What do you usually do in an exam preparation course? How are these lessons different from a normal lesson? How do you deal with the situation that not every student in your class might be at the right level and/or ready for the exam? Or an even harder question: have you ever thought about why it is that not all excellent students can pass an exam? And why can others, whose performance has never been outstanding, do it? Passing an exam is not equal to speaking/understanding a language. It’s more about understanding what exam writers want to see and how they want to trick candidates. Exams are business, they have very little to do with real language competence. But they cost money…
INTRODUCTION
Preparing for an exam is a big responsibility and a real challenge at first. Exam preparation lessons are not simply more General English lessons. Some courses prepare students for an exam and use a book that provides plenty of exam practice built into the units. However, even on these all-year courses, students should be given explicit explanations of how to approach their future exam, and at the end of the course they should sit a MOCK test (a trial version of the real exam). On the other hand, not every course has as its target sending students to sit a formal assessment, and so some teach only General English. In addition, schools might offer intensive exam preparation courses, which focus solely on exam training. These can be really stressful, since they leave no room for engaging, get-the-students-out-of-their-chairs activities, and instead have to concentrate exclusively on simulation and feedback.
Whichever type of preparation course you need to teach, here are some tips on what and how to do, and what to include in your suggestions to your students.
TIPS AND SUGGESTIONS WHEN PREPARING STUDENTS FOR AN EXAM
1. Sit the exam yourself
Not for real, but find a sample test, sit down and do it. Time yourself to see whether the given time limits for each part feel a bit tight, even for you. Then compare your answers with the answer key and reflect on what difficulties you encountered, what might be difficult for your students and why, and how to prepare them for these challenges. This is the single most important thing a teacher should never underestimate: firstly, because you cannot prepare students for something you don’t know yourself; secondly, because it gives you a guide as to what type of materials and exercises you’ll need to find for your lessons; and finally, because it will make you reflect on your students’ strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to give them appropriate help.
2. Analyse structure, timing and marking with your students
Before your students start on the exercises, give them a sample test and ask them to get to grips with the exam format. They should be able to answer questions like: How many parts/papers does the exam consist of (Reading and/or Use of English, Free Writing, Listening, Oral Exam, or, in integrated-skills tests, Reading and Writing, Listening, Reading and Speaking, etc.)? How many exercises are there in each paper, and what type? For example, multiple-choice and matching in the Reading paper, gap-filling (cloze) and sentence transformation in the Use of English part, etc. How many marks can they get for each exercise? Some questions are worth more than one point per correct answer, making them more valuable to the total score — for example, in FCE, each key word transformation earns 2 marks. How much time do they have for each paper? In First Certificate, candidates must complete the Reading and Use of English part — 7 tasks, 52 questions — in 75 minutes! That’s about 10 minutes per exercise, plus 5 minutes to check and copy the answers onto the answer sheet (in the paper-based version).
3. Time is money
Let me say a bit more about this time issue. In many cases, students fail exams because they can’t manage their time. They might complete the exercises correctly but fail to keep within the time limits, or they can’t control their thoughts under pressure. In other cases, they give a too-detailed answer (e.g. in the free writing part) and waste time. So it’s essential that they become conscientious about time as early as possible. Right from the start of a course (or at the latest, during the exam preparation phase), get your students used to being timed. Give them a time limit for every exercise, and respect these limits yourself. Ask them to bring a watch with them (even on the exam day) and to keep an eye on it. By the exam day, they need to know how much time each exercise requires in order to answer most of the questions.
4. Easy goes first
When I was a student, I was taught to start with the most difficult exercise, on the grounds that I’d have a better chance of completing it “with a fresh mind” and could do the easy questions afterwards. This resulted in wasting an awful lot of time on sometimes low-scoring questions, while leaving out ones that might have earned me higher marks. In an exam, the candidate’s aim is to collect as many marks as possible in the given time. So direct your students to start with the easy exercises: these will reward them with points and with motivation, since they’ll feel satisfied after completing many questions in a relatively short time.
