Don't be a Cambridge Exam dummy!

This weekend starts a period of Mock Cambridge Exams for all our students of FCE, CAE and CPE.

With this in mind I thought I'd share some frequent mistakes I have seen students making with the exams. I will of course tell you how to avoid them.

If you don't know it, skip it!
Time pressure can be a factor in Use of English and Reading. So if you come across an answer you don't know, don't sit there staring at it for 5 minutes. Move on to other questions which you do know. If you have time, you can come back to it later. If you don't have time, then wasn't it extra important that you didn't waste even more time looking at it?

"Sorry for the length of my reply, but I didn't have time to write a plan" - Winston Churchill
Like Mr Churchill here many students see making a plan of their Writing parts as a waste of valuable time. The fact is, that writing a plan will not only SAVE you time, but also score you valuable points on the organisation. Briefly jot down the main ideas and some grammar structures you can use in each paragraph (do NOT write a draft) and then start to write.

Watch out for distractors!
In the Listening part, the exam will try to throw in distractors to separate the weak students from the strong ones. 
If you hear exact phrases from the question paper, then the chances are that this is a distractor,Designed to avoid weaker students simply guessing the answers right, don't choose it!

Death to skim and scan!
With Reading and Use of English tasks that involve a long text. Don't spend 5 minutes reading or even scanning the text to find out the content before you start answering questions. This will take alot of time and experiments have proven it has little to no effect on the students ability to answer the questions. Maybe look at the title to make an assumption about it, and then get stuck in!

Hope you found those useful guys. Best of luck to all students taking Cambridge exams this weekend and next!

Why I love using FOCUS

FOCUS is one of my favourite books, and is superb for upper secondary students.
We asked teachers who use Focus to make a video telling us why they love using it.
Here is a fantastic effort by one of Odessa's most skilled and enthusiastic teachers and a very good friend of mine, Zoya Sagajdak.

We look forward to meeting the author Vaughan Jones on April 4th in Odessa.

Well done to all the students involved!

The future is in your hands

Here is one of my favourite activities to do with a class.

The next time you are teaching future predictions, why not use palm reading?

It requires very little preparation, will create genuine interest for students of all ages and creates a context in which the students must use their new language in order to complete the task.

A quick search on google will tell you some basic ways to read a palm. Simply demonstrate to the class as a whole and then get them to practice in pairs. As a follow up task they could create their own tarot cards ....  magic!

Free certificates for everyone!

No I'm not giving away dodgy English qualifications..

It's a simple idea to spice up lessons involving teams and competitions.
Many teachers use team competitions as a way of motivating students and making lessons more fun.This can be especially useful for things like exam practice, reading activities or listening tasks that students might otherwise find boring.

So how do we make the students care about the competition?

Sometimes just being the best group will be enough to create that competitive spirit and high energy atmosphere in the classroom, but we might want to add an incentive to really give some extra edge. Something like chocolate will certainly spice things up but we don't want to be spending our own money by bribing them.

Why not create fun forfeits like agreeing that the losing team must sing a song for 1 minute, tidy the classroom or even perform a forfeit designed by the other teams!

or

Give them a fun free certificate from the internet!  Just type 'make your own certificates' into google. It will take you 1 minute it's free and the students get a prize!

Don't think this just applies to young learners. Here are some of my my adult CPE class after winning their 'BEST REVISION GAMES TEAM' certificate before their upcoming CPE exam.

Have fun!

What is Business English?

This weekend I've been in Kiev to do a training course on how to prepare teachers for the FTBE exam, which is an internationally recognised certificate in teaching Business English.

It's a fantastic qualification to gain. Not only does it give you an advantage in getting those lucrative in-company contracts, but also gives you an answer to the question that very few EFL teachers know the answer to...

"WHAT IS BUSINESS ENGLISH?"

The common misconception people have, is that Business English is just General English with some business vocabulary. This couldn't be further from the truth.

