Summer might be the season for taking time off work, but for many English language students it’s also the time of year to sign up for an exam and work towards passing it. Whichever exam you’ll be taking, be it PTE, FCE, CAE, CPE or IELTS or another, we are here with some advice that will help you prepare. Here, then, are our 10 best practices for tackling English language exams.
1. Avoid learning language in isolation
If grammar is the skeleton of the language, then vocabulary is the meat (and we might say idiomatic language the blood). Of course, you can’t have one without the other. When learning new words, make sure you learn the grammatical constructions that go with them (e.g., dependent prepositions, whether verbs are followed by a gerund or the infinitive, and so on). When learning grammar, make sure you personalise and contextualise it with lots of examples. Familiarise yourself with collocations and learn language in chunks. Continue reading
As English grows ever more in demand in the worlds of education and employment, more and more people are taking the CAE to prove their level of proficiency. Preparation for the exam is an excellent way to improve all four language skills, but the exam is demanding. Knowing exactly how it works, what each part is testing, and how to tackle the different skills is crucial for success. Below are our top tips for passing the CAE Cambridge Advanced English. For a thorough course of exam preparation, look no further than 