colombia exams exams support preparing students for pet

7/29/2019 Colombia Exams Exams Support Preparing Students for Pet

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Examinations Services Colombia

Preparing Students for PET

Preparing students for PET

Do you have students working towards the Preliminary English Test? To have the best possible

chance of success, they need to be comfortable with the format of the exam and to have

practice in the types of activity they will find in each of the papers. You can now find detailed

information about every aspect of this intermediate-level exam on the new PET section of the

Cambridge ESOL Teaching Resources website. This on-line resource also has plenty of

classroom activities for you to use with your students and advice on the best way for them to

tackle each of the tasks.

PET topics list

Clothes Daily life

Education Entertainment and media

Environment Food and drink

Free time Health, medicine and exercise

Hobbies and leisure House and home

Language People

Personal feelings, opinions and

experiences

Personal identification

Places and buildings Relations with other people

Transport Social interaction

Sport The natural world

Travel and holidays Weather

Work and jobs

Reading and Writing at PET level

The Preliminary English Test is at the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework level

B1. At this level a learner should be able to cope linguistically in a range of everyday situations

which need a largely predictable use of language. They should be able to use English in their

own or a foreign country in contact with native and non-native speakers of English for general

purposes as described below.

1. Reading

The kinds of things that PET-level readers should be able to deal with are:

street signs





public notices

product packaging

forms

posters

brochures

city guides

instructions

informal letters

newspaper and magazine articles and features.

As you will notice, these are the kind of texts we look at if we want to find out about something

and they help us in our day-to-day lives. The focus is very much on practical need. Giving your

students experience of working with these types of texts, as you prepare them for the PET

exam, will help them manage in the real world in English.

Skimming and scanning

When reading, a learner at this level should be able to read in a number of ways. Sometimes

they will just need to get a quick overview of a reading text, to get a general feel for what it is

about, who it is intended for, how it is organised etc. This kind of reading is called skimming

and is a skill they will need in order to do some of the tasks in the PET Reading test. Once they

have a basic knowledge of the text they will then probably need to pick out specific information.

This is called scanning.

We use these skills regularly in our day-to-day lives. When you look at a bus timetable you

quickly skim your eyes over the timetable to see how it is organised. Once you know how the

information is organised, you then look for the bit of information you are interested in, and for

this you will scan down the timetable until you find the bus time you need. In an exam,

candidates are skimming and scanning in order to pick out information required to answer a

question. Just as we do with the bus timetable, they need to pick out important information and

ignore the rest.





Understanding attitude

PET-level students don't just need to skim and scan, they also need to be able to understand

opinions, attitudes, moods and wishes. When they read they should be able to get a feel for the

writer's attitude towards the topic and the effect the writer is hoping to have on the reader.

2. Writing

PET-level writers should be able to produce the kind of texts that people write on an everyday

basis, such as:

postcards

notes

e-mails

informal letters

stories.

Content

There are a number of things that PET-level writers should be able to do in these texts. They

might need to:

give practical information to someone

report the events of something that happened

describe a person they know

describe a thing they own

describe a place

describe their reactions to situations and events

report their opinions, hopes or regrets and say what makes them happy.

Register

Also, they should be able to use the language they know in an appropriate way. For example, if

they are asked to write to a friend, they should write in an informal and friendly style. At this

level students should also have some control of the grammar and use different grammatical

structures accurately and not just produce a range of simple sentences.





Developing general Reading and Writing skills

The kind of language skills needed to pass PET are the same as those needed to get by in an

English-speaking country. Learners need to be able to do practical things such as:

go to the bank or the post office

buy food in a shop

ask for directions or other important information

meet people and make friends.

By teaching your students how to do these things and providing them with meaningful practice,you are giving them many of the skills they need to pass PET.

Reading can be a good starting point for writing. Students can often read and understand texts

that are more complicated than the texts they can write. Give learners the opportunity to read a

range of texts that are written for different purposes. Talk with the class about the writer's

reasons for writing and about the vocabulary and grammar of a particular text. This will give

learners a good foundation on which to build their own writing ability.

Writing is a productive skill and can therefore be more challenging, so it often follows on from

reading. Frequently, when learners are more ambitious and try to write more complex language,

the number of errors increases. Because of this always keep in mind the purpose of the

exercise you are doing with your group. If you want them to take risks and try to be ambitious

with their language and ideas, focus on the things they get right. If you pick out the mistakes

they have made, it might be demotivating and prevent them from taking risks in the future.

Here is a list of a few things that you could do to help your learners develop their skills in both

reading and writing:

Expose them to a range of real English texts - from English language newspapers,magazines, the internet etc.

Ask students to find texts in English that interest them and bring them into class.

Set up real reasons for reading and writing, i.e. a simple piece of research to do in thelibrary or on the internet.





Encourage learners to read graded readers and write brief reviews on them for the restof the class to read.

Set time limits when they read in order to speed up their skimming and scanning skills.

Encourage learners to think about their own reading and writing priorities and theirstrengths and weaknesses.

Classroom activity

‘Gently Does It’

Aim: to increase learners' awareness of social and cultural appropriacy.

Target Audience: students

Relevance to PET: Writing paper

Organisation: whole class and pair work

Materials needed: writing paper or word processing programme

Ask students when they last had to apologise to someone.

If they are willing, get them to recount their experiences either to the whole group or to their

partner/neighbour.

Point out that when we have to tell someone something they may not like, we need to choose

our words carefully and always think about the feelings of the person receiving the information.

Now write the following headings on the board:

1. Saying sorry 2. Correcting

someone's mistake

3. Saying you can't

do something foranother person

4. Telling someone

that their work isbad

I'm so sorry that /for... Please forgiveme for... I doapologise for..

I don't think that'sright... I'm not sure if that's correct...

I'm afraid I'm notable to do... I'mreally sorry but Ican't...

I'm afraid your workisn't as good as ithas been... I can'tsay that I like thestory you wrote...

Discuss with the class the difference between 'Your work is really awful!' and 'I'm afraid your

work isn't as good as it has been.'





(Answer: the second sentence is more thoughtful of the recipient, it begins by apologising for

being about to cause possible offence, it replaces 'bad' with 'not good' which is a bit softer and

it makes reference to a time when their work was better.)

Read out the following situations and ask students to write down exactly what they

would say to the person concerned.

1. You accidentally pour fruit juice on someone's white suit/skirt at a party.

2. Your teenage son or daughter comes home at midnight when you told them to be home

at 9.30 pm.

3. Your friend asks you to look after his pet snake while he goes on holiday.

4. You are a football manager and your goalkeeper keeps letting goals in.

Ask pairs to compare what they have written. Who was the most polite? Was it always

appropriate to be polite?

Ask students to write a letter of apology to the person in situation A. They should aim to

be as polite as possible. Finish by writing a model on the board for students to copy.

For more PET classroom activities, please visit www.CambridgeESOL.org/teach/PET

Source: Cambridge ESOL

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