IB ENGLISH A SL: How to get a 7? | Sharing my Notes!

hey guys welcome to the channel and to the third video of the series where i go through my study method and tips for each of my iv subjects in this video we've come to english which is probably the subject i've grown most in i've started english by scoring fours and fives in class and towards the end of ib i was actually able to score six marks above the boundary for a seven so now let's get right into the video [Music] so first i want to talk about how i study my literature works that means the books and all the texts that your teacher chose from the ib prescribed list for your class to study just to clarify my cohort did not have paper 2 because i'm part of the may 2021 cohort and our paper 2 was removed from assessment in studying literature works i found the most important thing you can do is to learn how to annotate correctly that helps you to learn more effectively and organize your thoughts in the past i really didn't know how to annotate no one taught me how to annotate every time when i highlight things i chose a different color i used a different color to highlight different things i underlined which i have no idea what underlying means to me what i want to stress here is to develop a systematic way of annotating i searched online on youtube that time and then i just learned from other people's color coding method so i identified the five most important things that you want to look in literature work so for me that was tone diction detail figurative language and syntax and so i allocated one color to each of these things i was looking for this makes it so much easier for me to analyze the text because first i know exactly what i want to look for in this text i'm not just looking for random things i know i'm looking for one of these five things and secondly when you look back on your work your thoughts are more organized when i look at the color blue i know in the sentence i'm analyzing the tone while if you look at my one some of my earlier like annotation i have no idea why i was underlining there and i have no idea why this one was a green color because i was just using random colors to highlight things as you stick to the same color coding method over time it really helps you to prime you into your workspace and then it really helps you to get engaged onto the text a bit more than usual using this method to annotate is like one of the most life-changing hacks that i've ever used and so in annotation i do take baby steps in terms of how i annotate and what i add to my annotation so first when my teacher prescribed a chapter for us to read overnight the first thing i'll do is to read over the text without any distractions and then start annotating it could be anything that i noticed from the five things that i pointed out it could also be like what i felt from reading the text if i have a question just write down anything that popped it into your head and i want to stress here that please do this step without any external resources so don't look at any of these like summary websites like lit charts spark notes don't look at them first because you want to form this first impression from what you've read and this is so important in terms of forming your own perspective and forming your own argument because different people can have different understanding of the same piece of text because english is a skill-based subject you're not doing yourself justice if you rely on external resources and skip the process of processing and digesting the text on your own it's actually sort of doing like paper one like when you first read the text you're approaching this text that you've never seen before and you're already starting to analyze in your head so when you are doing this process of annotation of reading your text you are actually also preparing for a paper one skills so i used to be the type of person where when i read books i skim through the text and i forgot to understand what i was reading this process of annotation really helped me to feel engaged with the text and help me to block out any other distractions and it saved me so much time it really helped me to gain a much more deeper understanding of the text that i was looking at so after i read it for the first time and possibly like rereading some of the parts that i didn't understand then i start looking at secondary resources i think i use like lit charts and some of spark notes um i'll show that some of the ones i use i do look at multiple ones because i like to look at different perspectives and then after i resume this i start adding some of the things that they said into my annotation so if you did the first process of processing your text first yourself very well you'll notice that a lot of the things like written in like lit charts and spark notes are will be stuff that you have written down already when i was first developing and learning this process i did struggle but sometimes i might have not noticed something that was pretty obvious and so it's a process that you have to just like keep practicing over time and over time you'll just be more and more used to analyzing things we have a sketchbook and then sometimes i just uh wrote like the type the title for each chapter and just wrote out some main things so it's almost like a summary to each chapter for me this is helpful because and i don't know six months when you want to study for this text again it's easier for you to look back to the book and understand like which chapter is that you're actually looking for it's much more easier to refer back to these texts and they can just be like two or three bullet points that help you to like get a general idea of what this chapter was talking about my class is mainly based on discussion so my teacher like she does lead um discussions but it was mainly up to us i really just love listening to other people's perspectives by understanding like the other side of like what other people might understand you're also trying to understand what the examiner might think because you don't know what the examiner might think about your text so if you like understand all almost all the possible ways that people can understand this text you have a much stronger graph of the text and not just a very one-sided perspective so this is again a skill that you develop over time the more you talk to other people the more you're beginning to realize how these people might think of this text compared to you and sometimes you might have conflicting understandings and i would say don't be afraid to try and defend your stance because by defending your stance you're actually