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10 Idea Set Pedia Exams

ETpedia celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2024 by sharing 10 collections of practical ideas for preparing students for EFL and ESL exams. The document outlines various strategies and activities across different units to enhance exam preparation, including tips for speaking practice, progress tracking for young learners, and effective writing techniques. Additionally, it offers a promotional discount for purchasing the ETpedia Exams book.

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8 views6 pages

10 Idea Set Pedia Exams

ETpedia celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2024 by sharing 10 collections of practical ideas for preparing students for EFL and ESL exams. The document outlines various strategies and activities across different units to enhance exam preparation, including tips for speaking practice, progress tracking for young learners, and effective writing techniques. Additionally, it offers a promotional discount for purchasing the ETpedia Exams book.

Uploaded by

alraclitas
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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ETpedia

10
Exams
500 ideas for preparing
students for EFL exams
Years of Authors:

ETpedia John Hughes and


Louis Rogers with
Vanessa Reis Esteves

2024 marks the 10-year anniversary of the launch of ETpedia!


In that time, 6500 practical tips and ideas have been shared
across 12 different titles. Each title in the ETpedia series is divided
into units containing 10 bite-sized tips and ideas to give you
real practical help with planning and preparing for your lessons.
To celebrate the 10-year anniversary, we are sharing 10 collections
of ideas across 2024!

Here, you can explore 10 practical ideas from ETpedia Exams, which
provides activities, tips and pointers for preparing students for EFL
and ESL exams, whilst ensuring their general English continues to
improve as well. Enjoy 10 ideas from across the book below!

10 Ideas
Unit 7: 10 tips for providing exam
practice in the classroom
Idea 8. Hide the speaking questions
In most classes you will probably have a coursebook to follow. One of the
problems with this is that the speaking test questions will be written down in
front of the students. When it comes to a pairwork task in which one student
is the examiner and the other is the candidate, the student answering the
questions has time to read and think about their responses. In the actual
test they will just hear the questions and have no thinking time. To better
simulate the real test, copy some of the speaking questions onto sheets of
paper. Give the questions to the person playing the role of the examiner for
them to read aloud to their partner.
Unit 13: 10 Strategies and activities for
preparing young learners for exams
Idea 6. Record children’s progress
Boost the children’s motivation throughout the exam preparation process
prior to the exam by helping them see the progress they are making. Make
an individual exam passport with a few visa pages for each skill. Then, as the
children successfully complete the exam tasks you set them in class, stamp the
progress the children have made and encourage them to share it with their
families by showing them all the skills they have mastered for the exam.

Unit 15: 10 ways to generate ideas and


plan writing
Idea 6. Brainstorming
Students often lose marks for poor structure because they do not spend
enough time at the start of an exam developing and organising their ideas.
As a result, the ideas can read like a stream of consciousness. Encourage
students to dedicate a few minutes at the start of an exam to brainstorming
their ideas on a topic. Developing different styles of diagram can also help;
for example, for/against questions fit well into a table, cause/effect questions
fit well with connecting arrows, and explaining various aspects of a topic fits
well into a spider diagram.

pollution renewable
fines energy

reducing
climate
change

international taxation
agreements
Unit 18: 10 tips and activities for working
with graphs and charts
Idea 3. Identifying key information
Students will have a limited amount of time to write their description so it
is important that they try to identify key trends. Students do not need to
describe every single movement in a line graph, or every single segment in
a pie chart, but many will attempt to. Provide students with a graph showing
a trend, such as a line graph. When students first look at the line graph,
ask them to identify the key trend and to write one sentence describing
this. Then ask students to identify three other major trends in the graph.
For example, the period when the most significant increase or decrease
occurred, a long period without much change, etc. Ask students to write one
sentence for each of these trends.

