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Getting started with teaching exams in 8 easy steps
Published in MATEFL Newsletter May 2017

People get into exam preparation for a number of reasons, such as the
higher hourly rate many schools offer, a need for a challenge, the goal-
oriented atmosphere, or even just because they happened to be in a
school that needed one more exam teacher than they had at the time.
It was only a few years ago that I was pushed into an exam classroom with
no idea of what I was doing or what was even expected of me. That very
first group was a hot MESS. I hated teaching that class, because I knew I
wasn’t doing a good job, and I promised myself that I would work hard to
not ever feel like that after class again.

Four years, preparing over three hundred students, mentoring a handful of

teachers, and completing a one-to-one exam preparation Delta specialism
later, and I finally think I have a handle on this whole exam thing. Here is

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some of what I’ve learned so far, and hopefully this can save you from
completely screwing up your very first course like I did.
 
1.    Pick an exam
This step might not end up being in your control. A lot of teachers end up
teaching exam classes simply because the school has a student or a class
who needs to prepare for an exam, and their DoS happens to choose them.
For those who are going into this as a conscious choice, I would
recommend starting with picking just one exam to focus on for now. In my
opinion, the most useful exams to start with are either:

- the Cambridge FCE (First Certificate of English) which leads to a B2

certificate of English language proficiency,
- the Academic IELTS exam, which is graded on a scale and is a
prerequisite for many universities, or
- the TOEFL exam, which is also graded on a scale, and is seen as
equivalent in worth to the IELTS exam.

These particular exams tend to be in high demand, depending on the

institution you work for, and chances to teach these three types of exam
courses are usually more bountiful than other international exams.
 
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2.    Learn everything you can about the exam
It’s super important to make sure that you know the exam inside and out
before you actually step into an exam preparation class. The learners pay
hefty tuition fees for these courses, and normally have a lot riding on their
results (usually either university entry or immigration opportunities). As
their teacher, you owe it to them to walk in armed and ready.
Start by visiting the examining body’s official website and go from there.
You’ll be able to find a breakdown of the exam’s format, testimonials from
past exam candidates and exam teachers, sample tests, and normally a
guide or handbook to help get you started.
You need to understand how many sections the exam is split into, how
each of these sections assesses the candidates, and how the candidates’
scores are calculated.
 
3.    Do the exam yourself
Or more realistically, do a mock exam, under exam conditions, and have
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an experienced exam teacher or your DoS correct it and walk you through
how they score it. This will help you get more familiar with the exam itself,
as well as the scoring criteria for the writing and speaking sections of the
exam.
I believe that teachers with a greater understanding of what it feels like to
actually have to do the exam tasks themselves find it easier to respond to
questions from learners on the fly, to empathise with their learners, and to
understand how different exam strategies can help their learners on the
big day.
 
4.    Go to YouTube
It’s relatively easy to find recorded samples of candidates sitting for the
speaking section of the three exams I mentioned back in Point 1. All you
need to do is head over to YouTube and type in a search string like “IELTS
Speaking”. Many of these videos also include oral examiners or oral
examiners-in-training breaking down why the candidates achieved their
respective scores.
Follow along these videos with the scoring table (normally publically
accessible on the official exam website) in order to gain a deeper
understanding of what the examiners are looking for from their
candidates, and thus help your learners get closer to achieving the scores

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they need.
You can also find videos of other teachers explaining how they help their
learners prepare for the exam and improve their scores, and you can never
have too many tips or techniques for the classroom!

5.    Get familiar with exam preparation materials

Start by taking a look at what materials your school has in its library. These
will most likely be your go-to tools of the trade, at least at first. It’s highly
likely that your school is going to have at least a few volumes of sample-
tests and a coursebook or two, and it would be a good idea to get a feel for
the materials which are most easily accessible to you.
This would also be a good time to start Googling. Exam preparation is very
different to General English in that it’s very difficult to use a single
coursebook as the backbone of your course. Exam preparation courses
normally run on limited time, with classes being made up of people with
varying levels, and each having their own unique strengths and
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weaknesses, and in the case of exams like IELTS and TOEFL (which are
graded on a scale) can each often have different goals. This means that
you’re going to need to be very flexible, and that no two courses will be
the same.
You’re going to need to find as many materials as possible, and websites
such as ExamEnglish, OneStopEnglish, IELTSMaterial, Learn4Good, and
ESL-Lounge are great places to start, and I recommend starting to build up
a digital resource bank early on and saving it to the cloud for easy access.
 
