Job Discussion Forums

[bdawg]

I'm part of a teaching team at Nanjing Normal University preparing a select group of students for their upcoming IELTS exam. My primary task is oral prep.

This is my first teaching job, but I feel that I have a fairly good grasp of the requirments of the oral portions of the IELTS. I've been using Mark Morgans "Speaking Skills for the IELTS Test" as a resource.

My class is small (13) and I usually break them into smaller groups of 3 or 4 to discuss the topic I provide them. That way I can move around to each group and encourage dialogue. We are still working on part 1 of the IELTS (introducing and describing oneself) and I've had fairly good results with this approach.

However, I feel that the strategy is become stale and student boredom is increasing. I need to diversify, but I don't want to deviate to far from my assigned task of IELTS oral prep. That means I don't really want to dive into games or unrelated speaking exercises. I'd like to stick as close as possible to the three sections (introduction, presentation and discussion)

I'm hoping that some of you out there have some experience with IELTS and could give me a few pointers on successful classroom dynamics or strategies in preparing students for their IELTS oral examination.

Thanks in advance.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

I've been teaching courses to prepare students for IELTS for a few semesters now. However, my classes have 20+ students and it's an entire preparation (not just for the oral part) for one specific IELTS exam.

Most of the teachers where I teach have had training in how to be evaluators for IELTS oral exams. One thing we've noticed when using the IELTS format to test oral proficiency is that test takers who haven't had lots of practice in how to take the oral exam don't do as well as those students who are quite familiar with the exam format. Therefore, I spend a lot of time in class making students aware of what they'll be expected to do on the exam and how they'll be evaluated as well as having students practice how to do individual parts of the oral exam.

There are quite a few audio and audio-visual materials avaliable. I use some of these in class so that students can see and hear examples of people taking the exam. I also do practice exams with pairs of students (volunteers only) from the class and let the other students in the class observe these practice exams, followed by class discussions about what the test takers do well and what they need to improve. Later, students practice in groups of three: one student reads the interlocutor's script and times the practice while the other two practice the activity (compare and contrast photos, come to an agreement about something, put pictures of a story in correct order, etc.)

There are lots of other materials (textbooks and exam practice books with CDs, for example) on the market that are designed specifically to prepare students for IELTS oral exams and to help teachers prepare students as well. If your students have access to computers / Internet, there's a plethora of web sites dedicated to helping students prepare for IELTS, too. I've found lots of ideas for activities to do in class while browsing various web sites. (Google is great! )