Classroom practice of FCE Speaking Part Two

As with all kinds of exam practice in class, the most important thing is to make it as realistic as possible. The most important
thing is to get students used to answering both questions in one minute (or at least starting on the second question in that
time), and I never do this task without timing and interrupting them at just over a minute. I also insist on comparing and
contrasting (rather than describing) from day one, and it is well worth the extra expense to always use colour photos to get
them used to this aspect of the exam. You can easily find photos to match almost any topic in your class or textbook (e.g. the
reading text which you cover before or after Speaking Part Two practice), but dont emphasise the topic specific language
that could come up too much.

When it comes to presenting and practising the language above, one thing students could do is rank one or more of the lists of
useful language above (comparing and contrasting, speculating, etc) by how likely they are to be able to use it while doing
this task, then compare with your suggested order. With a different selection, students can also rank them by how sure the
person speaking is or how similar or different the two things being compared are.

These ranking tasks are easier to do and more fun if the phrases are given on pieces of paper to put into columns on the table.
Students can then deal out those pieces of paper and try to use them during a speaking task, feeding back on which ones
actually turned out to be easiest to use.

With classes who would benefit most from being pushed to use more and higher level language, you could give them points
for using phrases that no one had used so far, including even more points for more obscure speculating and comparing
phrases.

The game above works best if students take turns making statements about the same pair of photos, something that is also
worthwhile practice more generally despite it not being extended speaking, as it really helps students stick to comparing and
contrasting. Students can take turns trying to find more and more comparisons between the two photos, or they can set
challenges for each other by making a statement about one photo including an aspect that their partner must mention when
then talking about the other one.

It is also possible and useful to sometimes set it up as a pairwork communication task, with each person having one of the
two photos and getting them to find similarities and differences without showing them to each other. This makes it easier for
students to combine both speculating and comparing, with the initial statements that they make needing the former and then
working together to achieve the latter. You can also let them speculate about their one photo in pairs before changing groups
to do the blind comparisons thing with someone else.

The extended nature of speaking in this part of the test makes it the most suitable for classroom analysis of recordings or
transcripts of candidates answers. They can judge:

- Staying on topic

- Range of language (especially not repeating)

- Spending the right amount of time on the two parts of the task

- Structuring the answer

Especially if you edit it to make it worse, they can also try to improve on the performance shown in a (real or imaginary)
transcript. For example, you could take out all comparison, speculating and/ or discourse management language and get them
to put it back in. You could also have them correcting actual grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation mistakes such as
minimal pairs and false friends. However, students often have too much of an emphasis on avoiding mistakes already, and
those who lack fluency and/ or confidence wouldnt benefit from this at all.

An alternative is to get students to replace expressions in the text with something at least as good, maybe underlining the ones
that you want them to look at.

You can link from transcripts to other parts of the exam by designing a Use of English task around one, with Part One
(multiple choice open cloze) and Part Two (open cloze) being the easiest. Something similar can also be done with individual
useful phrases, e.g. sentence transformations with speculating language, but youll need to make sure you dont go too far
away from phrases that are actually useful in this part of the exam in order to ensure that students dont try to say It must
have been in the speaking.

You can also link to other tasks through choice of the topic of the photos. This is possible for almost any part of the exam,
e.g. a Use of English text on the same topic, but is probably best with Speaking Part Three as they can use almost exactly the
same comparing and speculating language in that task too. However, you might want to point out that Speaking Part Two and
Speaking Part Three never have the same topic in a real exam, with Part Three being rather linked to Part Four.

Copyright 2013 Alex Case

Written by Alex Case for UsingEnglish.com

Student Learning
An enormous amount has been written in the last two decades about research on how people learn.
While it is beyond the scope of this tutorial to summarize the literature, several points relevant to course
design emerge in one of the best summaries of the field, the National Research Council's 1999
publication How People Learn :

Research shows clearly that a person must be engaged to learn. People

learn by actively participating in observing, speaking, writing, listening, thinking,
drawing, and doing.

Learning is enhanced when a person sees potential implications, applications, and

benefits to others.

Learning builds on current understanding (including misconceptions!).

What messages can we take home for course design?

If student learning is the goal, effective teaching means creating effective learning
environments, and environments where students are actively participating
and engaged with the material are crucial to student learning.

Students are more likely to learn and retain if we ask them to do more than learn
information. Including activities where students can explore applications
and implications will improve learning.

A traditional lecture classroom focused on presentation of content by an instructor

does not typically promote active participation and engagement.
 o Most students dutifully write down what the instructor writes on the board or
shows on PowerPoint slides but are not actively processing the information.
[For others, the statement "the light's on, but nobody's home" would be most
appropriate]

o A few students are engaged in thinking, comparison, analysis and projection

during the lecture. They're the ones who raise a hand and say, "But what
about X"? or "That must mean that"

o Because many faculty members were this latter type of student, it is hard for
us to recognize that traditional lecture is not an effective learning
environment for many of our students because so many students do
not participate actively during a traditional lecture.

Learning Styles
Before we get to teaching strategies that promote active student particiation and engagement, we'll take a
brief look at learning styles, another important aspect of learning that is useful to factor in to assignment
and activity design. If everyone learned the same way, it would be easy to choose teaching strategies to
optimize learning. How people learn, however, varies widely, as does individual preference for receiving
and processing information. How does this influence teaching?

Your learning styles will certainly not match those of everyone in your
class, and your learning styles may, in fact, be quite different even from a majority
of your students.

What works well for you may not work well for some (or even most!!) of
your students. Because each of us knows what works for ourselves, we're prone to
selecting teaching strategies that favor our own learning styles. If you choose only
teaching strategies that would optimize learning for students with your learning
styles, many of the students in your class may be at a disadvantage.

Knowing something about learning styles in general and your own

learning styles in particular can help you to plan assignments and
activities that reach students with as many different learning styles as possible.

Bibliografy
Sources