Happy New Year!

victortanws
 

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!

English For The Long Term

victortanws
 

You’re probably here because you want to just get an A* for your English exam and then be done with it.

You’re looking for tips and tricks to be able to do well in the exams and then be able to go home and then just be done with it.

Well, I think that you should absolutely get what you want because that’s just one of the numerous things that a person should do along the way.

After all, once you master those English skills, it will surely be easy for you to do reading comprehension or, for example, write essays with no problems whatsoever.

After all, that’s what this training is meant for and why you’re even spending an evening looking at this website right now.

But is that really all? Is that all there is? Will you just take the A* and then go away?

If so, I think that that would be a crying shame.

English is a language that you’re going to use for the rest of your entire life. Right now, you’re reading everything here in English. You’ll probably go out there and speak to your friends in English, listen to an English-language TV show, and end up interacting with others in English as well.

Now, it’s absolutely true that from reading this site, you’ll learn the exam techniques and all the different things that you need to be able to excel at the IGCSE First Language English exam, but life at the end of the day is not just that exam.

In fact, a much wider world lies outside the things that you’re doing just for the purpose of doing well for this curriculum. Here are some suggestions for what you’ll get.

Professional benefits

English is, first and foremost, a means of communication, and even writing an exam paper is an act of creating a communication that tells your examiner that you are a qualified person, somebody who has the ability to deliver quality work that is able to be recognized on an international level as operationalizing key skills in the English language – an act of persuasion that will be important throughout the entire course of your adult and professional life.

Persuading others is not simply just a way of creating an exam response that manages to pass the expectations of some examiners, and then net you a nice-looking grade on a slip of paper that you’ll use for college applications but then forget about – It is also a means of learning to convince other people to do what you want, whether that’s to buy a product or to do something in a way that you advocate, leading in turn to professional success as you take on further responsibilities and refine the things that you are able to do; heck, even finding a boyfriend or girlfriend requires you to persuade people and to do so in a convincing way!

Whether you’re trying to find a job or a girlfriend/boyfriend, you will be involved in this game of communication that takes place between all human beings at all times, and that requires us to make use of our minds in order to discover the exact words that we should say in order to persuade people that your way is the right way to proceed, and to accomplish your goals in the right way!

Benefits of understanding.

English is not simply just a means of producing communications that can persuade other people – it is a means of developing understanding and coming to terms with what your goals are.

By reading the right works, you set yourself up to develop advanced understanding and a medium of pursuing knowledge that comprises far more than almost any other linguistic corpus in the world. Moreover, learning English, particularly with respect to developing critical thinking and skills of understanding, will help you to be able to access that corpus in increasingly better ways as you progress forward and develop the ability to comprehend on a greater scale as you move forward in your journey.

By committing to learning English well, you will learn how to read effectively, critically, with insight. English is not simply just a means of producing communications that can persuade other people. It is a means of developing advanced understanding and a medium of pursuing knowledge that comprises far more than almost any other linguistic corpus in the world. Moreover, learning English, particularly with respect to developing critical thinking and skills of understanding, will help you to be able to access that corpus in increasingly better ways as you progress forward and develop the ability to comprehend on a greater scale as you move forward in your journey.Whatever it is that you see and process, you’ll be able to better understand, as you develop better and better habits of critical thinking that will help you move forward, pushing into a realm of new understanding that in turn will inform the interests that you pursue and all the things that you choose to do with your life itself.

And with that in mind, English also allows you to obtain…

Benefits of connectivity

Let’s be totally real here. English, at the end of the day, is a language, and it is the lingua franca of the entire universe. Are you really going to just abandon it and forget completely about what you’ve learned just because you’re not taking an exam? Because it’s really impossible to do so.

Wherever it is that you go and whatever it is that you do, whatever you communicate, read, or speak to other people, you are going to be using the English language.

Therefore, why would you not learn to bring to bear the different types of nuance that you’ve come to be able to understand as a result of learning the English language?

It doesn’t matter where it is that you go, you will find English speakers around the world because there are just so many of us.

Learning how to speak the English language effectively helps give you exposure to so many different types of cultures and ideals that you essentially would be losing out if you were not to understand how to refine your skill, to catch shades in meaning, the variations in the ways that people use words, and the things that you choose to communicate as well.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, these are all things that you can access by developing a great understanding of the English language, and that would be a shame for you to simply just abandon and leave behind.

Learning how to master the English language helps you develop that kind of mastery, not just over the short term, but over the long term, resulting in large amounts of knowledge and understanding that will end up compounding over the course of your entire life.

Are you really going to just let that go after you’ve taken the exam? Simply let it become a single grade in the hallways of your high school memory when you could make it so much more?

I’d encourage you to not let it become like that. English has so many different long-term advantages that you would be remiss in just dismissing them offhand and just throwing them away because you think that there are other more important things to do. By mastering English, you will gain access to an entire world of different possibilities that lie beyond your IGCSE exams, so don’t let those advantages go. Rather, seize them and take them into your life, and you will find yourself with a much richer and much more exciting existence in the days to come, if only you will let that happen.

40 Excellent Descriptive and Narrative Essays

victortanws
 

Hey everyone, very happy to announce that I’m releasing a brand new compilation of descriptive and narrative essays for your reading pleasure. These essays are tailored to the May 2023 IGCSE 0500 exams and they will be a wonderful companion for you as you discover the wonders of rhetoric and learning along the way.

You can pick your copy up today if you’d like to learn how to score that A*, how to craft an incredible essay for FLEand just how to get a good sense of what good writing is to suit your needs.

Here’s a sample – have a look inside!

If you’d like to purchase the book, you can purchase it here 🙂

Enjoy and have a wonderful week ahead!
V.