Resources, tips, materials for the 2015 Cambridge English updates

Today I would like to share with you some great resources for the 2015 exam updates for the Cambridge English: First, Cambridge English First for Schools and Cambridge English: Advanced exams.

Cambridge English Language Assessment have created a microsite for the updated exams.

http://teachingsupport.cambridgeenglish.org/

On the microsite, you'll find lots of things, including details on the changes that will be incorporated to the exams, sample materials to prepare for them

and lots of resources to view and download. I've just downloaded the Teaching Tips for Cambridge English: First for Schools  and they look very useful.

You can also sign up for a monthly newsletter so that you don't miss new additions and developments.

Another date for your calendar

Every week now I receive invitations to webinars.  Sometimes they fit in with my busy schedule and I can take part in them live.  At other times, I can't connect live because I'm out or just too busy.  That's not a problem because I can watch the recording afterwards.  It's fantastic!  

If you have an internet connection, teachers can take part in training no matter where they teach.

The latest webinar invitation I received is for:

Register link

I've signed up for the Monday session.  I might meet some of you online?

Busy week - listening, listening........

This week, I've signed up for two webinars on the subject of listening.  

Today, I'll be connecting my computer at 3pm to watch:

Then, on Wednesday at 4, I'll be online again to take part in another webinar on Listening:

It's a shame that they are taking place this week because last Friday, I was in San Sebastian, giving 2 seminars on ...... Listening!  For Cambridge English: First and Cambridge English:  Advanced in my case!

Maybe some of you will also be connecting today or Wednesday :·))

I'll be uploading some activities that I prepared for the Cambridge English: Advanced Listening session in my next post!

Webinar: Changes to Cambridge English: First, First for Schools and Advanced

This webinar will focus on the revised versions of Cambridge English: First, Cambridge English: First for Schools and Cambridge English: Advanced, which go live in 2015.

It is aimed at teachers who are preparing, or going to prepare candidates for these exams. The presenters will concentrate on the formats and timings of the exams in order to fully inform teachers of the changes which are taking place.

To register for this webinar, please choose your preferred date and time.

Monday 11 November 2013  14.00 – 15.00 (UK time)

Wednesday 13 November 2013  10.00 – 11.00 (UK time)

Online First & Advanced Use of English practice

I am just gearing up for another trip to San Sebastian.  Hopefully, the weather will be just as good as last Friday when I was there too.

This time, we'll be looking at Cambridge English First: Teaching Tips and also Advanced Speaking.

I was looking through the links I have bookmarked for First preparation and revisited a site I discovered back in November.

I thought it was well worth a mention on this blog.

English Revealed has interactive exercises for the Cambridge First and Advanced Use of English papers.  Most of the material on the site is free (you can sign up for 5.99 Euros to get more over the course of 6 months).

I'll be passing on the address to the people who come along on Friday (and am doing the same with you now!)

Recording students describing photos

Hello again!  Sorry I've been 'missing' for a few days but life has been even more hectic than usual this week!  And it hasn't been for a lack of ideas to share with you on this blog, believe me!  I have a file full of materials and lots of links saved in my 'For later' file on my computer.

So, let's make a start on one of them!

As I told you recently, I gave a talk at the TESOL Spain 2012 Convention.

As well as giving my talk, I was able to attend a few sessions.  The first one I went to a Keynote presentation given by Russell Stannard.  Here he is in action:

(Thanks Donna Koniholm for the great photos you took at the Convention!) 

I've been reading articles and tips from Russell Stannard for a long long time.  Quite deservedly, his website http://www.teachertrainingvideos.com/  has won lots of awards.

For a quick (3 minute) presentation of the site by Russell himself, I recommend watching this video.

During Russell's TESOL presentation, the tool that really caught my eye was MailVU:  http://mailvu.com/.

This allows you to record video clips on a computer using the microphone and webcam and then send them to an email contact.

Here is Russell's description of the potential use of this site for language teachers:

… you can get the students to do recordings of themselves speaking in English at home … and then sending those recordings to you, you can then listen to them and obviously give them some feedback on their oral performance…

Watch Russell explaining this site here.


So, of course, me being a Cambridge ESOL teacher and teacher trainer, I thought:  What a fantastic tool to practise the 1 minute talking about photos tasks in the Cambridge English: Preliminary, First, Advanced and Proficiency Speaking Tests!!!

Let's consider how you could go about this:
For homework, tell students which photo(s) you want them to talk about and the question you want them to answer in relation to the photo(s)

For example,

Here are your photographs.  They show people spending their free time in different ways.  I'd like you to compare the photographs and say what are the advantages and disadvantages for the people of spending their free time in these different ways.  