Unit 21: 10 tips and activities for working


with reports, proposals and articles
Idea 5. Using adjectives
When writing an article it is important that students use a range of adjectives.
To encourage this, display a selection of adjectives on the board. For example:

attractive colourful exotic interesting historic modern

huge varied loud expensive cheap busy

Students work in pairs describing a place they have visited to their partner.
They should try to use a selection of the adjectives you have given them.
Tell students they should think of three more adjectives to describe the place.
Elicit these from students and write them on the board. Next, ask students
which of these could also be used to describe an event, a film or a book.
Students should then try to include a range of adjectives in the next report-
writing task you set them.
Unit 23: 10 ways to give feedback on
writing for exams
Idea 2. Use a feedback code
It can be very time-consuming to mark whole sets of essays with comments and
corrections. At the start of the course, establish a feedback code. For example:

Ag = subject–verb agreement
T = tense
R = register
 = missing word
P = plural
You can mark these abbreviations next to errors in a student’s work. Students
can then refer to the key and correct their own work. This should make marking
quicker for you and students will have a more interactive way of dealing with
feedback. On page 172 of the Appendix, there is a correction code form that
you could give students at the start of a course. Alternatively, you could create
your own.

Unit 26: 10 ideas for integrating grammar


in the exam classroom
Idea 7. Comparatives
Many speaking and writing tasks require students to form comparative and
superlative structures. Similarly, reading and listening papers often require
students to understand concepts that involve comparison. One way to revise a
range of comparative structures is to encourage students to discuss statements
involving comparisons. Give students the 10 statements below, all of which relate
to topics that commonly come up in exams. Ask them to tick the ones they agree
with. Then, in pairs, students compare their opinions and give reasons. While they
are doing this, monitor the discussions and make a note of any mistakes students
make. Write a selection of these mistakes on the board and ask students to
correct them. In later lessons, you can prepare a lesson to cover any major weak
areas you noticed.

1. Living in a city is better than living in the countryside.


2. Modern houses and apartments are much smaller than older ones.
3. Doctors have the most stressful job of all.
4. Old people are not as positive as young people.
5. The environment is being damaged much more rapidly nowadays.
6. Speaking online is almost as good as meeting face to face.
7. Young people are less likely to get a good job after graduating these days.
8. The longer you spend studying, the more successful you will be.
9. Today’s top sportspeople receive a lot more money than is necessary.
10. People were less stressed when there was less technology in society.
Unit 35: 10 strategies to help students
before, during and after listening
Idea 6. Reformulating questions into sentences
Another prediction technique that students can use on listening questions is to
turn a question into a statement, in order to predict the type of language they
might hear in the listening. So, for example, if the listening is on the subject of
an invention, there could be a question such as: ‘Why did Louis Pasteur become
interested in microbiology?’ In order to predict the type of language they might
hear in the recording, students can reformulate the question into likely sentences:
His interest in microbiology grew as a result of … / As a young scientist, Pasteur
started to study bacteria ….

Unit 43: 10 game-like activities to


develop a candidate’s discussion skills
Idea 3. Question generator board game
This board-game activity practises asking questions and answering them
fluently. Make one copy of the board game (page 182 of the Appendix) per
group of three or four students. The board is designed so that there are typical
exam topics on the outer track and question words on the inner track. Each
player needs two counters (coins or small objects). Place one counter on the
START square and one counter on any question word. The players take turns
to roll one dice and move both counters clockwise. The player must make a
question using the question word they land on about the topic they land on.
They direct their question at any other player. That player must answer. Then
the next player rolls the dice and moves their counters, and so on. The winner
is the player who arrives back at START first.

Unit 47: 10 tips on writing your own


exams
Idea 6. No easy guesses
With certain item types, you need to be careful that the answers aren’t too easy
to guess from the grammar structure used. One item type where you need to be
especially careful in this regard is summary completions with the words provided.
Try to make sure all of the words are of the same word class (nouns, for example).
If it’s obvious from the context that the answer is going to be an adjective, and
there are two adjectives in the word pool, then it’s too easy for the student as
they only have to choose between two words rather than, say ten. Another item
type where you have to be careful about giving the game away is matching two
halves of a sentence in a reading test. Try to break the sentences in half at a
similar grammatical point – for example, always cut the sentence so that the first
half ends with a verb; otherwise the grammar can give away the answer.
As part of the celebrations,
we also have some fantastic
offers for you throughout Save
2024!
Get your copy of ETpedia
Exams for just £28 (£39.95),
30%
throughout October!

Order now at www.pavpub.com/


pavilion-elt/etpedia-series/etpedia-
exams

 nly valid on purchases made through www.pavpub.com.


O
Sale price not valid with any other discounts. Offer ends 31.10.2024.

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