Bulgaria - Oral Exam Prep

Preparatory Class, EDS Plovdiv, 2008-2009

A lesson preparing for the oral exam - preparing a talk on the topic of travel.

Jan 6th, 2009

The students in the preparatory class have a intensive programme of study for the first year in the English language.  My role working with them is to help prepare them for the oral exam.  I base all my classes on topics provided by colleagues which come from the textbooks used by students and which are generally themes which can be expected to appear in the spoken exam.

language for countries 20 questions

The way the lesson usually goes (when we're not juggling!) is that we discuss the topic in question, compile notes on the board which gives us an idea of the main areas and also a possible structure to the topic for a talk.  We also discuss useful language which students can prepare.

Listening frame for guessing country names

1) Talk about topic, ideas, structure, language
2) Teacher pins up a world map and recounts one or two stories of travel (memorable, food, language) to exemplify the ideas given in 1.
3) Students talk in pairs for two minutes about travel they have made, good-bad, recent-in the past, at home-abroad, with a neighbour and then feed back to the whole class.
4) Students listen to a recording of two people talking about 10 different countries, their outlines, trying to guess which countries they are.
5) Whole class 20 questions activity first of all trying to guess the country the teacher is thinking of, while the teacher can only say 'yes' or 'no'.

Afterwards choose a student to volunteer, while the rest of the class ask the questions.  There is a good language support instrument for this type of activity which I think originally comes from Watcyn-Jones.


6) Homework: go to factworld.info and download the Travel Talk Template to prepare own talk for exam.

Template for talk on the topic of Travel (click below to download)

There are two short clips from my preps talking about their travel experiences here. 

I'll try to get more extended examples on another occasion. I think there is a lot to be said for mp3 recording students in class for use in class and we'll talk about that another time.

PS - we tried a little juggling too