I’ve been teaching exam English for a number of years and have used some great coursebooks in that time. Generally, I find they take a targeted approach to English language acquisition and by that, I mean they focus almost exclusively on exam requirements in order to get students ready for their big day.
I guess you could argue that’s what they should be doing – the students are in an exam class after all; however, how far are we really preparing our students for life after the exam?
I gave a webinar on Wednesday 25th September on exactly this topic. You can find the recording of it at the end of this article. Here’s a summary of some of what we covered…
An anecdote
A teacher friend and colleague told me a story while we were having dinner once. The story was about a first certificate (B1/B2) student who was doing really well in class and almost certain to come away with a solid pass. This student came to class one day upset and demotivated because over the weekend, they’d needed to take a taxi somewhere but was unable to use their English to order the taxi or tell the driver where they wanted to go.
My colleague friend was shocked – the student was using much more ‘advanced’ language in class. Yet they had struggled to communicate a relatively straightforward task of giving the taxi driver directions; something that is typically covered in many elementary (A2) general English coursebooks.This got me thinking about my students and how prepared they felt to face the real world after the exam.
I decided to ask them, and these are a few of the things they said:
I’m confident doing real things in class but outside it’s very hard.
I can’t see a connection…
The class is for the exam, outside is different.
From this I interpreted two key challenges:
- Students lacked confidence in real-world situations.
- Students could not connect classroom learning with the real world.
Simply, students were struggling to take what they had learnt IN the class and use it OUTSIDE the class. Whilst I suspected some of this was as a result of less functional language being taught in exam classes, (you can read more about this in last week’s blog). I also felt that I wasn’t making the connection between the classroom and the real world clear. I wasn’t ‘keeping the real world in mind’ during my exam English lessons.
Preparing students for the real-world
More often than not, we ARE providing our exam students with the skills they need to achieve success after the exam, but what we might not be doing is making those connections clear. Taking a moment to highlight to our students how a skill learnt within the relative safety of the classroom can be transferred to real life situations is invaluable. Students can’t always work this out for themselves. It doesn’t really matter which coursebook or materials you use either. It might take a bit of thought and some tasks are more easily transferable than others, but the confidence it gives to our students is worth it, isn’t it? So, let’s make those connections and keep the real world in mind.
Watch the full webinar below:
To find out more from Deborah on this topic, check out her blog post on ‘functional language and why we should teach it to exam students‘