ENGLISH

Since today, this blog will use ENGLISH as the main language. This is because I failed my IELTS two times in a row. I got 5 for my writing skills, both of its. Even I take a private lesson for preparing the second IELTS, I still got 5 for writing and the worst part is the overall score band lowered 0.5 point from the first exam. Is quite pathetic right? That is why I decide to write English many-many time before I take the third and the last IELTS I take this year.

I suppose you guys wondering why I persist to take the IELTS in such a hurry. Well this is because I am going school again for my Master Degree at Swinburne. To able school there I need at least overall score six and not having a score below six for each band. There are four parts in IELTS. The first is listening, second is reading, third is writing and the last is speaking.

For listening, we are being played a tape and we must answer the question from the question book on answering sheet. The listening will take about 40 minutes for answer 40 questions. Reading we answer 40 questions which the answer can be found from reading an articles. There are 3 reading materials, and each reading has its level. In writing there are two tasks. Task one we must write about diagram and describe it for 150 words. On test two, they give us a sentences and our job is to develop those sentences into 250 words. It looks easy but to be honest with you it is hard, because I never write in English before. If you ask me to write in Indonesian, I’m sure will pas the needed score. But dream and reality is two different things.

I understand why is hard for me to write in English. There are at least two main factors that make me hard to write English. The first one and probably the main factor is I did not remember very well the rules of writing English. There are many rules for writing English and I’m not good at memorizing. And the second factor is I rare to write English in long lines. I hope by trying writing blog using English my writing skills will improve quite better.

And how I know if my writing is good enough? The answer is I using Microsoft word before I post it on my blog. In Microsoft word there are spelling and grammar function which detect our writing. It seems I’m cheating but this quite help me to understand how to using the rules for writing English. Beside writing blog using English I also think about taking another private lesson for writing. But I still don’t know where to take the lesson.

The last part for IELTS is speaking. In this part we do conversation with foreign people using English. They will ask us a question and we must answer it. I don’t know the criteria in speaking but I think the main factor is the foreign guy understands our words clearly. For this the only solution is to speak English as many as I can with my Girlfriend.

That is the last part of IELTS. And this is the last part of today topic. I’ll see you guys later on other topics.