My Lpate Reflection

This paper provides me a chance to reflect on my performance after taking the LPATE. Basically how I am going to reflect on my LPATE is from the aspect of preparation.

I must admit that I did not prepare for LAPTE very well. When it was in January this year, near the Christmas Holidays, I was reminded to start my preparation for the Assessment if I still had not done anything yet. I was, however, organizing an activity for the English Students (the Annual Dinner 2012) because I had a commitment for the English Language Student Association. At that time, I thought that I could prepare LPATE from sorely working on these stuffs because all those documents we made were in English. Now, when I look back, I think I was wrong. I should not sit for the exam without practicing.

Since the day I entered this Institute, I know that both my writing and speaking are very weak. I lack sufficient vocabulary to express myself accurately. I am weak in word collocation. I did try to improve it by buying a lot of exercise books because I thought these exercises could help me increase my word power. However I still do not know if it works because I have not tried any of these exercises. I watched English movies with my friends and I thought this could help increase my vocabulary range as well. Unfortunately it is not effective at all. I don't feel like my vocabulary range have increased a lot over this two-year time. When I ran out of idea of how to increase my vocabulary, I started to recall my memory of how I got my vocabulary from when I was in primary and secondary school. Suddenly it becomes crystal clear. I remember that I learnt English from reading texts and recite the words appeared in the texts with drilling. To gain this limited range of vocabulary I have today, I have been doing this practices for my whole primary school life. However, I stop studying texts beyond textbooks since Secondary Four because my teacher stop teaching us to read texts in the lessons - what we did in the lessons were doing past paper for the AL examination. Also for speaking, I spoke English only when my teacher demanded us during the lessons.

Now, I finally realize that the key to do well in the LPATE is to read widely and work hard to study English. There is no short cut that could help me get through LPATE. What I hope to do from now on is to read at least 30 minutes of English (which is what Dr. Stella Kong told us all the time) so to develop my vocabulary back.