How many times have you taught students in Exam Prep classes and felt that your teaching has not actually improved their communication ability or their general command of the language but still they’ve passed their exams with flying colors?
What I have known since the very early years of my career is that the specific tests do not fit perfectly with a...
Five Essential Approaches to Test Taking
Is it that time of the year again? My, oh, my, how time flies! After months and in many cases years of preparation, it all comes down to that final exam which will reward the test taker for all his hard efforts. It would be futile to debate the effectiveness of tests or question what the best way to assess a...
Since its conception, the CEFR (Common European Framework) has offered a reference for languages as regards learning, teaching and assessment. This has established a solid, yet immense network of services comprised of educators, publications and of course exam evaluation leading to the eventual certification of competency as regards the target language and...
B2 is a scary level. It is the boss level in a video game that you and your students have been painstakingly practicing for years. You have trained your champions; you have groomed them to victoriously face any challenges. They have gone through the grind. They came to the school, young and bright and hopeful, copying “apple” with chubby fingers, toiling...
Summer of 2021 was a disillusioning experience: working as an exam marker brought me before grave teaching decisions of the past. And several others chosen not to be made.
An accepted application for the exam-designing organization arrived in the blissful hope that, assessing exam papers would enrich my teaching practice, coupled with a touch of...
It’s this time of the year! Again! Another examination period is coming and with that stress, pressure, anxiety, lack of sleeping or bad eating habits appear. Is this normal? Well, if you take it from the brain’s point of view, yes! Stress is the mental and physical state we face when we feel that something threatens us. We may feel either nervous for a...
INTRODUCTION
Many young learners nowadays are visual and auditory learners who are also generally quite computer literate, have no problems with digital technologies and enjoy watching videos on the internet: “digital natives”, as they are sometimes called. The lesson outlined in this paper illustrates how integrating digital technologies into the teaching...
In the ELT community, there are so many opinions when it comes to Tests & Exams. There is a major revolution in Social Media where there are many educators who complain about Exams, Testing, Exam Preparation. Well, I believe that what is happening is amazing. It is time for us, as educators, to understand that YES our students take exams, YES our...
The exam period is looming on the horizon, while practice tests, vocabulary lists, and more exam-related instruction begin to intensify. You are flirting with the idea of incorporating some extra slots of “teaching” the test while assigning some extra homework sounds like a good prescription for bridging those “last learning gaps”. “Now, it’s time to...
The examiner was pacing up and down the aisle in the examination room which was gradually getting crowded. Nearly all the candidates had arrived for the written part of a C2 level examination, and it seemed that the procedure would follow the scheduled times. Then, suddenly he heard a voice behind him. “Mister!!!”. He turned around utterly surprised...
