Review of VATE English Language

[ngRISING]

VATE @ English Language was so and so. 6/10. I have high expectations .

I went to VATE and attended their lecture in 3 parts. You could choose which one you can attend.
I gathered about 22 of my school mates all in different english language class hoping it to be pretty good. Turns out it was average.

I went in the following order;
English Language Exam/Essay Guide
Spoken
Written

Part 1
This part was okay itself, it went through pretty much the basics of essay writing in the INSIGHT English Language book, the only worthy thing they mentioned imo was that "You must refer to the stimulus material" which is a new thing in the 2009 exam. Apart from that i found it useless, i did write a few notes to remind myself though. If you have a look @ Derrick Ha & Insight books, i believe your pretty much set for the essay part of this exam, VATE did not help that much for me, but everyone is different. However it was quite boring, the person delivering it spoke at a constant tone, which was ridiculous since its Sunday 10am in the morning, I was dying(not literally of course).

Part 2
Spoken itself was slightly better than the previous one, he pretty much went through the core stuff of spoken language which can be found on the notes under the English Language section of this forum. So this part itself was almost useless to me, only part that was useful was when he spoke about the varieties of language and exam tips in regards to cohesion/coherence. The person delivering this part had put a bit more life into it by adding examples, jokes and a audio part which didn't make me feel sleepy.

Part 3
This section was as killer, it covered a few parts that weren't covered by the book or my school. It went into a more detailed section of written texts, which was fine however i believe it won't be useful for the exam. The person giving it was average, but being after lunch I was feeling ridiculously bored and sleepy due to the method of delivery, she was just delivering if off a power point presentation which was already given out.

Overall, this lecture is good if you havn't studied much through out the year OR skipped unit 1 & 2. This lecture isn't good if you know your stuff. However being only $44, it wasn't necessarily a bad investment or the best investment. I do feel guilty because i recommended it to my peers, and i reckon it was pretty average, not what i was expecting from VATE. The notes itself are good revision tools i guess.

Hope this helps .

note; the lady in the 3rd part mentioned VCENOTES.COM