The PASS English Exam Blog

  What did I learn from writing IELTS exams and model answers in a heatwave? I thought I was going to have a nice, long summer. A road trip around France, followed by a few quiet weeks back in Madrid working on PASS courses. And a short trip to the cooler environs of Hamburg to finish. How wrong I was! Everywhere was stiflingly hot and I also got involved in an IELTS textbook writing project. More fool me for taking it on but I couldn’t resist. You learn so much from being directly involved in exam writing. I was asked to write IELTS exams, in addition to model answers for Writing Tasks 1 and 2. So, essentially I was on both sides: examiner and candidate. The age group for the content was 14 to 17 and the aim was to prepare students for when they do IELTS when they’re older. This meant that I could write reading texts and listening scripts which reflected content which teens might be interested in. The writing and speaking tasks were also adapted to take their age into account....

What vocabulary does a learner need to know at C1 level? How many words do they need to know? What’s a lemma? Does it matter? A lot of students worry about which vocabulary, and the amount of vocabulary, they should know at each level of English, especially when they’re getting to higher levels such as B2 and C1. I’d like to highlight a few key tips for learning vocabulary when moving from B2 to C1 level. Here’s the million dollar question in terms of exam preparation. Is it more important to learn all the words that correspond to C1 level, or to be able to use fewer words and expressions more accurately? Let’s rewind a little. I did a blog just before Easter asking the Easter bunny for three gifts to help with exam preparation. One of them was about how to structure a vocabulary notebook. I wrote that it should be based on collocations, with example sentences, and be organised by theme, part of exam or some other personal system . You’ll notice there was no mention of a numbe...

How many papers are there in the Cambridge B2 First and C1 Advanced exams? Do you know what each paper is worth in terms of your overall score? Of course, there are four papers. Three of them are worth 20% each and one of them is worth 40%. How strange! If I had asked the same questions prior to 2015 the answers would have been different. Then there were five papers all worth 20%. So what happened? Well, in 2015 Cambridge decided to merge two of the papers, Reading and Use of English. So now this one paper is worth nearly half the marks. So, it must be really long, right? Actually no it isn’t, relatively speaking. In the B2 First it takes 75 minutes and in the C1 Advanced it takes 90 minutes. The Writing paper in the B2 First is longer, and in the C1 Advanced it’s the same length. But it’s only worth half as many marks. In total, the B2 First exam last about three and a half hours, and the C1 Advanced lasts about four hours. So these papers take up just over a third of the exam and rep...

Millions of people sign up for tests and exams each year to certify their level of English. The demographic of those looking to gain scores from B2 to C2 is clear. The majority are from 16-30 years old and are in, or wish to be in, higher education. Success in these exams opens doors and offers the chance to improve prospects. It provides young people with increased mobility and more options in employability and education. Attendance at a test centre to carry out a test, whether paper-based or computer-based, has always been the standard way of proctoring the process. However, if candidates are unable to attend test centres to carry out exams because of restrictions, such as happened during the Covid pandemic, then the field becomes vulnerable to disruption. Exam providers are mindful of this and have been using online proctoring systems for some time now. But there is a relatively new player with skin in the game. Enter Duolingo English Test (DET), stage left. The Duolingo app has bee...

Back in the nineties, I was living in Florence. A friend of a friend came out for a visit and was having a drink with a bunch of us language teachers. To the consternation of all present, he openly admitted he had no interest in learning languages and that he’d be delighted if someone could come up with a device that would do the work for him. In those days this kind of device was conceptualised as a machine that would translate your speech into the other language via an electronic voice. Lovely! We debated the pros and cons of this but couldn’t really come up with a strong argument against it, at least not strong enough for him, in spite of the fact that it could potentially put us all out of work. Well, über-magnate Elon Musk announced last year that a chip was in development that could revolutionise the way we communicate. The chip would be implanted into the brain and we would all communicate in a   universal language. It was only 5 years away! Great, right? Maybe it’ll com...

Easter is hard upon us and the Bunny is on its way bringing eggs to well-behaved children. Well, I have 3 things I’d like to ask the Bunny to bring to students who are preparing English exams such as Cambridge B2 First, C1 Advanced or IELTS. But they aren’t eggs. Today I attended a Macmillan Education webinar entitled, “7 tips for setting up an exam preparation course”. The speaker was Ethan Mansur, writer of the Teacher’s Book of the 4 th edition of Macmillan’s long-running “Ready for” series. I have always felt this series provides great support to teachers who are preparing their students for B2 First and C1 Advanced. In his talk, Ethan made some interesting points that I’d like to pick up on. Firstly, he stressed the importance of doing a needs analysis at the start of a course. So far so good but what I really liked were the 3 main areas of the needs analysis: strengths and weaknesses; motivations; learning preferences . This student-centred approach allows educators and teacher...