5. Clarify and simulate exam regulations
Read the notices to candidates (available on the official website of each exam board) and pass these on to your students. If they have to write their answers on an answer sheet, insist on giving them a copy so they get used to completing one (another easy way to make silly mistakes in an exam). Also ask them to write their full names (Italian students often write only their first name, since “name” is a false friend for “nome”, which means “first name” in Italian). If the answer sheets must be filled in with pencil, don’t accept answers written in pen. Ask your students to bring ID to class (you can even do some fun activities with their IDs — excellent for practising “used to”) so that they don’t forget it on exam day. Make it clear what they can take into the examination room: water — still or sparkling? tissues? a watch? etc. You can even turn this into a pyramid discussion — students in pairs, then in small groups (two pairs combined), then in bigger groups, and finally as a whole class — discussing what security measures invigilators need to apply to guarantee fair play and equal chances for all candidates. This is an engaging topic, given how sly some students can be when it comes to cheating.
NOW, LET'S GO INTO DETAIL
I’ve listed some exam exercises that definitely need explicit explanation and preparation. My purpose isn’t to list every exercise type here, but mainly to give an idea of what matters and how you can teach exam skills.
Paper: Reading
Exercise type: Multiple-choice questions
In this exercise, students choose one correct answer (A, B, C or D) to several questions after reading a text passage. All questions relate to the text and either refer to a particular paragraph, sentence or line, or ask about general understanding (the writer’s intention, possible titles, etc.).
Why is it a “tricky” exercise?
1. Because it tries to catch out students who can’t distinguish their own opinion from opinions expressed in the text.
2. Because it tries to catch out students who trust their memory instead of double-checking answers against the text.
3. Because the questions are loaded with difficult vocabulary, though this can usually be worked out from context.
4. Because the lexical items in the questions rarely appear in the text itself (or are misleading), as they tend to test knowledge of synonyms/antonyms, etc.
How to approach this exercise?
a) Students should read the text twice. First quickly, for gist, then they read the questions (not before that), and finally read the text again more slowly. This second reading can run alongside the questions, swapping back and forth between text and questions. The questions are always listed in the order their reference points appear in the text, except general understanding questions, which come either at the beginning or, more often, at the end.
b) Train students to underline the passages the questions refer to — this way they can be sure they haven’t just “remembered” something, but have actually understood it.
c) Explain the difference between “False” and “Doesn’t say”. Multiple-choice questions are often of the type a) True b) False c) Doesn’t say. The difference between the latter two isn’t as obvious as it seems. Students need to understand that a statement is false if the opposite is stated in the text (and can be underlined), while “doesn’t say” means there’s no information about the statement in the text at all — so nothing can be underlined.
d) This exercise tests lexical knowledge and often checks whether a student knows a synonym or antonym of a word. Students shouldn’t be fooled by seeing the same words in the text and in the answer options — that’s often a trap. If an answer belongs to the same lexical field, it’s a great opportunity to revise it. For example, if the question asks whether the main character A walked, B hurried, C ran or D wandered to the window, you could revise verbs of movement: students can rank them by speed or act them out in a vocabulary recap game.
Paper: Free Writing
Exercise Type: Writing a letter of complaint or application/essay/review/report, etc.
Students, mainly at higher levels, are asked to complete a free writing task within a fairly limited time. They usually get to choose which type of text to write.
Why might it be difficult?
1. We live in the era of communicative language teaching, which often means written communication gets neglected in lessons. So students may perform very well in the Speaking exam, or do really well in Reading and/or Use of English, yet still underachieve in Free Writing.
2. Free Writing is the skill where L1 interference can cause serious difficulties. Students often translate from their mother tongue and produce artificial or inaccurate sentences.
