How Use of English Practice can Revitalise Writing and Speaking

By Phan Ngoc Dai Nguyen

Introduction

I have been teaching IELTS and Cambridge Main Suite preparation classes for the last seven years. In that time, I’ve watched how my students approach their speaking and writing tasks when under time pressure, and I have noticed two particular obstacles that they need to overcome.

You might imagine that one of the biggest challenges is to come up with ideas worth speaking or writing about, but with the right preparation – usually involving reading widely, but even watching documentaries can help here – this is less of a problem than word choice and sentence range.

Essentially, the biggest challenge faced by many students is communicating their ideas with a combination of accuracy and sophistication.

One solution that I have discovered is to repurpose the Use of English tasks found in the Cambridge Main Suite so that they are put to productive uses.

Use of English practice is often thought of in mechanical terms – practice, practice, practice. You often see sample tasks on social media, with dozens of students posting their answers as comments to the original post.

In this article, I propose taking Use of English tasks and using them in productive scenarios, boosting students’ ability to speak or write with the accuracy and sophistication that will yield them the highest marks in the exam.

The Use of English Paper

Readers familiar with the Cambridge Main Suite exams – B2 First, C1 Advanced, and C2 Proficiency – will immediately be up in arms, saying that there is no Use of English paper as such. They are right, more or less – in 2015, Cambridge updated their exams, combining the Reading and Use of English papers and reducing the time allotted to them. However, grading remains separate, and on the certificate that students receive after taking the exam, they will find that they have received one mark for Reading and one for Use of English.

At this point, I should highlight the difference between the two parts of the combined paper. Reading tasks test receptive knowledge of English; Use of English looks at productive knowledge. Therefore, the first part of the combined paper, the Multiple-Choice Cloze task, counts towards the candidate’s Reading mark, not Use of English. There are, in fact, only three tasks in the Use of English part of the paper – the Open Cloze, Word Formation, and Key Word Transformation tasks. These are the three tasks that I will be considering here.

The Use of the Use of English

The three Use of English tasks can be used to train students in both accuracy and sophistication for speaking and writing. More for writing, perhaps, as over-reliance on written material when trying to speak with fluency can make what students produce sound slightly wooden; but in terms of inculcating a desire for accuracy as well as fluency, these tasks cannot be beaten.

The first task, the Open Cloze, presents students with a short text from which eight words have been removed. Unlike the Multiple-Choice Cloze Reading task, where the eight words are given along with, in each case, three words that don’t fit the gap, the Open Cloze requires the candidate to think of precisely the right word to complete the sentence. These words are usually short, high-frequency items, such as prepositions (in, on, at etc), linking words (so, and, but etc), and grammar words (do, have etc). The chances of the missing word being something like hypochondriac are zero.

My suggestion for making the most of the Open Cloze is to turn students’ writing into Open Cloze tasks to be shared with the rest of the class. Since students commonly make mistakes with the sort of language tested here, this will work both as an awareness-raising exercise and as a form of feedback for students who have submitted writing homework. My approach is to make a photocopy of the student’s work, use white-out to remove eight words, and to then prepare copies of this new task for distribution in class. Alternatively, if I have access to a number of pieces of written work, I’ll do the same thing but only prepare one copy of each, to be pinned up on the walls of the classroom for the students to write on as they move around the room.

The second task is the Word Formation task, where a short text is presented, similar to but shorter than that in the Open Cloze, and again from which several words have been removed. For each gap, the candidate is provided with the root word. The right word will consider the context of the sentence – perhaps a positive singular noun is required here, perhaps a negative adjective is needed there.

For example:

The teacher offered criticism of the student’s homework.

CONSTRUCT

From the root word CONSTRUCT we can build many other words, such as the positive noun CONSTRUCTION to the negative noun DECONSTRUCTION, or even a word to describe a certain kind of artist, a CONSTRUCTIVIST. But the word we’re looking for is an adjective to match the noun ‘criticism’ in the sentence, and so the answer is CONSTRUCTIVE.

I like to use these tasks in both speaking and writing classes. First, we complete a practice of one such task. Then we take the root words, and in groups the students have to build each one into as large a family as possible, as I did just now with CONSTRUCT. Once that is done, we propose a new speaking topic, and the task for each student is to try to shoehorn in as many examples from each family as they can, scoring points for using each one on the list they have made.

The last Use of English task is the one that causes the most consternation among learners preparing for their exam. A sentence is supplied, together with a second sentence with some words missing. One of these words is supplied, but the candidate must think of the rest, and the resulting sentence must convey exactly the same information as the first one presented.

Two points are awarded for completely correct answers here, but if the candidate fails to get the answer perfectly right, it is possible to score one point if either the first half or the second half of the transformation is successful.

For example:

Phyu lost a point because she changed the key word.

RESULT

Phyu lost a point ___ key word.

Since there are two points available, the candidate should expect there to be two transformations, and indeed there are – because becomes as a result of, and changed becomes changing to fit the new structure:

Phyu lost a point as a result of changing the key word.

This task works well both in speaking and in writing. In speaking, you can ask the first student in the row a question; the task of the second student is to say the same thing but differently.

Likewise, when a student produces a piece of writing, another approach to offering feedback would be to turn their sentences into miniature Key Word Transformation tasks.

Learner Response and Pedagogical Influence

There were, initially, mixed reactions to my approach of bringing Use of English tasks into non-Cambridge Main Suite Exam lessons. Some students were surprised at the challenging nature of the activities; others were curious about the value of doing “FCE-type exercises” for a course of IELTS. This resistance faded, however, when they saw the transfer occur.

One student said, “It was like going back at first. But now I realize it’s helping me dig deeper.” As the weeks passed, I could see steady improvement: students self-corrected more precisely, risked more challenging sentence structures, and paraphrased more freely. And more significantly, they became more sensitive to the workings of language. They stopped saying, “Is this right?” and instead “Is this effective?”

This is a shift in thinking. It is the difference between rule-based learning, versus expressive autonomy—something that distinguishes a Band 7.5 from a Band 6.5 essay.

Challenges and Differentiation Strategies

The procedure, naturally, is not without some challenges. Some students, especially lower level students, are intimidated by the linguistic density of Use of English questions. Others are not willing to switch between forms of exams, not wanting to be confused or overwhelmed.

To counteract this, I begin by explicitly setting each task in context. I explain to my students that the transformation they are undertaking today can be fed straight back into Task 2 writing tomorrow. I use differentiated scaffolding too:

• For lower-level students, I give partial stems, substitution tables, and parallel examples.
• For more advanced students, I create “chains of paraphrases” that ask for lexical accuracy or fine gradations of tone (e.g., from colloquial to formal).

Another effective approach is the use of before-and-after samples of writing. Students can see the transformation of a simple sentence into a more complex one, with more explicit argumentation and more effective cohesion. This concrete evidence helps create faith in the process.

Conclusion

Use of English tasks are a teaching resource for me and my students – we have made the switch from seeing them as purely practice exercises, and now look at them as providing true language development opportunities.

For me as a teacher, these tasks have enriched my practice. They have provided my IELTS teaching with more form, more reflection, and, naturally, more impact. For my students, they have provided new dimensions of clarity, of flair, and of confidence.

Author Biography