ATAR Notes: Forum
VCE Stuff => VCE English Studies => VCE Subjects + Help => VCE English & EAL => Topic started by: J_Rho on September 23, 2019, 07:41:35 am
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What are the best study resources for English?
I'm currently looking at:
Pearson VCE English Exam Guide
Pearson VCE English Skills
Lisa Study Guides eBooks
Checkpoints English 3&4
Insight Text Guides: Station Eleven, The Leuitenant, Black Diggers/Longest Memory
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bump
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Personally, I wouldn’t be looking at buying resources for English. The only resources I would consider buying are exemplar essays and original, unique interpretations of the text, which unfortunately company guides don’t offer. This is because the quality of your essays is dictated by YOUR unique analysis. The examiners don’t want to hear ‘ X represents Y’ in 100 different essays. They want creative, unique ideas and analysis. The best you can do is sit down and annotate your texts and compile your interpretations and analysis to use in essays. If you are struggling with expression, sentence structure or any other grammatical/fluency and flair-related issues, it may be worth it to purchase a book related to English skills, however I do not know the specifics of which company is better, etc. However, if you put in the effort and establish a feedback loop with peers and your teacher, your flair and expression will improve automatically with repeated practice and implementation of feedback.
Once again, I really don’t recommend purchasing company guided to your texts because they will likely only scratch the surface of what the texts mean and you may get better insight through perhaps a friend’s notes who completed 3/4, and even better, YOUR analysis.
Lisa’s study guides aren’t bad, and may be worth the purchase if their guide is specifically tailored to your needs. E.g. you need help writing a text response, and their guide focuses on how to write a text response.
I’m not sure about checkpoints, which I refrain from buying because it is more likely to ruin the end of year exam practice than other subjects. For psych, I didn’t really remember questions I did in checkpoints when I was revising for the exam. However, you are more likely to remember prompts due to the nature of extensive planning and writing that occurs for each prompt. I will also recommend that you think long and hard if purchasing rearranged VCAA questions will help in the long run, when you could just access and use the VCAA exams online.
Hopefully this helped a little!
(ignore typos/grammatical errors, i typed this on my phone :P)