The PASS English Exams Blog

3 things to ask the Easter Bunny for!

Easter is hard upon us and the Bunny is on its way bringing eggs to well-behaved children. Well, I have 3 things I’d like to ask the Bunny to bring to students who are preparing English exams such as Cambridge B2 First, C1 Advanced or IELTS. But they aren’t eggs.

Today I attended a Macmillan Education webinar entitled, “7 tips for setting up an exam preparation course”. The speaker was Ethan Mansur, writer of the Teacher’s Book of the 4th edition of Macmillan’s long-running “Ready for” series. I have always felt this series provides great support to teachers who are preparing their students for B2 First and C1 Advanced.

In his talk, Ethan made some interesting points that I’d like to pick up on. Firstly, he stressed the importance of doing a needs analysis at the start of a course. So far so good but what I really liked were the 3 main areas of the needs analysis: strengths and weaknesses; motivations; learning preferences. This student-centred approach allows educators and teachers to get to the heart of the matter. These 3 areas give us the “How” and the “Why” for each student, not just what’s on the surface.

Ethan also talked about study skills and pointed out that a couple of his recommendations are backed up by research. One was that writing in notebooks is more effective than typing on an electronic device, and the other was that more organised students learn more. I have a short, light-hearted video on YouTube and TikTok about the first of these and have embedded it here.?

The point is that writing activates the haptic senses and this aids memorisation. It may seem old-fashioned but being old doesn’t make it bad, does it? The points about using notebooks and organisation in study skills lead me on to my third request for the Easter Bunny…

It was stressed that a vocabulary notebook for exam preparation must necessarily be different to that for a General English course. It should be based on collocations, with example sentences, and be organised by theme, part of exam or some other personal system. I really liked this approach too, especially the last part. Memorisation will be achieved more effectively if the learner tailors their well organised study skills to their personal needs and style.

All in all, an informative and useful session with plenty of food for thought. What would you like the Easter Bunny to bring this year?

Happy Easter, Ramadan Mubarak, and best wishes for any other contemporaneous festivals, periods or events of which I am blissfully unaware!

Bye for now!