Steve's ELT Blog

  ZNO  ( Ukrainian: ЗНО ) is the Ukrainian equivalent to a high school's graduation exam as well as SAT or ACT. Students must receive a minimum score for each subject in order to graduate from high school and enter college or university. One of the most difficult is English in which students must graduate with a minimum A2-B1 level. Since Ukraine has started to use it's newly created ZNO exam (similar to Cambridge English's PET and FCE exams), many teachers have had to adapt their lessons to become a bit more communicative rather that relying on translating. Here are some ways that I hope can help foster a more communicative learning classroom as you prepare your students for ZNO. Random Line Prediction Make a copy of either a listening or reading text and cut it into lines. If you don't have a full sentence on a line, don't worry. Give each student one or a couple of lines. Then put students into groups. Students must brainstorm and predict what the full text will ...

  Without a doubt, one of the most difficult things to prepare students for on ZNO and Cambridge exams like FCE, CAE, and CPE is the Use of English section. In a Use of English task, students may be given a passage or sentence and must choose the correct answer from four alternatives, write in the word themselves from memory, or transform a prompted word using appropriate affixes based on the context. Here are a few ideas that might help ease your lesson planning and help maintain your students' motivation throughout the academic year or semester. Most of these are easy and take only a few minutes to set up and can be prolonged indefinitely so your students can keep learning and practising without even realising it. Categorization This is probably one of the oldest activities for practising Use of English, but also useful for review. My recommendation is to do this before moving on to any other games. The student is given several different lexical items according to his/her level a...