Pre-FCE Online Course

Official international Certificates are a very useful tool to study abroad or to demonstrate a specific Language level when applying for a job. In the job field some of the most commonly required Certificates are the ones issued by Cambridge Assessment English, particularly B2: First (previously known as FCE).

Over five million people in the world sit for Cambridge exams which measure basic skills when using a language: reading, listening, speaking and writing. First thing to do before becoming familiar with the exam structure is to reach the required level of proficiency in the language. That is why we have designed this Pre-FCE course where we will present and practice some of the most important language structures that are being assessed in the B2: First exam. Therefore, taking this course will allow participants to kill two birds with one stone: improve their Grammar proficiency and advance in their exam preparation. We can help you, contact us.

XVI ACADEMIC FACEBOOK EVENT

Cambridge Exams are really important not only for our students but for us teachers of English as well since we cannot teach what we do not know. 

This is why we have chosen the topic of Communication Skills for Cambridge Exams emphasising the Communicative aims of some of the papers and not focusing in just one exam but on the different aims that B1 Preliminary and B2 First in particular have.

Writing is a difficult skill and since it is a process, it needs time to be taught and improved. We are hosting this Writing event again because it has proved to be well-received, successful and very useful for those people training for Cambridge International Exams such as Cambridge English First and Cambridge English Advanced.

Whenever we start a new term I get really excited because we, the tutors at CTS, have more possibilities to meet new teachers and to work with the ones that have been with us for a while. We all share a common goal: to improve the level of our students by training and becoming better teachers.

This is the plan for the next term. We look forward to seeing you soon.

 

TACKLING TYPICAL GRAMMAR PROBLEMS

We  have now finished the third module of this course and the results could not have been more successful.

The purpose of the course is to help learners overcome some fossilized grammatical mistakes and/or raise awareness of some special cases that sometimes occur in even well-known structures.

Some sessions start with an activity based on a Use of English task and others go straight into understanding the structure and use of the Grammatical structure and then developing activities to put this knowledge into practice. The activities are not only sentences in a worksheet but also situations where students need to use what they have revised.

For instance, in the case of Reported Speech, students pretend they are at a party, they are given slips with some statements they need to say while mingling with the other guests while listening to some party music and then they have to report what they heard in the party.

To practise verbs and adjectives followed by prepositions we  use a game where students form groups and a member of the opposite group has to pick up cards with sentences where the preposition is missing. If they provide the right preposition,the score a point and can make their teams win.

Many people think learning Grammar is boring but in CTS we tried to make it useful and enjoyable and since the group was really small, we managed to make it really customized for participants´particular problems.

It feels good to hear from the participants that the course was good and useful and that they wanted more.

See you in the next course!!

 

The Second Summer Course for Top English Language Teachers has finished and I am really happy to tell you how proud I feel of the participants and how hard they have worked during the face-to-face and online sessions to use the tips they had exchanged in class. Congratulations to you all on your excellent performance!!!

 

 

 

 

FCE for Teachers: Writing

As one of the tutors of this course, organized by Customized Training Services, we have discussed with our students and have found out that in our case the best preparation for the Writing paper is to practice in two or three of the different model texts that have to be developed.

One of these written texts is an essay.

It is for this reason that I would like to share this presentation with a compilation of some ideas to improve your essay writing.

Essay writing from Maria Mu