3. Free Writing doesn’t only test language knowledge — it also tests students’ understanding of:
a) register and features (the expressions typically used in a given genre), e.g. “I’m writing to express my deep dissatisfaction with your company’s customer service”;
b) format and layout (what different genres look like), e.g. a report has headings at the top of each paragraph, with a blank line between paragraphs;
c) and style: It’s not true that English uses only informal language — modal verbs and conditionals are used to express formality, though the reader is still addressed as “you”.
All of this needs to be analysed and explained to students.
How to prepare for Free Writing?
a) Be good at 2–3 genres, not all of them. A student might be good at writing reports because it’s part of their job, but know little about reviews. That’s fine — help your students work out which genres they’re good at and prepare them for those. Every student should be prepared in 2–3 genres (my favourites to teach are letters/emails, essays and reports). Leave the rest, so your students aren’t overloaded.
b) Have a template in mind. Every genre has its own set of useful phrases, common expressions and typical format. Teach these to your students. For example, a report has a longer, descriptive title, opens with an Introduction, has a heading for every following paragraph, and ends with a Conclusion; all paragraphs are separated by blank lines. Typical opening expressions include: “This report aims to give feedback about the school canteen…”, “The aim of this report is to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of computer-based exams…”, or “This report aims to suggest what type of leisure activities students at our college are interested in. The results are based on a questionnaire given to 100 students on campus,” etc.
c) Be a good writer, but don’t try to be Hemingway. How good a candidate’s writing style is counts for relatively little in an exam. Even students who aren’t especially talented writers can score highly in the free writing part if they show they understand the genre and the general rules of the language and of written communication in English. So the bar is much lower than perfection. What’s more, being too keen on writing long, elaborate stories can mean running out of time and leaving a second task untouched. Extra words aren’t rewarded, and students should really stay within the given word count for each task. As always, time rules over perfection.
Paper: Use of English
Exercise type: Sentence transformation or key word transformation
Students read a first sentence and complete a second one so that it means exactly the same as the first.
Example: You should see a doctor. → …………… to see a doctor. (correct answer: You ought)
Why is it a difficult exercise (perhaps the most difficult one)?
1. It can test grammar and/or lexical knowledge. Sometimes it’s a simple transformation from active to passive; other times it calls for a particular phrasal verb (e.g. postpone = put off). While grammar knowledge can usually be recognised and applied, lexical knowledge is more of a lottery — the student either knows that particular idiom or phrasal verb, or they don’t.
2. The distinction between meanings is very subtle. The question asks students to transform the first sentence WITHOUT changing its meaning, yet it’s not always clear whether “must” really means the same as “have to”, or whether an active and a passive sentence are truly equivalent.
3. Students are forced to find one particular way of expressing the same content. They might know other ways, but must complete the one given in the second sentence — their options are often limited by a given preposition or particle, though these also serve as useful clues.
How to prepare for this exercise?
a) Start by teaching pairs of structures, in both grammar and lexis. Most coursebooks do this by comparing modals with each other, pairing active and passive sentences, asking students to decide between simple past and present perfect, or comparing the different future forms. You can also add a list of phrasal verbs (drawn from your coursebook) and match them to their Latin-based equivalents (e.g. participate and take part in, resemble and take after).
b) Give students the first sentence without the second, and ask them to express the same idea in different ways. You might be surprised how many ideas they come up with (and they’ll enjoy deciding whether each has exactly the same meaning as the one on the whiteboard). Then give them a word limit — for example, tell them the correct answer consists of three words. A little later, give another clue that moves them closer to the second sentence — e.g. transform the first sentence by changing the tense, or by using a phrasal verb, or an idiom. This narrows down the options students listed earlier. Finally, give them the second sentence with the gap (and the key word) and lead them to the final answer.
