Tackling Unit one of the Textbook

20 Feb 2015

In our new room 258 of the VHS we were able to work on the unit one of the Textbook Objective Proficiency drawing attention to the Exam spots and Idiom Spots in the book as useful to read.
My philosophy with this book is to in class do the activities which needed talking, listening or explanation and reserving the activities which need research and individual effort to homework.


Corpus spots

These (yellow-coloured sections of the book) show common errors that some candidates have made in the CPE exams over the last few years and I find that showing people common errors is not very helpful as what tends to be remembered are the errors not the correct versions of the texts. I will therefore be skipping over those sections and any exercises where you have to correct mistakes in the book. You are adults and if you want to do these exercises – you can chose to do them.


Foci for the evening

We focussed on the following parts of the Cambridge English: Proficiency exam:


hints and suggestions

Here are a few of the hints and suggestions made during the session:


some videos that help to lighten the weight of work

1. Someone on the first evening asked about accents that you might encounter in the exam and I explained that you might encounter Scots, Irish, Welsh, North American, Antipodean or Southern African accents in the listening paper so you need to be familiar with them to some extent. Here is a video where two Scots encounter a “voice recognition” lift – can you understand what they say?

2. Summarising is an art form that we have to learn. Here is the Monty Python Summarizing Proust Competition notice who gets the highest on the “Proustometer”:


Homework for 26 February 2015

The homework for the next week is: