Instructions for an assignment

Listen to a university teacher giving instructions for an assignment to practise and improve your listening skills.

Do the preparation task first. Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.

Preparation

Transcript

I want to explain a few things about your essay.

First of all, the deadline. The deadline for this essay is October the 18th. Not the 19th, not the 28th, not two days later because your dog was ill or your computer broke – the 18th. If it's late, I won't mark it. I won't even read it – you'll fail the assignment! So, please hand it in on time. You can even hand it in early, if you like!

You can email me the essays at j.hartshorn@lmu.ac.uk. That's H-A-R-T-S-H-O-R-N. I'll reply to say I've got it. If I don't reply within a day, it might mean I didn't get it, so please email me again to make sure. You can also bring a paper copy of the essay to my office, but let's be kind to the trees, OK? Email is better for the trees and for me.

Don't forget that you must reference every idea or quote you use that isn't your own idea. And the last page of your essay should be a list of all the books you used, in alphabetical order, not in the order you used them!

And lastly, make it easy for me to read! That means use a clear font. Arial is best, but Times New Roman is fine too. Not Comic Sans please! Size 12 font for the essay, and size 14 for the titles and subheadings. And use page numbers. Any questions?

Task 1

Exercise

Task 2

Exercise

Discussion

What do you find difficult about writing essays?

Download

Worksheet78.64 KB

Try another listening

Language level

A2 Pre-intermediate

Do you need to improve your English listening skills?

Join thousands of learners from around the world who are improving their English listening skills with our online courses.

Find out more

Writing an essay in Bahasa is easier than using English. because my grammar is bad and my writing skills still need more improvement. The idea is a lot easier when it's set by a teacher. we just have to read many journals to find references and paraphrase it to our work. but not just like that, after read some journals, we need to analyze that and match them with another theory.

Writing an essays is difficult for me because I hate grammar and technical standards.

In the first times, I always got in trouble with formatting my essays. But days by days, I practised it by many projects, essays and assignments, I am better doing it now. In the present, my most difficulty is preparing the essay contents. In this part, we have to brainstorm and work hard, the other part we can learn it or reference it from some e-source.

A difficulty was in my font and how to get reference and quotes

The first difficulty is to concentrate well and think about ideas, then how to structure them the right way. Sometimes, it is a bit tricky to turn ideas into sentences especially if you have to write it in a foreign language that you don't master. Another thing is the time. Time is used to be my ennemy, I 'm slow in organizing my ideas and writing. Usually, I need to use a draft and copy it on the exam paper.

I can write an essay by Arabic it seems easy, but in English, I think it's will be full of mistakes needs someone help me

i have some difficulties in writing, because i don't have much vocabulary and i also don't know how to organize my ideas.

Hello Teresa. Would you like to practice English with me?

If I write essays in the native language it's very easy for me. I need only some time to do it. But I'm not ready to write essays in English because I know English grammar not enough and my vocabulary isn' too rich. Unfortunately, I make pretty simple sentences and it isn't a very good style.

I think writing essays it's so difficult for me, I must to have a vocabulary too much, grammar and references too. writing essays is need reserachs a lot.