Exercise type: Gap-filling
In the literature, gap-filling exercises are typically defined as texts from which items have been removed at a regular interval (e.g. every seventh word), which students must then complete. In exams, words are usually removed at irregular intervals, sometimes testing grammar (e.g. a missing auxiliary), sometimes lexis (e.g. omitting prepositions after verbs or adjectives). There are two types: open cloze and multiple-choice cloze. The first gives students no clues, so they must draw on their own knowledge; the second offers 3–4 options to choose from. This doesn’t make the multiple-choice version simpler, since it typically lists lexical items close in meaning (walk, stroll, gallop) or tests knowledge of collocations (fixed combinations of words, e.g. heavy traffic).
Why is this exercise challenging?
1. As explained above, it can test either grammar or lexical knowledge, and students need to work out which type of gap they’re dealing with.
2. The sentence might make sense even without the missing word, so students need to find the option that not only fits the sentence but keeps the whole text coherent.
3. Students might not be familiar with the lexical item (or grammar point) being tested.
4. Phrasal verbs are particularly tricky, as a non-native speaker may struggle with all the possible combinations of one verb and its different particles (get on/off/by/in/out of/along/away with/up, etc.).
How to prepare for this exercise?
a) Ask your students to read the whole text first, quickly, without writing anything. This helps them get the gist and understand the writer’s intention — essential when deciding, for instance, between positive and negative adjectives or adverbs (e.g. happy or unhappy, fortunately or unfortunately).
b) The good news is there’s often more than one acceptable answer, but they usually belong to the same part of speech. So students should be familiar with parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition, connector, etc.) and able to identify which one is missing. This helps them focus their attention correctly (looking for auxiliaries or adverbs, for example). The position of the gap matters too: at the start of a sentence, it’s usually an adverb or the subject. Finally, it’s essential to look at what comes before or after the gap. If there’s a particle after it, a phrasal verb is very likely required. If there’s an article before the gap, expect a noun, or an adjective if a noun follows. Give plenty of examples of all these cases in your preparation.
c) Listen to your reading. Ask students to read the completed text aloud quietly to themselves. We often “hear” that something sounds right (or doesn’t), and this can be a clue to the correct answer. If they’re unsure which preposition is missing, encourage them to trust their instincts rather than overthink it.
Paper: Listening
This might be the biggest challenge for your students, mainly due to poor learning habits. Traditional language teaching still emphasises mechanical grammar exercises, reading, tests and speaking drills that don’t really involve listening skills training. Students should be exposed to native spoken English every day. Homework involving watching TV in English, or listening to short videos on YouTube, encourages students to practise their listening skills — though this type of homework is still the exception rather than the rule. There may be some improvement from using the CD-ROM included in a coursebook, but these often provide subtitles, which turns the exercise into reading practice rather than listening practice.
So, whether it’s completing a form based on an audio track or completing a summary, the main issue — even in exam preparation courses — is that students often struggle to understand audio tracks. Here are some general exam skill tips for listening exercises.
Why is listening difficult?
1.Students have no visual input — they can’t see the speaker’s lips, face or body language. They have to rely entirely on their ears, whereas in real life we perceive 70–80% of the world around us through our eyes.
2. Students tend to get stuck on a word they recognise but can’t recall the meaning of. While trying to remember it, they miss a good deal of the audio, then panic on realising they’ve missed more than one question.
3. English is full of homophones (e.g. hear vs here), which easily confuse students.
4. Students tend to focus too closely on the exact wording of the questions, waiting for the words they’ve just read, and overlook synonyms or antonyms in the recording.
5. Students may not activate their background knowledge of the topic, due to misinterpreting — or not interpreting at all — the title, etc.