6.    Draw up a few lesson plans
By the time you get to this stage, you should have a decent idea of what
learners need to know by the time they sit for their exam. Being a teacher
with some experience under your belt already, you definitely know how to
get this information across.

While exam preparation courses can be very different from general English
courses, the fundamental principles of how people learn and how we can
present information don’t change. Your lessons need to be as lively and
engaging as your General English lessons, just with clearer aims and
objectives.

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If possible, show your plans to an experienced exam teacher, or your
DoS/ADoS, to get some feedback. This would also be a great way to show
the people above you that you’re taking this seriously, and are committed
to doing a good job.
Try to have a selection of a handful of lessons ready and planned before
you even get started, this way you have things to build on, adapt, and edit.
This can save you a lot of time during your first time teaching an exam
class, as you’re also going to need to correct a lot of homework.
 
7.    The magic secret
 
I’m going to let you in on a secret, a secret which will make sure that
you’re likely to be an effective exam teacher from day one. Are you ready?
Are you sure? Okay then:
Exam preparation lessons are about much more than just doing practice
tests.
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If anyone tells you that all you need to do is photocopy a few sample
exams a week and you’re good to go, ignore them!
The best exam teachers I have ever had the pleasure of working with (and
learning from) understand that these English proficiency exams are about
testing different language skills and systems, and that in order to prepare
your learners for an exam, you need to give them language input and skills
development.
Some might tell you that exam teachers aren’t responsible for their
learners’ level of English, or that exam teachers are only responsible for
teaching learners about the exam and giving them techniques to get
through each section. You are responsible for arming your learners with
exam strategies, but those need to be supported by language systems and
skills. At the end of the day, these exams assess candidates’ abilities to use
English, so you’ve got to make sure that the learners’ English is up to
scratch too.
 
8.    Start getting some experience!
Congratulations! You’ve done all the prep-work, and you’re ready to hit a
class!
It would be a good idea to really invest some time in teacher reflection on
your first course or two. Just like with anything else, the first time you do it

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isn’t going to be perfect, and that’s fine as long as you use it as a learning
experience.
Understanding what worked and what didn’t, as well as why, are key. You
need to know what to continue doing in class, and what to improve on.
This goes a long way to making sure all of your learners get the scores they
need.
Some of you will be lucky enough to get assigned to an exam preparation
class relatively quickly. Others might not be so lucky as to be in the right
place at the right time. However, there are ways of getting experience that
don’t involve you switching schools or breaking any non-compete clauses
in your contracts: volunteer teaching.

I know, working for free doesn’t sound all that attractive, but trust me, this
is a win-win. If you’re in a school that already has a number of exam
teachers, you’re going to need to find a way to get a foot in the door, and
that’s going to be a lot easier once you actually get some experience. Try
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contacting an NGO and seeing if they need anyone to help prepare
refugees or low-income foreign nationals get into university.

Personally, I volunteer for an organisation called Spark15, and I spend

between an hour and a half and two hours a week helping young people
between 18 and 25 prepare for the IELTS exam in order to get access to
higher education. They’re always looking for volunteers, so if any of you
need some experience teaching exam classes, feel free to contact them at
REDACTED@gmail.com . We’re always happy to have more volunteers to
help out!

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Discovering new approaches: I used to suck at
teaching Writing.
Published in MATEFL Newsletter November 2017
The vast majority of teachers here in Malta are, primarily, teachers of
General English; meaning that our primary concern is to help learners
improve their overall level of English. With English proficiency being split
into a person's abilities in four systems (Grammar, Vocabulary, Phonology,
and Discourse) and four skills (Speaking, Listening, Reading, and Writing)
us teachers have a lot of different things to consider when planning and
delivering courses to our learners.

A typical General English course tends to include a heavy focus on

grammar and on speaking practice, with vocabulary, reading, and listening
being  next on the list of priorities, and pronunciation and writing being
"those family members we don't talk about."
However, in the context of being human beings living in the modern world

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in 2017, this approach has one critical flaw: people spend much more time
writing in their day-to-day lives than they ever have before in the entirety
of human history.

