Four Minutes Forty Seconds on a Three-Minute Talk
A candidate must give a three-minute talk on "Should sport be compulsory at school?", followed by two minutes of examiner questions. The criteria are fluency and coherence, lexical range, grammatical range and accuracy, pronunciation, and interaction - 5 marks each, 25 total.
The recording shows: the talk runs 4 minutes 40 seconds; the candidate reads aloud from a full script, head down, and twice loses her place; she says "you know" 11 times and "like" 9 times; her vocabulary is accurate but plain; her pronunciation is clear and easy to follow. When the examiner asks, "What about students who can't take part in team games?", she says, "I didn't prepare that one," and stops.
The teacher has three weeks and four 20-minute sessions before the test. The candidate is willing but anxious, and believes the main problem is her accent.
1. Rank the three most costly problems and justify the order against the criteria.
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Rank by marks at stake divided by cost of fixing, not by how annoying the problem sounds.
1. The script (biggest, and cheapest to fix). Reading aloud breaks fluency and coherence (unnatural rhythm, no signposting), damages interaction (no eye contact, no responsiveness) and caused the two losses of place. It also explains part of the overrun: written sentences take longer to deliver than spoken ones. Two criteria are directly affected, and the fix - keyword cards - takes days, not months.
2. The unanswered follow-up (second biggest). "I didn't prepare that one" concedes the whole interaction mark in one sentence and probably drags coherence down with it. This is a five-mark criterion lost to a single missing strategy, and it is fixable in one session.
3. Fillers (you know ×11, like ×9). These are a fluency issue, but they are largely a symptom of reading and nerves - remove the script and the count usually halves on its own. Attacking them first means fighting a symptom.
Not on the list: accent. Pronunciation is already clear; accent is not a criterion, and treating it as one will make an anxious candidate worse. Say so explicitly, because she will not believe it otherwise.
2. Design the four 20-minute sessions. Be specific about what happens in each.
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Session 1 - from script to cards. Candidate delivers 90 seconds of her talk from the script. Then she reduces the script to five keyword cards (one per idea), and delivers the same 90 seconds from the cards only. Teacher times it and counts fillers without commenting. Homework: deliver the full talk from cards, recorded on a phone, twice.
Session 2 - the unseen question. Ten rapid-fire questions, 20 seconds each, on topics she has not prepared. Teach one structure: acknowledge – reframe – example – conclude. No answer may begin with "I didn't prepare". She hears her own "that's fair, but…" openers played back so she notices the pattern works.
Session 3 - timing. Full three-minute run, twice, with a visible timer and a signal at 2:30. Target: end between 2:50 and 3:10. Then a three-minute run where the teacher interrupts at 1:30 with a question - she must answer and resume. This is the closest simulation of the real conditions.
Session 4 - full mock. Complete five-minute test, recorded, then watched together with a single focus: did she look up, and did she answer every question? Give her exactly two targets on a card for the day. No new content this close to the test - the aim is confidence and automaticity, not more material.
3. Give a model 30-second answer to the examiner's follow-up, and explain what makes it work.
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"That's a fair objection, and I'd separate activity from competition. If the requirement is thirty minutes of movement, a student with a mobility impairment could referee, keep score, or run the fitness station - those are real roles, not consolation prizes. For students who can't do contact sport at all, the school would need adaptive kit and a parallel option. So my answer is yes to compulsory activity, and no to compulsory team games. The principle is participation, not a place on the team."
What makes it work in 30 seconds:
- It opens by conceding ("that's a fair objection"), which signals a thinking speaker rather than a defensive one - this is where interaction marks are won.
- It reframes the question (activity versus competition), which is a lexical-range move as well as an argumentative one: two precise words doing the work of a paragraph.
- It gives one concrete example (referee, scorekeeper, fitness station) so the answer has substance, not just principle.
- It ends with a clean one-sentence position, which is what a listener remembers and what a marker can credit.
Rehearse the shape, not the words. If the examiner asks something else, the same four moves apply, and the candidate will not need to have "prepared that one".