The GCSE and A Level exams are approaching rapidly. It really is time to knuckle down and get a revision schedule sorted out so that you make sure you spend enough time on each subject and have a chance to look at all aspects of the curriculum.
Here are a few helpful tips to help you stay on the right path:
1. Don’t revise for an exam within half a day of taking it. Exam in the morning? Stop revising for it at lunchtime the day before. Exam in the afternoon? Don’t revise for it that day. Revising at the last minute can sap your confidence as you convince yourself that you don’t know anything and will never get a good grade. If you don’t know your stuff that close to the exam, then spending the remaining hours cramming is unlikely to help!
2. Little and often is key. It can be really tempting to leave the final exams until much nearer the date. However, after 4-5 weeks of exams you will be suffering from revision fatigue and you really won’t want to spend hours each day revising for the last one or two. Besides, we can’t focus well for hours on end so that kind of revision is less effective anyway. Schedule in a few revision sessions for those last exams earlier in the month so that you can keep things ticking over nicely.
3. Take a break every 45 minutes or so. There is a good reason why school lessons last 35-45 minutes – we cannot focus intensively for much longer than that. Work hard and focus well for 45-50 minutes, then take a short break. Not three hours of social media, but 5-10 minutes to walk around the house or garden, get a drink or something to eat, and stretch. Then sit down for another session. Try looking into the “Pomodoro Technique” – there are lots of videos to explain the idea.
4. Vary your revision techniques. Reading and re-reading the same page again and again only works for a very small minority of people. Try drawing mind-maps, thinking of acronyms to help you remember key info, summarising and re-summarising to get to the key points. Get busy with the highlighter pens, add stickers to mark the important bits, see what works best for you.
5. Test yourself regularly. At the beginning of a topic, write yourself a quiz covering 5-10 key pieces of information. When you think you have finished with that topic, try the quiz and see if you can remember the answers without looking in your notes.
6. Check your timing by trying some past papers, under timed conditions. Time management is an important exam technique as it is vital to leave enough time to tackle all of the questions on the paper. Your teacher may give you some past papers, or you can usually find some on the website for the relevant exam board.
7. Successful multi-tasking is a bit of a myth. If you are watching TV, listening to music, checking social media AND revising, then you aren’t concentrating properly on any of them. Book time in your schedule to check email or messaging apps, tell your friends you are going off-line for a while, and allow yourself to really focus.
8. Downtime is important too, so remember to plan it in your revision schedule. Maybe not full days or a whole weekend, but careful slots to allow you to exercise, meet friends, or go to that party.
9. Eat well. Lots of fruit and veg, of course, but also proper good quality protein and carbs. Yes to home-cooked stir fry, stew, bolognaise etc. Proceed with caution when it comes to doughnuts, chocolate and fast food.
10. Prioritise a good sleep habit. Although it can be tempting to revise late into the night, you have to balance the likelihood of retaining something important read at midnight, with the probability of impaired thinking if you have been up that late!
GCSE speaking exams will be taking place in April which leaves just a few weeks of revision and preparation time. So, if you have just 10-12 minutes or so to wow the examiner and get the best possible mark, what preparation can you do?
1. Firstly, be sure to look at the specification for the exam board that you are doing. They are all freely available online, and your teacher may have given you some information already. In general, there will be a picture card section, a role play and a conversation or two – do you know how long each one lasts? How long do you have to prepare?
2. Use your preparation time wisely. You will have a few minutes (12 or so) in a room with an invigilator. During this time you won’t have access to a dictionary or smartphone. The idea is that you look at the picture topic and prompts and plan the role play. You are allowed to make notes, but you must not read out full sentences from your notes, so use keywords only – maybe past participles or verbs to remind you to use them – even a simple list of the things to remember like tenses, adjectives, smile etc.
