Angola 12th Grade English National Exam common mistakes
Angola 12th Grade English National Exam · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Leaving multiple-choice and short-answer items blank when unsure, rather than eliminating options and choosing the best remaining answer.
Candidates fear a wrong answer more than a blank, not realising that an unanswered item scores zero while a reasoned guess can score, and time pressure late in the paper pushes them to abandon items.
What to do instead
Practise a fixed guessing routine: cross out options that are clearly wrong, then pick one of the rest and mark it; during timed mocks, enforce a rule that no item is left blank before the final five minutes.
Answering comprehension questions from personal opinion or general knowledge instead of from evidence in the passage.
Under time pressure candidates skim the text, recognise the topic, and answer from what they already believe about it, missing that the question asks what the passage says.
What to do instead
Train the locate-and-quote habit: for every question, underline the sentence in the passage that supports the answer and write the question number beside it before writing anything.
Copying long chunks of the passage verbatim as the answer to a comprehension question.
Candidates equate 'finding the answer in the text' with 'copying the text', and lack practice in rephrasing, so lifting feels safer than rewording.
What to do instead
Do exercises where the same answer is written twice, once as a quote and once in the candidate's own words, and require answers of one or two sentences that do not repeat more than three consecutive words from the passage.
Ignoring the instruction word in a writing task (for example writing an argument when the prompt asks for a letter of complaint, or omitting the required number of points).
Candidates read the topic only, not the task, and start writing immediately because they fear running out of time, so register, format and content points are missed.
What to do instead
Before writing, spend two minutes underlining the instruction words and listing the required content points as a checklist; after writing, tick each point off and check the format (salutation, closing, paragraphing) matches the genre.
Writing a whole composition as one undivided block of text with no paragraphs and no linking words.
Paragraphing and cohesion are rarely practised as separate skills, and candidates write as they speak, sentence after sentence, without planning an introduction, body and conclusion.
What to do instead
Use a fixed skeleton (introduction stating purpose, one paragraph per content point, conclusion) and rehearse a short list of connectors (however, therefore, in addition, finally) that must appear at least once per paragraph boundary.
Choosing the wrong tense or verb form in gap-fill and transformation items, e.g. using present simple where a time marker such as 'yesterday' or 'since 2019' requires past simple or present perfect.
Candidates select the form that 'sounds right' in isolation rather than reading the time expressions and context clues in the whole sentence, and tense contrast is often memorised as labels rather than meaning.
What to do instead
Drill a two-step procedure: first circle every time marker and subject in the sentence, then decide the tense from those markers before looking at the options; practise sets that contrast past simple, present perfect and past perfect in the same exercise.
Mismatching subject and verb or pronoun reference in error-correction and cloze items, e.g. 'The students was' or 'Each of them have'.
Concord is checked by ear on short phrases, and long subjects with prepositional phrases between subject and verb hide the real head noun.
What to do instead
Teach the bracket trick: cover the phrase between the subject and the verb with a finger, read subject plus verb alone, and check agreement; include items with 'each', 'everyone', 'neither of' and collective nouns in practice.
Forming the wrong derivative in word-formation items, e.g. writing 'success' where 'successful' is needed, or inventing forms such as 'unpossible'.
Candidates translate the base word's meaning without checking the grammatical slot (noun, adjective, adverb) the gap requires, and they over-apply prefixes and suffixes without knowing which combinations exist.
What to do instead
Before filling a gap, label what the sentence needs (article plus noun, adverb modifying a verb, adjective before a noun); keep a personal table of common families (succeed, success, successful, successfully) and practise only real derived forms, checking each new one in a dictionary.
Confusing near-synonyms and collocations in vocabulary items, e.g. 'do a mistake' instead of 'make a mistake', or 'say' where 'tell' is required.
Vocabulary is learned as single words with a translation rather than in phrases, so the candidate knows the general meaning but not which partner words the language allows.
What to do instead
Study vocabulary in collocation chunks (make a decision, take a decision is wrong in this sense; tell someone, say something) and do gap-fills where both options are semantically plausible so only the collocation decides.
Missing key information in listening items because the candidate writes during the first playing instead of listening, or waits for the exact words of an option rather than a paraphrase.
Candidates try to transcribe everything, lose the thread, and are then unable to answer later items; they also expect the recording to repeat the wording of the options, so they reject correct paraphrases.
What to do instead
Practise the two-pass routine: on the first playing only mark the option chosen and note nothing else; on the second playing confirm or change answers; pre-read the questions before the recording starts and predict synonyms the speaker might use.