More and more people work in international environments, or conduct

business globally, meaning that a lot of business communication (as well
as social communication to help cultivate business relationships) happens
in English. In their personal lives, people spend tons of time on social
media writing status updates, tweets, comments, and forum posts, with a
large number of these interactions happening in English and bridging
people across the world. In our private lives most of us spend more time
communicating through services like Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger
than we do through traditional phone calls or even VoIP services like
Skype. I mean, clearly writing is an important thing to teach.

How I used to approach writing lessons resembled the kind of writing

lessons I had experienced at school: Teacher sets homework; students do
the work; teacher corrects the work and hands it back; students forget
they ever did the work.

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My students had no control over what it is they were writing about. They
didn’t get any advice on their work until after the work was finished. I
would write comments on their work, but they’d read the comments once
and never look at the essays again. This worked for highly motivated and
organized students at the end of their exam preparation courses, but it
didn’t work for anyone else. The students didn’t like doing the writing, and
I didn’t like doing the correcting as I knew it never amounted to much.
Something had to change.
 
I had to force myself to understand that my learners, as individuals living
in the 21st Century, need to be able to develop a variety of writing  micro-
skills in order be part of modern global society. The question was: How
could I help them do that?

So I started reading more and set out to find a way to make things more
impactful. I found lots of ‘tips’ telling me to do things like use a set of
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cheerful stickers as a code (‘wide grinning face’ = Fantastic work that I
almost actually enjoyed reading, ‘smiley face’ = It’s okay but not worth
putting up on the fridge, ‘sad face’ = I hated reading this and it definitely
affects how I feel about you as a person) to make the learners care more
about the feedback; or to use jazzy glitter pens instead of a red pen to
make students more excited to read the comments (I don’t even know why
I thought this would work, honestly); or to only write positive comments
and not give any constructive feedback (because it isn’t like improvement
is one of our goals, right?).

Needless to say, while that stuff was very ‘positive’, I was just putting
lipstick on a pig. I still sucked at teaching writing, the only difference was
that my students were throwing away essays covered in stickers and
glitter and Zen affirmations instead of essays that looked like they were
corrected by a sane adult.

It took me a while to stumble across something called the ‘Process

Approach.’ Admittedly, my previous experience with trying out tips from
the web left me skeptical, but I noticed that some pretty trustworthy
people, like the British Council[i], were writing about it, so I reserved
judgement, read some more, and it ended up blowing my mind.

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Basically, there are two main approaches to teaching writing. There’s the
Product Approach, and the Process Approach. The Product Approach was
basically what I had been doing all along, which I then found out is an
approach that is best to use AFTER using the Process Approach. The most
succinct way to compare them is the following picture from the British
Council’s @TeachingEnglish Twitter:

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1. Process vs. Product Approaches to Writing[i]

Basically, the Process Writing Approach treats writing like a cycle. There
are pre-writing, drafting, editing, and post-writing stages. When a teacher
uses the Process Approach to teach writing, writing is no longer a solitary
activity for the students, as the teacher and their peers are involved in the
several stages between being assigned a topic and handing in a final piece
of work (Harmer, 2004)[ii].

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While the Product Writing Approach focuses on students working alone to
produce a piece of work that’s comparable to a sample text they had seen
earlier, the Process Writing Approach is more about spending time to hone
the students’ micro- and macroskills. (For anyone who, like me, can’t
memorise all the different macro- and microskills, here’s a handy link that
I refer back to every now and again:

https://www.academia.edu/6238260/MICROSKILLS_AND_MACROSKILLS_O
F_4_LANGUAGE_SKILLS )

The Process Approach was a totally different way of doing things for me.
Instead of serving as my students’ version of Simon Cowell, my writing
lessons started looking a lot like all of my other lessons. I wasn’t just
judging their performance, I was suddenly actually helping my students
shape their ideas into words. My students started learning about things
like genre and style. They discussed things like the logical order of ideas,
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and which linkers to use to link their ideas together. My students started
LEARNING.

And that’s when it hit me. I didn’t suck at teaching writing, I had just never
TAUGHT writing. What I had been doing before wasn’t teaching at all, it
was assessing. Now, there’s nothing wrong with assessing your learners’
work; assessment is a vital part of the learning process. However,
assessment comes after learning, assessment doesn’t replace learning. My
writing lessons started to look a lot more like my speaking lessons, and all
of us involved enjoyed them more.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I don’t use the Product Approach. The aim of
this piece isn’t for everyone to throw down their Product Approach ways
and decry them as enemies of the state of Learning. Like I said, the Process
Approach has a lot more in common with assessment than it does with
teaching, and we DO need to assess our learners.

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As I had mentioned above, I think the Process Approach is fantastic to use
when helping prepare learners for exams or tests. At the end of the day,
every international English Language exam includes a writing component
with a time limit that doesn’t allow for proper brainstorming or drafting,
so our students definitely need to learn how to handle those situations.
The real magic for me was learning when to use each approach. When I
know my students need to learn more about how the skill of writing
works, we go the Process route; when I know my students need test
practice or want to test their skills, we go the Product route.

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References:

[1] https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/product-process-writing-a-
comparison
[1] https://twitter.com/TeachingEnglish/status/833541806562357249
[1] Harmer, J. 2004. How to Teach Writing. Longman

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10 things I learned Teaching English and Training
Teachers in Kazakhstan
Published in MATEFL Newsletter November 2018
For some reason, I decided that a Post-Soviet, Asian, Muslim country was
the best place for me to live as a not-quite-21-year-old, gay teacher. I spent
almost three years in Kazakhstan, the 8th largest country in the world, and
I can honestly say that it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Here’s what I learned there:

1. How to teach a variety of levels, courses, and ages at once.

One of the best things about teaching in a non-English-speaking country
is that you get to teach students in the city and country they actually live
in. Your students aren’t taking a short break from their lives to come learn
English, learning English comfortably slots in to their existing lives.

This also means that you aren’t spending between 3 and 6 hours a day

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with the same students everyday. Most classes run three times a week, and
as the Native Speaker Teacher, I only got to teach them once or twice a
week myself (more on this below). Obviously, my full-time contract wasn’t
there for me to teach one or two lessons a week, so I had to juggle lots of
different classes at a time.

For example, an average week would have me teaching at least three or

four different groups of adults, three or four groups of teenagers, an IELTS
Class, and likely one or two one-to-one students. I found myself getting
very good at distinguishing between levels without having to think too
hard about it, because I would teach at least 4 of the 6 CEFR levels each
week. I developed a much keener sense of how to help students get from
one level to the next, as I had a much more immediate and concrete frame
of reference.

2. How to share (classes)

As I said above, while students would typically have three lessons a week, I
would generally only teach one lesson of those three, two at the most. This
was because I shared all my classes with local teachers.

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Teaching has often been described as a “lonely” job, as we don’t often
really get to interact with our colleagues in the way that people doing
other jobs can. However, when sharing classes, you HAVE to make the time
to talk to your colleagues. You need to get on the same page, and when
both teachers really care about doing a job, absolute magic happens!

Sharing classes with my colleagues forced me to make spending time with

them a priority, and it was a great way to build solid professional
relationships with pretty much every local teacher who was employed at
the school.

It was also great in terms of teaming up with more experienced teachers

who I could learn from, and less experienced teachers who I could help
guide. Overall, it created a very supportive and connected work
environment.

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3. What it’s like to deal with students over several years as opposed to
weeks

Working in a non-English speaking country is really different to working

somewhere like Malta or the UK. For starters, courses are not roll-on-roll-
off, but have specific start and end dates; students don’t take classes for
three to six hours a day, but usually have three 90-minute classes a week;
and you can have the same students for years as they progress through
CEFR levels.

For example, one of my first ever students in Kazakhstan was an 11 year old
girl who had booked three one-to-one lessons a week. I was her teacher
from October 2012 until May 2015, and got to see her improve and literally
grow up before my eyes. I had a specific class of teenage students who
started with me in Pre-Intermediate and eventually ended up progressing
to Advanced, and even prepared for the CAE exam together.

