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...

Every weekday morning, I get an email from Delancey Place.  It’s a non-profit organisation that sends short excerpts from non-fiction books and if you buy the book through the link they provide to Amazon, they make a donation to children’s literacy programmes.  For me, it’s a short piece of good writing I can enjoy when I have a 5 minute break in my day.  For you, it could be a nice way to have a broad choice of things to read...

It’s difficult to become a good writer without spending a lot of time reading good writing.  And I think we all know the quality of most of the writing on Facebook and Instagram.  So where do you find good writing that’s not 350 pages long? One place where you can read (and listen to!) short essays about hundreds of different topics is at This I Believe.  The website is a revived version of a radio programme in the 1950s where...