FCE Oral Interview & ELT Pics

For part 2 of the FCE oral interview, it is necessary to practise comparing and contrasting photographs. If you have taken a look at the past paper examination books, you have probably discovered that the photos chosen are not always that telling of exact details of place and what the people in them are up to. My own students usually complain they do not know what else to say about them.

I usually point my students to Flickr for finding striking photos that will ignite their imaginations. I use some of my own photos in class too, but I try to encourage them to surf and find new images.

What to bear in mind when choosing photos:

-You aim at stretching yourselves to speak about a variety of topics.

-You can follow tags to find similar images to pair.

The idea is to get you to be fluent about any topic, not just your favourite ones. You should try to relate to the photos as well as guess and predict what's going on. This exam task is, in my opinion, a step before creating a story.

Think of the story setting or conflict and you get the picture!

The is a drawback. It is hard to find a pair of closely related photos to compare and contrast. Doing it on your own is time consuming.

How to solve this?

I've found this initiative that Sandy Millin explains in her blog. Several EFL teachers have been collecting photos for classroom use and organized them in sets according to topics. These are over 2,000 photos from all round the world and they cover the vocabulary range you need.

Ceri Jones has an idea about annotating the photos on an interactive whiteboard to enlarge your vocabulary. That gets interesting. But why not do it in Flickr? Students could choose themselves whether to click on further vocabulary or ideas for their description on a need-to-know basis.

See this example:

If you go to the Flickr link of the image above and hover the mouse over the photo, you'll get surprised with Cogdog's suggestions.

I think it's great that teachers can share these photo prompts online, but it would be wonderful to see students creating notes on them and sharing the learning!

Storytelling

Did you know?


Many of the students sitting for the FCE exam are afraid of writing stories. You know that in your part 2 of the Writing Paper you get a choice of rubrics to write about. Stories are, in my opinion, the freest and most creative opportunity the exam gives. We need to unlearn so much guided or repeated practice using typical starters and endings in letters. We need to go out of our comfort zone. To tell a story, we are always putting a lot of ourselves out there. And that's scary, yeah.

How to start? I do not have enough imagination...

Excuses.

Think of this:

"The scariest moment is always just before you start [writing]. After that, things can only get better." – Stephen King

Inspiration 911

Here is the site where I found Stephen's quote. It's an emergency line for those in need of getting ahead in their writing, but suffering from writer's block. Do you need a setting for your story? A verb? Do you need to kill a character?

http://www.webook.com/911writersblock

Now, would you let yourself be inspired and write a story? Take a look at these beautiful photographs. She's Dominoe.





My last year students did beautifully. Today we are writing again. You can read their versions in our class wiki. The wiki is not worldwide open, but you can post your version of the story in the comments here, if you like.

Stories help us getting connected. Connected to ourselves, to othe reader and the author as well! Alan, the author and owner of the real Dominoe, read the class production and wrote this post in return.

Here you can and hear Alan telling his original story.



What I enjoy about re-writing Dominoe is how a dog can wake up our imagination, how we can all become a new owner that breathes another life to it. So here are our frisbees to Dominoe. Hope you enjoy them and join our storytelling.

FCE Listening Practice through Dictation

The word dictation probably brings to mind images of old, dull teaching practices. However, dictation has long been proven a learning device for foreign language students.

To mention but a few benefits, dictation can:

-help you obtain a list of words you usually misspell

-give you practice in note taking (FCE Listening Paper, part 2)

-foster thinking in the new language. Every learner's dream, isn't it?

Now, none of these benefits will happen unless you are motivated to practice dictation. If you choose how to practice it and try to vary the exercises, you'll focus more on its benefits rather than getting bored in a few minutes.

Here is a choice of websites to browse.

This site gives you three options of practice: jotting down the first letter of a word only, the whole word or a fill in the blanks with a bit of context to help you.

http://www.listen-and-write.com/
Here you will find dictations with real life English videos. British accent throughout.

Perhaps you'd like to try dictations from texts first. Then, the graded dictations at
http://www.fonetiks.org/dictations/ can be the place to start.

For a quick practice at the word level only, try
http://www.learnenglish.de/dictationpage.htm

How can this practice help me develop listening skills?

Many students complain that listening is one of the most difficult parts of the test. Indeed, English has an isochronous rhythm that languages like Spanish do not share. Dictation can help you at the level of the sentence, the words, the division of a chunk of speech into sensible units.

For the FCE level, however, all of that is taken for granted. You will be asked to make assumptions, establish connections and not simply recognizing sounds and words. So, if listening is your stumbling block, why not get some dictation practice to help you break such a big task into manageable portions?

Image source:

Verifying Dictation by mpujals

Punctuation

Punctuation matters. Period.

Is that all?

Well, you may say:

Don't stop.

Or

Don't, stop.

There's a difference, right? When I read, I don't like wondering what you meant. I want you to spell it out to me.

Writing is about making it easy and enjoyable for the reader. I usually tell my students that when they plan a paragraph, they are signalling a road for the reader to have a pleasant journey.

Extending this journey metaphor...

"Think of punctuation and mechanics in terms of driving your car. Punctuation and mechanics provide direction and signal the information to which you need to pay attention. Without punctuation and mechanics, phrases and sentences would run into each other and would be unclear, and your writing would go virtually nowhere. The purpose of punctuation and mechanics is to make your meaning clear by telling the reader when to pause, when to stop, when to take notice, etc" (I found it here.)

The power of punctuation is better explained by examples. Then you need some general rules. Above all, you need exercises!

The Purdue University website has a good menu to cover the punctuation you need to know.

If you find that too much, you may wish to do a quick quiz instead.

In the middle of your writing, you may need to consult a guide about specific punctuation marks. This one is quite comprehensive. This one is faster and has exercises.

A quick cheat-sheet to have near you while you write could be this Oxford site.

Last, but not least...

Beware the use of apostrophes and unnecessary quotation marks!

Too much? OK.

Period.

Image source:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maubrowncow/2956760927/