How can you prepare them for the listening exam?
a) Teach students that in real life we usually have expectations about what someone might say. In an exam, the topic (i.e. the title) and any accompanying pictures or slogans help build up expectations — get students to analyse these quickly. The questions come next: in most cases, students need to know in advance what type of answer is expected. For example, in a gap-fill exercise, a sentence like “He is a …” calls for a noun (possibly preceded by an adjective), while “His phone number is …” calls for numbers. This narrows down the possibilities and lets students listen for specific key words.
b) Clarify how many times students will hear the track. This lowers their affective filter, since they’ll know they have another chance. Tell them to listen the first time without worrying about the questions, focusing only on what’s happening, and save the answers for the second listening (if there is one). Giving a gist question for the first listening, followed by detail questions, mirrors how coursebooks typically handle audio texts: the first listening is for the general message or mood, and students work on the detail questions during the second.
c) Listening exercises share a difficulty with phone calls: there’s no visual input, and the listener can’t read the speaker’s lips (something we often rely on even in our first language). Meanwhile, what students do see — the exam questions staring back at them — is stressful in itself. So encourage students to use their imagination: ask them to close their eyes and picture the speaker(s) in front of them. This helps them focus on what they hear, rather than stressing over whether they’ve missed the answer to question 2.
d) Good news: in listening exercises, at least up to B1 level, spelling doesn’t usually matter. So even if a student writes down a homophone (they understood the sound but misspelled the word), it won’t be penalised, and the answer will be accepted. What matters is that the completed sentence makes sense. That said, if a word is actually spelt out in the recording, it must be written correctly.
e) Practise listening for gist as often as possible. From the start of the course, try to convince students that they can follow a situation without understanding every single word of a dialogue. Play them recordings containing words they won’t know, and push them to work out what the speaker meant without giving a translation. Remind them that the key information is rarely at the very beginning, so they need to keep listening right to the end — they shouldn’t give up after the first two sentences just because those seemed difficult.
f) Finally, ask them not to make any noise, comments or questions during listening. Even if they don’t understand a word, they shouldn’t disturb the other students.
Speaking/Oral exam
Last but not least, some tips on improving your students’ performance in the speaking exam. Remember that your students are only used to speaking to you and their classmates, so having to talk to a complete stranger about unexpected things can cause a good deal of stress, which might trip up even the best student. So take the time to talk about the examiner’s role, about realistic expectations (an A2 student doesn’t need to be “fluent”, and not knowing a word isn’t a sin), and about what candidates are actually expected to do during the exam. This will help your students face the oral part of the exam with less anxiety.
Exercise type: Introduction/Introduce yourself
A piece of cake? Most oral exams start with the candidate introducing themselves. This part often isn’t marked as part of the total score, since it mainly helps students relax and get used to the examiner’s accent.
Even so, students are expected to use language appropriate to their level. If a candidate makes no mistakes but only uses grammar structures and vocabulary from a lower level, they might still score poorly. So spend half a lesson on introductions, following this advice:
a) First elicit questions — not just the typical ones about personal details, family and hobbies, but also questions examiners might ask related to the topic areas of the given level. Any exam preparation book, or the relevant coursebook, will give you plenty of examples.
b) Ask students to answer these questions, in pairs or in writing at home. The important step is transforming their answers into accurate, level-appropriate language. Try matching a grammar point to each question:
Example (Level B1+):
Teacher: What’s your job? (present perfect continuous)
Student: I’m a doctor; I work at the city hospital. I’ve been working there for more than 10 years.
Teacher: Tell me about your work experience before this hospital job. (past perfect)
Student: Before I got this job, I had worked in three other hospitals as a volunteer…
c) Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Talking about oneself might seem simple, but if students stumble here, they’ll likely get nervous and underperform in later tasks — so it’s essential this first part goes well. Start every lesson with a 2+2 minute exercise, where students interview each other using a list of questions they’ve put together with you, swapping roles (examiner, candidate) after 2 minutes.
d) Don’t forget simple things like how to spell their surname — it’s embarrassing when a B2-level student mixes up English vowel sounds.
e) Ask students to evaluate themselves and/or their partners. Every oral examiner follows a marking scheme, which is public and usually included in exam preparation books, so students can see the criteria examiners use to assess them.
