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| 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 be about. After eliciting predictions from the students, read or listen to the text and check their guesses.
Ordering
Write a few phrases on the board that the students are going to listen to in the recording. Students should put them in the order that they hear them.
This can be adapted to a reading exercise by number events in the order that they appear in a text.
Not There!
Like in "Remember the Order," write some phrases that the students will hear in a recording, but also add some that they won't hear. Students should determine which phrases were NOT used in the recording.
This can be adapted to a reading exercise by writing several events that the students must find in the text (perhaps the number them), but with some extras that cannot be found in the text.
Spot the Mistake
After listening to a recording, use the script but make some changes to it. It can be with incorrect grammar, vocabulary, etc. Whenever students hear something that is different, they should say, "Stop!" while read your altered script.
As a good followup, you can give them a copy of a script or even a reading text (ideally each pair gets a different paragraph from their partner) that they are familiar with and ask them to make changes. As they read their altered script or paragraph, their partner must say, "Stop!" every time they hear something different from the original. This can even be adapted into a team game.
Story Dictogloss
While there are various forms of this kind of activity that can be found all over the Internet, here are a couple of variants that you can use.
Have students write the numbers 1-15 in a column. Then tell the students to write the most important words they hear or read so that they can retell the story. If they are listening, it might be a good idea to listen to the audio twice or to be sure that they have already listened to it once before. Then divide them into small groups and have them write the story while reconstructing the story. Have them exchange their papers for peer editing.
As a followup, you could also ask them what could have happened if something didn't happen or if something changed in the story.
Grammar Dictogloss
This is a good way to check whether students understood the meaning of a grammatical structure. I tend to favour using this with more complex grammatical structure like future perfect continuous.
Create a short story (around 3-5 sentences) and make sure that you use the targeted grammar structure at least once. Let the other sentences set the scene by providing the context. Allow students to take some notes. Then ask students to retell the story. If they can communicate the same grammatical structure correctly, then you can move on to freer practice activities. If they can reproduce the same story's meaning, but using a different grammar structure, make sure to review the meaning with them and give them some controlled practice as needed. If they weren't able to understand the meaning at all, then you'll need to analyse the meaning more before you move on.
Conclusion
The key to keeping an active classroom for ZNO isn't just the activities, but keeping your students actively moving through the lesson. If students seem bored or uninterested, you've either given them too much at once and need to scaffold it a bit more or they have already finished and are waiting on you. Depending on the class, some of these can even be used for students who are fast finishers.
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