The teacher-student relationships were very different there than to here,

as while we spent less time per-week with the students, we had the
opportunity to really track their progress and become a part of their lives
over a much longer period of time. It was a lot easier to make sure that

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they didn’t go from one level to the next with weird gaps in their
knowledge, and we could build on lessons taught much earlier on.

The major downside, however, was coming up with new materials and
lesson arrangements and activity types etc. It’s a lot easier for teachers in
contexts like we have here in Malta to recycle materials as we tend to have
fresh faces in our classes all the time. When you have students for two or
three years, however, hunting for materials becomes a way of life.

4. Understanding the true value of non-native-speaker teachers

We’ve all heard of the Native vs. Non-Native debate, and until I moved to
Kazakhstan, I was pretty uninformed about the whole thing. There’s a lot
of misinformation surrounding the topic (from both sides!), with native
speaker teachers being made to look like drunken nomads, and non-native
speakers made to look like caricatures of ‘foreign’ people that you’d see in
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The Simpsons or Family Guy.
Our company worked on a very simple philosophy: different backgrounds
had their own pros and cons. For example, our Local Teachers knew
exactly what all our students were going through, because they had been
there themselves and could predict the issues or roadblocks that could
come up in each level; us Native Speaker Teachers were more useful for
things such as helping students sound more natural.

This didn’t mean that the Native Speaker teachers had no empathy for the
struggles of learning English or that the Local Teachers couldn’t help
anyone sound more natural, but it meant that we got to divide things
between us, and we all had to recognise each others’ strengths.  It was
also a great way for us expat teachers to get insight into how our students
felt about their language learning journey, as we benefited from the
hindsight of our wonderful local colleagues.

I don’t honestly feel like it’s a case of one type of teacher being better than
the other, my experiences taught me that we just have different
experiences informing our practice. At the end of the day, our system
worked, and we became one of the top-two language school chains in a
country bigger than Europe.

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5. Dealing with corporate clients

When you teach in non-English-speaking countries, corporate contracts

can be the bread-and-butter of the leaner months (i.e. summer months, as
the students all come to places like Malta!).

As a young teacher (I was basically a child in an adult body) I got to

experience corporate environments that I had never had access to before. I
got to spend time with CEOs, CFOs, surgeons, marketing executives, and a
whole slew of people whom I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunity
to speak to otherwise.

I didn’t just teach them English, but because of the positions that a lot of
these people occupied, I had to read into a large number of topics in order
to help them be able to communicate at their corporate levels with their
peers. I had the opportunity to learn about surgical practices,
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neuroscience (even came close to being allowed to watch a life-saving
actual brain surgery one time!), management, finance, and much more.

As the old cliche goes, I learned as much from teaching them as they
learned from me, and it was a wonderful period of personal growth for me.

6. How to understand other teachers

While I was working in Kazakhstan I spent quite a bit of time working with
both Cambridge University Press and Pearson ELT. I would be sent to cities
and towns all over Kazakhstan to promote materials to state schools,
colleges, and universities and I would promote materials, run teacher-
training workshops, speak at state conferences, help with syllabus design,
etc.

I met and interacted with over a thousand different teachers while I held
that role, which helped me develop a deeper understanding of different
types of teachers, and that most of us all do this for the same reason: we
like helping people.

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I got to work with newly qualified teachers; teachers who were nearing
retirement; teachers who had never been to an English-speaking country;
teachers who poured blood, sweat, and tears into their lesson planning;
teachers who spent large amounts of their own money on books and
resources; technophile teachers, technophobe teachers, and lots more. It
was honestly really wonderful to be surrounded by teachers almost all the
time, because I always felt like I was surrounded by people from “my tribe”.

Doing all of this definitely helped me become a better teacher trainer, and
the lessons I learned from interacting with all those teachers help me as a
DOS. It’s a lot easier to manage a team of teachers when you can really
understand where they’re coming from.

7. Becoming more open minded to other cultures

Kazakhstan is VERY different to Western Europe. Virtually every aspect of

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my life changed when I moved there, and in lots of ways I didn’t even
think to prepare for. For example, growing up here in Malta in the 90s and
early 2000s, I had never been exposed to people who were SUPER into
their religious beliefs. Issues of ethnicity and race weren’t really a huge
feature of my upbringing (other than the odd person having some reason
or other for not liking that I’m half English, but that was never a serious
thing). I wasn’t used to being surrounded by so many people whose views
were so much more conservative than my own.