Source:  First for Schools Handbook

You send students a link to MailVU by email.  They open the link, record themselves doing the task, and send you the clip by email.  You watch it and can give them feedback (by return of email/record a video of yourself talking about their performance/discuss the clip with them in class (maybe while you both watch the video).

I believe it has fantastic potential for working on this part of the Cambridge ESOL speaking tests!

If you try it out, please let us know about it!

Phrasal verbs and the Cambridge: Advanced Use of English Paper

In my previous post, I discussed the presence of phrasal verbs in the wordlists at the different levels of the Common European Framework as defined in the English Vocabulary Profile.

I had said that I would share some useful links with you for working on the area of phrasal verbs in my next (i.e. this) post, but on reflection, I thought I'd go into WHERE phrasal verbs are tested on the Cambridge English: Advanced Use of English Paper.

Let's look at the December 2009 CAE Use of English Paper:

Phrasal verbs are tested twice in Part 1 of this CAE paper - within the context of a text about the Toronto Shoe Museum.

In question 3 of this part, candidates had to choose from phrasal verbs containing the verb 'look' in the following sentence:

The more I (3) .................... the subject, says Sonja, the more I find that footwear (4) ...... (reveals) more about the world of the wearer than any other item of clothing.

For question 3, candidates were given these four phrasal verbs:

look through, look into, look up, look over

Later on in this same text, candidates had to choose between:

pick up, take on, get over, make out

In this case, it was the precise meaning of different phrasal verbs connected with the idea of understanding or perceiving that was being tested.

I just couldn't .......... (11) why it was like that.  

In Part 2 of the same CAE Use of English Paper, in an article about the Census of Marine Life,

the phrasal verb 'cut off' is tested.  Here, candidates have to supply the particle in the gap fill text:

(The project) is expected to discover thousands of new species of marine animals, many of ..........  (which) have been completely cut ........ (off) from the rest of the world for thousands of years.

In Parts 3 and 4 (Worldbuilding and Gapped Sentences), no phrasal verbs are tested.  With the wordbuilding task, this is to be expected, but with Part 4, phrasal verbs ARE tested on some versions of this exam.

For example:

At the start of his career, James was ..... between taking a job in television and becoming an accountant.

The main suspect in the case told the police that his jacket had been ........ when he fell off his bicycle.
                                                                                                                                                 
In some urban areas, tower blocks are being ......... down to be replaced by rows of houses.               

CAE Handbook

(In all three sentences, the missing word is 'torn' and in the last sentence, it is part of a phrasal verb - tear down)

Finally, in this paper, phrasal verbs may also be tested in Part 5 - the Key Word Transformations.

In December 2009, candidates had to transform the first sentence:

They told Nick not to go to the city centre on New Year's Eve.

using the key word 'warned'

to complete this second sentence:

Nick  ..................................   from the city centre on New Year's Eve.

Here, two phrasal verbs could form part of the answer:  to stay away or to keep away.

Nick was/has been warned to stay/keep away from the city centre on New Year's Eve.

As you can see, knowledge of phrasal verbs is tested considerably in the CAE Use of English Paper (and at other levels of the Cambridge ESOL exams too)

So, in my next post, I will share some great resources with you for working on phrasal verbs.


So, I'll sign (1) ......... now but will be. back with you again soon!


1  a)  up   b)  off   c)  in   d)  on

As you like it:Catching Up in an Age of Global English

I was re-reading a report today of a study into the future of the English language, published in 2007.

The report, 'As You Like It: Catching Up in an Age of Global English', focuses on various issues, including the continuing fall in the number of school and university students in the UK who study a language other than their mother tongue.

The pessimistic view expressed in the report about the state of foreign language learning in the UK seems to be born out by an article in the Times Higher Education last week,  with the headline:

"Tongue-tied UK badly equipped to join in the conversation of nations"

This report contains some thought-provoking figures, for example:

There has been a general fall in the number of people applying to UK universities this year :

Much of this decrease is explained by a sharp decline in applications from older students - those in their twenties as distinct from school-leavers aged 18 among whom the application rate is down only slightly.

The biggest worry is the marked decline in languages and related studies. There has long been anxiety that the new funding arrangements would adversely affect language studies, partly because many language courses require an additional year of study and thus an additional year's worth of debt. Now we have evidence. Applications to European language courses are down by 11.2 per cent, those to non-European languages are down by 21.5 per cent: both decreases are well above the average decline across all subjects.

The writer of the article: Sir Adam Roberts, is president of the British Academy. He expresses concerns raised in As You Like It, such as: 

We Brits are at risk of becoming a nation of monoglots in a world of polyglots. 

All this contrasts starkly with the article from the ABC I referred to in a previous post. The 25,000 Spaniards contributing to the National Insurance Scheme in the UK and the 40,000 Spanish students taking a language course somewhere in the UK each year.

