Key Stage 2

Once again it’s time to congratulate those children from Year 4 and Year 5, who will be proudly receiving their Cambridge Diplomas for The Young Learners Tests (YLE) before the end of the school year. This year they were able to take their tests earlier in April, in order to have more time to study for their own class assessments. Well done to these two groups!

We had lots of fun preparing for the three parts: reading and writing, listening, and their oral interview. This third part includes creating a story, explaining the odd-man-out, and spotting the differences in two almost identical pictures. They love this part! They are always eager to talk about their interesting hobbies and extra activities, both in and out of school time. The children have so many different and exciting opportunities to learn new skills in such a wide variety of situations.

The following children have taken the Cambridge English Tests:

MOVERS - 2nd level (Year 4)
Adrian Alvarez De Toledo Garcia
Lucien Rienzi
Elisabeth Blyumin
Maria Gustav
Valeria Zimina
Maria Rodríguez Mata

FLYERS - 3rd level (Year 5)
Axia Amarante Naranjo
Yousef Benali
Ester Nielsen
Sebastian Szekely
Dina Bakhat
Frank Yannick Huisman

These certificates equip the children with the ability to tackle everyday situations in English with increased confidence.
In the Cambridge ladder of examinations, a very enthusiastic group of students from Year 6 will be taking a higher level, the Key English Test in June 2009. KET, like other Cambridge examinations, it focuses on all four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Consequently, they find out their strengths and weaknesses when using English. KET is designed to help young students to communicate more effectively in real-life scenarios in our demanding world.

The following students from Year 6 will be taking the KET Test:

Laura Alida Calia
Rocio Pertiñez Grande
Viktor Zelikov Romanov
Stefan Greatorex Campos
Jana Hidalgo Hopson
Celia Rodríguez Mata
Noor Saudi
Victoria Wallace Corral
Luna Maria Sammon

Quite an impressive list this year, with all the children taking extra time out of their normal studies to improve their English. Fantastic!!

Year 6 have thoroughly enjoyed interviewing each other, giving them continual practice for the oral part of the exam. They have been enthralled with the game of Hedbanz. This classic game of “What am I?” has an abundance of topic cards about animals, food, objects, and insects. They have really loved this activity and regularly voted this to be their top game to help improve their vocabulary and oral skills.

Passing KET gives them the enthusiasm and self-assurance to move onto the higher qualifications in the Secondary school, like the Preliminary English Test (PET) in Year 7 or Year 8, and The First Certificate in English (FCE) in Year 9 or Year 10.

Well done again to all the students for their hard work, as many of the tasks they have to perform would certainly not be easy for their English friends!

A great year with my Cambridge groups. Keep up the motivation and hard work next year.
A big thank you as always to all the parents for your support, even to the extent of getting up early on a Saturday. It’s worth it !!

Rosemary Cox

Key Stage 1

This year, we have used to great effect the love that all children have for puppets, games and music. Polly the Parrot has been busy teaching and reinforcing traditional nursery rhymes, which have helped them tackle some of the more difficult consonant clusters and other sounds in the English language.

Characters from well known stories have been great props to help the children learn and practise their new vocabulary. Also, finger puppets and animal masks have encouraged them to engage in easy and relaxed conversation.

It’s been great to see them grow in confidence during the year through using and developing their newly acquired language. Well done to all the EAL children in Key Stage 1!

Belinda Tyndale-Biscoe

Secondary EAL

Another busy year started with the arrival of the First Certificate results for the June 2008 exams, and well deserved success for the three students, then in Year 10, who had prepared by attending weekly after school sessions. Congratulations to Philip Blau and Hind Kaddoura for their B grades, and particularly to Nick Leijden van Amstel who achieved an A.

As I write this, many of our Secondary students are undergoing final preparations for this June’s tests: seven Year 8s for PET, six Year 9 and 10s for FCE and Denise Wagner in Year 13 for the CAE. Key Stage 3 students, including the Year 7 PET group,  have been studying the specific language and exam techniques required during English lessons once a week. It is worth emphasising how relevant these courses are to the general development of their English skills in the four key areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking; for example, the FCE writing tasks are very similar to those in the Checkpoint tests taken by all EIC students at the end of Year 9.

It is also interesting to note how demanding some of the questions are, even to native speakers; Denise has tested out some of her Year 13 colleagues with exercises from the English in Use paper, and yes, they found them challenging as well! In total, the CAE involves more than four and a half hours of examinations.

Obviously, as they are operating in English every day at school, EIC students do have a clear advantage over most Cambridge EAL candidates. However, there are certain areas in which errors do still tend to occur; the most common of these is the use of phrasal verbs (a verb with a preposition that changes the meaning, for example ‘to stand out’). You may have noticed when watching non-native speakers being interviewed in English on television how they normally use the more formal alternative, which is often more closely linked to their own language: a football manager might ‘introduce’ instead of ‘send on’ a substitute, and a politician might ‘abandon’ rather than ‘give up’ an idea. If you would like to know more, there is a 350 page dictionary of phrasal verbs in my classroom; in fact, eleven of those pages relate to the verb ‘to go’, and the phrasal verb ‘take in’ has 16 different uses! How many can you ‘come up with’ ? Now that’s a phrasal verb that uses two prepositions!

Duncan Trafford