My FCE Class 2012

Dear New Students,

I thought I would stop planning my first lesson and take a break to write to you. Writing before I meet you this afternoon, that is. This is an introductory letter with a very wide audience and a late arrival. What do I mean? Some people have already read this because they have subscribed by e-mail or RSS to my blog, but the specific addressee of this letter, you, my new student, will only know about its existence after you meet me in class and I point you to this blog url as a kind of homework. Well, not quite.

In my letter to my 2007 class I said:

This blog is not homework, but an invitation. There is no proper way of reading this. See the menu or help yourselves. Read it all or just a bit every other day. Either way is equally perfect. You decide.

This blog is all about learning, developing autonomy to study and reflecting all along. Exams and certificates are papers. Communication with the world is magic.

Every year, every new start of a course is something exciting for me. This is how I see my challenge with you:

-you have enrolled in this course either because you want to know more English at this level or because you need to present a certificate to a future employer. Maybe some both.

-I particularly do not like teaching exams. I like teaching English. More accurately: I enjoy learning with you. Yes, teachers learn a lot in the process of preparing lessons for you!

My challenge? How to balance the two extremes. (I can feel many a teacher nodding at this point).

In my class I will always be inviting you to explore on your own, to be curious, to read voraciously. Are you ready?

I have been taking a good look at the new book we will use this year and I am glad there is lots of writing practice. Writing these days, writing when you don't know how far a Facebook post or a forwarded email gets to, is difficult. You need to think a little bit like bloggers do: you do not always control how the message is received or who reads it or what for!

When you write for an exam, you also need a split target reader in mind: an imaginary friend, a story reader or an employer receiving your application letter. At the same time, we write for a teacher, an exam corrector who is interested in your skills to get a message across.

It doesn't matter if you write on or offline: you always write for people you know and a lot more people you do not know.

Enough said for starters. There is so much I want to share with you, but we have time till the course ends in November. We'll meet in class or online soon.

All very best,

Claudia

P/S: Oh, one last thing. I can imagine you saying "Wait, tell me about the exam!"

Here is a presentation a teacher called Hellen has made. She summarizes the task you'll have at hands.

FCE Exam Summary

View more PowerPoint from Helen Collins

FCE Oral Interview & ELT Pics

For part 2 of the FCE oral interview, it is necessary to practise comparing and contrasting photographs. If you have taken a look at the past paper examination books, you have probably discovered that the photos chosen are not always that telling of exact details of place and what the people in them are up to. My own students usually complain they do not know what else to say about them.

I usually point my students to Flickr for finding striking photos that will ignite their imaginations. I use some of my own photos in class too, but I try to encourage them to surf and find new images.

What to bear in mind when choosing photos:

-You aim at stretching yourselves to speak about a variety of topics.

-You can follow tags to find similar images to pair.

The idea is to get you to be fluent about any topic, not just your favourite ones. You should try to relate to the photos as well as guess and predict what's going on. This exam task is, in my opinion, a step before creating a story.

Think of the story setting or conflict and you get the picture!

The is a drawback. It is hard to find a pair of closely related photos to compare and contrast. Doing it on your own is time consuming.

How to solve this?

I've found this initiative that Sandy Millin explains in her blog. Several EFL teachers have been collecting photos for classroom use and organized them in sets according to topics. These are over 2,000 photos from all round the world and they cover the vocabulary range you need.

Ceri Jones has an idea about annotating the photos on an interactive whiteboard to enlarge your vocabulary. That gets interesting. But why not do it in Flickr? Students could choose themselves whether to click on further vocabulary or ideas for their description on a need-to-know basis.

See this example:

If you go to the Flickr link of the image above and hover the mouse over the photo, you'll get surprised with Cogdog's suggestions.

I think it's great that teachers can share these photo prompts online, but it would be wonderful to see students creating notes on them and sharing the learning!

Storytelling

Did you know?


Many of the students sitting for the FCE exam are afraid of writing stories. You know that in your part 2 of the Writing Paper you get a choice of rubrics to write about. Stories are, in my opinion, the freest and most creative opportunity the exam gives. We need to unlearn so much guided or repeated practice using typical starters and endings in letters. We need to go out of our comfort zone. To tell a story, we are always putting a lot of ourselves out there. And that's scary, yeah.

How to start? I do not have enough imagination...

Excuses.

Think of this:

"The scariest moment is always just before you start [writing]. After that, things can only get better." – Stephen King

Inspiration 911

Here is the site where I found Stephen's quote. It's an emergency line for those in need of getting ahead in their writing, but suffering from writer's block. Do you need a setting for your story? A verb? Do you need to kill a character?

http://www.webook.com/911writersblock

Now, would you let yourself be inspired and write a story? Take a look at these beautiful photographs. She's Dominoe.





My last year students did beautifully. Today we are writing again. You can read their versions in our class wiki. The wiki is not worldwide open, but you can post your version of the story in the comments here, if you like.

Stories help us getting connected. Connected to ourselves, to othe reader and the author as well! Alan, the author and owner of the real Dominoe, read the class production and wrote this post in return.

Here you can and hear Alan telling his original story.



What I enjoy about re-writing Dominoe is how a dog can wake up our imagination, how we can all become a new owner that breathes another life to it. So here are our frisbees to Dominoe. Hope you enjoy them and join our storytelling.

FCE Listening Practice through Dictation

The word dictation probably brings to mind images of old, dull teaching practices. However, dictation has long been proven a learning device for foreign language students.

To mention but a few benefits, dictation can:

-help you obtain a list of words you usually misspell

-give you practice in note taking (FCE Listening Paper, part 2)

-foster thinking in the new language. Every learner's dream, isn't it?

Now, none of these benefits will happen unless you are motivated to practice dictation. If you choose how to practice it and try to vary the exercises, you'll focus more on its benefits rather than getting bored in a few minutes.

Here is a choice of websites to browse.

This site gives you three options of practice: jotting down the first letter of a word only, the whole word or a fill in the blanks with a bit of context to help you.

http://www.listen-and-write.com/
Here you will find dictations with real life English videos. British accent throughout.

Perhaps you'd like to try dictations from texts first. Then, the graded dictations at
http://www.fonetiks.org/dictations/ can be the place to start.

For a quick practice at the word level only, try
http://www.learnenglish.de/dictationpage.htm

How can this practice help me develop listening skills?

Many students complain that listening is one of the most difficult parts of the test. Indeed, English has an isochronous rhythm that languages like Spanish do not share. Dictation can help you at the level of the sentence, the words, the division of a chunk of speech into sensible units.

For the FCE level, however, all of that is taken for granted. You will be asked to make assumptions, establish connections and not simply recognizing sounds and words. So, if listening is your stumbling block, why not get some dictation practice to help you break such a big task into manageable portions?

Image source:

Verifying Dictation by mpujals