Teenagers: Preparing teenagers for the exam: Speaking

No comments

This section contains useful suggestions for preparing teenagers for speaking components in the exam.

Do not leave speaking English out of your lessons

Encourage students to use English as much as possible. This is probably the most stressful part of the exam as they are faced with a stranger and are expected to have a conversation. They won’t be able to just learn a few lines of English to use in the exam. Nothing will substitute for regular oral practise.

Plan your exam preparation programme backwards from the exam

If the exams are in June, plan how you can spread preparation classes over the term(s), beginning in January (or before if possible). Ensure that all lessons are not dedicated to the exam, but that you continue language development and fun lessons too, as well as covering the required units in the course book.

For example:

February	March	April	May	June
Review and practice reading skills	Review and practice skills	Review and practice listening skills	Review and Practice oral skills and go over exam skills	English exam

A typical week in March:

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Vocabulary quizzes on adjectives and practise brainstorming for a sample essay	Punctuation exercises and read a funny short story and discuss what made it good	Write a sketch/ dialogue and act it out	Descriptive paragraph writing in groups on OHTs - for class correction	Students design quizzes/games to test each other's vocabulary based on the book units they have covered

The course book can be covered by doing some of it in each lesson or dedicating 2 or 3 lessons a week to it, plus the following, which do not have to be very long activities.

Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday
Reading	Writing	Listening	Grammar	Speaking/fun

Make sure that each lesson has variety

Plan an exam preparation sandwich - start with a light-hearted quiz about language items covered previously and finish with a fun game. These quizzes and games are not a waste of time, but another way of revising language items or skills that may come up in the exam.

You can use games and quizzes as warmers at the start of a lesson to revise key vocabulary and grammar items. Also you can get students to work in groups and design quizzes for each other – here you double the revision, as students need to check the language while preparing the quiz and then practise it while doing the quizzes set by their classmates. Also this minimises the work you do – your job is to monitor and help students while they prepare and do the quizzes.

You can download an example of a vocabulary quiz from the bottom of this page. To help students work quickly under time pressure, you could set a time limit for the quiz.

Key considerations in exam preparation are: