Reading Part 4: the gap that was filled by a shared word
A tutor is reviewing Daniel's first full mock of the B1 Preliminary Reading paper: 32 questions, 45 minutes, worth 25% of the total mark. His raw scores by part are: Part 1 (five short notices) 4/5; Part 2 (matching five people to eight short texts) 5/5; Part 3 (long text, multiple choice) 3/5; Part 4 (five sentences removed from a text) 1/5; Part 5 (multiple-choice cloze) 5/6; Part 6 (open cloze) 4/6. Total 22/32, which the centre's conversion table places at about 136 - four marks below the 140 needed for a B1 pass. Daniel answers every question and finishes with six minutes to spare. Asked to explain two of his Part 4 answers, he says: 'The sentence had the word library in it, and so did the paragraph before the gap.' In Part 6 he wrote informations, depend of and make a photo. He has eight weeks left and two one-hour lessons a week.
1. Daniel can realistically gain the marks he needs in one part. Which part should the next two weeks target, and which part should be left alone for now? Justify the choice with the numbers.
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Decide on recoverable marks per hour of teaching, not on total marks lost.
- Part 4, 1/5 - four marks lost. Daniel's own explanation shows the cause is a strategy, not a language gap: he matched vocabulary instead of testing cohesion. A reader who scores 4-5/5 on Parts 1, 2 and 5 normally recovers three of these four marks in two or three lessons.
- Part 6, 4/6 - two marks. The slowest marks on the paper: articles, dependent prepositions and uncountable nouns build up over months, not weeks.
- Part 3, 3/5 - two marks, but the cause is unknown (possibly topic vocabulary) and would need diagnostic time to find.
Arithmetic: 22 + 3 = 25/32, roughly 143 on the same table - over the 140 line with four weeks still in hand. Target Part 4 for two weeks, then Part 6, and do not spend lesson time on Part 3.
2. Write the procedure you would train Daniel to follow at every gap in Part 4, in the order he should do it.
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The aim is to break the shared-word habit by forcing him to predict before he reads the options.
- Read round the gap first. Read the whole paragraph, then re-read the sentence that follows the gap. Do not look at the five options yet.
- Name the job of the missing sentence. Is it a contrast, an example, a time link, a result, or a sentence that introduces something the next sentence points back to?
- Check the reference chains. If the sentence after the gap begins 'These courses...', the missing sentence must have introduced plural courses. Pronouns, articles and singular/plural are the strongest evidence on the page.
- Then read the options and eliminate on links: this, such, another, however, for example, then.
- Test the leftover. One sentence is extra; if it fits as comfortably as his choice, he has misread a reference word and should start again at step 3.
Give him this as a laminated card and make him say steps 2 and 3 aloud for two lessons, then silently.
3. What do the three Part 6 errors have in common, and would you teach them as grammar rules or as vocabulary?
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They are three different error types wearing the same clothes:
- informations - information is uncountable, so this is a rule about nouns (a genuine grammar point).
- depend of - the verb is correct but the dependent preposition is wrong; the rule is not predictable from meaning.
- make a photo - a light-verb collocation; again not derivable, English just uses take.
Only the first is worth a rule. The other two are only learnable as whole chunks, so teach all three through a phrase book: depend on + noun/-ing, take a photo of, a piece of information / two pieces of information, with the wrong version crossed out beside the right one. Test by gap-fill in context two days later and again a week later, not by naming the rule.