Hello everyone,

Tomorrow is Eiken day! For the past few weeks, I have been helping a student prepare twice a week before school. We start at 7:30 in the morning. She does not usually come to school that early, so just getting here and sitting down to study at that time deserves some credit!

Today, she showed me a practice writing question. It was a summary task. She had read the passage carefully and found some good sentences to use in her answer. There was only one problem. The instructions said:

“In your own words.”

So we talked about another way to make a summary. First, read the passage. Then, take short notes about each paragraph. After that, close the original passage and write the summary using only your notes. This makes it much more difficult to simply copy the original sentences.

Funny enough, as soon as we finished, another student came to see me. She is a third-year student preparing for a university interview, and I had assumed that she had already passed Eiken Pre-1. She told me that she had failed the test. Why? Because she received zero points on the summary writing section! I immediately wondered if the same thing had happened. Maybe she had found useful sentences in the passage, but had not written enough of the answer in her own words.

These days, this problem appears in another way too. You can use iPads, translation apps, and AI to find an answer to a question very quickly. Usually the English looks perfect. The problem is that the student cannot explain what the sentence means.

Finding English is becoming easier and easier. Using English that is really yours is still difficult. Tomorrow, I hope all of our students remember one important thing:

Read carefully, think carefully, and write in your own words.

Good luck on the Eiken!