Hello, and welcome to the first of two videos showcasing the updated 2020 exams.
My name's Christian Grant. I'm a Product Manager here at Cambridge Assessment English.
With me I have Joanna, who is one of our Assessment Managers here at Cambridge.
Hi.
Joanna, would you like to give us a quick overview of what the changes and updates have been to the exams?
Definitely. Many people do ask us why we update our exams.
At Cambridge English, our exams are revised regularly
to make sure they are fit for purpose,
they are relevant to the needs of our learners,
they incorporate evolving approaches to assessment and learning.
Also, they're updated to incorporate feedback from our stakeholders -
teachers, students, exam centres, ministries of education.
And also, we wanted to align the A2 Key and B1 Preliminary exams
with our other Cambridge English Qualifications.
The A2 Key and B1 Preliminary exams have been aligned more closely to the higher level exams,
to make the progression from one level to the next clearer and more coherent,
and with more repetition of the same task types, and to help with upwards and downwards certification.
But we haven't revised all of the parts in the exam.
Feedback we've received and validation analysis have shown that many of the pre-2020 tasks work very well.
Can you just explain some of the changes we've made to the A2 Key exam?
Definitely. A2 Key exam - so, the Reading and Writing exam is slightly shorter now. It's about ten minutes shorter.
It has seven parts, and 32 questions now.
There are two new tasks, highlighted in pink.
And two parts have been revised. These are highlighted in blue.
Part 1 is made up of six multiple-choice texts,
and it's similar to the task focus of B1 Preliminary.
Instead of matching notices to sentences, as in the pre-2020 exams,
candidates have to choose the correct answers - A, B, or C for each notice.
And Part 7 is a short story writing task.
For this task our candidates need to write a story based on three pictures.
They need to write around 35 words.
This has been designed to enable our candidates to demonstrate a wider range of writing skills.
And this also allows us to achieve greater alignment with the CEFR.
For the Listening paper, the length remains the same.
It's thirty minutes, but there have been some changes to the order in which the tasks appear.
We've made it so that the less complex tasks appear first.
And then, we've made some changes to one of the tasks,
and introduced one new task, which is Part 4.
And this is a multiple-choice tasks based on five short texts.
Quite a lot of changes then?
A few, yeah! But there's still a lot that remains the same.
However the Speaking exam, I would say, has changed the most.
Most of the feedback we got suggested that people were happy with the Part 1 task.
But we've tried to make it a bit more conversational,
by asking questions around a common theme.
Part 2 is a new task. It's a collaborative task consisting of two phases.
And it assesses the candidate's ability to take part in discussion,
talking about their likes and dislikes, based on picture-prompts.
And it gives the candidates a lot more freedom
to talk about themselves, and to say quite a lot more, I think.
Are the changes the same for the B1 exam, or are they different?
Slightly different! I think the one thing that most test takers will notice
is that the Reading and Writing paper has been divided into two papers.
It was quite a lot long paper up until now.
And there are two new tasks in the B1 Preliminary Reading.
Part 4 is a new gapped-text task. It's similar to the one in the B2 First Exam.
Sentences have been removed from the text,
and candidates have to decide which sentence goes in which gap.
This assesses for reading for gist, and understanding text structure.
So for example, cohesion and coherence.
Part 6 is also new. It's a new open-cloze task.
Candidates read for detailed understanding, at both word and sentence level.
They fill in six gaps in the text. This predominantly focuses on grammar, and aligns B1 Preliminary with our other exams.
The Writing paper is now separate from the Reading paper,
and it consists of two parts. Part 1 is compulsory, and Part 2 includes options that candidates have to choose from.
The whole paper takes around 45 minutes. Part 1 is a new email task.
And in Part 2, students can now choose to write either a story or an article,
rather than a story or a letter, as they did before. And we think this makes the test a bit more relevant to today's learners.
And the Listening, not many changes to the Listening. It remains about the same length - 35 minutes.
But we've made some changes to the order of the tasks, like we did with A2 Key.