basically making an argument you're actually doing paper one orally the better you are at talking it out the better you will be at writing it down and making a stronger argument to just be active in discussions and just like practice this on a daily basis like in all of your english classes so towards the end when you do paper one you act you actually feel very confident in making an argument because you've done it orally to your friends your teachers so many times already i know i kept mentioning paper one i know like for literary works it's like not about paper one but what you do in class is like what you will be doing in exams and this is just a skill you have to develop over time there are no shortcuts to it some other tips i found helpful was to get an audiobook you can easily find audiobooks i just looked for stuff on youtube and i just let that audio book play while i was reading the text on my physical book i feel like this just prevents me from getting sidetracked it also helps you to like get an understanding of the tone and mood because the way in which the narrator reads the text might actually be the tone or the mood that the author intends it to be and also what you can do as you read your literature text is to note words that are more complex and more complicated that you can potentially add to your vocabulary bank i try to do this throughout because eventually you will need this literature work for your i o and for a paper too if your assessment is not removed and they both of those assess you on like the vocabulary you use and how accurate it is so i feel like the easiest part to get the accurate vocabulary is from the text itself it's just small things over time that actually build up and that can actually help you in your um studying process a lot more so for instance like instead of using the word sad to describe the tone a more advanced word would be mournful and if you want to take it further it could be something like lugubrious and you can get these type of words from like tone words bank and then try to apply it and talking to your teacher about it so all these preparations are there to help you to do well in your i o like for me because i just didn't have paper one and for on my i o i was predicted a 39 out of 40 which i'm super proud of because the text i love that text like we read the things they carried it's just one of my favorite books i will not be talking about my i o in this video because i had a whole other preparation process for when i am actually uh preparing for my i o and preparing for like the assessment so i'll be making a separate video about it uh on my english ie soon and share them to you guys so you guys can um access like my actual i o that was submitted to the ib so consider subscribing to stay tuned to my ia videos [Music] let's move on to actually how like you can prepare for a paper one and this is the only exam assessment that we had which is sort of weird it takes up 55 of your overall grade so paper one is mostly about your ability to analyze and to justify your argument with the effective use of evidence so you definitely have to practice no matter what like use past paper text from ib english textbooks but here i want to tell you the process of me studying for paper one so hopefully you can learn something from it and you can implement some methods that i use to try to make the best out of doing past papers actually before i do past favors i actually look over the types of stylistic features out there and i did this because my teacher never talked about stylistic feature in a very structural manner in class so i had to look at it outside of class like at that point i only knew very very simple stylistic features so i looked at stylistic feature a lot outside of class and i did a lot of study outside of class well not a lot but i did some and my teacher uh she could see that like because i was naming some stylistic features that are very like obscure and then like she was asking me about it and in terms of looking stylistic features outside of class don't memorize all of them there's so many there's no way that you can memorize all of them and also it doesn't work unless you really start applying them and actually start seeing what they really are so what i did here was that i looked at the cambridge iv english textbook so i'll link it in this description it's this one one with this cover i looked at that one and i found that textbook to be the most helpful because it organized its table of content based on the different text types so you can easily see the different stylistic features that are commonly associated with a specific text type i read over this english textbook i think over summer like i read a bit every day this is just to give me an idea on what the possible features that i can potentially analyze on in the future for instance in the past i didn't know something as simple as primary colors can be noted and can be analyzed and it also really helped me to like actually note the obvious yeah this is important i'm going to build it on the screen note the obvious because some things as simple as like the use of empirical evidence have a reason behind it and sometimes we just forget to talk about those because we just assumed that everyone would know but pointing it out is still important because it could be one bullet point on the my scheme so this is something i learned a lot from just like bringing these textbooks and also looking over mark's schemes and so after i looked through these like textbooks and stuff like that i started beginning to do past papers so i feel like when you start doing past papers like outside of class if your teacher did instruct you to do so at the beginning i think it's better if you write a full essay and when you really do get hang off the time and everything else like towards the end maybe the last month um before you go into exam you can start writing essay outlines instead of full essays so when i do this i start to apply the stylistic features that i saw on the textbook previously onto the text and i tried to do it from memory first like itself just looking through the text and then see what applies try to explain how this feature has had an effect on the audience because again i'm going to build this it's so important to note the effect on the audience because by noting the stylistic feature is one thing the other thing is to be able to explain how it works i explained why it's important in the context of this text provided if i look at the essays i wrote at the beginning i found them very overly descriptive and i don't really analyze a lot and there's no point describing