Exercise type: Describing pictures
Another typical exercise asks students to describe pictures — sometimes a single picture, sometimes a choice from a collage, or two pictures to compare.
Why is it difficult?
1. It’s far from a real-life situation: you might have to describe a picture to a blind person, or a scene to someone on the phone, but here you’re talking to an examiner who has the same picture in front of them.
2. Describing pictures requires specific language (see below).
3. Comparing pictures also requires certain expressions that should be pre-taught.
How to prepare your students for picture description?
a) Have a selection of good pictures — ones showing action, with distinct layers (background and foreground). Choose one and elicit the necessary language from your students. To describe a picture, they’ll need:
• there is/are + articles/quantifiers with countable and uncountable nouns, e.g. “There are two men in the foreground, talking…”
• prepositions like in the foreground/background/middle, at the top/bottom, on the left/right, in the top right corner, etc. (You can write these expressions onto different parts of the whiteboard, positioned to match, so visual learners remember them better.)
• present continuous to describe actions — but explain that we say “I see + object” rather than “I’m seeing + object” in this context.
b) Tell students to focus on the following questions: who/what, where, when, how and why:
Who/what can you see? What are they doing? Where are they? When is this happening? How are they doing it? And why?
It’s important that students understand the difference between describing a picture (answering the questions above) and commenting on it (which might be part of the task, but isn’t picture description itself).
c) Give students plenty of opportunity to practise — including in open class, since exam preparation is when students need to get used to speaking in front of others.
d) Also provide useful language for comparing pictures. Key items include:
• prepositions: in the first picture, in the picture on the left/right
• connectors: whereas, on the other hand, on the contrary
e) Make clear to students if and when they’re expected to express opinions. Sometimes they’re asked to reach an agreement about the pictures — all of these functions have their own language.
f) Picture comparison tasks usually include a question that needs to be answered: "I'd like you to compare the two pictures and say why the people might have chosen to spend their free time in these ways." If a question is present, then the picture description and comparison should be really brief and concise: the focus should be on answering the question appropriately (in the example, by expressing speculations with modal verbs).
Exercise type: any
In an oral exam, the first thing examiners look for is candidates’ communicative skill. Flawless language is only a secondary consideration — if a candidate can express their ideas and follow the “rules of the game”, even mistakes are forgiven.
What does “playing by the rules” mean?
a) Turn-taking. Candidates are usually tested in pairs. If one dominates the conversation and talks over the other, they may lose marks for not taking turns. Candidates should show they know how to interrupt (if necessary), how to hand the conversation back, and how to draw the other candidate into the discussion. In some exams, candidates are even expected to ask each other questions.
b) Expressing opinions, agreement/disagreement. Constant use of “I think” doesn’t demonstrate a high level of lexical knowledge. Make sure your students each have a few favourite expressions for the major functions — they don’t need a long list, just one or two they can reach for whenever needed. Some examples:
• Expressing opinion: As I see it…, From my point of view…, In my opinion…
• Agreeing: I couldn’t agree more. Exactly!
• Disagreeing: I see your point, but… You might want to consider that…
• Apologising: I’m really sorry, but… I apologise for…
• Paying compliments: Well done! You’re great! Good job!
c) Defining or clarifying words/utterances. No one expects a candidate, even at higher levels, to know every word they need. Teach students that if they can’t recall a word, they should stay calm and describe it instead. Useful language includes: The word’s on the tip of my tongue, or It’s something you use to open a wine bottle (corkscrew). They should also know how to ask for repetition (Could you repeat that, please? Pardon?) and clarification (I don’t really know what you mean. Could you explain?), since candidates need to show they can communicate even when understanding wasn’t guaranteed the first time.