3. Your teacher has probably given you a list of likely topics/questions. Ensure that you understand ALL of them and that you can recognise them quickly. If you have been encouraged to write sample answers for each question then accept that you may not remember each answer in full – that’s like learning a script. Instead, try to learn keywords for each area and if necessary be willing to stretch the truth in order to demonstrate your language skill, rather than stick rigidly to what you really think/did. E.g. if you spent last weekend canoeing in Somerset but can’t remember how to say so, then tell the assessor that you went to the cinema with your friends to see a comedy!
4. Your assessor will give you a chance to demonstrate past, present and future tenses. Make sure you recognise the clue in the question (ie “What did you do last weekend” = past, “What do you like to do at the weekend” = present, “What will you do next weekend” = future).
5. Learn some panic vocabulary. Swapping from your target language into English to say “I don’t understand” will lose you marks – doing it in French/German/other target language will lose you fewer marks and may gain you some for effective communication! Remember that for some parts of the exam the assessor is only allowed to repeat what they said, not to change the words at all.
6. Know how to formulate questions in your chosen language. For example, does the word order change when you make a question instead of a statement? What are the different question words and what do they mean? Can you recognize them all? You will have to ask a question as part of the role play, so do practise relevant questions for each topic.
7. When it comes to the picture prompt, it is always a good idea to have practised a couple first. Do remember to try to link your description of the photo to the topic where possible. So if the topic is “Work” and you have a picture of a young man serving an elderly couple, try to include the words “waiter”, “restaurant” or “hotel” in your answer as well as describing what they are wearing/doing/eating. Remember that the prompt words are there to give you an idea of what will be asked. The assessor will not use those exact words during the conversation, but will formulate a question around each (from their script).
8. Consider your choice of conversation topic carefully. For example, for Edexcel you can choose one of the two topics and have a minute or so to talk about it before being asked questions on other themes in that topic. You could select one of the themes you are LESS confident with so that you have the maximum amount of time possible to prepare, or you could just hope that it doesn’t come up in the exam and choose one that you know really well instead.
9. Grammar! If you are aiming for the higher grades, then you will have to demonstrate a range of grammar knowledge. See how many of these you can include in your conversation…
– A range of tenses (past, present and future as a minimum, but for a higher grade add, imperfect, conditional and pluperfect if possible) – Complex grammatical structures – e.g. um…zu for German, après avoir +infinitive and avant de +infinitive for French. – A range of people doing the verbs (to show you can use correct endings) – Opinions (3 different ways of showing what you think) – Modal verbs (can, should, must) – Word order: especially for German but also with French (adjective order) – Correct endings depending on gender (and “case” for German) – Time phrases – not just “at 12 o’clock” or “tomorrow” but also rarely, often, never, always etc. – A negative or two
10. Take time to take a deep breath or two as you go into your speaking exam. Remember to smile. And when you run out of things to say, stop and smile confidently rather than trailing off in the middle of a sentence…
French grammar constructions? How dull, I hear you cry! However, that grammar does have its uses, especially if you are trying to make your language more interesting – whether you are looking to impress your friends with some fancy phrases, or you are keen to get some of those extra exam marks for “complex grammar constructions”.
Here are a few useful ways of saying things which should help to widen your vocabulary. Many of these constructions can be used in a range of tenses, so I have given a couple of examples in each case.
1. Être en train de + infinitive – to be in the middle of doing something.
Je suis en train d’écrire un blog – I am in the middle of writing a blog.
J’étais en train d’écrire un blog, quand j’ai vu un chat – I was in the middle of writing a blog when I saw a cat.
2. Au lieu de + infinitive – instead of doing….
Au lieu d’écrire un blog, il faut faire mes devoirs – Instead of writing a blog, I must do my homework.
Au lieu de faire mes devoirs, j’ai regardé la télé – Instead of doing my homework I watched TV.
3. Après avoir/être + past participle – after having done something
WATCH OUT! Just like the present perfect tense, you need to take care of the être verbs…
Après avoir écrit mon blog, je vais prendre un thé – After having written my blog I am going to have a cup of tea.