We've made these changes so that the test gets gradually more complex.
And we've also introduced one new task, which is the Part 2.
And in this task, candidates listen to six unrelated texts.
And they choose the right answer - A, B, or C. And here the focus is on understanding gist and identifying opinions and attitudes.
Last but not least is the Speaking.
There are some changes to the Speaking exam.
Mainly in the order of the Speaking exam,
as well as some minor changes that make it more similar to the B2 First exam.
You'll see the changes mainly in Part 2.
Here each candidate talks about a different photograph.
And the photos are not thematically linked to each other.
And, also you'll see more changes in Part 4.
It's similar to the previous (pre-2020) Part 4.
But it's linked thematically to the collaborative task in Part 3, so there's more of a flow.
And in this part there's a three-way discussion, with the interlocutor, in which the candidates talk about their preferences, their habits, and opinions, related to that topic.
Alright, so to re-cap about the changes to A2 Key and B1 Preliminary.
We updated them because we wanted to enable upwards certification,
to separate the Reading and Writing papers in B1 Preliminary,
to give a better coverage of the Listening and Writing constructs,
at A2 Key and B1 Preliminary level.
To provide greater alignment across Cambridge English Qualifications.
Yeah, I think that's about it!
Thanks! That's a really great summary. I really like the modernisation for the learner. I think that's a really important part to bring out.
Thank you all for joining us for part one. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments box.
Also if you want any additional information about the exams, please go to the website - cambridgeenglish.org
That has a wealth of stuff to support what we've just talked about.
I hope you can join us for part two of the video. In that we'll be discussing more about the support material that's available for the updated exams.
Including an exciting new mobile application called Exam Lift, for B1 Preliminary for Schools.
This is a preparation app available to support that exam.
We do hope you can join us for that, and just want to say goodbye and thank you again. Bye.
Hello, and welcome back, to Part 2 of our video, showcasing the updated 2020 exams.
In this section we're going to look at some of the support material that's available for the revised exams.
My name is Christian Grant. I'm a Product Manager here at Cambridge Assessment English.
And with me is Maija, who is one of our fabulous Assessment Managers.
So Maija, can you give us a quick overview of the updated resources available for the 2020 exam updates?
Sure. To help teachers and learners prepare for the changes
we're providing lots of support on our website.
You can go - it's called keyandpreliminary.cambridgeenglish.org
And on there you will find free resources such as
an overview of the changes, authentic practice tests,
updated word lists, and handbooks for teachers,
some posters for learners and free activities for them to engage with.
As well as some free lesson plans for teachers to use.
There's also a link to the resources available from Cambridge University Press.
As always, they include a full year's worth of materials, and all of the materials have been updated to be sync with our revised Key and Preliminary exams.
So, I may be biased but, Exam Lift is a really exciting project to be a part of.
Can you tell us how the app will help learners preparing for the B1 Preliminary exam?
In order to address some of the learner needs which we discovered in our research process,
which was that learners needed something that was accessible to them, on the go, something that's bite-sized, and something that's snappy and easily available to them.
We developed something that's completely different to what we've done before.
It's an app, as Christian mentioned, called Exam Lift.
It's aimed at B1 Preliminary learners, who are 11-15 years old.
It's available to them in small chunks of gamified experiences, or games,
which they can play any time they want and practise their English language skills.
It's designed as a supplementary material. It's not intended to replace any of learning that happens in the classroom or at home.
It's something that learners will be using in their free time to supplement any ongoing learning.
We had a very unique design approach,
which was to focus on skills instead of task types in exams.
And these skill-based activities were based on the skills that candidates need in order to be successful in any given exam.
So for example, here you can see some of the thought processes that we had
when we were designing our games.
For Reading for example, we focused on skimming and scanning.
For Listening it was producing words they think they might hear in the paper.
For Writing, it's spelling things correctly and identifying common errors.
And for Speaking it's just developing this fluency and building vocabulary, and knowledge of phrasal verbs and colloquial expressions in order to be successful.