Computer-based oral exams
Finally, a note on oral exams conducted on computer. This format is about as far from real life as it gets — we normally speak to other human beings, but a Skype call without video puts you in the odd position of talking to a screen without a face. TOEFL and other exams conduct their oral component on a PC. Students read and/or listen to a track and, after a brief preparation time (we’re talking seconds), must answer questions into a microphone. Their responses are recorded and assessed later. Don’t underestimate the importance of simulation for computer-based oral exams — the situation is highly unnatural, and candidates face tight time limits, needing to give a clear answer while staring at a ticking clock. They’re sometimes given preparation time beforehand, but often start writing full sentences instead of notes (note-taking is, incidentally, an essential exam skill worth teaching in its own right).
How can you prepare your students for computer-based oral exams?
a) The key is simulation: Get students to sit in front of a computer and practise this format directly. If you don’t have computer access, have students answer questions orally facing the wall, the whiteboard, or anything other than a classmate — so they get used to talking to an object.
b) Encourage students to use their imagination: It helps if they picture a face on the screen, one that smiles and encourages them to speak clearly.
c) Practise the different question types with your students. Some simply ask for an opinion; others require a summary, a comparison of two statements, or a final personal viewpoint. Candidates often need to make a choice and explain their reasoning, so it’s essential they understand quickly what’s being asked and practise responding accordingly.
d) Teach useful language. Linkers matter: firstly, secondly, finally; on the one hand — on the other hand; however/whereas/while/instead, etc. Some prepositions are useful too: according to…, as opposed to….
e) Time your students. Start with easy questions and gradually increase the difficulty, with increasingly tight time limits — 45 seconds to prepare an answer, then only 30, and so on. Teach them that they can take notes, but notes should be keywords, not full sentences. For example, take the question: “Why is sharing a flat a good option for a university student, and what drawbacks might it have?”
Notes for a possible answer:
Pros: shared costs, good atmosphere, studying together, social life
Cons: possible arguments, noisy flatmates, cleaning disputes, boy/girlfriends
After timing the note-taking stage, continue timing while students formulate their answers — give them one minute to answer using their notes. At the start, repeat the same question-answer format a few times so students build confidence and fluency.
f) Speed is the secret. Students often need to read something they must then summarise or compare against their own or someone else’s opinion, so quick reading is essential. Give students plenty of practice reading a text fast and picking out its main message.
g) No second chance. In a TOEFL speaking test, for example, students can only listen to the tracks once — so it comes down to trusting their listening skills. Well before the exam preparation phase, regularly assign homework involving listening tasks. Useful websites include Khan Academy, TED-Ed, ESL Lab and BBC News videos with transcripts, and you’ll find near-endless resources on YouTube.
FINALLY...
So far, I’ve discussed some typical exam exercises for each paper (Reading, Use of English, Writing, Listening and Speaking) and tried to offer guidelines for preparing students for them. In this last section, here are some final tips for your exam preparation course.
Simulate the exam. It won’t be enough just to talk about exams — you need to set up the exam situation and throw your students in at the deep end. They need to feel the pressure and formulate real answers under real conditions; this is how they prepare to face the actual exam without making it into a bigger deal than it needs to be.
Don’t over-practise. Practice makes perfect, but not in exam conditions. Give your students 2–3 opportunities to simulate the exam, and some exercise types will need thorough practice — but know when to stop. Students usually score higher in real exam conditions because they’re more focused. You’ll know they’ve mastered an exercise type when the mistakes they make are down to lack of concentration rather than lack of understanding. Where possible, add some fun activities to your lesson plan to help students stress less about the exam. You can find some useful tips in this BusyTeacher article.
Don’t let your students cram at the last minute. Sitting a language exam is about skills, not facts. Students often try to memorise words the day before the exam, learning them only superficially — missing articles, mixing up prepositions in idioms, or misunderstanding connotations. In an exam, students need to demonstrate what they already know, so it’s far more useful to make good use of existing knowledge. In an emergency, teach them 10 useful phrasal verbs and 5 commonly used idioms and encourage them to work these into their speaking and/or writing where possible — this can pick up a few extra points.
