The PASS English Exam Blog

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...