GCSE ORAL PREPARATION : the last push!

These days I am reading quite a lot about teachers who have just finished doing their oral mocks. We actually carried them out before Christmas, which means that now we are embarking on the last preparation tips just before the real thing, after the Easter Holiday.  

Whatever your situation, the window to perform the orals is nearly here and we, teachers, will use a significant amount of lesson time focusing on this skill, which students find so stressful, but key to score a decent mark to boost their final GCSE grade. 

We use AQA but the approach described below can be applied to any board.  

Practising the Role Play

Students can find this section of the exam very challenging as the prompts found in those Roleplays can be particularly odd. 

What works here is practice, practice, practice, so students can get as close to the 15 points as possible by being accurate and being concise! This is hard to understand as we always encourage them to extend answers! Well for the Roleplay, No! 

I always make a selection of past Roleplays and to start with (mid Y10 and beginning of Y11) I spend time going over the bullet points, analysing them and explaining what is “a detail”, which can be any piece of information! 

Example: ¿Qué hiciste el día de la excursión? 2 detalles: fui a un museo (detail 1) but instead of saying another activity, which requires conjugating a verb, hence risking making a mistake, students can just say por la tarde/con mi clase/ por la mañana/ con mi profesor (detail 2). It will score the same as saying: y vi muchos cuadros! 

I always start practising the Roleplays together as a class, with MWBs, so I can check for understanding and spot errors that we can comment on. This can take up to one lesson! 

At a second stage, after lots of modelling, students can move to practise the Roleplays in pairs. For this we have an oral booklet, click here, with Roleplays, Photocards (from specimen and past papers materials) and examples of general conversation questions. On the booklet, I include the Teacher’s sections, so students can practise easily in pairs or on their own, testing themselves! 

I also spend time practising how to ask questions. This is key! What’s the easiest way to ask a question in French, German, Spanish that would fit nearly any topic/situation? For me is, what do you think of? In both ways: the polite and familiar forms. Also, do you like…? Finally, depending on the Roleplay,  the question is there? is very useful! 

In my experience with these three questions students can answer the Roleplay well! What about having some starter, retrieval practice quick fire questions practising asking questions? This should be second nature! As the exam approaches, have a roleplay as a starter activity, to start with with MWBs

Practising the Photo Card 

I use a similar approach for this component to that used with the Roleplay but emphasising the idea that, in this section, they need to extend answers by giving reasons and providing examples using a different tense. 

We do this via MWBs with the whole class. We focus a lot on the first question: what is there in the photo? And use the PALM acronym (describing people, action, location, mood). Then, to stretch students we talk about imagining a little story using the structure: Creo que acaban de + infinitive (I think they have just….) or Creo que están a punto de + infinitive ( I think they are about to).

As with the Roleplay, having our oral booklet with all the Photocards and the teacher’s input is key! Once we do lots of modelling together with MWBs, students can then practise in pairs or individually with these. 

Tip: have a look at the questions used for the photocard by your exam board and include these questions, or similar ones, as part of your oral General Conversation model questions. These questions keep appearing in a similar format year after year, and by including them in your bank, students will be familiar with the questions even if they are surprise ones! 

Embedding the General Conversation in all lessons

This section is the core! We have a bank of questions, many taken from the Photocards, which students have been working on since the beginning of the GCSE course. Every time we finish a topic, students write model answers to that specific topic set of questions, and practise them in lessons with lots of games throughout the two year course! 

I make it clear they must not learn them by heart but it is good practice to have an idea of what can be said for each question, transfer the answers to flashcards and do active learning/ testing as from Y10 with our guide. We make sure these general conversation questions are embedded into our Scheme Work and all our lessons aim to reach fluency/communication having these as our final goal!

I like this approach as we don’t only tackle the oral aspect, but also the writing tasks, basically productive skills. 

To start with, especially to support weaker students, we practice the questions with MWBs: I say a question and everyone has 20 seconds to write the best possible answer they can think of. Then, we move to proper oral activities, mainly including games: snakes and ladders, connect for, Battleships or our latest addition, trivial!

To promote spontaneity, when practising these questions, you can ask students to answer the question using a specific structure. Check this Flippity activity. 

Finally, we have prepared a revision  Easter Padlet, consisting of slots of 45 minutes for three weeks, to be completed during the Easter vacation. The final push for them! For us the focus is the oral exam, which also includes the writing!!!

My experience, from 2018 and 2019 is that this approach works extremely well! 

Good luck to all Y11s who have to sit this GCSE ORAL EXAM!