Mistakes to avoid when taking the 2016 National High School Exam in English

"With the reading comprehension and filling in the blanks section, due to limited vocabulary or fear and boredom with this type of question, many answers are incorrect," said Ms. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong (Hocmai.online Center).

In the 8 subjects of the 2015 national high school exam, English had the lowest score (2.5 points), which shows that currently many students are still very vague about English knowledge.

Therefore, the 2016 national high school exam is approaching but many students are scared and confused, especially when the English exam has an additional essay including rewriting sentences and writing paragraphs, it becomes even more challenging.

Regarding the above issue, PV had a conversation with Ms. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong (teaching name Huong Fiona) - a teacher with many years of experience in English exam preparation.

- Miss, could you please tell me what are the common mistakes candidates often make while taking the English test?

In the multiple choice test, candidates often make phonetic mistakes because they do not pay attention to pronunciation or word stress when learning new words or do not understand the rules for word stress, so candidates are often afraid of this type of test or tend to guess randomly.

There are also errors in not reading the question carefully in the synonym/antonym section, which is when looking for an answer that is close in meaning to the underlined word while the question requires finding an antonym.

For questions whose answers require combined knowledge of 2 or 3 topics in English, such as passive voice combined with subject-verb agreement or passive voice combined with to/Ving and conjugation, many students cannot solve all the parts of the knowledge asked. Most students can only handle one part without considering all the factors carefully, so they give wrong answers.

With the reading comprehension and filling in the blanks section, limited vocabulary or fear and boredom with this type of question lead to many incorrect answers.

Candidates should remember that what they understand is always more important than what they don’t understand in the test, so stay calm to read and process it best. The information asked can be found through the keywords and through the logic of the content and spirit throughout the test.

In the essay writing section: While writing a paragraph, students often start writing without outlining the paragraph, leading to errors in structure, lack of logic, and unconvincing ideas. In addition, students often use the wrong structure, wrong word order, lack of articles, incorrect tenses, and do not ensure S & V harmony.

In addition, in the Vocabulary section, there are errors such as: repeating words (using the same word too many times) or using inappropriate and undiversified words.

- With the characteristics of both essay and multiple choice exams, how should candidates allocate their test time to be reasonable and effective, ma'am?

If the candidate's goal is to get 5 - 6 points, then in the exam, they should spend 40 minutes completing 34 multiple choice questions (the easiest questions to score on the exam); 30 minutes for 2 reading comprehension questions and the fill-in-the-blank passage, and 20 minutes for the essay question.

If you want to get 8-10 points, spend 30 minutes (maybe a little more) on 34 multiple choice questions, 30 minutes on 2 reading comprehension and fill-in-the-blank passages, and 30 minutes on the essay (writing an essay takes 3 minutes to outline and 3 minutes to check after completing the essay).

In fact, English is not dry or scary, but in fact it is colorful and lovely if you open your heart and learn it with love and passion. Currently, our country Vietnam is gradually integrating with the world economy, not knowing English to communicate and work is no different from being illiterate.

To best prepare for the future, take advantage of this "terrible pressure" to study English with all your might to do your best in this subject in the upcoming national high school exam and then be able to confidently travel around the world without worrying about language barriers.

- Thank you for sharing!

According to Infonet