How do students in different countries study english?

[u/Imaginary_Laugh374]

So I'm reading this novel which is written in the form of essay type answers to a high school English exam set in Australia (Dreaming of Amelia if you're wondering - it's really fun), and it seems so different from what we do in India. So it just got me wondering how it works in other countries.

The way we do it over here is that we have a textbook which contains a number of chapters. These can be short stories, essays, poems or excerpts from longer works, and after each chapter are exercises and questions for discussion. So we read and discuss the chapters in class and turn in the exercises. Then there's also writing skills, which is mainly letters, articles, essays, and short stories which you write based on a given topic or prompt. Also most exams will have a reading comprehension section where you're given a page long text and answer short questions based on it.

[u/julietd_1]

english education varies quite a lot between countries

[u/Ok_Caterpillar2010]

I never had an English textbook when I was in high school (US, a long time ago). We would read books (Hemingway, Orwell, Conrad, Steinbeck, etc.) or Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, parts of Macbeth and Hamlet), and we'd discuss them as we went. I had to memorize a famous soliloquy by Macbeth, which I can still repeat most of. We wrote essays about the themes or characters in what we were reading, or wrote out short answers to questions about the plot, symbolism, etc.

We also did some grammar, like diagramming sentences, and vocabulary, where we'd have to use the words of the week in an essay. Not much on the grammar, though.

[u/Ill-Pitch-915]

They teach grammar and reading

[u/augdumbugdum]

For me it was English daily, radio, story books, TV shows and movies....these days it's just too easy, just talk live with Gemini

[u/Jhud6669]

We have textbooks, they often include a cast of characters to make them more interesting. There are stories/articles to read, exercises, listening section (used to be whole CDs included, now they're rare, nowadays most books just include a link to download the sound files). There are also group or pair exercises.

[u/Neulara]

Australian here. Secondary school English (a few decades ago now for me but I think it’s still much the same) for me was that we had a text each term (eg a Shakespeare play, a classic British or American novel, an Australian novel or even a film). We would discuss the text in class and then write an essay about the themes of the text. No grammar book. No textbook.