I’ve sat through nineteen years of exam prep, and if there is one thing that makes me roll my eyes, it’s the “magic” online quizzes that promise to tell you your lexical level in thirty seconds. Most of these tools are useless; they either feed your ego with easy words or bury you in archaic
Stop wasting your time with those massive, leather-bound dictionaries or those flashy mobile apps that promise “mastery” in ten minutes a day. I have spent nineteen years watching brilliant, hardworking adults sit in my classroom, only to watch their exam scores stall because they are busy memorizing obscure, academic words they will never actually use
I’ve spent nineteen years staring at stacks of exam papers, and if there is one thing that makes my eyes twitch, it’s the “thesaurus vomit” students use to try and impress examiners. You’ve been told that to score high, you need to sprinkle every fancy transition word you can find into your writing, but let
I was sitting in a quiet exam hall last Tuesday, the kind of heavy silence you only find in professional testing centers, when I watched a student stare at a reading comprehension passage as if it were written in ancient hieroglyphs. He wasn’t struggling with the grammar or the complex sentence structures; he was simply
I was sitting in a cramped exam hall in Johannesburg last Tuesday, watching a student stare in absolute horror at a reading comprehension passage. He knew the words, he understood the grammar, but he had completely tripped over a simple mention of a “pavement.” To him, it was a sidewalk; to the text, it was
I was sitting in a quiet exam hall last Tuesday, the only sound being the frantic scratching of pens, when I saw it again. A student—brilliant, articulate, and clearly highly educated—had just lost a crucial point because they couldn’t get a simple word right. It wasn’t a lack of vocabulary that tripped them up; it
Stop wasting your energy memorizing obscure, archaic dictionaries or buying those expensive “master the alphabet” workbooks that promise fluency in a week. If you are sitting an exam, you don’t need to know every linguistic outlier; you need to stop bleeding marks on the predictable errors that appear in every single paper. Most students approach
I see it every single term: a student sitting in my classroom, clutching a thick, expensive vocabulary builder, sweating over words like obfuscate or peripatetic. They are working so hard to memorize “sophisticated” terms that they’ll likely only see once in a decade, yet they stumble over the basic connectors that hold an essay together.
I’ve spent nineteen years sitting across from exhausted adults, watching them stare at thick, expensive vocabulary workbooks with a look of pure defeat. They think they need more lists, more flashcards, and more high-level synonyms to pass their exams, but they are missing the point entirely. Most students treat vocabulary like a collection of museum
I’ve spent nineteen years sitting across from exhausted adults who have spent hundreds of pounds on “immersive” audio courses, only to fail their speaking exams because they can’t actually use a single new word. They think that if they just leave a podcast running in the background while they wash the dishes, magic will happen.