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First Language English

First Language English GCE O Levels

This is not a cult!

Victor Tan
 

Hello friends!!

This morning, something pretty funny happened. I was casually checking the performance of this app that I created about a few days ago to realize that a few hundred people had liked it and everything, which was a little bit surprising along the way, but nothing really to shout at, because just because somebody likes your advertisement doesn’t mean that they’re actually going to buy it. 

But as I looked more deeply into things, I realized that there was something odd that was happening. 

Comments had started appearing over and over again, and somehow or another, all of them read the exact same thing.

Amen… Amen… It wasn’t just one amen. 

After the first amen, there was a second. After the second, there was a third.

A string of amens greeted me as I scrolled down the page, looking at all these people there who seemed to be throwing up their metaphorical hands in worship. 

And I can’t help but throw the ball back to you. 

Why? 

Here’s the original ad.

It’s a relatively simple ad that I’m using to advertise the fact that I’ll be starting up live class signups again.

I understand that it is a book, and I understand that the picture looks pretty, but there’s no indication here or anywhere else on the page that this is a cult.

I am not asking you to worship me.

I do not want your divine favor, your words of fateful reverence that will not ascend up to a sky, but instead into dead space. Because I am not your guru, your spiritual leader through a tumultuous world.

Just a simple academic guide.

I hope that this is nothing serious, and I think that this is probably nothing more than just a simple advertising experiment gone awry. Speaking about that, here’s my take on it – I think what happened was that Meta’s advertising algorithm sent out my budget to advertise to people who were being bid at a relatively low level.

Now I could do something weird like complain about how people who are of low income have greater desperation and will latch on to anything that they feel is meaningful, but I won’t do that. I would rather simply declare this as a small failure on my part to target the right people in this case, and will take it as a lesson for the future. 

Having said that though, there is a small hope on my part that whoever these people are, that they won’t look just to a picture of a book in order to determine the entirety of their meaning.

Either that, or that they will not just declare affirmations or amens to things that aren’t even in support of any particular cause. As a human being, I believe that there are many more meaningful things that a person can do in this world than pay homage to a picture of a holy book, for the story of life is long, it is complex, and there are many things that lie beyond an apparently captivating image on a phone screen.

Whatever the circumstance though, and even if it was the result of a haphazard and mistaken waste of a hundred ringgit in total, I hope that whoever was impacted by it will receive some sort of comfort, hope, and a desire to push forward to the future. Amidst the whirl of things unchangeable, to navigate beyond that which cannot be changed, and to recognize with the perspicacity and necessary wisdom that which can be, in the course of time, either directly or indirectly, through my path or something else. Whatever it is though, it was an interesting laugh. Not something I hope to be venerated for, but hopefully some good Saturday morning entertainment 🤭

Thank you for reading.

Ciao for now, and please remember, please don’t worship me.

You have better things to do… Like study English, for instance!!!

Speaking of which, did I mention? I’m opening up sign-ups for my IGCSE group classes, which take place on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7:30pm at GMT +8. If you need help with the First Language English, please feel free to follow my Facebook page and drop a message here 🙂

Chat soon!

V.

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First Language English General English Site update

Happy New Year!

Victor Tan
 

Happy, happy new year, everyone! I can’t believe that it was just a couple of days ago that we were all doing our preparations for the end of the year, going on holidays, and just celebrating Christmas.

But now, it looks like we’re right into the thrust of brand new year, and the school year is starting for many of you out there, and I wish you the very best for that.

As we come into a new year, I hope that many more of you are going to see the importance of the English language (and not just IGCSE First Language English!) in your everyday lives, and not only just become better at using it on a day-to-day basis, or understanding the nuances that make it such a beautiful and incredible language, but I also hope that somehow or another that you’re going to find joy in being able to make use of the skills that you learn in the upcoming year of 2024 to understand the world better.

2024 was a year of profound challenge for many of us out there. People faced war, struggle, and strife.

Even as we took part in our studies, faced with the luxury of being able to simply learn unabated and unstopped by anything out there, there was a great privilege on our parts to be able to obtain knowledge, and obtain knowledge you did through this website and through the various resources that were available here.

Thank you for doing that, and thank you for investing in yourselves.