Always correct exercises together as a class, then collect results. You might simply put the correct answers on the whiteboard (especially for multiple-choice exercises) and have students quickly check their own, or, if time allows, go through each question and correct the answers as a class. It’s important that students have the correct answers clearly in front of them, so they can also see why the other options were wrong. Once the feedback session is done, ask students how many questions they got right. This makes them take the tasks more seriously, gives you a sense of where the class stands in its preparation, shows whether they’re above or below the required minimum, and, over time, demonstrates whether — and hopefully that — they’re improving.
Make concrete suggestions. Advice like “you must learn the vocabulary” or “you should do better” is empty. Students need specific, actionable suggestions, so make sure you have concrete ideas ready. If there’s a workbook students have neglected, assign extra homework from it. If listening is a weak point, point students towards sites offering extra practice. If irregular verb forms haven’t been properly learnt, show students where to find a good list and assign the first 20 for the next lesson, the next 20 the lesson after, and so on — within a few weeks, they’ll have learnt the whole list. Know your available tools (coursebook, workbook, CD-ROM, online materials, learning platforms, readers, newspapers, apps, etc.) and put them to use.
Repeat exercises. Especially if an exercise went badly the first time, give it another try a little later. Tell students what they can do to improve, let them sleep on it, and set the same exercise again one or two lessons later — it should go noticeably better, which is motivating in itself. Take a gap-fill task, for example: working through it gives students good practice with collocations, verb + preposition pairs, and so on. They learn vocabulary in context, which increases the chance they’ll use these items accurately in their own productive tasks. So have students re-read exercises done in class from time to time.
Train vocabulary. Grammar is still often seen as very important, and very difficult — but a language isn’t just grammar. Knowing a language means knowing its vocabulary, and not only in its primary meaning (denotation). The higher the level, the more students need to know about a word: beyond denotation, spelling and pronunciation, they need to understand its use, connotation, collocations, and so on, to use it accurately. So ease off on grammar teaching, at least during exam preparation, and focus more on vocabulary. Choose what matters for your students’ level (they don’t need five synonyms at A2, but should have plenty by C2) and teach useful vocabulary accordingly.
Teach them to guess. In Italy, students (especially at university) are often afraid of being penalised for an incorrect answer, since that’s how Italian schools tend to work. But in an exam, they should never leave a question blank. A wrong answer earns no points, but it doesn’t lose any either. So encourage students to guess when unsure, and always give an answer. In multiple-choice, they can simply pick a, b or c (a 33% chance of being right); even in gap-filling, it’s worth attempting an answer. Instinct can help here — our memory is full of expressions we’ve absorbed unconsciously, and that “gut feeling” is often a vague memory of something heard before, which, with luck, turns out to be correct. So teach students to trust their instincts and always attempt an answer.
Clarify the minimum overall score needed to pass. Some exams require a total of 60% to pass, others 70%. Some set a minimum for every individual skill (with no paper allowed to fall below 40%, even if the overall score clears the minimum). Also consider what universities and employers actually require — they often ask not just for a certificate, but for a specific grade or score (e.g. TOEFL iBT minimum 86, or FCE Grade A or B). This means a student might technically pass the exam without meeting their actual goal, so make sure they’re aiming for the score they truly need.
Finally, find out when candidates receive their results and certificate. With computer-based exams, results are usually available after 10–15 days, typically via a platform where students log in with a personal username and password. Certificates, however, often take months (sometimes 3–4) to arrive. So find out whether your students need just the result (which can often be proven with a simple statement of results) or the final, official certificate, and explain this timing to them.
Well, that’s what I had to say about exam preparation. Bear in mind that everything here is based on my own teaching experience: these are examples of what I’d tell my students before sending them off to sit the real exam. The list isn’t exhaustive, and covers only the types of exams we typically prepare for here in Italy. If you have any ideas or comments, I’d be very happy to read them.