How to prepare your Year 11 students for their MFL GCSE reading and listening exams

I recently put a call out on my Instagram and Facebook pages for your top tips for preparing your students for the reading and listening exams... and oh my gosh you did NOT disappoint!!

There were so many comments and great pieces of advice, so do check out the posts online for more, but here are a few of the best ones:

1. From Joanne Davies on Facebook: I have taken the 3 SAMS listening transcripts, got Google Gemini to analyse the word frequency of nouns, verbs and adjectives and then got it to make a word cloud of the top 30, which prints the words in different sizes, according to frequency of usage. This will be my do now tomorrow. Students will have 5 mins to spot and translate as many as they can. Then, I have a positive and negative adjectives list for them to read to a partner and whoever translates the most successfully wins a small treat (I have a smallish class). We are then going to look at the SAMS 3 listening transcript and RAG the vocab. My group are all doing foundation tier and the idea is, that there should be so much that they do know and much less that they don't. We have a warm up session for 40 minutes on Thursday before the exam, when I plan to play some word games, pointing out the false friends!

2. From @l.c.hus on Instagram: Lots of starters based on false friends and non cognates as well as distractors. Go through exam practice style questions one by one, self marking the answers and showing transcripts for listening and in general reflecting upon and unpicking each question. Getting them to write down and highlight key vocab. I am doing listening and reading lessons per theme. Ending with translations at the end as an exit ticket.

3. From @tigemt on Instagram: For the reading paper, training students to highlight keywords in the questions, then pinpointing the equivalent word or phrase in the text to help them see where to locate the information needed to answer the question. And I think it’s always worth reminding students that for a ‘where’ question, they should be looking for a place, etc. I know it sounds obvious, but some students really benefit from having it spelt out for them.

4. From Zoe Johnson on Facebook: Repeated little words and repeated vocab between papers. Crossing the road analogy - Find the vocab and look left and right to see if anything adds to it or makes it negative.

5. From @jdlanguagetuition on Instagram: It’s always distractors for me. Those little words that change the whole meaning and throw students off course. Negatives are a huge one, especially in French. Then conjunctions, time phrases, other people (e.g my brother thinks this but I think…).

What would you add to this list? My last one would be to translate reading texts and listening transcripts with the students so they have a really good idea of exactly what the texts mean and can analyse them in greater detail.