Changes to the Writing Paper:

As just mentioned above, the writing paper has changed with the use of an adapted
summary task for the first (compulsory) question. Candidates now need to access two
100 word texts and distill the main ideas (as they relate to the essay question), evaluate
those ideas and provide their own opinions on the topic. The good news is that the
word count has gone down – to 240-280 words.
In the Part two question, little has changed in terms of format and task type, although
the proposal genre seems to have been dropped from the list of possible genre
types. The word count here has also been reduced to 280-320 words.

The changes to the word counts mean a reduction from 600-700 to the revised 520-600
for the entire paper – but this also reflects the reduction in the total time for the revised
paper: candidates now only have an hour and a half to complete it all.
Opposition debates for CPE Summary tasks

This was something that popped into my head the other day as a way to change the
dynamic of a CPE lesson based around summary tasks – and which will also be useful
for the 2013 revised exam (writing part one).
Frame the summary question (the last question on the exam paper, usually question 44)
in more contentious, combative terms and write it on the board.

Set the class up in two groups and give each group one of the texts from the CPE part 5
task – so group a gets text a and group b gets text b. Give the learners some time to
process the input and to prepare their arguments, discussing what they found in the
texts, developing any elaborations and predicting and preparing ripostes to any counter-
arguments.

Usually with an opposition debate, I like to seat the learners in two lines down the
middle of the room, so that learners are (a) facing each other and (b) up close and
personal.

Begin the debate!

At the end of the debate, and before focusing on any language feedback, do some
content feedback. In particular ask the learners what the main areas of discussion were
and get these listed on the board. Point out that these are the (probably – obviously
you’ll need to check with the task key) content points they need to identify for the
summary task.

Make sure learners have a copy of both texts (a and b) and then with their debate
partner, they can formulate a written answer to the summary task.
Say that again? Avoiding repetition & developing paraphrase

Trying to come up with new and interesting ways of saying the same old thing is a skill
that taxes most of us on a daily basis: “I like your hair.” “Your hair looks
nice.” “Wow! Have you had your hair done?” “That new style really suits you!”

For language learners, it’s obviously even more difficult. For learners preparing for
exam classes, where displaying a wide ranging linguistic resource helps garner
improved scores – it’s an essential skill. It’s useful for all those writing tasks (avoid
using words or phrases from the questions) and particularly useful for CPE
comprehension and summary tasks where the questions state “in your own words”. But
it’s also a handy skill to have for those speaking tasks, wheredemonstrating “range” is
almost as important as actually having range. After all, there’s no point learning all
those different words and structures if you don’t actually use them? Right?
So here’s an activity which needs no (only a very small amount) of preparation, but
which helps extend and develop the paraphrase skill. I call it “Say that again?”

Materials: As much scrap A4 paper as you can find chopped down into either A6 or A7
sized slips – ideally it’d be about six bits of paper per student.
Students write a single (short) sentence on each bit of paper – ideally something they
might say in everyday life. You can model this with “I like your hair.” or “Local football
team played well/badly at the weekend.” Students can work together in pairs during the
sentence creation phase.

Collect all the slips of paper up and ask the learners to form small groups (three or four
people per group). re-distribute the slips of paper with the sentences on evenly
between the groups, placed face down (i.e. sentences not visible) in a pile in the middle.

One learner takes a slip and turns it face up and reads the sentence. They then have to
produce a paraphrase of the sentence, as does the next person and the next etc, until
someone can’t come up with something that hasn’t already been said. So if we go back
to our example: Learner A turns over the slip of paper and reads out “I like your
hair.” Learner A paraphrases thusly: “Your hair looks nice.” Learner B comes up with
“Wow! Have you had your hair done?” and Learner C with “That new style really suits
you!”. Learner D however can’t think of anything new, so gets to keep the slip of paper.

The winner is the person in each group with the fewest slips of paper at the end of the
activity.

Feedback can be given on any errors that were overheard during the game, but also
content feedback on any sentences they found particularly difficult to paraphrase.
As an extension, for those classes preparing for an exam, the teacher could take the
input from one of the writing paper questions and divide it up into sentences on
separate bits of paper and ask learners to come up with alternative phrasings.

Extracted from http://teflgeek.net/