Meanwhile in these early days of the year, I’d like to advise you all to take a moment of time and think about the English language outside of your exam performance, and to see it as something that is capable of bringing you more than just that scholarship and more than just that university admission, because those are all extrinsic motivations, goals that come from outside of ourselves, and things that, at the end of the day, are outside of the English language.

Now, of course I know that a lot of you out there, you have your own reasons for wanting to excel in this exam. You don’t know the exam format, you just want to get that A star or various other things out there.

But, amid this new beginning, I encourage you to be more reflective about why you’re doing this, and how you can move from just being motivated by a carrot at the end of a stick, towards looking for all the many reasons that you have out there to become better at the language, because it’s interesting, because it’s going to help you to access dramas, because it’s going to help you to just become a knowledgeable person at the end of the world, as you master the world’s lingua franca and have it right at your fingertips.

In the year ahead, I have no doubt that many of us will continue to face challenges that are of unprecedented scale and scope, but I’m also confident that many of you out there are going to thrive, having taken the first steps to do so by seeking out the knowledge that you need from here – and we hope to provide more to you in the year ahead.

As you thrive, I hope that you will take this message with you into the year, as you consider ways of strategizing and building your strategies outwards towards developing yourself as an effective English language learner.

Go get those A stars if you’re looking for them, and go conquer the world as you see it. If this website was able to be a part of your journey, then I’m tremendously honored, and I wish you the very best for an outstanding 2024.

Have a great one ahead, and I look forward to seeing you soon!

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First Language English General English Grammar

I’m Writing An IGCSE English Grammar Book!

Victor Tan
 

Every Sunday evening, my family and I have dinner together – it’s a classic Tan Family thing where we gather relatives from all over different parts of KL and we just have a good meal together and spend some quality time together enjoying fellowship with one another and having conversations about many different things.

One of these conversations was about language learning.

As some of you know, I’m in the process of compiling a grammar book at the moment for IGCSE students – it’s a process that began about two weeks ago when I realized that one of the hugest gaps in instruction for IGCSE students (both First Language and English as a Second Language) is grammar, which has led to a long process of writing that continues to this day and even more extensive reading as I research what needs to be included and as I refine the work.

As a matter of fact, I read four entire grammar books in the past ten days, inclusive of Swan’s Practical English Usage (~600 pages), Penston’s A Concise Grammar for English Teachers (~130 pages), Parrott’s Grammar for English Language Teachers (~400+ pages); the last one was a recommendation from my relatives, many of whom hailed from an earlier generation and learned English from this book:

It was interesting to leaf through the pages of this old gem; browsing through it, I couldn’t help but think that it was a wonderful resource… Though one that was quite clearly incomplete.

Still, though, it offered me some valuable guidance and thoughts on how to structure my own book and, more importantly, highlighted for me the generational gap in English language proficiency faced by many students in Malaysia and the world at large, whether schooled in international schools or otherwise.

There is little formal training for students to get better at grammar within a schooling context, and almost every resource that I’ve seen focuses altogether too much on topic-based learning (which is understandable to a degree) to the extent that a sustained focus on understanding the rules of the game seems to have been entirely forgone.

The consequence? An entire generation of students who seem to be navigating the waters of good rhetoric with a hole in their metaphorical ships, allowing meaning and comprehension to slip through because the rules that govern language are not familiar in their heads and the powers that be assume familiarity with them or are unable to assess the extent to which student work is grammatical or isn’t for they themselves are unfamiliar with the rules of the game themselves and presume to teach a higher order skill that they themselves have only imperfectly procured.

It’s for this reason that I’m writing The Complete Grammar Guide for IGCSE English Students, a book that I hope you’ll find enjoyable and tailored to the unique context of the IGCSE, whether for First Language English or English as a Second Language.

I’ll be continuing to draft and write the book in the week ahead in preparation for formatting, but just as a bit of a sneak peek for you, have a look at some of the covers I’ve compiled and that I will be using in the days ahead 🙂 (Which ones do you like? Let me know in the comments!)

I wonder what difference this book will make in people’s lives, but I do know for sure that it’s important to me to create this because I think that it will help to impact many people in this world 🙂

If you’d like to contribute towards my understanding of what is needed, do feel free to drop a comment in the blog post or to communicate with me, and I’ll look forward to working with you soon. Enjoy the week, everyone, and rest assured that I’ll be working hard to bring you more content in a bit – I’ll look forward to catching you again soon!

V.

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