| Try as we might, we find it very hard
to get all textbooks back in from our Year 11 pupils, resulting in a costly replacement
exercise that is rather hard to predict when it comes to the new school year. Added
to this, exactly what does one do exactly after the mock exams to improve performance:
all that effort to get pupils to produce correct perfect tense forms and what do
you get? -half of the pupils even in better groups seem to revert to the present tense
with the odd ich habe gegehen thrown in. The life saver for gaining recognition of
producing a correct past tense is of course "war"! Does this sound all too
familiar? Or does it just make me look like a very bad teacher? Suffice it to
say, with German being my second foreign language, that I was delighted to hear of
the arrival of Success At Grade C in German by Kate Corney and produced
by Collins Educational. This book solves the
two problems. We get in the text books before Easter and only hand them out when
necessary and can now as with the French (Success at Grade C in French) issue an
expendable workbook that gives a focussed, comprehensive run in to the examination.
We also issue the booklet of oral questions available from this site and a similar
booklet for role play practice, so pupils are well set up-if they are prepared to do the
work of course!
So what's so good about the book?
 | It's cheap-under £30, making up into a 64 page
booklet that will cost less than 50p if you have an efficient reprographics department. |
| Exercises are short and clearly laid out to fit in
well with lessons that inevitably will have to encompass several areas per lesson. |
| There is a no nonsense approach giving teachers just
what they need to expose pupils to, to achieve a grade C. |
| Pupils are made to understand graphically exactly
what they need to be able to do with tenses to get a C. The first 10 exercises
concentrate on the perfect, the next two on the future. Several pages are
given over to expressing opinions-essential for gaining so-called "developments"
on the NEAB syllabus at least. |
| There are 12 pages of nice straightforward
Model letters with suggested structures for model answers, although nothing too fancy. |
| Five practice writing questions culminate the writing
part of the book. They are set out in the language as they are at
Intermediate/Higher level and still have some help at the bottom of the page to encourage
correct use of the tenses. These could of course be left out for some pupils if you
felt they didn't need it. |
| The oral is neatly covered with flowchart style
practice for the roleplay on the more common topics-Accommodation, Shopping, Travel,
Arranging a Meeting, Restaurant. |
| General conversation gives some straightforward
suggestions for using the 3 tenses, es gibt, man kann to fit in with virtually everything.
|
| Finally , there are eight Reading Comprehension
exercises, giving practice in most types of questions in the target language. There
is a comprehensive range of tips accompanying each exercise. |
Although billed as success at Grade C, in my
experience any candidate who was producing the structures given here in quantity would
gain an A not a C. Admittedly the candidate is not drilled in weil clauses or the
imperfect(except for war/waren) but there are examples of them given to help bulk out
answers.
This attractively produced copymaster book will
quickly repay itself in increased confidence in the average even above average student and
will give the teacher a reassuring structure to work on for those difficult last
weeks.
I would recommend that with this resource and the
increasingly comprehensive Bitesize interactive exercises on www.bbc.co.uk/education your pupils will
have everything they need to excel themselves in their GCSE exam.
BUY THIS BOOK! |
