Preparing students for exams is a tricky business. Unlike ‘normal’ classes, where the aim is to improve students’ language skills, exam classes have an added objective: training and practice in the skills needed to tackle the exam. So the question for teachers is how to balance those two objectives and achieve both, usually within a limited timeframe — not easy!
For many teachers, the answer is to pack lessons with as many exam tasks or even complete exam papers as possible. On the face of it, this might appear to be an effective strategy – “practice makes perfect,” as the saying goes – but the reality is more complex.
Research into practice
There’s plenty of evidence that practice is the key to attaining high levels of skill in any discipline. The ’10,000 hour rule’, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, states that to achieve expertise in any field you need to accumulate ten thousand hours of deliberate practice. It’s based on research that found many expert performers in fields such as chess, music and sport had practised their craft for well over 10,000 hours by the time they had reached the peaks of their careers. (1)
Teachers seem to instinctively recognise that practice is valuable, and evidence shows that teachers increase the number of hours they spend on exam practice as exam dates draw nearer. (2) The wash back effect also means that teachers plan their classes differently, since they tend to incorporate exam practice tasks or exam-style exercises to familiarise their students with exam task formats.
But there’s also research to suggest that spending class time on exam practice isn’t always a good thing. One study found that when classes who had spent time on exam practice were compared with classes that hadn’t, there wasn’t actually any difference in their exam scores – in other words, the exam practice seemed to have had no effect. (3) And researchers have also pointed out that focusing too much on exam skills tends to make classes less communicative and reduce the opportunities that students have for actually developing their language skills. (4)
Effective exam practice: 3 strategies
So what kind of exam practice is likely to be most effective? Practice needs to be meaningful rather than mechanical, and it needs to promote a communicative classroom rather than prevent it. Here, then, are three strategies for ensuring that practice makes perfect:
1) Practice should be reflective
When students pick up their pens and begin writing in an exam, the processes and approaches they use to tackle the exam questions aren’t visible – we don’t know what they’re thinking. So reflection aims to help students notice those processes, make them explicit, and then find ways to improve them. Teachers can do this by simply asking students to discuss questions like these when they’ve completed a task:
- Which questions did you find easy?
- Which questions did you find difficult?
- Why did you find these questions difficult?
- What was your process or approach to answering the questions?
- What would you do differently next time?
If this discussion takes place in groups or as a whole class, students can begin to share their strategies for dealing with exam tasks and either learn new ways of tackling questions or pinpoint areas they need to work on.
2) Practice should be interactive
While speaking is usually not allowed in exams (unless they’re speaking exams!), allowing students to talk during practice tasks can be an excellent way of allowing them to learn from each other.
This activity is a good example:
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To complete this task students will need to justify to their group why their word is the correct answer – verbalising their knowledge of collocations and lexical chunks, and sharing exam strategies.
3) Practice should be authentic
Making practice authentic means using the right practice materials – click here to see the range of official Cambridge practice material – but also creating the right environment. For written tests that involves timed conditions, whereas for speaking tests the aim is to recreate some of the pressure that candidates will feel when they take the exam.
The best way to do that is probably to record them.
This is easily done on a mobile phone or tablet, and really adds a sense of pressure to a speaking practice task. Recording apps usually include a timer too, which can help students get used to speaking for a given period. If students are asked to record themselves at home, they’ll often spend time rehearsing and re-recording themselves in order to get the best possible result, so even a 30 second recording might involve 5-10 minutes of speaking practice.
More practice ideas
For more ideas for exam practice tasks and free lesson plans, visit the website.
[1] Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological review,100(3), 363.
[2] Perrone, M.J. (2010). The impact of the First Certificate in English (FCE) examination on the EFL classroom: A washback study. Unpublished doctoral thesis. Columbia University, New York.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Latimer, D. G. (2009). Washback effects of the Cambridge Preliminary English Test at an Argentinean bilingual school. Doctoral dissertation. University of Georgia.