The Language Geek: English

7/12/2018

How to pass the Cambridge Advanced Exam (preparing it on your own)

In this post I am explaining how did I pass the Advanced by preparing the exam on my own. The Certifcate in Advanced English is provided by Cambridge and correlates to the C1 level (in the CEFR scale) and equals to a score of 6.0 to 6.5 in the IELTS exam.
I am not going to explain the structure of the exam because it is explained in the official website of Cambridge (here) still I will focus on my method and tips for the exam.

FIRST PHASE.

I have desigined this stage as the acquisition level, because the other ones are just to "perfecionate" the level and learning how to resolve the exam exercises.

ENGLISH FILE ADVANCED STUDENT'S BOOK + WORKBOOK

An excellent pack of books which will help you to achieve C1 level. Features a large collection of exercises (some of them quite similar to the Cambridge exams) revision tests and lots of vocabulary.

I found the Teachers' books and the revisions exams on the Internet which helped me quite a lot. (I cannot post the links but they are easily found)

I have also made a Memrise course especifically for the book which includes all the vocabulary, idioms and phrasal verbs. The course can be found here.

SECOND PHASE

In this stage we will start to properly study for the exam, So the first step is to get the C1 level, and the second to improve it.

COMPLETE ADVANCED SB + WB

I have to say that all the preparation books for the Advanced are quite similar but I liked this specially. It continues giving some interesting vocabulary, phrasal verbs and grammar.

I also started to use another book only for grammar which is called Oxford English Grammar Course Advanced and is suitable for both C1 and C2 levels, I didn't finish the book but I will use it again for the Proficiency exam.

THIRD STAGE

And last but not least important (in fact, the most important one!) phase. Sadly, the Advanced Exams is more about repeating exercises similar to the ones in the exam than really studying English (However, you will need a good English level to pass the exam)

I used a wide range of different books that include mock exams with key and audio.

The books are Cambridge English : Advanced exams (it is a collection of books) , Advanced Trainer (Cambridge), Cambridge English Advanced Practice Test Plus 2 (Longman)

*Please note that since 2015 the Advanced exam format has slightly changed, all the books that are listed here include this new format*

While I was doing my practice test I wanted to know how would I score in a real Advanced test, so I found a document that correlates the score you get in the practice test to the one you should get on your certificate (Eg, If you get 32 marks in the reading part of the mock exam it equals to the C1 level - good job! ) . The document can be found here.

SO... IS THIS ALL?

Obviously not.

I like to think language learning should not be based only in books or learning material but immersing yourself in the language.

I personally recommend you to listen to radio podcasts (especially the British ones) because it helped me more than watching series as your are "alone" with the language, without visual aids. (I particularly recommend the Greg James' ones about music, films, interviews all of them with a great sense of humour -you can listen to the podcasts here-)

Whichever activity or resource in English you can think of is definitely great to improve your language and to expand your vocabulary.

Also, remember reading books, articles or even recipes in English in order to improve your writing fluency ( I wrote an article about a tool designed by Cambridge that corrects your writings for free)

- About the speaking part, which I consider it to be the most difficult part when preparing the exam on your own, I'd recommend you to watch the official videos uploaded by Cambridge with real aspirants (includes the corrector notes!)

A video with tips for the Speaking part.

Also, remember to record yourself in order to improve your pronunciation, I recommend the app Sounds : the Pronunciation App by Macmillan available in both Apple and Android devices.

STRATEGY FOR THE EXAM

For me, preparing for the exam on your own has various pros: one of them may be the economic one as it is cheaper than preparing it in a course. The other, is the flexibility of this method, as you can strengthen your weaknesses and study whenever you can (and whenever you want) BUT PLEASE NOTE THAT IS IMPORTANT TO HAVE A STUDY ROUTINE

The main downside (apart from the necessity of having a routine, which is a big one) is preparing the writing and speaking parts. Although there are resources (as the one I've said before to correct your writings) except you pay a private tutor, will always be bots so the corrections will not be very accurate. Another problem of this, is the grading as it is so difficult to grade your own exercises (being objective) even with the guidelines provided by Cambridge.

So, my tips for these two parts are :

Use forums to improve your writing and share opinions with other people
Record yourself
If you wish to, use resources as italki when you can have skype conversations with teachers (I didn't use it but I've heard good opinions about it) there are also, free apps as Speaky (which I've used and it's free) but I didn't particularly like it, as 90% of the chats (which are normally by text) are useless and will not help to improve your English in advanced stages. (Though I recommend it if your starting in a language)
Make a strategy. As I was preparing the exam I finally realized that it would be really difficult to pass the Speaking and Writing part with a good score (or pass them at all) So, I focus my preparation on the other three parts of the exam to get the maximum score I could because in this exam it is not compulsory to achieve the C1 level in all the parts but the average of all parts should be C1. So, I scored in Use of English the equivalent to C2 but in Writing my level was B2 and the average is C1.
Take the Computer-based exam. If it's available, I highly recommend you to sit a Computer-based exam. Why? In my case, I prefer writing on a computer than on a piece of paper because it's quicker and cleaner. But, there's also another advantage, the listening part, I heard lots of people complaining that in the "traditional" way it is really difficult to properly hear the audio as it is played in a speaker for all the class, whereas in the computer-based you can have your earphones, each audio is played individually and volume is adjustable.

IT'S ALL ABOUT TIMING...

How much time did I spend in preparing the exam? I don't usually have much time to study languages, so I dedicate all summer to it. I prepare the exam in two summers, the first one, was only dedicated to stage 1, but in the next summer I prepare both stage 2 and stage 3 (and did the exam in September!)

During the time between summers, I read, listen and watch everything I could in English and continue using the Memrise app to improve my vocabulary.

*All the books I used can be easily found on the Internet.