I found myself nodding on reading the following reflection on learning another language in an article published in the Guardian yesterday: 

the initial years of studying a language are tough: there is no escape from the grind of learning how to conjugate verbs, construct sentences and to absorb enough words to begin to understand what is written and said.

To elect to do this, young boys and girls need to know that, like practising a musical instrument, designing clothes or playing a sport, the end-result will be worthwhile. They need teachers who can inspire them, classmates who encourage them and families who understand the value of the skill. In Britain, none of this exists to a sufficient degree.

 

Let's hope our students are not reluctant to learn another language and see it as something useful!!!

If you need some arguments to convince them, there are lots in this New York Times article:

English Is Global, So Why Learn Arabic?

You could give each student or group of students one of the different views put forward by the 6 debaters - all of them coincide in the desirability for everyone to speak at least one other language.

And you can also read what the readers of the New York Times have to say on the matter.

Why not follow this up with some essay writing practice:

"Everyone should learn at least one foreign language" Why?

Text analysis and UsingEnglish.com

I have just subscribed to another site.  I had used various worksheets before from UsingEnglish.com but hadn't really got round to looking round the site when I'd visited it previously.

Right now, I am working on several seminars that I have coming up - most of them are on Cambridge English: Advanced, so I'm enjoying preparing activities and tips to share on all five papers - Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking.

Back in November, I shared with you a tool for making Word Clouds by feeding in a text to Wordsift.

I have found another very useful tool for working on and analysing texts.

I fed the following text from a CAE Reading Paper  into the Text Content Analysis Tool on the UsingEnglish.com website.

THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

Time was when physicists dreamed of a final theory of fundamental physics, a perfect set of equations that would describe every force and particle in nature. Today that dream is being overtaken by the suspicion that there is no such thing. Some even fear that all attempts at a deeper understanding of nature are dead ends. This will lend support to those who have long claimed that research into fundamental physics is a waste of time and money; that at best it provides answers to obscure questions which few people understand or care about. So do these reservations undermine pure physics as a scientific pursuit? Surely, it makes no difference if the truths that physicists seek turn out to be more complex and messy than they once hoped. It could even make the search more intriguing. There are as many profound questions out

there as there have ever been, and to answer them physicists need the kind of hard experimental evidence that can only come from pure research. Can we, therefore, justify spending the huge sums of money that such research demands? What it boils down to is whether we think the search for fundamental truths is important. This quest for knowledge is a defining human quality, but it’s hard to quantify how our lives have been ‘improved’ by it. There have been plenty of technological spin-offs from the space race and other experiments. But the spin-offs are not the point. In showing us how the universe works, fundamental physics could also tell us something profound about ourselves. And for that, a few billion dollars would be a small price to pay.

After clicking on the 'calculate' button, I was impressed by the information I obtained about the text, all in a matter of seconds.















I found out that:

• The Total Word Count for the above text is 273 words.  
• 165 words appear only once in the text.  
• There are 15 sentences.  
• The average number of words per sentence is 18.2. 
• 25 of the words in the text are classed as Hard - they are three or more syllables long.

Lexical density

The text is lexically dense.  (The lexical density is 60.44%)

This is calculated by taking the total number of words in the text, dividing it by the total number of words and multiplying that by 100.

The programme also made me a Word Cloud for the text and I could sort this either alphabetically or in order of frequency of use in the text.

I then tried out the same text in the Advanced Texts Analyser (you have to be registered with the site to be able to use this).

I could then obtain:

•  graphic information about the words in the text (For example:  there are 64 four letter words and 42 of these four letter words only appear once in the text).
• information like the fact that there are 7 2-word phrases that appear more than once in the text (e.g. fundamental physics, spin offs, have been)
• 94 of the words belong to the Common Words word list.

I will certainly be trying these tools out again soon and sharing them with teachers at the CAE Reading seminar!

Hope you will try it too!

Online Cambridge exam style exercises

Picture from: Education week

In almost every class, there will be students who barely have time to make it to class every week and struggle to get their homework done on time.

There will also be other students who have more time on their hands (or maybe they just manage to find more time for English!)

Picture from:  Cortland edu

For both of these types of students, I try to cater for them as well as I can.  I set homework for everybody and tell them that it's really important for them to do it by a set date.  And for those who want and have time for more, I point them in the direction of other things they can be doing.



When a friend mentioned the International House Bristol website and the online practice exercises there for First, Advanced and Proficiency, I looked at it immediately.

I have mentioned it at several Cambridge ESOL seminars and shared it with colleagues and friends.  Now, I'm mentioning it to YOU!

I hope you and your students find it useful and if you know of any other sites like this one, please share them with the rest of us!