Category Exam Courses
IELTS Problem-Solution Essay Helpsheet
I produced one of these for my students. Sharing it here in case yours would like it too. Click on the image to download it. In case you’re interested, the sample essay here was written by ChatGPT. (By the way, what text book do you use for IELTS? We use National Geographic’s Complete Guide to […]
Summary Skills Team Activity
Who says summary writing tasks have to be boring? My class don’t love summaries but they did love this lesson. The aims of this lesson were set by my students after filling in the ‘POST’ side of their post-mocks exam wrappers. They wanted to be more confident in identifying the key points in a text, […]
Paraphrasing activities & resources
Practising paraphrasing is so important for our students: it requires them to know vocabulary and to manipulate structures successfully. Doing it in pairs or groups means they have to be explicit about the process, further advancing their confidence and control. If you can name it, you can tame it! It is of course a skill […]
Exam Wrapper for Listening exams
Have you tried exam wrappers? I recently learnt the term ‘exam wrapper’ through some EduTwitter posts. In case you haven’t come across it yet, it’s a short form (or ‘metacognition worksheet’) that students fill in before a test, designed to help them evaluate their learning and think about what they can do to prepare for […]
Formal or Informal?
Cut-ups and Kaboom! Students often struggle to distinguish between formal and informal language, and also to produce appropriately formal language when appropriate. Given that academic language is generally formal, and that my students need to be able to write texts of varying registers for their IGCSE E2L, it’s worth some time focusing on the features […]
Developing answers
Do you find your students sometimes struggle to develop their responses to prompts for Speaking exams? I used the “My Place In The World” idea to help students to broaden their thinking. (This could also be used to develop ideas for essays.) First I asked them to consider this question: Why is education important? and […]
Writing Mats for IGCSE E2L
I’ve created these writing mats for our IGCSE students to refer to whilst learning how to write the various genres of text required for the CIE IGCSE in English 2nd Language. They’re also handy for revising. You can download the ppt file under each picture. Please note: I didn’t write the model texts myself. I […]
Improve writing with confidence (using a model and the mark scheme)
In this activity, students “marked” a ChatGPT-generated text in order to become familiar with the mark scheme. As they had already tried the task, they noticed differences between this text and their own. (Spoiler: the text was grammatically sound and fairly well organised, but not amazing in terms of the organisation required by this particular […]
A Hive of Activities 