Anne Robinson, co-author of Fun for Starters, Fun for Movers, and Fun for Flyers 3rd Edition, explores how paraphrasing is used in Cambridge English: Young Learners Tests.
In many parts of the Cambridge English: Young Learners Tests, candidates have to understand paraphrasing.
In Part 2 of the Listening Tests at all levels, students have to understand paraphrasing between what they hear in a conversation and what they read on the question paper.
In Cambridge English: Starters, they have to write numbers or names. (In Movers and Flyers, they sometimes have to write these as well as other kinds of words.)
For example, in the Starters Sample Paper, Volume 2, they hear a girl and a man talking.
What they hear is:
Man: Is this your friend in the picture with you?
Girl: Yes, it is.
Man: What’s his name?
Girl: His name’s Alex.
Man: How do you spell that?
Girl: A-L-E-X.
Man: Is he in your class at school?
Girl: Yes! We’re in class eight.
Man: Sorry?
Girl: In class eight. And we’ve got a great teacher.
What they read (on the question paper) is:
1 What is Lucy’s friend’s name?
2 Which class are the children in at school?
Candidates have to understand that the boy in the picture is Alex, that he’s Lucy’s (the girl’s) friend and that his name’s Alex.
And in the second question, that the children refers to Lucy and Alex, and We in the girl’s answers means me and Alex.
Paraphrasing is a common way of testing listening and reading comprehension!
Movers and Flyers candidates often find Reading and Writing Part 5 difficult. Here, they have to read a story and complete sentences using 1, 2 or 3 words in Movers. (1-4 words Flyers).
Let’s look at a section of the text from the Movers Sample Paper, Volume 1.
Two of the sentences to complete are:
3 When the children went outside, they saw a ………………. in the garden.
4 The clown had a green beard and wore some ………… which were square.
Students need to understand that went outside is a paraphrase for the children obeying Mum’s order to Go out in the garden again.
And that they saw is a paraphrase for ‘There was’.
And also that there after clown in the text means in the garden (mentioned in the previous sentence and in 3).
Notice the changes in the way and the order that the information appears in 4 too. We read about the green beard in both the text and the sentence, so the gap can only be the glasses or his hair. You don’t wear hair and it isn’t square or plural, so the right answer is glasses!
Paraphrasing often involves both different words and a difference in the order of the information like we see here!
Finally, let’s look at Part 2 of the Flyers Speaking Test (Information Exchange). Candidates answer and ask questions.
The prompts for the questions and answers are given in a table like this:
On forms and tables like these, words like age and address are often used. But when we ask a question about these things, we would usually ask: How old is Sue? and Where does she live?
The ability to paraphrase from a written prompt is a real life skill AND it’s tested in the Flyers Speaking Test!
Explore Fun for Starters, Fun for Movers, and Fun for Flyers if you’re interested in exploring further!