If you are new to teaching classes for Cambridge English exams to students it can be quite intimidating at the start. There seems so much you have to learn about them and so little time to do it.
And although it is true that there is so much to learn about the exam before you start feeling comfortable about what you are saying, remember that every now experienced teacher was in the same position as you when they started teaching it. And you will too in time. Over the course of the year you will improve your knowledge of the exam: what the parts of the exam are, how to mark the different parts and get a good understanding of the level of English which the students need to have to do well in the exam you are teaching them.
But I presume you are not reading this just to be told something which is pretty obvious, but to get some advice about what you can do in the short term to make you feel more confident now when you go in front of your students. And that's what I will do below, tell you not only some things which you can do to quickly improve your knowledge, but also some things you need to know because you'll be very likely to be asked questions about them or make mistakes on them in front of the students. Because the last thing you want to do within the first couple of classes of the course is to come across as incompetent to the students.
A brief overview of the exams
Before I advise you what you need to focus on in the beginning, I will give a very quick overview of the Cambridge English exams. There are three main levels which you are likely going to be teaching and these are First/FCE, Advanced/CAE and Proficiency/CPE. The level of language goes up progressively in each, First/FCE being B2 level, Advanced/CAE being C1 level and Proficiency/CPE being C2 level.
For each of these exams, the students have to do four separate parts. These are:
- A Reading/Use of English exam
- A Writing exam
- A Listening exam
- A Speaking exam
And to pass they need a overall score for all of the exams combined of 60%.
So now on to what you should do.
The Reading/Use of English and the Listening parts
Do the Reading/Use of English and the Listening exercises in the exam
This is fundamental and the first thing you learn about because your students will definitely ask you questions about them. At this stage you don't need to suggest methods for doing them (this will come later), you just need to know what you do in them.
I would recommend doing the exercises in a practice exam for the Listening and Reading/UOE which are included in the Cambridge handbook for teachers which you can download online from Google for the level you are teaching. Below you will links to the First and Advanced handbook for teachers:
First handbook for teachers
Advanced handbook for teachers
The good thing is that once you know the exercises for one level (e.g. First), you'll know many of the exercises you will find for the other levels (e.g. Advanced and Proficiency).
The marking of these
The Listening exam is very easy to mark, each correct answer gets one point. The Reading/UOE is a little more complicated. Some parts get 1 point for each correct answer, while others get 2 points per correct answer, while in part 4, you can either get 1 or 2 points. To see what each part of the Reading/UOE exam is worth for the First or Advanced exam (and more about this part of the exam), read either of the following articles:
FCE Reading and Use of English Exam Basics
CAE Reading and Use of English Exam Basics
Playing the audio for the Listening exam
This may seem a very simple thing to do, but playing the audio tracks for the listening parts of the exam in class is the one area which teachers new to teaching Cambridge exams screw up on is. And below I will explain why.
The first thing to be aware of is that students listen to the audio track for each part of the listening exam twice.
The second thing to be aware of is that students in the actual exam are given a period of time to read the questions of the listening exercise they are doing, before they hear the audio dialogue. If the audio track and exercise is from a Cambridge published course or exam practice book, you don't need to worry, it will be included. But if it isn't, it may not include this extra time (where instructions are given and/or there is a period of silence afterwards). So if this is the case, you are going to have to give this time before you start playing the audio recording.
To know more about how much they are given, read my article on
How long the introduction and period of silence are for the Cambridge FCE English Listening exam parts
Times for the Advanced Listening exam parts
The Speaking exam
Watch a video for the Speaking exam
After you know the different parts of the Reading/UOE and the Listening exam you need to know what the students are expected to do in the different parts of the Speaking exam. During the course you will be practising doing the speaking part of the exam with them. You will often be taking the role of the examiner when they do it in pairs. To know what to do for the parts and for how much time to do each, watch a video on YouTube of students doing it at the level you are teaching. Below you will find links for videos of the full Speaking exam for the First and Advanced exams:
Full First Speaking Exam
Full Advanced Speaking Exam
When you are doing a practice speaking in class, I would recommend at the beginning of course show your students the part they are doing from the above videos before they do and ask them what they have to do.
The marking of speaking
At some point you are going to have to mark/evaluate their performance when doing a part of the Speaking exam. And unfortunately, at the beginning this is going to be tricky for you. You need time to know what to evaluate. So for the first few times that they do it in class, I wouldn't recommend giving them a mark (like with all parts they need to get 60% to pass the speaking based on a number of areas of their speaking (e.g. grammar/vocabulary, pronunciation, doing the task etc…)). Just tell them if it was good, very good or needs to improve. At this stage base this on the speaking performance relative to the other students in class.
To get some ideas of what students are evaluated on, click on the link which says "Read examiner's comments" for the students in the YouTube videos which are linked above, directly below the actual video.
The Writing exam
Of all the knowledge for the parts of the exam I would say that you need to know when you are beginning to teach Cambridge classes, writing is probably the least important. The reason why is that it takes many years of teaching to really get to know what type of vocabulary they need, the structures they need to use and the marking system. And this will come naturally the more you teach classes for Cambridge exams.
However, there are some things you should learn.
Know what types of pieces of writing they have to write
In the First, Advanced and Proficiency exams, they will be expected to write two pieces of writing. The first is a mandatory essay, the other can be one of a number of other pieces of writing (they will be given three different options on the exam paper, of which they have to choose one to write about). Depending on the exam, it can be one of a variety of different types of writing (e.g. a review, a report, an article, a letter etc…). To learn which these are for the First exam, read the below article:
At the beginning and before you teach it in class, I would recommend that you do familiarise yourself with the essay task for the exam you are teaching (it is different for each different level of exam), what they are supposed to include/write about.
The marking of writing
Exactly like with the Speaking part of the exam (their writing is evaluated along similar lines), this is going to be tricky for you to do at the beginning. They get a mark out of 20 for each piece of writing (12 being a pass) which assess 4 different areas of their writing (not something which you really need to worry about at this stage).
What I would recommend is that for the first few months of teaching you give them a mark based on the number of mistakes they have made in their grammar and vocabulary and whether they have done what they were asked to in the exam task they wrote about.
Don't mark them either too high (no 18s or higher, or 6s or lower). If it is overall good, done the task but there are quite few mistakes, give them an 11 or 12. If it is good, done the task with few mistakes and uses varied vocabulary, give them either 14 to 15. If it is just awful in every sense of the word, give them 8.
Grammar and Vocabulary
When beginning to teach Cambridge classes, don't worry about knowing what the level of vocabulary and grammatical structures students will be expected to know or use to pass the exam you are teaching them. Over the course of the year you will naturally learn these from the course book you are teaching them from and the practice exams you give them.
If you do what I suggest, it will make the experience of teaching Cambridge exam classes a lot easier and enjoyable. And many teachers prefer teaching Cambridge exam classes to other types of English classes, myself included.