Après être allée en ville, j’écrirai encore un blog ! – After having gone to town I will write another blog!
4. Avant de + infinitive – before doing something
Avant de boire mon thé, je vais finir le blog – Before drinking my tea I am going to finish the blog.
Avant de finir le blog, je cherche d’autres exemples – Before finishing the blog, I look for other examples.
5. Venir de + infinitive – to have just done something
Je venais de trouver un exemple, quand la téléphone a sonné – I had just found an example when the phone rang.
Je viens de finir mon blog. Youpi ! – I have just finished my blog. Hurrah!
Teri is a Surrey-based language trainer specialising in French, German and English as a Foreign Language. She has many years of experience of trying to sound more interesting in French, especially with a view to boosting exam grades!
We all know the scenario – it’s Christmas time. The children are distracted and over-excited, the teachers are tired and rather stressed with all the mock exams. What happens? Someone cracks out the same old Christmas worksheet or Powerpoint presentation which is used every year and all classes learn the keywords to describe a British Christmas – because it’s easy, because it’s what they are interested in right now, and because…… well, because that’s the way it’s always been done.
It doesn’t matter which festival you look at, when it comes to GCSE Modern Foreign Languages they are all in the syllabus as the students are encouraged to learn about the “standard” ones for their target language and then also to express themselves in talking about their own festivals. All too often though, this can be left until the end of the course or done as a vague afterthought which the students don’t even realise is important for the course (see the worksheet scenario above) and a learning opportunity is missed, or diluted. Here are six ideas to liven up the festival module.
Teach in bite-sized chunks, at the relevant time of year. Learning about Easter in June, or Bastille Day in September can make the topic feel very disconnected from real life. Consider whether you can teach each festival in the relevant month, maybe with a short set of activities spread throughout the lessons rather than one intensive burst for all festivals.
Use realia. Yes, it can be a bit of a hassle, and you will need to be mindful of allergies, but talking about German Christmas biscuits (Plätzchen) or a French “Galette des Rois” is always more interesting if you can see one, or EAT one. Watch out for nuts with these specific exmaples, as both commonly contain almonds. You could also use other festive items in a “feely bag” (a cloth bag which can’t be seen through) to set the scene and teach the vocabulary.
If you can’t use realia then you could always use some good pictures of the items, or look for a video (there are instruction videos for baking all kinds of treats on the popular video-sharing website!). This could then lead to a great practice of the imperative as the students can reproduce the instructions for making the recipe – or give instructions for how to make one of their own traditional treats.
Exploit the topic to practice grammar, while hiding the fact that you are doing so! “I went to the shops and I bought…” is a popular memory game where each person adds an item which was bought, and then has to remember all the items which went before. Make it more complicated by encouraging the use of adjectives. Discuss gender differences for the use of those adjectives and help the children to get some speaking practice at the same time. You could extend the game further by listing different activities which will be done (or which must/could/should be done – squeeze in some modal verbs!) in order to prepare for the festive season.
Try to highlight the similarities and differences between the country in which you are teaching and the way that the festival is celebrated in the target language area. This kind of cultural input is what brings language-learning to life and makes it all more interesting. You could produce a “letter from a penfriend” to talk about their country and encourage students to write back to them for an independent writing task.
Use traditional tales, legends etc. You could use card sorting to order the nativity story, to explain about St Nikolaus visiting German children on December 5, to tell the story of how the church bells bring the chocolate eggs to French children at Easter etc. Students could be encouraged to tell the story of one of their own festivals in a similar way.
Time pressure is always a challenge, especially in the GCSE course, but the ideas above could also be adapted to be used in an extra-curricular language club, or as a one-off lunchtime activity for those who have more than 20 minutes to eat.
In the meantime – Joyeux Noël, Frohe Weihnachten – and Merry Christmas!
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