Thomas Brock, our resident travelling English teacher shares some more English learning advice from his lessons this week.
Read on to hear what advice Thomas has for learners who are planning to take English exams!
Vocabulary List
- Panic
- a sudden strong feeling of fear that prevents reasonable thought and action
- Regularly
- often
- Escape
- to get away from a situation, place, or person that you do not like or that limits your freedom
- Scene
- a place where an actual or imagined event happens
- Decade
- ten years
- Ins and outs
- the detailed or complicated facts of something
- Examiner
- someone whose job is to decide how well someone has done in an examination
- Decent
- acceptable, satisfactory, or reasonable
- Know something like the back of your hand
- to have very good and detailed knowledge of something
- Unfamiliar
- not known to you
- Stumble
- to make a mistake, such as repeating something or pausing for too long
- Go blank
- to forget something that you know, often temporarily
- Dreadful
- causing fear, shock, or suffering
- Downright
- (especially of something bad) extremely or very great
- Process
- a series of actions or events
DON’T PANIC
Hello again everyone,
This week I wanted to give a little more English Learning advice to anyone out there who needs it. The topic I want to focus on is test panic.
I’m not sure if there is a better name for this problem, but my idea of test panic is when you sit down to do an English language test and, well, you simply panic.
What is Test Panic?
Picture the scene. You have been speaking English for years, decades even. You have been using English daily for your job. You join the Thinking in English Conversation Club and practice with other learners 3 times every week. You have even hired a private English teacher to practice with and to guide you through all the ins and outs of the test. And yet, come the day when you sit in front of the computer with the examiner, when they ask you the simplest of questions: Nope. Nothing.
Many students experience this feeling. They may be able to hold a conversation in English perfectly well and to a high level of fluency. You may have a decent vocabulary and list of go-to phrases that you know like the back of your hand.
None of this matters.
You hear the question but the words seem unfamiliar. You take a pause that seems to last for hours. You stumble over basic words and your mind goes blank. That’s when the panic sets in.
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There is Hope
Whilst all of this sounds terribly dreadful and downright scary, there is hope.
I say it a lot to my students, but the answer is practice. However, it is important to understand what practice is actually going to help. You need to practice the process of your test. What you need to do, is to teach your brain that this situation you are in, is totally normal, just like those Conversation Club sessions or private lessons when you speak fluently.
I am a native English speaker, but I’m not really used to interviews, and so, if I know I need to perform in an interview, I need to do some practice, regardless of my C1 English native ability – it’s not about that.
Once you get used to the setting, then you can be yourself. You are good at English. You can do it, it’s just sometimes your brain tells you that you can’t. Sometimes your brain is wrong.
That’s it for this week.
Thomas
Are you planning to take an English exam?
Have you ever had test panic?
Are worried about doing an English test?
