Preply Tutors Academy

Fluency and confidence

Does the student mean that they need help with the speaking part of their exam? If so, find out the following

- Exactly what the format of the exam is: what do they need to speak about? How long for? Alone or with another student? 

- What the scoring criteria are: typically examiners listen out for good vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation etc, but very often it will also be aspects such as communicative achievement, language appropriateness, coherence and cohesion, to name a few. Exam boards often provide detailed criteria tables that explain what a candidate needs to do in each of these aspects to get different scores. Show your student you are serious about their performance by finding this document, if it exists, and bringing it to class.

You can typically find all of this information on the website of the exam provider. You can often also find examples of speaking exams on YouTube.

💡 Lesson idea

Do a "mock" speaking test with the student, making it as similar to the real exam as possible. Record the student while they do this. Listen again together with the student, and ask them to give themselves a score in each category using the exam criteria table. Discuss their opinions together, and give the student specific feedback of good or not so good language they used which informed your decision. 

⚠️ Warning

If you are not comfortable giving an exact score to your student for their performance, you can say so. Explain that examiners go through hours and hours of training to be able to give correct scores, and that you have not received this training. However, you can and will provide feedback on how to improve their performance - which is what they really need. 

Accuracy & Vocabulary

Ask the student why they feel they need this. Is it that they feel that they make a lot of mistakes in the speaking and writing parts of the exam, or is there a specific part of the test that focuses on grammar and/or vocabulary? If that's the case, become as familiar as possible with that part of the test and the type of language it addresses. Once you have identified this, strike a balance between teaching grammar and vocabulary communicatively (in a way that is useful for the student's speaking and writing) and for the grammar/vocabulary test (using questions and exercises similar to those they'll encounter in the exam). 

⚙️ Technique

 Reuse grammar exercises. We often think that if we have used an exercise in class already, we shouldn't use it again. On the contrary, students are very unlikely to remember every answer to every exercise we've ever done, and seeing the same questions or gapfills helps them reinforce their memory of the language point. It also builds confidence, because instead of doing brand new exercises every time, and getting 50% of the answers wrong, for example, they get a chance to improve their scores and feel a sense of progress when they get it right the second, third or fourth time.

📚 Homework idea

Encourage the student to commit to a vocabulary learning routine. For example, for each piece of vocabulary added during a lesson, the student has to write three sentences using the vocabulary. Two should be true and one false. At the beginning of each lesson, choose one piece of vocabulary from the previous lesson and ask the student to read out the three sentences. Ask them questions to guess which sentence is a lie.

Pronunciation

If it's difficult to understand the student, there might be two problems at play. 

1) They mispronounce individual words because they don’t know how to pronounce these specifically, and/or

 2) They have systematic issues with certain sounds of the language (e.g. Spanish students systematically pronouncing /v/ as /b/). 

Take notes of these as you hear them in your student's speech and correct the mistakes in 1) and commit to reviewing these regularly as you would vocabulary items. 

For 2):

⚙️ Technique

Search online for explanations of why that happens (e.g. in Spanish /v/ doesn’t exist, so the student need to learn how to make that sound. They should have their upper teeth lightly touch their lower lip, and then gently let air through while their vocal cords vibrate. Another way to explain this is to ask them to make the /f/ sound, and then change it by starting to vibrate their vocal chords). Introduce these physical explanations, and then have “focused moments” during each class where for a few minutes the student should do whatever speaking activity is in your lesson plan, but paying special attention to the sounds they find difficult.

If it's easy to understand the student, but they tell you they want to sound more native, check the speaking exam criteria. If "sounding native" is not mentioned, let the student know that you'll be happy to help but that it should know that this will not help them get a better score in the exam.

Listening & reading

Once again, become as familiar as possible with the exam format. Ask your student what they feel they struggle with. Common answers may be:

- Time management (the student needs more time than is given during the exam). In this case, you may want to observe the student doing an exam task and identify areas where they are using their time inefficiently, and help them practise different strategies.

- A specific part of the exam is proving very difficult. This could be because they're tackling the task in a way that doesn't help them (for example they're reading the text before the questions, or vice versa, depending on the task). Alternatively, they may have genuine issues with the aspect the exam task is testing (such as coherence and cohesion). 

- Lack of vocabulary: the texts are too difficult because they use too many words and phrases the student does not know. In these cases, on top of helping the student expand their vocabulary, you can help them learn to infer context for meaning, as explained in the next two tips. 

💡 Lesson idea

Introduce a topic the student finds interesting and knows quite a lot about. Play a 60 second audio track about the topic - in the student’s language. Even if you don’t understand it. While you play it, mute the video a couple of times for just a second or less in random spots. Ask the student to explain to you what the audio said, and ask them: was it a problem when you couldn’t hear for a second or less? The answer is usually no (unless you got very unlucky and muted a keyword). Elicit from the student that this is because our brains don’t need every single sound and word to make sense of what we’re hearing - we can skip some and still understand fine. Repeat the exercise but this time use an audio track about the topic in the language you’re teaching. Guide the student to understand the audio even with a couple of seconds missing. After you have introduced this concept, you could make this a standard practice: every time you work with audios you will mute a couple of spots for just a second or less. Eventually the student will not even notice. 

⚙️ Technique

In a reading lesson, after the student reads the text for gist (quickly, for the main idea), ask the student to underline five words they don’t know (not all of them, or the lesson will lose momentum). Look at those words: could the student guess the meaning from context? If so, guide them to do it. Example: “The football match was utterly boring: nothing happened, nobody scored, nobody even tried”. Ask the student: was the match boring? - yes. How boring, do you think? - very boring. Yes: utterly -> very. 

Writing

Once again, become as familiar as possible with the exam format. Ask your student what they feel they struggle with. Common answers may be:

- Time management (the student needs more time than is given during the exam). Ask the student to do a writing test at home and use a stopwatch to keep track of how much time they spend on each task, and what they invest time in (Do they make a plan? Do they proof read their work? Do they write a draft and then try to rewrite the text with clearer writing?)

💡 Lesson idea

Imagine the student has to improve their essay writing fo the exam. Find a number of successful model essays online.  In class, look together at these and ask the student to underline all the useful phrases and conventions they see and would like to use in the future (e.g. what language is used to start and end the essay? How are paragraphs linked to the previous ones? How are ideas compared and contrasted?). Noticing these frequent patterns is the first step towards automatising using them, which is what allows us all to write and communicate as fast as we do. For homework, the student rewrites an essay they have previously written, adding the language noticed in class. Using a familiar essay will allow them to focus only on practising the new language, without having to worry about the content.