CPE Introduction

The English-Learning and Languages Review Æ Homepage

Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English

Contents: Make as many copies of these CPE web pages as you like, but see the conditions at the end

Paper 4: Listening Comprehension (in preparation –see preliminary advice at Advice on language examinations (Multiple choice)

Paper 1: Reading Comprehension As a result of changes in the form of the CPE exam this page has become partly out of date. However, much of the advice is still valid.

Paper 3: Use of English As a result of changes in the form of the CPE exam this page became out of date. It has been partly revised, but it should now be regarded more as general advice, rather than an exact guide.

Paper 5: Interview (in preparation)

Practical information

These CPE web pages are a greatly expanded extract from The Art and Science of Learning Languages, by Amorey Gethin and Erik V. Gunnemark, published by Intellect (http://www.intellectbooks.com)

"This book is very interesting...could be a great help to students of foreign languages, but also to tutors. ...The best section of all, however, in my opinion, is the chapter on how to pass language examinations, which includes all those techniques which are likely to help the student..." From the review in The Lecturer July 1996.

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Introduction

Contents:

...the need for realism	Know your weak points	Examination technique - Timing
General principles	Reading material	" " - Checking
Preparation	Grammar books	" " - Summary

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The tyranny of examinations and the need for realism

Exams are hateful things. No truly civilized community would ever subject anybody to such ordeals. There are not only the emotional effects of fear of failure, and of failure itself - a collapse of self-confidence and a miserable anxiety about one's ability to cope with the future. Countless millions of people's whole lives are decisively affected by how they do in exams. Because exams play such a big part in modern society I want to suggest some ways in which people could do better in them.

I have been helping candidates to prepare for the Certificate of Proficiency examination for over four decades, including 14 years as the Director of Studies at a Cambridge language school. I have had exceptional success with the methods I recommend here. Several private students who, after repeated failures, had been given up as hopeless cases by private teachers and institutions alike have been able to pass their exams by using these methods. The same methods have also worked extremely well with whole classes. Of those who used them a very much higher proportion than the average (sometimes as high as 95%) passed their examinations.

What has particularly gladdened me is that in my classes my advice has helped many candidates who have been on the 'borderline' between passing and failing. It is such students who need help most.

There is nothing special, difficult or complicated about the way of working I suggest. It is based on nothing more than common sense and being systematic.

The key to success is to be realistic. One of the most common reasons for people failing their Proficiency examination is that they aim too high. They aim for perfection, and instead just make a terrible mess of everything. Unfortunately it is often teachers who are responsible for this situation. They try to get their students to achieve perfect or near-perfect answers, and as often as not undermine the students' morale as well as failing to show them the essential thing: a practical way of dealing with the problems.

This in a way contradicts what I believe should be a basic principle for most people when they learn a foreign language: one should aim for perfection. But exam candidates face an immediate practical problem, and preparing for an exam and finding good enough answers to the questions one finds in the exam papers themselves are in many important ways not the same as learning a language.

There are many thousands of candidates with a good enough knowledge of English to pass who have failed because they have not prepared in the right way and because they have used the wrong technique, or no technique at all, in the examination itself. But there are also many students with less knowledge of the language who have passed, through good preparation and good examination technique.

You may feel that what I am saying is that the best way to pass is by using tricks. But that is not really so. What I am saying is that you can do best by being systematic and self-disciplined. Below I first offer some general advice. I then discuss in detail how to deal with the various types of test.

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General principles

This web page has not been written for those who, without much difficulty, will get a top grade in their Proficiency examination. They have little or no need of the advice in it. All that such lucky people need do is make sure they know exactly what sort of tests they are going to meet in the exam papers and what the examiners expect of them.

Most candidates are in a very different situation. They know they will not get the highest marks. The important question for them is simply, "Can I pass?" If you are such a candidate, there are a number of simple practical things you can do to get many more marks than you might otherwise get.

Above everything else, though, there is a principle about language examinations you should never forget:

You must show the examiner only what you know, never what you do not know.