The fundamental difference is that people studying Business English do not require an in-depth knowledge of the language itself, but instead only the skills required in order to complete their work activities through the medium of English. This means that Business English courses will typically:

• Use a negotiated syllabus 
• Not follow a main coursebook
• Be function based
• Use a TBL approach 
• Not focus on the English tense system

There are many more differences when teaching Business English and these are all covered on the FTBE training course. Give yourself an advantage and move from simple EFL teacher to business trainer!

I'd like to say a big thank you to Phil Warwick for delivering an excellent course with such passion and knowledge. The MIM Kyiv Business School has excellent facilities and I look forward to attending and delivering courses there in the near future.

Now back home!

AAAA#@RRGG@hh#h PHOTOCOPIER!

Photocopiers can be temperamental beasts, and every teacher has experienced THAT day when the lesson they had in mind goes out the window due to a problem with the photocopier... Don't stress! Don't panic!

Here are some low-prep activities you can do with no photocopier or printer available

• Speed dating- Students write 2 or 3 questions connected to the lesson on a slip of paper. Then they exchange the papers, and sit in two long lines facing each other. Every 2 minutes one of the lines moves up and they get a new partner.

• Blockbusters- Divide the board into a grid and write a letter in each square. Then divide the students into two teams, one red and one blue. Teams take it in turns to choose a letter. You give them a definition of a word beginning with that letter and they must give the word. If they are correct the square is shaded that colour. The red team must make a connecting line left to right and the blue team from top to bottom.

• Verb Scramble- Write 10 random verbs on the board and the students must make a stroy/questions/sentences using those verbs in the tense or form that you are studying

• DIY Roleplays- Why give out prepared rolecards when you can get the students to do it themselves? Simply give each student a role and in groups get them to create the information themselves; they can then swap and perform the roleplays!

• Past tense photo challenge- Give the students a few minutes to run around taking silly photos of whatever they like (they will love this). Then how many past simple / continuous / perfect / future in the past  sentences can they make about the photos "Geoff was jumping but Tracey had moved"

• Sentence building relays- Put students in groups of 4-6 and give them a word. The first student must add a word either side which can go next to this word, and passes it to the next student, who adds another word. For example: 

stand
can't stand
I can't stand
I can't stand listening
I cant stand listening to
I can't stand listening to Jazz

The last student then runs and brings the sentence to the teacher and the first team to do so wins. There should be a minimum of 5 words in the sentence (more for higher level students) 



And they if they don't, just try switching it off and on again ;)

Seminar on Wider World - Nikolaev

Today I presented a seminar on 'The Joy of Teaching' to teachers from around Nikolaev. We used our new title 'Wider World' as a great example of how to follow key principles which will lead us to successful outcomes.

We discussed:

• Having specific aims in each lesson
• Engaging the students before trying to teach them
• How to differentiate activities for classes with mixed abilities
• Comparing students to their past selves, not other students.
• And many more classroom activities!

Wider World is a book designed around these key principles with a clear one page, one lesson format; each individual page has its own specific lesson objective and each lesson comes with its own engaging activity, which reduces planning and leads to successful outcomes!

I'd like to say thank you to all those who attended for their enthusiasm and keen interest in the world of teaching. It was a pleasure to meet so many great teachers. Thank you also to Ira, the city methodologist, for her fantastic organisation of the whole event.

Please leave any comments or photos in the comments below.

Happy Teaching!

Team writing- a great idea to make writing fun

Today I was teaching in-company for some students who needed to learn how to write an essay for the FCE exam. However, this class  doesn't have time to do writing as homework and the lesson is only one hour.  That's why we chose to do TEAM WRITING!

The idea is simple: students work in groups of four and each member of the group does a different paragraph.You then stick the results to the wall and the teams correct and grade each other's work.

As well as being time efficient, it really makes learners think about the idea of paragraphing, and let's them see an example of how an essay should look without sitting and writing it all themselves.    

Here is our result from today's lesson!

