Exams

Overseas Teachers of English Teaching Exam Classes Exam Skills Overview Making Things More Interesting

Overseas Teachers of English Teaching Exam Classes

How much experience do you have teaching exam classes?

How do your students generally feel about exams?

Here are some ways to make things more interesting!

Alex Case/TEFL.net

1. Challenge each other The best way to make students care about answering the questions correctly is to make those questions ones written by their classmates. Writing those questions to challenge the other teams is also a good way of getting students to understand how examiners think and so learn how to look out for trick questions.

2. Make it oral After you have finished a task you can get students to test each other orally on, for example, what the missing words were. As well as being extra practice and revision, this also helps them access a different part of their brain in order to remember the language for the exam better, and adds a bit of noise and interaction to improve the classroom atmosphere. You can also make tasks more challenging and fun by reading out the question rather than letting them read it from the page, e.g. reading out one paragraph heading and getting them to tell you if it matches their text or is one of the extra distractors as quickly as possible. You can also do a pairwork version of that, where one partner has the questions and the other has the text and they have to complete the task without looking at each other’s worksheets.

3. Time limit/ race This gets the adrenaline rushing and is good practice for the time constraints they will have during the exam.

4. Teams Putting students in teams means you can get the good class atmosphere of cooperation without needing to spend too much time doing non-exam stuff to produce that feeling.

5. Points and competition Although points aren’t always necessary to motivate people to work in teams, they can add a little bit of fun.

6. Movement It can be difficult to justify getting up and moving around in an exam class when they know they will be sitting down in the exam, but it is often vital to improve concentration powers. At the most basic level you can easily justify asking the student who is pretending they are taking a speaking exam to stand up until their examiner partner asks them to come in and sit down. Tasks like adding headings can also be done standing up and putting the headings into envelopes below each text stuck on the walls around the room. Most exam tasks can also be done as running dictations.

Overseas Teachers of English Teaching Exam Classes 7. Cut up stuff Another way of getting a bit of physical movement is to give texts cut up and get students to sort them into the right order or pair them up. This obviously ties in with paragraph heading matching tasks and putting paragraphs in order, but you can also cut between each text and its questions (of any type) and get students to match the texts and the questions as a quick reading for general understanding task before they try to answer the questions.

8. Real communication/ personalisation This is the one element of motivation and memory that most non-exam textbooks aim for and most exam classes miss out. Get students to ask each other speaking exam questions they really want to know the answer to or to ead someone’s exam writing and respond orally or in writing to it, e.g. as a reply to an email or a refutation of a viewpoint essay.

9. Memory games For example, have a cloze text without gaps on the board and erase word by word until students can’t remember all the missing words. Then do the original cloze task.

10. Give them control For example, let them decide when and how often to rewind the tape.

11. Warmers Exam classes can be very reluctant to do anything not directly related to the exam, so warmers are usually best justified as being directly related to an exam skill like using body language in the speaking exam or reading quickly. It can also be worth doing them as and when students get tired rather than at the beginning of each class.

12. Video Any listening comprehension tasks can be adapted for use with a video, for example Mr Bean for TOEIC Listening Part One. You can also use bits of dialogue for language tasks such as error correction, and then watch and listen and check.

13. Songs Songs can also be used either for listening comprehension (difficult) or language tasks such as open cloze, sentence transformations and error correction.

14. Jokes Labelling each joke with its name (“Knock knock”, “Doctor jokes”) is quite similar to a matching paragraphs to headings task in IELTS Reading etc. Adding punchlines can also be similar to a CAE add missing clauses Use of English task. Please make sure that students understand and will not be offended though.

15. Quotes Famous quotes can be used for reading tasks such as matching up sentence halves or identifying what reference words refer to, and language tasks such as open cloze.

Quotations might be already familiar to the students, might come up in conversation with native speakers and are generally more amusing and provocative than exam texts. One thing to watch out for is that they are often quite difficult to understand.

Overseas Teachers of English Teaching Exam Classes Example tasks using the CAE advanced Use Of English Exam.

Part 1: Multiple Choice Copy the text and the answer choices on to A3 paper.

Put the answer choices on the wall covered by letters (A, B etc) Put the students in pairs and give them the text.

Designate them a letter and tell them to go to the appropriate wall are.

The students do the task by circling the answers on the wall sheet.

When they are finished, they return to their seats.

Give each pair a new letter and tell them to mark the already completed sheets.

Part 2: Gap Fill Copy the text to A3 and give each pair of students a sheet between them.

The students complete the exercise. Remember to set and stick to a strict time limit.

For feedback, have the answers hidden around the room behind their appropriate numbers.

The students race to find the answers and mark their sheets.

Part 3: Word Transformation Cover the words on the right of the page and copy the text to A3.

Put the students in pairs or threes and tell them to read through the text and decide which type of word they need (noun, adjective etc). Remind them to look out for spaces which need plurals or negative prefixes.

Put the words you removed on the board in the right order.

The students complete the gaps using the forms they discussed in the first stage.

Have the answers written on A3 on the board (covered).

For feedback remove the cover from the answer sheet and have the students check their work.

Highlight the words needing plurals etc.

Part 4: One word for 3 sentences Photocopy the questions and mix up the sentences.

The students reorganise the sentences in groups of three by discussing the words that they need to fill the gaps. This will highlight questions of suitability, synonyms etc.

The students then decide on the one word they need to fill each gap.

Part 5: Key word transformation Photocopy the questions are large as possible onto different coloured sheets of A4.

Cut the sheet below each answer line almost, but not quite to the end of the paper.

This will create a ‘grass skirt’ of paper.

Put the skirts on the walls inside or outside the classroom.

Put the students in threes and have them designate a ‘runner’.

Take the runners outside and instruct them to remove one strip from the skirt and run to their team.

Together with their team, the students write the answer on the strip and show it to you. If it is correct, they get the next one. If not, they return to their group to try again.

The winning team are the first to get all the strips correct.

What should you remember to provide your students with at the end of the lesson?

Overseas Teachers of English Teaching Exam Classes