CAE: Step-by-Step Guide to Exam Preparation

 Do you know exactly what you have to do to prepare for the CAE exam? Will doing the sample tests one by one be enough? Or may be you could just follow a coursebook and do all the suggested tasks? 
Below I will give a step-by-step guide of what you have to focus your attention on while preparing for CAE.





Step I. Enlarge your vocabulary with advanced collocations. This will help you kill several birds with one stone:
- get a good point for lexical resourse  both in Speaking and Writing papers;
- increase your chances of succeeding in parts 1 and 4 of Reading and Use of English paper as one of the things they check is knowledge of collocations.

Learning phrasal verbs and idioms is also a good idea, but the main focus has to be on collocations.

Existing coursebooks for CAE preparation, as good as they are, do not pay enough attention to vocabulary expansion (possibly, on the assumption that candidates have already achieved good results in this sphere when they start preparing for the exam), which is why I advise using materials from books like English Collocations in Use Advanced, Oxford Word Skills etc.

Step II. Learn to make a good use of advanced grammatical structures like cleft sentences, participial clauses, relative clauses, sentences with inversion etc. Be sure you can make complex sentences with various relations between their parts and use them as often as simple sentences in both speaking and writing.
This will:
-  give you good points for grammatical resource in Writing and Speaking;
- improve your score in part 4 of Reading and Use of English.

The coursebooks like  Gold Advanced, Complete CAE etc. cover the most advanced features of grammar and suggest tasks for practising them. However, if you are not sure you can use all the tenses accurately enough, have some problems with expressing different relations between parts of a complex sentence or just need more practice you will need to use some good grammar books, among which my favourites are Longman Advanced Learner Grammar and English Grammar in Use Advanced.

Step III. With regard to the Speaking test, apart from learning advanced collacations and grammatical structures it's necessary to do the following:

a)  learn and practise functional vocabulary in accordance with each part of the paper:
- vocabulary for speculating and comparing for part 2,
- vocabulary for conducting a discussion (moving from one point to another, asking your partner's opinion, agreeing and disagreeing etc) for part 3;
- expressing opinion and supporting it with reasons and examples for part 4.

b) learn to use fillers instead of hesitation pauses when you need time to think over the question. Some of the most common fillers are: well, let me think, you know, what else? etc.
Another way of giving yourself some time for thinking is to comment on the question (That's a difficult one. I've never thought of this before. etc) or repeat the question changing the pronouns. (What do I like most about ...)

c) practise doing the exam format tasks with the time limit and focusing on the questions you are given.

Step IV. Getting ready for the Writing paper requires doing the following:

a) learn the conventions of each of the five tasks that you can be given:
- essay
- proposal
- report
- review
- letter (formal and informal)

b)  practise writing in formal and informal style

c) learn useful expressions for each paper

d) learn to link your ideas effectively which will be needed in every task.

c) practise doing writing tasks with the time limit. Keep in mind that you will only be given an hour and a half for both tasks that makes about 45 minutes for each of them.

d) do not forget about using advanced vocabulary and grammar.

Step V. In order to prepare for the Listening task do the following:

a) Take pains to increase your exposure to spoken English in natural context, instead of relying solely on listening tasks in coursebooks. Be sure you listen to people speaking with various accents and on various topics. Whatever is to your taste everything will do for this purpose: listening to the radio or podcasts, watching movies or serials, communicating with native speakers etc.

b) do the exam format tasks, with the use of techniques that will allow you to maximize your chances of being successful


Step VI. The Reading and Use of English paper may seem the easiest, however it does require  a lot of preparation: 

a) learn collocations, set expressions, phrasal verbs and similar words with shades of meaning for part 1
b) learn linking words and set expressions for part 2

c) learn word formation for part 3

d) learn advanced grammatical structures and phrasal verbs for part 4

e) practise exam format reading tasks, using special techniques (like highlighting key-words) that can help you do the tasks successfully and within the time limit.