Activities to practise speaking for CPE

Speaking parts of exams are probably the most challenging of all. They are more stressful due to face to face communication as a result of which test-takers may demonstrate lower language competency than they have. It will be fair to state that exams are by no means a way to assess someone’s real language competency in a normal day-to-day environment.

In any case, if one has decided to take the exam, there are several ways that can help to be as ready for the exam and its anticipated situations as possible.

As you know, there are 3 parts in the CPE Speaking test.

Part 1 is an interview. It checks the ability of the candidate to use language for social purposes, such as making introductions, answering random questions, giving opinions. To help students practise this skill, one of the most efficient ways is to conduct interviews choosing different questions, asking follow up questions, encouraging the learners to give as long and extended answers within the scope of the topic as possible. There are many interesting resources with this type of questions. Here are some ideas.

Another way to practice this skill is to organize marathon speaking sessions. You can do this by timing the students to ask and answer each other random, world questions and develop a conversation as long as possible. You can establish records and challenge the students to beat their own records.

Part 2 is a collaborative task. It checks the ability of the candidates to use language to discuss and interpret, to agree, disagree or agree to disagree, negotiate and collaborate, to rank or classify, speculate, evaluate, make decisions etc. To practice this skill it is crucial to develop students’ collaboration skills. They need to learn to get along and communicate with each other as constructively as possible. This can be achieved by giving a statement/a picture/a set of pictures to a pair of students and asking them to speculate on them by sharing their opinion, discussing the content, expressing agreements or disagreements to each other’s ideas, etc.

Another interesting activity is to organize debate sessions where students will be asked to debate on a suggested topic using a target language. Check the link here for more ideas. This activity gets interesting especially when the person who needs to agree/disagree doesn’t really feel comfortable in their role. In that case, they need to show more effort to prove their point. A key thing here is to teach the learners to drive constructive debates by supporting their opinion with facts and figures.

Part 3 is a monologue followed by a discussion. It checks the candidates’ ability to speak at length coherently, use language to develop a topic, describe, compare and contrast, hypothesise and comment. This calls for good knowledge of the target functional language, so the teacher’s job is firstly to make sure students have the appropriate resources for this.

A cool activity to help the students develop monologue skills is to ask them to record their answers for 2 minutes and share the recording. However, the students need to record the answer to a specific topic 3 times and choose the best one of their choice. Firstly, it gives a triple practice to even the lazy learners and the students feel more disciplined when they know their speech will be recorded on camera. It creates a kind of exam-like situation.

In general, to help the students develop their speaking skills for exams, it’s important to make sure they have enough practice with similar tasks and activities. Other than that, being surrounded with the target language — movies, songs, out of classroom practices, etc. make a lot of difference.