Job Discussion Forums

[riverboat]

Hi,

I have a new student who wants to prepare for the CPE exam. She's probably the most unusual student I've ever taught: 17 years old, her native language is French but she's at an international school here in France where she studies bilingually in French and German. Her mother is Italian so she also speaks fluent Italian. Her goal is to go to Oxford or Cambridge to study law, and become an international lawyer afterwards.

So English is her fourth language, but to have a conversation with her you'd probably think she was a native speaker. Her accent is flawless, she never searches for words, her comprehension seems perfect. She learnt English primarily by spending every summer in England while she was growing up plus having an English nanny.

Anyway, it's through her school that she's taking the CPE, and she's already having 3 hours of preparation lessons there per week with the rest of her English class. But this girl is so super motivated that she's also having 1.5 hours per week individual private lessons (with me) to help her prepare.

Her main problem is with the Use of English section, where she's "only" scoring at something like 60% most of the time. My brief is to prepare her for this.

In testing her, I saw she had major problems with phrasal verbs (she can learn them for a test at school but says she forgets them one week later) prepositions after verbs/adjectives, and an incomplete knowledge of idioms. It was amazing to see this girl who you could easily mistake for a native, when challenged to complete the phrasal verb "straight _____ ", meaning "immediately", not be able to do it.

So obviously I'm going to need to find a way to get her to learn phrasals and idioms in such a way that she has lots of opportunities to actually use them in conversation, hear them in films etc, and thus hopefully remember them. But apart from that, does anyone have any tips for helping someone prepare for CPE Use of English, except for doing the exercises repeatedly? Another problem I'm up against is that she didn't learn English through studying the grammar rules, so using grammatical rules in teaching her is going to be tricky...

[mmcmorrow]

She sounds like an interesting student to teach! I could send you a couple of phrasal verbs / idioms materials to try out with her. Take a look at the teachingenglish org site for some interesting ideas and resources too - and she might also find my podcast on academic English helpful - it includes a vocab slot on dependent prepositions etc ... tinyurl com/6xy9hy ... by the way, if she's looking at law at Oxford, she might like to have a look at St Anne's College - it has its own law library .. but no doubt she's got some leads on that aspect .. ps 'straight away' not a phrasal verb!

Martin McMorrow
Massey University, New Zealand
[email protected]

[jpvanderwerf2001]

English Collocations in Use, and English Phrasal Verbs in Use are two good titles to find (if you haven't already).

[the_thinker]

Yep, as mmcmorrow says, 'straight away' isn't a phrasal verb, and that tells you something very important: trying to focus on one, conveniently labelled area such as 'phrasal verbs' isn't only going to help up to a point, as the Use of English part of CPE tests a huge variety of multi-word items. I think the books already suggested would be a good start, but I think the priority should be to encourage her to read as much and as extensively as possible ��it's only then that the student is likely to be exposed to as much of the language that could be tested as possible. I don't think looking for phrases that can be used in films or conversation is a priority either, as much of the language tested in the paper is based on that found in neutral to formal written language.

[BenE]

I personally am starting to look at Upstream Proficiency as a book to use for CPE.

I am currently teaching CAE though sometimes I refer to it for extra more difficult activities.

Good luck

[riverboat]

Oops, yes. "Straight away" clearly not any type of verb. The connection between what I was thinking and the way my brain categorised it wasn't quite working there.

She's already reading a lot...well, according to her she's reading uniquely (for pleasure) in English at the moment. But I get the impression that, as she's a full-time high school student with other important non-English exams to study for this year, she doesn't have as much time for reading in English as might be ideal. It's a shame, because I get what you mean about reading extensively being the best approach to CPE, and that's why I'm struggling with knowing exactly what to do with her in the lessons. Her school is already preparing her "tactically" (as far as is possible) for the exam. I feel like "teaching" her any given set of multi-word items in our lessons could be uselessly just chipping away at a massive ice-berg...

mmcmorrow - thanks for the links, that looks great. I'll go through that material when preparing our next class.

I've got English Phrasal Verbs in Use, and I like the way it clearly sets out content by theme or key verb, and the clear explanations and exercises. However I don't find it particularly inspiring for ways to then use the vocabulary in freer/fluency activities...and I'm lacking in planning time to actually create such activities myself. Maybe some of the online websites, such as teachingenglish.org or onestopenglish.org can help me out here.

[the_thinker]