Gearing up for the upcoming PSLE oral exams with your child? Help boost their confidence and score with these oral exam tips for primary school students.
As PSLE approaches, it’s crucial to ensure your child starts preparing for the oral components of the exam as soon as possible.
In this article, we’ll help by providing you with valuable tips and strategies for the PSLE oral exam. By implementing these suggestions, you can help build your child’s confidence, enhance their communication skills, and ensure they are prepared for this assessment.
As PSLE approaches, it’s crucial to ensure your child starts preparing for the oral components of the exam as soon as possible.
In this article, we’ll help by providing you with valuable tips and strategies for the PSLE oral exam. By implementing these suggestions, you can help build your child’s confidence, enhance their communication skills, and ensure they are prepared for this assessment.
We all know elaboration is very important in communication. As it happens, your child can use examples to easily elaborate on arguments during the oral exam.
This is a good idea as it shows examiners that the child has the ability to illustrate and support points during the stimulus-based conversation. Examples generally help children score higher in oral assessments, especially when used right.
Fortunately, practising this skill is easy. Just encourage your child to start by integrating examples into daily conversations.
Chances are good that children have to provide a point of view or opinion at some point during daily conversations, after all. If they practise using examples to illustrate points then, they’ll develop the habit of naturally incorporating examples in speech.
This will make them even more comfortable doing it during exams.
It’s helpful to explore many different topics when practising for the exams because you won’t know exactly what they’ll ask your child about until they’re already asking it!
Fortunately, there are some general guidelines you can use. Most examiners will cover common topics like the Internet, social media, sports, health, family, environment, and world news.
It may also be useful to look through past year exam topics to find some common or trending issues that may be covered. Some of the topics from previous exams may be repeated later on, so these are great sources for practice topics!
As for the types of questions that may be asked, our next tip actually provides a great strategy for practising dealing with them.
This is definitely not new to students. The 5W1H format stands for - What, Who, Where, When, Why and How.
Each of these is a critical query that is likely to pop up in the oral exams for just about any topic. Examiners love to ask students these questions, so practising answering them is a great way to revise.
Let’s take one of the most common topics covered in the orals: recycling. Using 5W1H, you can easily think of some queries that an examiner may ask related to this subject:
Practise asking your child questions like these about topics you got from the previous tip. It’s a great way to train them to elaborate on and reveal their grasp of each topic.
Time management is another factor all too often overlooked in the orals. Provide for it in your practice sessions so your child is prepared.
The idea is to make sure that your child is neither too quick to end a conversation nor too prone to dragging it out. Try to allocate appropriate time for each question of the oral exam in your practice.
Set limits (depending on topic) for how long they can speak so they learn to manage their time in conversation. It’s a great way to ensure they can complete each section effectively, without rushing the last ones.
After your child has finished expressing his or her views, it’s important to end the stimulus-based conversation with a conclusion. A strong conclusion is the perfect way to end on the right note and leave examiners with good impressions.
Here’s a tip for your practice: the simplest way to conclude is usually just to reiterate the points one has made and sum up the main idea or thesis of one’s responses.
Your child may also want to try including reflections or lessons learned if applicable!
Examiners are looking for students who are confident when they read aloud and answer questions. That’s why your child has to be positive and confident during the exam.
Practice can do a lot to help here. When practising with your child, show them how to display good body language and posture – encourage them to sit straight, with their chins raised and maintaining eye contact.
Also try to show them how to enunciate properly. Encourage them to avoid mumbling or stuttering, with clear projection of voice.
Assure your child and give them the support and confidence they need, of course. If they make mistakes, support them through it and remind them that it’s all part of the learning process – it’s the effort that matters!
The tips above should have done a lot to get you and your child ready for the PSLE’s oral component. That said, we’re here to help if you and your child need more support with exam prep!
Not only do we have special programmes just for PSLE preparation, but we also have dedicated tutor-coaches with experience in helping students ace these assessments.
Our classes are kept small to facilitate individualised attention for each student, making our lessons even more effective.
Want to learn more? Get in touch with us today!