I’m not gonna lie, after 3 years there I decided that I was culturally
incompatible with living in Kazakhstan, but trying to integrate into a
society like that taught me a lot about how people work, and how to deal
with people who had fundamentally different upbringings to my own.

For example, as a gay man I had to exert a level of caution and discretion
that I had just never really needed to think about while living in Malta. I
also came to learn that if a person raised in a Muslim family in a Post-
Soviet country has homophobic or transphobic views, that doesn’t mean
they are “A Bad Person!” but just that they think in the ways they’ve been
taught to think (just like we do!), and that many of them are happy to
reevaluate their views when provided with proof that “gays” aren’t evil.

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In general, this makes it a lot easier for me as a teacher and as a DOS to
deal with whoever walks through my door. Even if I’m dealing with
someone who I don’t think I would like or would particularly like me, I
know how to find some scrap of common ground to start from, and that
makes moving forward and finding solutions to problems a lot easier.

8. The limitations of learning through partial immersion without a

teacher
Confession time: I am a TERRIBLE language student. Always have been.
This got even worse when I became a teacher, and reached its peak
terribleness when I became a teacher trainer.

As an English Speaker, it’s hard enough to find the real motivation to learn
another language, let alone to put aside money and time for language
lessons.

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When I got to Kazakhstan, however, I quickly recognised a need to learn
Russian, as no one spoke English and Russian is the lingua franca of the
Post-Soviet States. I tried finding classes to join, but none were being
offered. I then tried to find a teacher for one-to-one lessons, but that
didn’t really work out either. Most teachers in Kazakhstan are taught a
Grammar Translation style of teaching, and I just couldn’t study like that.

I ended up mostly being taught by taxi drivers, in all honesty. Taxis in

Kazakhstan are about the same price as the bus is here, and their busses
are slow and even more packed than ours, so I mostly got around on foot
and by cab. I would sit and try chat with taxi drivers, trying to pick up
chunks of language that I could reuse and recycle. Between taxis,
restaurants, bars, and shops, I ended up learning enough Russian for very
basic survival within a few months.

What I could never do, however, was have a regular conversation. My

language skills were limited to solely transactional interactions due to the
context in which I was learning the language. Whenever anyone asked me
about things like what my hobbies were, or what I liked about Kazakhstan,
I drew a blank. All my colleagues, obviously, spoke English, as did all of my
friends; meaning that I very rarely had the opportunity (or felt the need,

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to be honest) to have more human conversations in Russian, as I always
had enough English-speakers around me to satisfy my social needs.

9. How to be responsible for my own professional development

When I first arrived in Kazakhstan our school had no professional

development programme in place. We didn’t have any sort of CPD
sessions, or a lending library, or any sort of mentorship system, until I
eventually set them up myself later on down the line.
At the beginning, though, I needed to take my professional development
into my own hands. I started following a lot of ELT blogs (Sandy Millin’s
blog was a regular stop for me), got involved in a lot of Facebook groups
for Teachers and tried to actively get involved in discussions about
materials, and different types of lessons, activities that teachers shared
with each other, etc.
While I missed having a more structured direction to my CPD, I found that
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the wider ELT community across the world had a lot I could learn from,
and it was great to be able to ask questions to a group of people and get
tons of answers in response.

10. It’s a bad idea to try teach someone you’re involved with.

Just to make this clear at the beginning of this section of the listicle, I
didn’t meet my husband in class, as that’s a question I get asked a lot.

When I first met my husband he was just about at around an Elementary

level of English. A few months into us dating, and I had the bright (read:
moronic) idea to try and give him English lessons.I have never in my life
hated teaching, with the exception of those three ill-fated lessons I tried
to give to my husband.
My ‘teacher persona’ and my ‘real self’ are just too different to exist in the
same space at the same time. I found myself losing my patience in ways
that I never would in a real classroom, I found myself trying to balance this
awkward combination of ‘Teacher’ and ‘Boyfriend’, and we both just hated
it.

Don’t do it! Don’t try teach anyone you’re dating, for both your sakes!

THEO NAVARRO - WRITING PORTFOLIO .17.