Preparing for university entrance exams isn’t easy, as college readiness requires a high level of English comprehension skill in order to receive high enough marks to pass qualification exams. This is especially the case if English is not your first language. It isn’t just the content of the exams, but also your ability to test well and your ability to adjust to college life that will determine how well you do in college. That’s why brushing up on some basic language skills you’ve acquired prior to taking an entrance exam can be helpful.

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If English is not your first language, no matter how good you are with vocabulary, the finer details of reading and writing can sometimes escape you. Adding your nervousness of taking an exam, you could miss important details that might otherwise be obvious to you. It helps to take a brief course that assists you as you try to improve your English reading skills and English writing skills. If you aren’t a native English speaker, this could be a key to pass the college entrance exams. A few things that you may want to focus on to improve your English writing and comprehension skills could include:

Critical Thinking – Critical thinking exercises are meant to present information to you that will invite you to analyze or interpret this information and to draw a reasonable conclusion. Try to go through critical thinking scenarios in your mind to prepare yourself for testing.
Context Clues – When reading a passage, start by circling any words that you don’t understand. Then, look at the context of the words you don’t understand and how they relate to other words to come up with clues that may help you better understand the passage.
Punctuation Rules – Before taking a writing test, it’s best to brush up on punctuation rules related to commas, quotations, colons, semicolons, apostrophes, parentheses, and dashes.

As you prepare for your entrance exam, remember that universities are very competitive. Their students represent the abilities of the university, and, as such, are expected to be successful. To that end, one of the main components of an entrance exam is going to involve being able to read and write at a collegiate level. The university wants you to succeed, but they have to know you have the tools to do so as well. Brushing up on these skills beforehand in an ESL program can help to improve your reading, writing, comprehension and conversation skills in a very short time. To learn more about the ESL programs at the Computer Systems Institute, feel free to reach out to us today at 1-847-967-5030 or through our online contact form.