If you are like me and you primarily prepare your students to take Cambridge exams, then you always find yourself going in circles and explaining different parts of the examination. It isn’t rocket science but obviously, some parts are more complicated than others. The handbook provided by Cambridge official helps a lot but I often need to explain the same things and answer the same questions over and over again! This is why I came up with a set of easily digested brochures that are handy and answer all the questions for you.
Preparing for the Cambridge exams isn’t a piece of cake. In order to pass, you have to make sure that your students are familiar with each part of it. At the end of the day, it’s an exam and apart from your students’ knowledge, it also tests their ability to quickly and accurately eliminate the incorrect answers and choose the ones that make the most sense.
The Cambridge exam handbook for teachers provides a good explanation of what to do and what our students are expected to know during the exam. In my opinion, these handbooks are a bit too long and require you, a teacher, to explain everything in detail. If you have ever been in the same room with teenagers, then you know that there are moments that information goes in one ear and out the other. That’s why I felt inspired when I saw a bunch of brochures prepared by Write on with Miss G. She’s prepared them to motivate her students to read different book genres. I love the idea of having brochures as you can easily display them in your classroom, or give them to your students to keep nearby if in doubt.
I’ve made four Cambridge PET brochures, each focusing on a different part of the exam: reading, listening, speaking and writing. Let me show you an example brochure to explain what they are about.
Above you can see the “outside” part of the brochure. On the first part of the trifold, you can see the title, picture and just a general explanation of this part. It also tells you how long this part takes in total and how your students should distribute their writing time.
This page also deals with the most common question of How to improve your writing skills. I came up with a few ways in which your students can practise writing on their own and what parts they need to pay attention to at the exam. My favourite way of improving is paying attention to your errors – something that I should be doing more often myself! After you are done writing, read your answer again just to see if it still makes sense and also pay attention to your most common errors. So simple, yet so effective!
At the back, the students can find the scoring system divided into four parts: content, communicative achievement, organisation and language. To score high, your students need to be aware of what the examiner actually wants, so by explaining each part I believe that learners find it much less intimidating and much more doable.
And of course – the resources. Coming to the classes isn’t enough and learners are often expected to put some effort at home. It isn’t ideal but by telling them that the more effort they put in now, the sooner they can move to another level. I included some of the websites that can be used to find extra tasks to do at home. I especially love Write and Improve an official Cambridge website. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a life-changer! Unfortunately, it doesn’t give any specific tasks for B1 level students, but there are so many other exercises that can help with language development.
This is the inside of the brochure. It is divided into three parts: an email, an article and a story. Each part deals with the objectives of this task and what the candidates are assessed on. Each part helps them understand how many words they are expected to write and shows an example picture of the task. All the tasks were taken from the B1 Preliminary for Schools Handbook. Additionally, each part describes different ways in which your students can approach this task and be successful.
As you can see, all the information is condensed to only one page, which means that it’s easily digestible and also can be stored in students’ files and kept nearby at all times. Moreover, you can always keep them out in the open so they can be accessed at all times and they make for a nice classroom display!
If you like what you see feel free to download Everything you need to know about…Cambridge PET writing for free!
The set of brochures contains four PDFs that you can download from my Teachers pay Teachers store. Below you can see a little teaser of what they look like.
I really enjoyed making these brochures and I hope you liked them too! If you find my content helpful, I would appreciate your support.
JoannaESL 