Tag Archives: CAE
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 […]
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 […]
Speaking challenge: focus on accuracy
My IGCSE students have been preparing for their mock Speaking exams recently – and the real thing is just after the holidays. We’ve spend time focusing on developing answers, on using a range of structures and on using vocabulary to show “shades of meaning” but the students needed to work on their grammatical accuracy. This […]
Gallery Grammar Goals
My IELTS students are definitely getting to grips with the writing tasks for IELTS, but Grammatical Resource and Accuracy is one criterion they often score low in. The marking codes I use most often with this group are s-v (subject-verb agreement), T (tense), p (punctuation) and s. or pl. (singular or plural). The reasons for […]
Using pictures to study Sentence Transformations
It doesn’t matter how often I go to Cairo, I´m always struck by the beauty of the Pyramids. No matter how many times I go to Cairo, I´m always struck by the beauty of the Pyramids. Some people say that there’s no place for an exercise like Sentence Transformations in an assessment of English ability, but there […]
This is a…
What is it if it’s not a pipe? Could it be an elvish golf club, a tiny unfinished old-fashioned periscope, a fancy straw for drinking ale, part of a faucet, a teensy weensy watering can? Course it could, if you can forget the boring, sensible, conventional use and think sideways. This little warmer requires students […]
A low-prep, low-tech, effective game for revision
In this activity, pairs or small groups of students compete against other groups to answer written questions. It could be called a low tech version of a Socrative quiz. It’s most easily done with a whiteboard and projector but it could certainly be done with a blackboard instead. You just need a list of 8-12 […]
Text summary and analysis
This is a great way to get Proficiency students (although it could be adapted for Advanced or FCE students) reading, finding useful vocabulary in the text and sharing it with each other. I got it from the inspiring Elspeth Pollock who gave a talk on teaching CPE students in Seville in February. She reminded us that […]
Pas Cap (A spelling game)
I loved this game when I was learning French at school (probably because I was really good at it) and was delighted to be able to use it in class yesterday. I know it as Pas Cap (short for Pas Capable?), and I’m sure it has a name in English but I don’t know what […]
A Hive of Activities 