Second July

19 April 2008

IELTS MUET BBQ

Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, for my absence these few days. The reason being, as you might have noticed from my lil chatbox over your RHS, my IELTS English test.

Ahhh...yes, studying again. For the first time in history I'm putting so much effort for an English paper. Sitting in front of my very lil desk, spending around, I don't know, 2-3 hours a day doing exercises? No joke, that explains my absence. IELTS is serious. MUET is no-brainer. Relatively I mean, not to say MUET is easy on itself lah.

So let us count the ways, shall we? As to why IELTS means serious business.

1. For the listening test, you need to know how to spell everything from January to December, Monday to Sunday plus some random words like lentil and balloons with double L's and O's. Everything is subjective here, so you'll be surprised to know some can't even spell daily words. Not to mention the people in the recording have British accent and use bombastic words like horrendous.
   
   On the other hand, to sit for MUET's listening test, you only need to listen and draw circles around alphabets A to D. The people in the recording have Malaysian accent I think, if there is ever one.
   
   
   
2. I open my writing test booklet today and they ask me to write on the current and future effects of the ever-increasing of children's proportion of population. You tell me sei mou? And the time given -- an hour -- to finish 2 essays is like just ngam ngam to let me squeeze a tad over the basic requirement of 150 words for the first essay and 250 for the second.
   
   MUET's writing paper is slightly kinder, 1.5 hours to finish a summary of 100 words and a 250-word essay the least.
   
   
   
3. I think they use size 12-13 font for the texts in the reading comprehension, which is tiny, too microscopic, even, to make yourself comfy while reading. To add oil on the already blazing fire, each text is 2 whole pages long. They don't expect you to read the texts thoroughly, you see. What they want you to do is scan and skim. Yes, scanning and skimming makes life hell lot easier because just like the writing paper, time is a factor.
   
   To add more oil, there are questions that need a higher level of interpretation. For instance, not only do you have to determine whether a statement given is true or false, they also added the term ' NOT GIVEN', which means if they simply come up with a fact that's not mentioned in the text but is somehow very closely related to, you put NOT GIVEN instead of FALSE. You'll know what I mean lah if you're sitting for it. If not, just take it that I'm crapping. Most of the questions are subjective by the way.
   
   MUET's, as usual, comes with choices of Apple, Boy, Cat or a Donkey. Sometimes, if unlucky, an Elephant is introduced.
   
   
4. Finally, the speaking section. Just like what Mrs A told me, she had a gwei po while I had a gwei lo. Is that lucky or unlucky? There were 3 speaking rooms, 2 of them had locals (I think) while the remaining one is what I got. Haih, luckily he's friendly. It's like having a not so casual conversation, he asked me about my hometown and the recent changes I observed. I said it's KL and the traffic. Of course I did elaborate a bit lah. The thing is they don't care even if you're lying, what they're looking for is your vocab and language fluidity. I lied just to throw in the word 'thriller'. Just popped up in my mind and I said it lor. Don't care lah. There is also a 2-minute individual presentation. Longest 2 minute ever.
   
   MUET also generally has the same speaking module but it takes 4 candidates in one turn, less scarier I would say. The questions asked are more general too as in they don't ask bout which part of the world you came from because all are Malaysians obviously.
   

There you have it, my 2 cents. To conclude an essay, I would always start with all in all.

So all in all, I think the IELTS plus the 12 hours of workshop I attended have greatly improved and influenced my English usage in such a way that OMG I spoke with a weird accent during the speaking test.

Labels: The Educatee

posted by: JYLing @ 10:08 PM

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