Checklist: How to do a written mediation task

I. Understanding the instructions

 Read the instructions carefully.

 Find relevant information:

o What is the situation?

o What is your role?

o Who is the addressee?

o What is the relationship between “you” and the addressee?

o What is the purpose of the text you must write?

o What text type must it be?

o How formal will the text be?

II. Working with the Spanish text

 Read the text carefully.

 Find out which information is immediately relevant to the task, which is potentially relevant, and which is not relevant at all.

 Mark the information you decide to use.

 Identify keywords you need to explain

III. Planning to write

 Remind yourself of the features of the text type you produce.

 Decide what to add to the relevant aspects from the Spanish text in order to complete your text, e.g. a headline for an article or some small talk for an informal e-mail.

 Put everything you want to include in your text into a logical order.

 Find ways to express the ideas from the Spanish text in English.

Avoid word-for-word translations; summarize and paraphrase instead.

 Decide how to express yourself in order to be formal or informal (depending on the text type).

 Decide how to deal with culture-specific words, e.g. ¨modas ¨ trends, tendencies, fashions... REPHRASING

 Make good use of your active vocabulary.

IV. Writing

• Watch the tenses.

• Watch where and who you start a new paragraph.

V. Checking your work

• Focus on types of mistakes you typically make. Adjective/adverb, subject/verb(singular/plural), add frequency, manner adverbs, inversion, modal verbs, accurate answer, right spelling, connectors, participles, adjective clauses...

	Created by Andrea Lladro almost 5 years ago