FCE

Top Tips for the FCE

by Rosie Burke

Rosie Burke is a teacher/teacher trainer with International House – BCN. She is an experienced exam preparation teacher specialising in teaching YL and teenagers.

The following is a summary of the workshop she gave at International House – BCN on Saturday, 6th February, 2010 from 4.45 – 5.45 pm as part of an ELT Conference.

Summary

Through several fun and engaging teacher activities Rosie managed to get her message(s) across:

* teachers should be well- familiar with the FCE exam format
* when giving instructions clear focus on the task should be kept – students can easily get distracted and overwhelmed by information
* teachers should build up a good rapport soon after course starts so that students can fully trust their methods
* students should be encouraged to keep an error record, or as Rosie calls it ‘favourite mistakes’ record
* TQA technique (timing, analyse questions, analyse answers)
* do regular mock exams & make sure you focus enough on timing, transferring answers, but non-language aspects as well, like dealing with stress, making sure you’ve got the ID, stationary, etc. remind students not to cheat
* When transferring answers, numbers should be written in numerals, not words, e.g. ‘5 hours’ not ‘five hours’ (Listening paper)


Some ideas for student activities:

* quizzes (exam format)
* matching tasks
* jumbled exam paper
* writing exam tasks
* exploring the topic area
* predicting / brainstorming possible answers
* talking about the exam to people not directly involved in the process, like family and friends

We (the participants) tied out to some extent some of these activities. It was an eye opening experience as far as some aspects of exam practice teachers normally don’t experience are concerned, for e.g. receiving a lot of information in a short amount of time, having to multitask and monitor your decisions, confronting stress and frustration. However, I found predicting answers to be overvalued and little or no attention was paid to how it affects individual students, whether it is more effective or less overall and how much time should be assigned to this practice having in mind the course length and syllabus constraints.

Overall, I found attending this workshop a valuable and rewarding experience which allowed us to step back from our daily routine and reflect on the whole process from both teacher and student perspective.