858. Focus on each detail



One day teacher of English A said to teacher of English B, “I’ve taught a lot of private classes, training a student to pass a written exam. I don’t like training for just passing a test in a few days or weeks. I can train the student but he doesn’t learn English really – roughly speaking. I give my students some of the following pieces of advice for the exams:

1. Understand the instructions, questions, exercises. Read them carefully. If you know what the exercise asks you to do, you have (some) 50% of the exercise already done.

2. Understand each sentence of the exercise (for example a drill). Comprehend all the information each sentence gives you. Each sentence is like a short story the test tells you.

3. Revise the answers. Probably you’ll find mistakes to correct.

4. If an exercise or question overwhelms you, and you don’t know much what to do, don’t keep choked, go ahead into the next exercise.

5. Write clearly and with a nice handwriting.

6. The exercises are logical: they ask you to give a specific answer and not other - I'm referring to drills, like fill-out-the-blanks.

7. It’s stupid to cheat.

8. An exam is communication between you and its author; and it’s one more step in your process of learning and acquiring English.

9. Focus on the exercises you know more about, but don’t stop too much in doing them.

10. Have a look at all the test paper through, so as you can learn how much time you have for the different questions and activities.

11. At listening and reading activities, read the questions before the actual listening and the actual reading.

12. You attend the exam with the baggage of knowledge and practice you have acquired: so go easy; yet it’s true you should have studied harder and you have a problem, guy.

13. Learn from the errors and mistakes of your exams. Try to keep calm and serene: the test is one more exercise, in some way.” / Photo from: toulouse univ.tlse1 fr

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