Teaching for Exams? Have Fun (Part 3)

UPDATE: This blog post has been shortlisted for the 'Blog Award for Innovative Teaching Ideas' by Teaching English British Council.

Here we are with another post about having fun while training your students for their English language exams.

Last month I attended an excellent webinar by the amazing Sylvia Guinan about interactive storytelling for English language exams. She fully explained how storytelling comics could be used to present/revise phrasal verbs as well as for showing English transformation structures before students ever even realise that these are official parts of the exam. You can find her presentation here.

I found her ideas so interesting and stimulating that I started using www.bitstrips.com to create personalized materials in order to train my students for the Cambridge KET, PET, FCE for Schools.

Below you will find some examples about how I used comics to prepare my students for their exams. 

1. KET for Schools
Reading&Writing part 4
Right/Wrong/Doesn't say OR 3-option multiple choice - In this part of the test students have to read for the detailed understanding and main ideas.

(I adapted the following exercise from the book KET for Schools Trainer) 

(If you are interested in the questions, please contact me.)


2 PET for Schools
Writing Part 1
Sentence transformation - In this part of the test students are given sentences and then asked to complete similar sentences using a different structural pattern so that the sentence still has the same meaning. Candidates should use no more than three words.

(In this example my students and I were revising the reported speech.)

3 FCE for Schools
Use of English Part 4
Key word transformations - In this part of the paper students are tested about lexical and grammatical structures. This exercise focuses on the students' ability to express a message in different ways.

(In this example my students and I were revising the use of comparatives and superlatives.)

If you have more ideas about how to use comics to teach for language exams, please share them with me!