something that the examiner already know so again this takes time to develop but it's something to keep in mind like try to keep asking yourself the question what effect does it have on the audience and i did have problem with doing that at the beginning i struggled with it a lot so i took some other approaches that will help me do that better in text so after doing like some past papers i started to note that some stylistic features often serve the same purpose like for example anaphora is always used to like appeal to the emotions of the audience in order to persuade inspire or motivate them and encourage them and to create a sense of participation and engagement from the audience most of the time the effect of anaphora is the same so if you had that prepared beforehand during your paper one exam you can basically just regurgitate what you have prepared before onto the text and so it saves you a lot more time instead of having to like think about how do you phrase this um in your head during the exam of course this depends on your judgment it's not the same every time and depends on the context of text but i'm just say most of the time the effect of the same stylistic feature is the same so the way i did it was that i identified a lot of stylistic features that are more commonly used from past papers and from the textbook and i made a table where i had the stylistic feature on one column and on the other column i tried to google like what what is the effect of nafra for example and i copy and pasted those onto the right side of the column i just look at this like from time to time so it just refreshes my memory as to what each stylistic feature is what effect each stylistic feature has on the audience i do this because i understand that i don't have a very good vocabulary sometimes i think in chinese and when i see a text i want to explain it and when i think of the adjective or whatever thing i'm thinking of i think about it in chinese and i couldn't find an english word for it that's why i had to go through this like very long process of just like collecting like stylistic features and researching about their effects and then have them prepared beforehand and so if you're really smart like if your english is just really good and you can easily explain its effect on the audience like you don't have to do this but it's just something that i had to do because i really wanted to score well and i maybe didn't have the very high language ability that i needed to do whatever i want in an english test so in terms of the stylistic features that i uh compiled i compiled it into word doc and so i will link them down in the description below again i want to emphasize like my ib psychology video that a lot of the things in that document is copy and pasted from the internet i did not intend it to use it on any of my assessments just a way in which i study so please don't copy and paste those things because it'll put you in the risk of plagiarism yeah so go check it out if you need that sort of guide to help you it's sort of a mini textbook i made for myself and i just find it helpful for me okay so after you complete a past paper it's time to reflect on what you've written and reflect on the difficulties you've encountered for instance if you're like me struggling to find a word to describe something do a google search now and find that word write it down somewhere so you can look over that word again when you have time the point of reflecting is that you want to know what you can improve next and because this is a long process where you start to develop these skills you can only take baby steps every time you cannot so that's why you it's important to reflect on yourself step by step what do i want to focus on next what can i do better next what do i need help from my teacher and just small things like that and so another tip is to look at sample essays i'm sure most schools have access to in thinking which is a website created by a lot of ivy teachers and so in thinking has a lot of these like good sample essays for like some of the texts that they've chosen along with some examiner comments for me my class we looked at sample essay a lot during class our teacher even asked us to grade the sample essays ourselves so that we to ensure that we understand the assessment criteria the same way as the examiner does and this is again something i found really helpful so if you have that skill you can basically assess yourself over time see how you've done like yourself instead of having a teacher to do it for you in terms of identifying what other essays have done well it's also important for you to learn from these essays so for example i learned from one essay that it's better for you to frame each topic sentence of each paragraph in a way that directly answers the guiding question and that would gain you more organization criterion see marks in general so just constantly learn from other essays constantly talk to your teacher and just repeat this process until you really get the hang of what the examiner wants and what the mart scheme potentially wants and the last tip i have for paper one is to do paper ones together towards our mock exams a couple of my friends and i we just got together in a cafe and now we just timed ourselves like 15 minutes for each text and we just wrote essay outlines similar to studying a literature text in which this helps you to discuss with other people and see what other people thought and it's interesting because for our mock exams after we came out the exam my friend and i talked about what we wrote we took an entirely different approach i talked a lot about emotional appeal she talked all about reasoning so it's entirely different pathway and i talked to my teacher about it and she said for ib exams like for paper one the examiners definitely want a bit of both so they can see how you like consider both perspectives instead of going like all on reasoning or on emotion as i said the same text different people can approach it the entire different way so talk to more people talk to your friends talk to your teachers discuss with people to help you to develop the skill of looking on the other side of your argument as well so that's all i have for ib english i know it's very rambly but i am very proud of myself for completing this course with a7 because i really did struggle with english at the beginning that's it for this video the next video of the series will be on ib biology so stay tuned for that next week

Channel: Syndey Wong

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Id: i6gAyo6q7nk

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021