Job Discussion Forums

[Cool Teacher]

Hi there everyown,

I am helping a student at my high school because she watns to get to a universtiy, but she has to do an English interview but her English is not that good.

Does anyone have experience with this?

What questions will they ask at the interview do you think?

Can you help me?

I have made a list of questions I think they will ask and was told by my Japanese co-workers that might come up:

Here they are:

How are you?
How did you get here today?
What do you think of our universty?
Why did you choose these courses?
Have you been abroad?
Tell me the differences between that country and Japan?
What troubles did you have abrods?
Why do you wnat to study English?
What are you going to do in the future?
What are your hobbied?
Do you do any club activities?

I have been helping my student and she is enthusiastic but her answers sound like she's just memorized them and not that natural. I worry they will aks a strange question and make her get nervous.

Of course I ahev helped her with the answers.

Help me Daves cafe! Your my only hope!

[spiral78]

Hmmm. Is the interview in English because her study program will be in English??????

If yes, the situation is obvious: refer her to a year-long intensive English study before she applies. Just getting through the interview is obviously not enough.

I know there is a myth that, if one goes abroad and starts studying in a target language, one quickly gets up to speed 'naturally.' It's not true in most cases, unfortunately.

[Cool Teacher]

The interview is next week! It will be difficutl to squeeze a years study in between.

Anyway this is a Japanse university so she won't need to speak English to do her English course.

[spiral78]

Ok, so then they are probably using the interview only to test her level of English. I do it this way myself for placement into classes/levels (but not in Japan).

If they are doing it this way, the questions will become progressively more challenging in terms of grammatical demands - starting out with present tense (your first four questions above) and then moving to past and future constructions. They'll throw in some conditionals if she's up for it.

You might order the questions you expect this way for study by your student -and highlight the vocabulary and grammatical forms that will be needed. It's usually a good way to study for these types of questions.
Also note that the question form itself gives the signal what grammatical structures will be needed to answer it well.

[Cool Teacher]

Hi there thanks for your help.

I think this interview is to make sure she can do some English but not a level checker. I don't think they will put her in a grade from this. She will have an interveiw with three people and one of them is an Englsih speaker.