Practising Exam skills at A Level with Wheel of Names

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about A Level teaching. There are so many activities and ideas to help us teach languages from KS3 to GCSE, but hardly anything for A Level teaching. In the case of Spanish, I have always loved Neil Jones' Blog, Ollie's Boletín and the weekly news from Fiona's A Level news, which have always inspired me with ideas and resources fo which I am extremely grateful!

In this short post I want to exemplify how gamification can successfully and easily take place at A Level too, to practise those elements of the A Level exam which are vital to score the highest grades. For AQA, these are the six skills that students need to have command of:

• Listening for key information / summarising texts from audio input
• Reading for key information / summarising texts from written input
• Accurate translation skills = Command of application of grammar
• Essay writing skills: analytical and critical skills + vocabulary + accurate application of grammar
• Knowledge of culture and society to be applied to the essay and oral exam
• Oral skills: Fluency + development of ideas + knowledge of culture and society + vocabulary + accurate application of grammar + analytical and critical skills

Most of these skills can be practised with simple, interactive, fun games.

I use Wheel of Names (Yes! my favourite app!) to develop oral follow-up ideas, containing analytical thinking in my students, orally, or in writing, to start with, using MWBs in a competition format between two teams. The questions in the wheel have been taken from several Stimulus Cards from AQA past exams. When a question pops up, a student in the correspondent team needs to answer such question, backing up their ideas with specific examples (data, facts, events) showing their knowledge of Spanish society. Students need to answer on the spot, developing fluency. 

The same technique can be used with a proper Stimulus card. In this case, students need to respond to the information in the stimulus card, giving a critical opinion and making sure they make reference to all the information printed in the card. This is an essential skill to have if students want to score marks from the top band in the exam. Again, giving an element of competition between a team A/B works well after doing work with the whole class with MWBs: How do you react to this information?

The same principle can be used to practise reading summarising skills in a fun way as an activity embedded in our lessons:

Finally, the same technique can be used to practise essay skills for the writing paper. In this case, a question comes up and students, in MWBs or in paper, write a paragraph answering the question in relation to a text or book. They must do so, giving evidence to prove a point and explaining how this evidence proves such point, another essential element to score high marks in the A Level essay. After writing their paragraphs they exchange it with a partner and mark each other's. Where does the paragraph fall within the mark schemes bands, why? Alternatively, students can work in pairs and write a paragraph collaboratively.

Finally, Wheel of Names is perfect to carry out simple games with translation or grammar!

These little games are not only great way to embed exam skills practice in lessons, but they are also a great way for students to use on their own to revise for their exams as part of a revision schedule. They work great to be used with a language assistant if you are lucky to have one. After working with them as a whole class competition, I share the URL with my students and they work in pairs, orally.

I know I use Wheel of Names a lot, but, isn't it a versatile, easy to use and above all GREAT tool to be used even at A Level?