So, let me show you some of the examples.
One of the Reading tasks that we've developed is quite an exciting game.
It's called Speed Reading.
In this game learners see a line of text running across the screen.
They pay attention to each word and try to capture the meaning of the text.
And at the end they get a short question
based on the detail in that specific text that they've just seen,
and two options for the answer.
They only have eight seconds to answer that question.
So the whole idea here is that we're replicating this expeditious reading,
that's under time pressure constraints;
that trains their attention and focus, and attention to detail,
the type of skills that will enable learners feel more confident and be successful in the Reading part of the exam.
One of the examples of a Listening activity is something that we've called Topic Match.
It's a specifically designed activity helping learners to recall vocabulary,
surrounding certain topics, so it's activating the vocabulary
around a certain topic or a word that they see or hear in the Listening exam.
And it's aimed at not only building and reviewing vocabulary,
but also encouraging a bit of independent learning for students.
For any new vocabulary that they don't know,
we encourage them to go out and ask their teacher
or refer to their resources that they have at home.
This type of activity helps them prepare for the predictive part of the Listening exam,
for example Listening Part 3, and it's also helpful for Part 4.
An example of a Writing task is something that we've called Error Finding.
It's an activity that's based on common wrong answers
that actual candidates produced in the actual exams.
We've recycled these answers and showed them
to candidates in this gamified fashion,
and in this game they have to identify if the phrase that they see is correct
or contains an error. And again, we're not giving them all the answers on purpose.
This activity serves as a grammar review, a game,
in which they can choose to find the answer, review what they already know,
or go to their teacher, refer to their vocabulary books, grammar reference books that they might have, and support their learning that way.
And a quite exciting development that we have had recently
is a Speaking game called Dialogue.
It's a simulated chat bot experience in which learners see a question
from a chat bot, and they get two options. What would they respond?
Each of the options triggers a response from the chat bot,
encouraging learnings to speak and to be comfortable with a conversation
with another English speaker. It also builds their confidence in their ability.
It trains their pronunciation, and also shows them that in real life
there is no right or wrong answers, and that your conversation partner will help you
if you are stuck or don't know what to say, because the chat bot employs a repair strategy and brings the conversation back on track even if the answers that were selected weren't correct.
And of course crucially, we've also included activities that simulate exam practise tasks.
Here you can see Matching. It's based on Reading Part 2.
In this game learners have to use their skimming and scanning skills,
as well as attention to detail in order to identify the information
that's relevant and match the activity with the person that's being described.
Each of our activities includes a long summary, which summarises all of the answers
that they've selected, and with slight bolding
it indicates what went wrong or what was right.
And that type of input promotes independent learning,
and again, encourages learners to go back to their teacher or the resources they have and explore why something that they've chosen is right or wrong.
Overall, this app was developed to promote confidence and independence, where our aim is to maximise engagement and maximise fun, and that way we're promoting learning.
Because when the learner's enagaged, that's when they're more likely to go back to the material to review it and become more confident in their skills as a result.
All of the content for the app was developed using CEFR at B1 level,
the language learner corpus, in which we have answers from candidates that have sat our exams all over the world as well as Cambridge English expertise.
Thank you Maija.
For me, having Assessment as part of the development for this product, right from the very outset has been critical for it's success up to this point.
It's just fabulous to have that level of detail and expertise built in from the activities through to the content - it's been fabulous.
So if you are looking for a fun way to help your learners develop their skills and confidence for the B1 Preliminary for Schools exam,
look no further then Exam Lift B1 Preliminary for Schools, available now on the IOS Store and the Google Android Play Store as well.
I hope, well, we hope, you and your students enjoy the app as much as we have really building it. It's been a lot of fun during this process.
And keep an eye out for new activities and content coming soon, and maybe some other surprises very soon - I can't reveal too much!
And just a massive thank you from us here in Cambridge, and I personally look forward to hearing some of your feedback in the comments.
Go to the app store, review it, because all that feeds into the direction of this product, because we can't build it without you.
Absolutely!