The practice that we did on English Paper 1 was definitely a learning experience for me. I believe it is the first time for most of my friends including myself that we have done anything similar to this. It is quite different in terms of both structure and content compared to the language practices in IGCSE. The IB English Paper 1 is, in my own opinion, more challenging because we have to analyse more in-depth as what messages, values, themes….. that the piece of text is trying to convey. Furthermore, we also have to make various connections and show relationships between them and the author. In general, I think the attempt this time reflected a few areas that I need to improve on:
1. time management issue, I spent too much time annotating and making plans on what I am going to write, which puts a lot of time pressure on the conclusion, as a result, I could not finish the conclusion of my essay.
2. Lacking key connections between themes. I successfully identified various key themes from the advertisement but I did not link them with other aspects of the advertisement, such as the time when this advertisement was made, aims of the author, etc.
3. More in-depth analysis of the theme that I had developed. After identifying the key themes in the advertisement, I did not analyse them deep enough which kind of undermined the overall strength of my argument.
