DSE 2024: To ace English Paper 1, pay attention to details and use ChatGPT to study

“Candidates should not just focus on how to connect the sentence. They should ensure the grammar of the whole sentence is correct and makes sense,” Chan said.

One good example from last year’s paper is how some students copied entire chunks of text from Michelle Obama’s autobiography in their answers and used “I” instead of “Michelle”/” Obama”/or “she”.

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Lee agreed that many students tend to copy from the passage without rephrasing or miss out on important context clues to identify a person’s attitude. This can appear in many forms, such as figurative language -similes and metaphors can reveal a person’s perspective. You can also learn a lot through descriptions of a person’s actions; for example, the sentence “He crossed his arms and scowled” suggests disapproval, and through a character’s interactions with others.

In addition, Chan noted that many students struggle with “how” and inference questions and those requiring evidence to support a point. “For ‘how’ questions, do not just list facts or state the answer. You need to demonstrate your understanding and explain the situation clearly and, as much as possible, in your own words,” the tutor said.

Inference questions usually contain the words and phrases “suggest about”, “tells us about”, imply”, “display”, “show”, and “demonstrate”. Similarly, the key to tackling these is to explain the ideas in a more straightforward way than stated in the passage. Evidence-related questions require candidates to provide a fact or information from the passage that indicates an idea is true.

Make sure to review feature articles from newspapers and magazines, biographies and autobiographies, blogs, online posts, WhatsApp messages, letters to the editor, formal and informal letters, emails, fiction, drama scripts, and lyrics.

“In addition, candidates should also study recent exam papers and practise answering different sorts of question types because they have become a lot more diversified,” Chan said. He added that last year’s reading passage was quite manageable, and the main reason students were shocked was because they assumed they could answer the questions by directly lifting off the passages.

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According to Lee, one way to help you save time in your revision is by making use of ChatGPT in various ways: to check that your answer is grammatically correct, to find out the meanings of words and uncommon phrases and their synonyms, to get more examples of how unfamiliar words are used in sentences, and to identify key information and ideas in a passage.

“Chatbots are incredibly helpful, especially when doing practice papers, because you can get immediate feedback. They can also help to polish up your writing,” she said.

Chan and Lee strongly advised candidates to attempt Part B1 if they think they have less than 60 per cent of the answers for Part B2.

Those who choose B1 should allocate 45 minutes For Part A and 40 minutes for Part B and ensure they set aside five minutes to check their answers. Candidates who take on B2 should allocate 40 minutes for Part A and 45 minutes for Part B2.

Regardless of their choice, they should all attempt Part A first and not swap the sequence. The writing lines also indicate the length of your answers. Generally, you should aim to use about 70 per cent of the space provided.

“When the invigilator announces you can check the exam booklet, you can skim and scan the title and the last sentence of the first paragraph in the passage to get a preliminary idea of the theme. This will help save some time,” Chan said.

“I suggest quickly going through the last page of the question booklet first, as this often contains questions related to the whole passage,” the tutor added.