How I jumped from C5 to A2 in O-Level English (and how you can do better than me)
I took my O level and was very active in this community last year. Today I’m just going to share my experience of me jumping grades in English.
Before anything, you need to understand that English is one of the hardest subjects to improve on. It is very possible to jump from C or D to A1 in a few months for math and science but it’s going to take you way longer for English. There’s no easy way out(if you don’t have HMT like me) and you’ll have to put in your effort. I started my sec 3 years with a C6 and I never get anything above 60% for my essays. My English grade was in the bottom 20% of my class for a first few terms and I still get many C5s all the way to WA2. I always pushed myself to study English harder, but I really all in for June Hol.
Improving my weak language fundamental
From June to August, I spent at least 1 hour a day reading Harry Potter(Around 1. That was the first English fictional book I finished. I wrote down every vocabs I don’t know(surprisingly 20-30 words per chapter) and searched for meaning + tried writing sentences with them. I ended up with around 700+ vocabs on my book combined with 800+ I already had earlier from Atlas(an app for vocab training) and other news articles(these are better for essays writing). I really feel the different especially in narrative compre where I can actually get higher than 60% because I understand the passage more.
Doing better in Paper 1
After the all the reading, I find my text editing score range improved on its own from 4-6 in sec 3 to 8-10 near O level. For essay and situational writing , I just try to write out O level questions and send to my teacher to mark. I did around 2-4 questions/week. By this time you should already have an idea of what question type you want to do in O level and stick to it. What I found helpful for Discursive and argumentative writing was you already have some kinds of structure in your head before going to exam(Eg. Connectors, arguments order) then the contents just depends on the question prompts. It’s not the most ideal way to improve your language or achieve very high marks but it does help reducing language errors for people with weak fundamentals like me
Oral tips
I would say the best you can do is stick to the structure and keep yourself calm. The examiners can’t recheck your points so most likely you’ll get benefit of the doubt even if your contents aren’t that good as long as you provide multiple perspectives. The delivery is the most important so don’t overthink even if you can’t think of good points.
Getting a lot of support
I booked consultations with my teacher 1-2 times a week during term 3-4 of Sec 4. I’d say it really helped me a lot because some mistakes you’re making can only be spotted by teachers.
Some of my mistakes not to follow
Use your AI wisely. Some tasks like comprehension answers you might need checking from teachers but simple essays/ text editing you can type for AIs to review once before getting real feedback from teachers when AI already says it’s fine. AVOID CHAT GPT if you don’t have prompt/customised bots for essay marking, it tends to glaze you too much.
If you start now, you’re still starting earlier than me when I started last year. Just have to make sure you put in all the effort you have, be disciplined with yourself, follow all the plans. Also don’t make excuses like you need to wait for your teachers to check like me. Most importantly, have a clear reason why you started.
Thank you for reading. Any need for help/ specific advice pls dm.