ELICOS Experts / Progress

Test preparation without hollowing out the course

Both extremes fail the student.

A programme that ignores the test the student needs is not serving them, because the score is the gate. A programme that becomes entirely test practice produces students who reach the score and cannot operate in the environment the score was supposed to admit them to, which they discover in their first semester of study.

The workable balance is to treat test technique as a distinct and limited component rather than as the organising principle. Technique is genuinely teachable and genuinely useful: understanding the task types, managing time, knowing what the criteria reward. That is perhaps a small fraction of a course and it produces most of the technique gain available.

Beyond that, score improvement comes from actual proficiency gain, which is slow and does not accelerate by doing more practice tests. Students frequently believe otherwise and ask for more practice tests, and explaining why is part of the teaching.

It is also worth being honest about timeframes. Moving a substantial distance in proficiency takes a length of time that is reasonably well documented, and a student on a short course who needs a large gain should be told that at the start by somebody who knows, rather than at the end by a test result.

There is one speaking arrangement that consistently produces more production than any other, which is repeating the same task with a different partner. The second telling is faster and more fluent, the third is noticeably better than either, and the whole sequence costs little preparation because the task is prepared once.