May FIS

Hi there!

We believe exam feedback offers many benefits to the hard-working student willing to improve. In short, it highlights what to stop, start  and continue doing in your learning process. We already suggested some ideas about it in a previous post.

After a year together, it’s time now to reflect upon your performance and to try and finish once and for all with all these funny little ways some of you still show when using your English.

You all received personal comments on your performance but still, we know some of you like having the exercises done in class to have another go at them at home. Find them attached:

FIS + listening tracks + KEY

As you still have two more opportunities to show your excel at English (final exam 24th May) and September, we’d like you to focus on these criteria to improve your performance:

* full realisation of task: all content points should be included within the number of words requested and including relevant information about them.

*appropriate register and format.

* wide range of vocabulary and structures: try to include all the specific vocabulary and grammar structures learnt in class.

* well-developed control of language: be careful with accuracy, basic mistakes are fatal, e.g. verb/subject agreement, spelling, pronoun agreement, verb tenses, collocations,…

* efective organization of ideas and use of a wide variety of linking devices (linking words, punctuation, parallel structures, adverbials, synonyms, etc)

Exam Feedback

An exam should allow students to show how much they’ve learned by putting things together in a way that helps them learn something more. It should give students a chance to demonstrate how much they know and how much they have learned. Although we are giving marks we want it to be a continuation of the teaching process — a sort of very intense final class — in which students together with their teachers can think about how the material fits together and have a class discussion about the best way to show their command.

You must tackle an exam properly.  You must think “I know what to do, when to do it and how to show off what I know”. Find attached February FIS exams. Try to do it again. Click here to listen to listening 1 and listening 2.

Once finished, have a look at the KEY and the comments about succesful writing and speaking tasks to improve your exam technique and keep your hard work up.