Drama in the classroom

Discussion questions can be great but sometimes students can get bored of always asking their partner's opinion about something neither of them really care about. In this case, role plays can be a great way of making teenagers use the target language in context. Here's how it works:

1. After the students have learnt the target language and you are ready to start your 'activate' stage, put the students in groups of 4 or 5
2. Tell the students to think of a funny situation and also let them know that the next group will have to act this out. Giving the students control over the situations will personalise it and give them a feeling of ownership. You may well get sillier scenarios but this all adds to the fun. Making them decide the situation for the next group will be really enjoyable for them as they will take great pleasure in devising something THE OTHER group must perform, whereas they might feel the need to make something 'cool' if it is their own group and then be bereft of ideas.
3. Tell the groups to exchange the slips of paper with the situations written on. If possible, take different groups to another room or put them in the corridor. Doing this will allow them to prepare unseen by others and will provide much better results
4. The students must then create a short dialogue which must include the target language of the lesson
5. After the allotted time is up, the students return to class and perform their short sketches. They will take great pleasure in watching the other groups act out the funny situations they devised, and you can see the target language being used in the right context.

      Happy teaching!

5 Tips for speaking exams

Last weekend I was assessing speaking examinations. While the overall results were great, some students didn't do as well as they could have done. The good news is that the problems can easily be rectified with some targeted work in the classroom. 

With this in mind, here are my top 5 tips for speaking exams:

• Leave it on the field    - As we say in sport, if you aren't good enough then fair enough, but make sure you give everything. So make sure you try to use all your best and most advanced language. Don't worry about mistakes! International exams such as Cambridge and PTE assess you on the language you CAN use and not on the things you can't do.  Think you can make a third conditional? Go for it!
• LIE LIE LIE -  Don't worry about the actual information you give. Instead, concentrate on the LANGUAGE you use. If you get a question about your best ever holiday, telling a made up story about your trip to USA will score higher points than sitting thinking for 10 seconds whether your Carpathian skiing trip was actually better than that Istanbul city break! It doesn't really matter what you say, only how you say it!
• Laugh and smile - Laughing can instantly release tension and make you feel less nervous, whilst having a positive friendly attitude will give the examiner a more positive view of your communication skills. If the interlocutor has to drag every last sentence out of you, this isn't going to be looked on favourably.
• Listen to your partner- When your partner is speaking, don't just stare out of the window thinking about lunch! Listening to what they are saying and then commenting on it will show that you are able to develop a conversation, and score you high marks on exams that require interaction
• Present perfect continuous is your friend- In most speaking exams you will first be asked a general question about where you live/work/study. Being prepared to use the Present Perfect continuous right at the start will instantly get the examiner looking at those higher level band scores. It's easy to remember, and can be used for the majority of opening questions! 

         Good luck!

Writing in class

Today in Ovidiopol we spoke about getting students to write in class, and how important this is despite the fact that it can often seem boring for students. 

A good solution is to use 5 minute writing storms. 

5 minute writing storms

1. Give the students the start of a sentence and two linkers for example

 '  I am very                    despite                  however

      2.  The students then complete the gaps about themselves using  the linkers

      3. They can then share their sentences in groups

      4. They can then complete ONE paragraph of a ZNO writing task using the same linkers       in just 5 minutes!

It is enjoyable for the students, practices ZNO writing in class under timed conditions and because it's fast, fun and allows the students to express themselves, it shouldn't be met with resistance.

Happy teaching!

5 Point Checklist for ZNO in Ovidiopol Novia schoola

Your 5 Point Checklist for ZNO

Today I had my first visit to Ovidiopol to talk about ZNO and how FOCUS can help in preparing students for this exam.

We spoke about 5 ways we can do this:

1. Doing timed reading activities in classes and how we can make this fun!
2. The importance of teaching lexical chunks and how this can help with the use of English
3. Why production is key
4. How to teach writing in class without students getting bored
5. The importance of recycling 

It was great to meet such a lively group of fun and enthusiastic teachers who are so obviously dedicated to their pupils. I also had the chance to visit the school thanks to Marina of Novia Schoola.

Please leave comments or questions below guys!