A new exam? What’s changed? Starting in January 2015, there will be a new version of the Cambridge English: Advanced exam (previously known as the CAE). This post will explain the major changes in the new exam so you know what to expect. Big changes to Reading and Use of English papers First the good news: starting in January the exam will be 45 minutes shorter! There will be 4 papers instead of 5, which means there will be one fewer break as...

Now that you have a strategy for time management during the Use of English section of the exam, let’s look at exactly how to approach part 5.  Remember, this is the only section of the exam where you can get one point even if your answer is not 100% correct (in that case you will get two points).  This means that you can try and get at least one point even if you don’t think you can get both of them.  Typically, each correct answer has a...

The Use of English is a tricky part of the exam and you can improve your score by using good time management.  You have 60 minutes to complete the five parts of this section of the exam.  First, let’s look at how many points are available in each part of this paper: Part 1: 12 questions, 12 points Part 2: 15 questions, 15 points Part 3: 10 questions, 10 points Part 4: 5 questions, 10 points (2 points per correct answer) Part 5: 8 questions, 16...

The speech accent archive is a project run by Stephen H. Weinberger at the George Mason University Program of Linguistics.  He and his colleagues and students have collected and phonetically transcribed hundreds of speech samples from English native speakers and learners from around the world.  Everyone reads the same short script so you can really hear the differences in accent!  It’s a fun way to travel around the world, linguistically!...

There really is nothing quite so tedious and boring as a prescriptive grammarian.  And I’m a native speaker, and an English teacher with a section about grammar on his blog!  I really have a lot of sympathy for people who are learning English.  Let me explain what I mean by “prescriptive grammar.” To paraphrase the linguist David Brazil, a grammarian must begin from one of the following assumptions: We can discover the rules...