When it comes to big, general tests on foreign language knowledge, students often find themselves confused and unable to find a proper method of preparing for such exams. Not only students have a hard time preparing for general tests. Teachers also find it hard to choose a method by which they will cover these types of assignments. That's why, besides giving lectures and assignments, it's the teacher's responsibility to find the best possible way to provide his or her students with knowledge and confidence about such tests. 'Regular' lectures and assignments are not sufficient – while preparing for language efficiency tests, it's important to have separate classes focused solely on these types of tasks.

Focusing on fixed tasks

Most language efficiency tests have a lot of tasks that repeat test after test, following a same pattern. You should cover these types of tasks in detail and practice them with your students constantly. When it comes to English, whether it is an Oxford, Cambrige, ESL test, most tasks follow the same pattern. Listed below are some of the most common tasks and tips on how to cover them in your classes.

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It is believed that initial learning of human beings begins with all ears open in silent period, just like children producing sounds by hearing voices around them. To strengthen command on foreign language, structures and vocabulary are to be reinforced to identify sequence in the learned language. Listening TV shows, music and movies in the learned language makes retaining and memorizing interesting as well as helps you a lot.

While learning a target language, key factors to measure progress is person’s motivation and attitude. As it was found in studies that due to Anglo-Francophone’s tension, Anglophones did poor in learning French language learning as they were holding grudges. People who are curious and keen to learn foreign language are more successful and more receptive to the target language. Forming relationships with natives of the target language can be a source of guidance. Struggling with language learning needs patience, hard work and low tolerance of ambiguities. Dealing with new vocabulary, grammar rules and structures involves uncertainty. Practicing is the only way of reducing uncertainties until fluency is accomplished.

Speaking, writing, listening and reading are the most essential skills one must possess to be able to advance in a foreign language. Among those, writing is probably the one which requires the most effort, knowledge and skills. When it comes to foreign language teaching, you will probably notice that some students love to write essays and papers, while some despise it. Nevertheless, writing is surely one of the best ways to test or prove real skills and ability of maneuvering in a language. The teacher's job is to bring out the best in every student, enabling them to reach their full potential and the best possible level of foreign language knowledge, and that also applies to writing.

Along with rapid development of technology, the 21st century also brought tendencies to apply those technological inventions on every possible area of sciences, arts and humanities. The most fruitful of such attempts is applying multimedia to the process of learning. In today's schools and universities, technology is an essential part of the educational process. This article will list some of the most effective ways to employ multimedia in teaching a foreign language.

To begin with, it's important to define multimedia to be aware of what distinguishes it from older teaching methods. Older foreign language teaching tools include text, audio, posters, images, while multimedia is defined as content which uses a combination of two or more of those things. Basically, when it comes to language teaching and learning, it refers to Powerpoint presentations, interactive games, animations etc.

Powerpoint presentations

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We ended the last issue by saying that learning another language meant learning the dictionary, the grammar, and the sound system of the language in order to be able to properly encode and decode messages.

Let's develop this idea further. Let's say that you speak English and want to learn Chinese. (Linguists would say that your L1 is English and your L2 is Chinese.) If you are a beginner, then you can easily put your thoughts into English and you can also understand things said to you in English, but you can't put your thoughts into Chinese or understand anything said to you in it either.

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There is an opinion that some people are more gifted in languages than ​​others. Certainly, if they choose a good learning method. In fact, it is only a matter of habit and your good will.

To help you succeed, we offer you 5 tips that will make your language learning process easier.

Listen to speak better

According to some linguists, we begin to learn our firs language during the so-called «silent» periond, i.e, as babies, we learn by listening to understand and reproduce sounds. We need to listen because it helps us to put in order the learned vocabulary and retain grammatical structures, therefore, to lay the foundations of our language.