Are your children preparing for the French Common Entrance exam" Nigel Pearce, author of Galore Park?s French Common Entrance textbooks and revision resources, shares his top tips.
The first part of this guide is a series of general points about French exams at 13+, while the second focusses on advice on how pupils can make the best of their knowledge, especially if they don’t like exams. Everything in Nigel’s guide is based on many years’ experience both as a student and teacher of French.
Top Tips for Passing the French Common Entrance Exams
If pupils come to the exam thinking of it as a chance, at last, to show what they can do, they will be fine. If they think the exam is set to catch them out, and find out what they don’t know, they will not find it so easy. French Common Entrance is carefully designed to give the pupil the opportunity to demonstrate what level of French they have reached. This is why the questions and sections are graduated, from quite simple through to quite demanding (to make sure they have a good command of the basics), to open-ended (where the pupil can bring in more advanced or ambitious language).
Clearly, the highest grades will go to those who show good understanding of the listening and reading material, but (and this is more in the control of the pupil) especially those who confidently show a wide range of vocabulary and good grasp of verbs in the speaking and writing tests. Knowledge of verbs means knowing how ...