How well did units 1 and 2 prepare you for units 3 and 4 English language?

[vcestudent123]

A bit of a strange question, but I remember units 1 and 2 being close to useless for units 3 and 4 English language other than the metalanguage.

[herrinal]

Not really well at all. I had a crappy teacher though, so I didn't really understand how to write the essays and what to put in them, and we never did any analytical commentaries. I ended up getting 56% in my unit 2 exam because I just didn't get it, and you only learn the easy half of metalanguage in year 11 as well. Then in my first SAC in year 12, I got the highest mark in the cohort (people get 50's at our school so that's pretty decent), and that was clearly nothing to do with year 11.

My tip, get ahead and learn the metalanguage in the study design before the year starts, especially cohesion and coherence, and information flow ew. And make sure, when you complete an area of study that you have a bank of essay paragraphs with relevant examples relating to that area of study. For example, in formal language you could have a paragraph on: obfuscation (managerial language), manipulation, standard english, jargon, euphemisms etc etc

[Sono69]

Units 1&2 have been pretty much irrelevant to the 3&4 course, most of the kids that went straight into 3&4 (we had around 8 debutantes this year) have been excelling and are close to top of the class.

[rui97]

i agree with herrinal, most of the content in 1/2, eg child language acquisition, development of English is quite useless in 3/4. The only thing i felt useful was the basic metalanguage. Make sure you're well versed in word classes, sentence structures/types, types of clases etc. Then, I'd recommend you look at the study design and get a tutor maybe? and get a headstart on unit 3/4.