Tips for the C1 Advanced exam

Author: SEO Voiceskills

As the C1 Advanced exam draws nearer, there’s a good chance your students will be feeling quite nervous. After working hard for months and months, it all comes down to a 3 hour 40 minute written exam and a 15 minute oral test.C1 Advanced

Reading and Use of English

Students have 1 hour and 30 minutes to complete eight sections in this part of the exam. The first four sections test their use of lexico-grammatical usage and the final four test their reading comprehension.

Students should plan carefully as it is easy to run out of time in this paper. With 90 minutes total, it’s a good idea to spend about 10 minutes on each section. That will leave them with 10 minutes at the end, which can be used to check answers, fill in any blanks and make sure they’ve completed the answer sheet correctly.

Many students start with Part 1, which is multiple choice. However, those worried about not finishing on time should consider starting with sections 2, 3 or 4, which may take more time as they require students to come up with their own answers.

Writing

Students have to write two texts in 1 hour 30 minutes. They must answer the essay question in Part 1 and then choose one of the options in Part 2, which will be a letter/email, a report, a proposal or a review. C1 Advanced

Students are assessed on the following four criteria:

  • Content – have they included everything from the task?

  • Communicative achievement – have they used the right tone and register? Does the text sound like it is supposed to?

  • Organization – have they organized the text appropriately with clearly defined paragraphs that link together?

  • Language – have they used a wide range of vocabulary and grammatical structures?

Each text is worth the same amount of points, so students should spend approximately the same amount of time on each piece. Although they have to use a pen, it isn’t a huge problem if they make mistakes. They should simply put a line through the error and continue.

Listening

The final part of the written exam is the listening paper. It consists of four parts and takes approximately 40 minutes.

In the listening paper students are given five minutes at the end of the test to transfer their answers from the question paper to the answer sheet, so this isn’t something they need to do while the recording is playing.

In each part they are given time to read through the questions before they start. Students should use this time wisely to think about what they are about to hear, underline keywords and start predicting the types of answers they need to give.

Part 2 of this paper requires them to complete the gaps with a word or short phrase. Although the exact words might be difficult to guess, they should be able to work out whether it’s a verb, noun, adjective etc. from the words before or after the gap. This is something you can train them to do in class.

Final reminders

  • Students should save time at the end of each paper to check for silly mistakes and make sure they’ve completed the answer sheets correctly.

  • They shouldn’t go back and change answers unless they’re absolutely sure. Quite often students will change the correct answer to a wrong one.

  • If they don’t know an answer, they should move on and then go back at the end if they have time.