LEARNER TRAINING
MEMORISE AND WRITE
This is another fantastic memory-based task. I often use it with students in class if they finish reading a text a little earlier than others: “Wonderful”, I say, “Now write down everything you can remember!” It’s a great way of identifying which parts of the text you understood and which you haven’t quite got yet.
The Basics:
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Choose a text which you’ve read a couple of times and understand well. It shouldn’t be too long - one paragraph or two is plenty.
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Read the text over once again, focussing on the main points.
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Cover the text, and write down everything you can remember.
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Compare your version with the original - did you forget anything?
Adaptations:
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Focus on the language. The task above prioritises the memory of ideas, but you could easily change this to prioritise the language used. Take a slightly shorter text and try to write as similarly as possible to the original text. When you compare, identify structures and phrases which you changed - is your version correct but different, or did you make a mistake?
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Make it relevant. Choose a text which is useful for your life: a cover letter for a job application, or an article on a topic in your field, perhaps.
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Get competitive. Give yourself a score - perhaps the number of points you remembered or the number of phrases you successfully remembered. Wait a day or a week and repeat the task with the same text - see if you can improve on your score.
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Help your studies. If you’re in college or university, or perhaps taking part in a training course at work, it’s likely you’ll have to read articles or essays as part of your course. You could use this task as a revision tool to help you recall the ideas of a particular writer or text.
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