HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR IGCSE SPANISH EXAM GRADE WITH LIMITED TIME
Your IGCSE Spanish final exams are soon and you realized your Spanish is not as good as you thought. You have limited time for revision and you don’t know where to start or how to make the most out of the available time. If you can’t go for Spanish tutoring or Spanish lessons here we tell you which should be your main areas of focus and which ones should not.
DON’T:
Spend too much time preparing for your reading exam. A language has thousands of words and it will be impossible at this stage trying to improve your vocabulary memorizing hundreds of words in a short time. Do 1 or 2 reading past papers to get familiar with the exam structure and forget about reading.
Spend time trying to improve your listening skills, it is a long term process and if your exam is in a few weeks there is nothing you can do. You should practice with one past paper so that you are familiar with the exam format and sections and move on.
DO:
Prepare hard for your oral. How? First: Memorize all the question words, what, when, how…. Second: Revise al the tenses with the endings of “I” and “you”. In the oral the teacher will ask 90% of the questions on the “you” ending so you must be able to identify the tense and reply “I…”. Third: prepare and memorize some typical answers including a lot of actions that you can adapt, remember in the exam you don’t say the truth of what you do or what you did, you just show that you know how to reply the questions! Forth: Do the same with a descriptive answer with a lot of adjectives describing your home, neighborhood, school etc.
Prepare hard for the writing. How? First: Make a list of a few vocabulary words that you MUST know on each of the exam topics and memorize it. That includes the topic of your school, your home, your neighborhood, your free time, your daily routine, your holiday, food, healthy lifestyle, work experience and future plans. Second: Revise and memorize all the key tenses on the “I” ending and “you” ending so that you can recognize the tense in the exam paper and you know how to write about it. Also try to avoid irregular actions. Main tenses include, present, past simple preterite, present perfect, future going to, future will and conditional. Third: Practice writing past papers and most important get someone to revise your writing! Students tend to make many mistakes when they write but unfortunately they don’t realize about these, its normal you are not a native speaker! Finally, remember to keep your writing simple and you don’t have to say the truth about your life, just show that you know how to write in Spanish correctly!
As you can see many of these things you can do by yourself at home! Others you will need the help of a Spanish tutor, your school Spanish teacher or someone who is fluent in Spanish, but now you don’t have an excuse for not revising Spanish! This post was done in collaboration with Spanish Tutors London.
