Week 6

CONCENTRATING AND MEMORISING AND

WRITING SKILLS

I, concentrating (Nga)
what is concentrating? It is the ability to think carefully about something you are doing and
nothing else.

The way we can improve concentration:

1. Make a timetable. If you have a long night of studying ahead of you, make a plan for the day.
Aim to work for 30-60 minute periods with 5-10 minute breaks in between. Try dividing work into
smaller chunks.

2.Stop setting aside time to worry or think about other things .

• If you start to feel your mind wander, stop it dead in its tracks. Take a second to shake it
off, and then resume with the material.

• Keep pen and paper beside you and write down everything that comes to your mind during
your study sessions.

3. Switch up how you learn. Setting up a controlled environment is one technique to help improve
your concentration.

4. Reward yourself. It may help to know that you will reward yourself if you concentrate. Think
about a special treat at the end of a study session.

5. Give yourself a chance to move around. Schedule a five-minute walk at the end of each
hour of studying.

6. Make studying more active. Ask yourself questions as you read. Look away from the
page and summarize out loud what you read.

II, memorizing (Tống Trang)

How can you sharpen your memory then? Well, there are many ways and you can easily
incorporate some of them into your daily life:

1. Eating well has much to do with memory and brain function. Although before a test
your place is probably filled with snacks and sweets, you might want avoid fat foods and go
for ingredients that help your brain. Why do you think Popeye ate spinach? So he’d
remember to save Olive! Milk, orange juice and strawberries have plenty of B 43 vitamins
that are good for the brain and salmon has that juicy Omega 3 everybody’s been talking
about.

2. Brain exercise. Go to the gym, but don’t forget about the brain gym. When you
exercise you get oxygen flow and your brain just loves oxygen (smoking block arteries that
deliver oxygen to the brain which affects memory and brain function). When you brain
exercise with various brain games, crossword puzzles, and even reading, you’re making sure
that your head stays sharp and responsive while improving memory and concentration.

3. Stay organized. When you are in control over your daily schedule and keep your
surroundings organized you have better chances to remember things. Being disorganized
can lead to stress which is bad for concentration and memorization, while being in focus
helps your brain be alert and tuned.

4. Use your senses. Experience a situation with all your senses. Relate information you
need to remember with what you see, smell, feel, taste and touch.

5. Sleep. At least 8 hours. Sleep is necessary for memory and memory consolidation.
Sleeping lets your brain reset, fix issues, connect pieces of information and help you solve
issues and memorizing.

Memorization is another technique to use to help with studying. Several memorization

strategies are suggested for studying. One strategy is using acronyms. An acronym is a
combination of letters that represent words that need to be remembered. An acrostic is a
sentence or rhyme that has a first letter cue for you to remember.

III, writing (Thảo Nguyên)

How to Improve Your Writing

The first one: Write, write, write!

I think to improve your writing you really need to write something in English more or less
every day. In my experience, it's best not to be too hard on yourself, but just write a few
lines about what you did or about your opinion of something. If you're studying for an
exam, you probably need to do more writing, perhaps writing the answer to an exam
question at least twice a week.

The second one: Get your writing checked

If you attend an English class, ask your teacher who will probably be happy to help.
Otherwise you could try www.italki.com or www.lang-8.com, which both offer free
corrections.

The third one: Learn the correct version

When you find a mistake in your writing, it's a good idea to learn the correct version by
heart. Otherwise it's easy to keep making the same mistakes . You can use flashcard
software like Anki to do this.

The fourth one: Keep adding phrases to your vocabulary

You also need to keep reading and studying vocabulary to gradually make your language
more sophisticated. I strongly recommend studying collocations as much as possible rather
than single words when you're learning vocabulary.

The last one: Take care when you're writing

Finally, I often see writing that could be improved by taking care about very basic things.
Easy ways to make your writing better include making sure that you've used capital letters
and full stops where you need them and checking your spelling. Also, it's not a good idea to
use abbreviations like 'u' instead of 'you' (except possibly in very, very informal text
messages if you are a teenager).