For instance, in the composition paper it is foolish for most candidates to try to write something that meets perfectly all the demands the examiners make. They will probably meet with catastrophe if they do. It is much better for you if you can be realistic and use practical methods to write good language, even if that language is not up to the ideal standard the examiners are asking for from candidates they would give the top grade.

To pass the examination you need:

1 the right preparation before the examination

2 the right technique during the examination itself

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Preparation

Before anything else you must obviously know in outline what is going to be in the papers set for the examination. This is only the beginning. It is essential to know too, in detail, exactly what type of language the examiners will ask you to show you understand, what sort of subjects they will probably ask you to write about, and what sort of grammatical or vocabulary points they are likely to test you on.

Clearly you must be prepared for the sort of questions you will get and clearly you must practise answering some of the same sort of questions.

Some teachers may have fine intellectual or practical ambitions on behalf of their students and may resent the distractions of examinations. They should always remember what a terrifying responsibility they have. If you have teachers, you must insist that they do not give you things to do that you do not have to do in the exam; that's a luxury you cannot afford, and can be dangerous for candidates' confidence. Teachers and candidates have to be thoroughly systematic, and make sure they are really ready for all the problems they are liable to get.

But do not make the mistake that, unfortunately, so many students make. Do not believe that doing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of test questions, and discovering the answers, is the right way to prepare. Do not believe that if you do 600 questions and answers you will be twice as well prepared, will have learned twice as much, as if you do only 300. Very often this sort of preparation just means going through automatic, mechanical motions without thought; don't just say to yourself "Ah! So that's the answer, is it! Next question please!"

Ten thousand test questions will be useless to you unless you study the method needed to answer, and the method needed to prepare. If you doubt this, remind yourself of the fact that you will almost certainly never get exactly the same question again. You should spend the time studying how to be ready for questions you have never seen before. It is much better to spend an hour thinking carefully about how to do five questions, than to spend an hour doing fifty questions and answers without thinking about them. The question a candidate should constantly ask is "How?" In this way you can build up confidence that you can deal with almost any problem. If you decide to use the services of teachers to help you prepare for your exam, make sure that they too concentrate on answering the question "How?"

This point about dealing with problems leads on to what is probably the most important piece of advice I have to offer.

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Know your weak points!

You must learn about yourself. You must discover what your own special needs are in the language concerned. There is no need to 'learn' the whole of the foreign language 'equally', so to speak - spending equal time and effort on each part. This is a waste. You should pick out what makes English different from your own and concentrate on those parts. And then, above all, you should discover your own personal weak points in the language, become aware of your own special problems, find out what mistakes you most often make.

Make a list of them.

You should practise doing the various sorts of work you will be asked to do in the examination; in particular you should practise writing compositions. You should then make a careful note of any mistakes you make more than once. Count up how many times you make each mistake, and the mistake you make most often should be at the top of your list, the next most common one in second place, and so on. If your own language is Japanese or Persian, you may find that the problem of articles (a, the) comes at the top of your list. If you speak German, you may find if is your biggest problem. If your mother tongue is French you may find you are always having trouble with since. And if Spanish or Italian is your language, you may constantly forget to use it when you should.

But these are only examples of mistakes typical of speakers of certain languages. They may or may not be your particular personal mistakes. Those personal ones are the ones you must discover. It is surprising that so few students organize their studies and exam preparations in this way, for the logic of the method is so clear and simple:

Find out your problems and deal with them.

This principle is connected with another important truth that can be expressed in the slogan:

The problem is not remembering the answer; the problem is remembering the problem.

An example of what I mean is given by the many thousands, perhaps millions, of German-speaking students of English who repeatedly make the mistake of using would with if: "If I would do that, I would miss my flight" etc. Most of them, if you asked them how one uses if in English, would probably give a correct answer. They know how if should be used. But they constantly forget the problem when unreminded by someone else, and so, unthinking, fall into the same trap again and again.^note¹