Getting Started

When you are doing the Speaking and Writing parts of the exam, it is important that you use a number of strategies for avoiding repetition, as it will increase your marks for cohesion. Cohesive devices effectively make your discourse flow and, in order to avoid repeating yourself, these can include, amongst other things, ellipsis, substitution, synonymy and antonymy, as well as reformulation at sentence level. As a result of using these devices and strategies, you are creating a link between the words in a text.

The aim of this lesson is to help you understand how to use the above effectively and accurately so as to improve your chances in the exam. Although the focus of the lesson is on how to do this productively, it will also improve your receptive skills and help you to see how Reading and Listening texts are linked – something which features heavily in the exam.