Preparing for an exam, whether it’s to help you get into a university, qualify for a job, or as a personal challenge you’ve set for yourself, can seem like a daunting task. In our many years of experience of preparing students for various exams, there are a few tips that will help make the process easier and slightly less stressful!

Get enough sleep, eat healthy, exercise and follow some of these tips below.

One key strategy we’ve come across in our years of teaching is knowing how to say the same thing in different ways. The wording of questions will almost never be the same as what comes up in the answers – whether it’s Listening, Reading, or Use of English. Remember this when doing the exam – look for synonyms, phrases with similar meanings, collocations, and of course everyone’s favourite: phrasal verbs!

Read as much as you can. Read broadsheet newspapers, magazines, books; anything aside from your textbook. Familiarizing yourself with language beyond what you’re exposed to in your textbooks will definitely be an advantage and help you along in your exam preparation: you’ll read faster, understand more, expand your vocabulary, and feel more comfortable when faced with words you haven’t come across before.

Practice, practice, practice! The more familiar you are with the exam and know the ins and outs of each section, the more likely you are to feel relaxed on the exam day, and know how to manage your time while writing. Time yourself at home. Practice the speaking tasks with a friend. Write as much and in as many different styles as you can.
Most importantly, remember this age-old bit of advice: get a good nights’ sleep the night before and eat a healthy breakfast on the day of the exam!

Classroom interaction has been considered one of the most important pedagogical research topics in language classrooms in recent decades, mostly due to the influence of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Hall & Walsh, 2002) views the act of language learning as a social activity in which children build their knowledge through the help and scaffolding of more knowledgeable peers or teachers. Interactions in language classrooms are important social activities for students through which they not only construct knowledge, but also build confidence and identity as competent language users (Luk & Lin, 2007). In an in-depth ethnographic study of teacher-student interactions in Hong Kong, Luk and Lin (2007) found out that students develop multiple identities through their classroom interactions with their language teachers. Although the study took place in an ESL classroom where native English language teachers are available, Luk and Lin (2007:188) present a telling story about how students negotiate identity and cultural resources, which are “translated into non-institutionally sanctioned language practices and identities”. Perhaps, the social knowledge students bring into the classrooms might be those “non-institutional language practices”, which schools and teachers are supposed to build on in order to enhance their learning.

Interaction in the classroom refers to the conversation between teachers and students, as well as among the students, in which active participation and learning of the students becomes vital. Conversations are part of the sociocultural activities through which students construct knowledge collaboratively. Conversations between and among various parties in the classroom have been referred to as educational talk (Mercer and Dawes, 2008) or “exploratory talk” and “presentational talk” (Barnes, 2008:5). Presentational talk is the one-way lecture conducted by the teachers in the classroom, mostly featured in Nepalese EFL contexts, which contributes little to encouraging and engaging students in a communicative dialogue. Exploratory talk is a purposeful conversation, often deliberately designed by teachers, which provide opportunities to students to engage in “hesitant, broken, and full of deadend” conversations enabling them to “try out new ideas, to hear how they sound, to see what others make of them, to arrange information and ideas into different patterns” (Barnes, 2008:5). Given the limited linguistic resources the EFL students possess in their school years in EFL contexts like Nepal, these hesitant, broken and deadend conversations could be developed into spontaneous conversational skills. When students engage in interactions, they produce “symmetric dialogic context” (Mercer & Dawes, 2008:66) where everyone can participate, get respected and get the decisions made jointly. Students’ participation in interactions, therefore, can help them enrich their linguistic resources and build their confidence to communicate with others in English.