been reading over my comprehensive notes on We All Fall Down and doing practice essays. Some of the questions they throw at you aren't broad enough. I struggled to write 3 A4 pages on 'how does the author draw you into the world of the novel question'
 

Trebla

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Forgive me if this seems a bit arrogant, but I reckon it's fairly easy to score band 5 in English Standard. It's all about targeting the right thing.

A lot of people in Standard do not know a lot of basic jargon that is extremely relevent in their responses such as context and audience reaction.

I personally found it quite shocking that many people I knew who scored band 4 did not know the fundamental relationship between the composer's context, the composer's purpose, literary devices, the effect of these devices on the audience, and how this effect attempts to orientate the audience's perspective of a certain idea or context. So to be at band 5 level, typically means that you need to understand these basic concepts in English under each module heading.

Another thing I noticed with those who scored band 4 is that they are often confused about the requirements of the module and many didn't even realise that you have to approach your essays/responses differently with each module.

So, Module A - Experience Through Language, means you have to examine how composers use particular aspects (either narrative, dialogue or image) to allow the audience to experience the their perspective(s).
Module B - Close Study of Text, means you have to engage with your text very closely and thoroughly, and examine how several features like context, certain literary devices, medium, genre, themes/messages etc, make up the distinctive (unique) qualities of the text.
Module C - Texts and Society, means you have to relate texts with their context and how composers attempt to represent an aspect of society in those texts.

Many band 4 students do not know the above and often blindly answer a question by regurgitating memorised essays word for word or writing down irrelevent ideas (e.g. tell the story rather than analyse it).

So basically, it's not about the time you spend on English, it's about whether you explicitly understand the concepts or not (and similarly applies for most other subjects). I think the raw mark to get 80 last year was about 70/105, so that'll give you something to aim for.

I for one, spent the least weighting of my study on English and still managed a mid to high band 5. I'm sure you can as well....;)
 

Beege

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Well here is my schools marking scheme out of 15:

13-15 (band 6) - Highly Developed
10-12 (band 5) - Well Developed
7-9 (band 4) - Sound Development
4-6 (band 3) - Generalised Development
1-3 (band 2) - Elementary Development
0 (band 1) - Non Attempt

My marks so far have been 9.5 and 9 for two essays that I have written. Do you think my essays would actually be equivalent to a band 4? I'm trying to get into the well developed band to improve my rank.
 

Trebla

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Well I can't be the judge of that, firstly because schools often have different standards to the BOS, and secondly because I've never seen any of your essays...:p

I'm guessing that since you said you could 'only' manage 3 x A4 pages for last year's Module B question (which is more than what I wrote in the HSC anyway :p), then you probably could do better by relating many more examples and squashing your words so you can be as succinct as possible.

In my opinion, that question was very broad, (considering that in 2005, they asked for an analysis of a particular scene/extract, which is very specific) because you can incorporate any unique aspect of your text, especially context and the several themes/messages of the text. The 'how' part refers to literary devices and the 'drawing into the world' means the effect of those literary devices in attempting to orientate you (as the audience) to see the composer's perspective of the world. There are many ways to approach this question.

The way that I approached it, was that I organised my response into three main themes and underlying messages in my text and for each analysed many techniques and relevent examples (i.e. 4-5 of them for each) and how they were effective in allowing me to see the composer's view of the world. In my case, the text was the Shoe-Horn Sonata, so I related some of the feminist themes to how they orientated my views on the historical event of World War II (i.e. the context), which in this case, is the perpesctive that there is a lack of recognition of women in war.
That was probably the easiest, yet effective method of approaching the question. Of couse, there are other methods of approaching this question, such as analysing the effectiveness of many specific extracts/scenes as a whole which could work just as well depending on how well you answer the question.
 

RyLix

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Memorizing essays isn't really a good idea. I'd recommend to study it off past papers such as H.S.C papers. It really helps and also teachers are lazy to create new problems. I certainly read alot of books because it improves by vocabulary. It is really handy to write down words that you don't know. Then you can use those words in an essay to make it sound better.
 

Beege

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I'm learning new words at the moment. It is really easy to pick them up i.e. memorise them easily. Every time I will hear a word that i'm not familiar with from now on I will look it up in the dictionary.
 

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RyLix said:
Memorizing essays isn't really a good idea. I'd recommend to study it off past papers such as H.S.C papers. It really helps and also teachers are lazy to create new problems. I certainly read alot of books because it improves by vocabulary. It is really handy to write down words that you don't know. Then you can use those words in an essay to make it sound better.
At least someone agrees.
 

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