Okayama Public High School Entrance Examination - English common mistakes
Okayama Public High School Entrance Examination - English · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Leaving an answer blank on the listening section when a number, time, or place is not caught the first time, instead of writing the best partial guess and moving on.
Okayama listening passages are played a limited number of times with short gaps; candidates who freeze on one item miss the next two items because the audio does not wait, and they treat a blank as safer than a wrong answer when in fact blanks and errors score the same.
What to do instead
Before the audio starts, read the question stems and underline the question word (when / where / how many / who). During the first playing write only key words or numerals in the margin; during the second playing confirm or correct. If an item is still unclear when the audio ends, write the most plausible option immediately and never leave it empty.
Treating a distractor number or name that is spoken first as the final answer, without listening for the correction that follows (e.g. "three o'clock - no, sorry, three thirty").
Candidates listen for the first matching word and stop processing; Japanese junior high listening practice often rewards keyword matching, so learners are not trained to track self-corrections, negations, and 'actually' signals that Okayama items deliberately include.
What to do instead
Train with a rule: do not commit to an answer until the speaker finishes the sentence. Drill a set of short audio clips containing self-repair markers (no, sorry, actually, I mean, instead) and practise crossing out the first number heard and writing the corrected one. Keep a personal list of these repair phrases.
Answering short-dialogue and passage questions from a single matching word in the text rather than from the relationship the question asks about (who did what, why, or how someone felt).
The questions in Okayama reading sections often paraphrase the passage, so the exact word in the question does not appear in the text, while a distractor option does repeat a word from the passage. Keyword-matching learners therefore choose the option that looks familiar instead of the one that is true.
What to do instead
For each question, first identify what type it is (fact, reason, feeling, main idea) and then locate the sentence that answers that type. Underline the evidence sentence and write a three-to-five-word Japanese or English summary beside it before looking at the options. Reject any option that repeats passage vocabulary but does not match the evidence sentence.
Reading a longer passage or a notice/chart set straight through and then trying to answer all questions from memory, without locating the relevant lines.
Time pressure in the reading block pushes candidates to read fast and answer from overall impression; multi-source information-retrieval items (timetables, posters, e-mail plus schedule) require cross-checking two places, which memory-based reading cannot do reliably.
What to do instead
Use a two-pass method: first pass skim for the topic and structure (30-45 seconds), then read each question and return to the text to find the exact line or table cell. For information-retrieval items, physically point to the condition in source A and the matching row in source B, and tick each condition off in the margin so no condition is skipped.
Choosing a grammatically possible word in a fill-in-the-blank without checking the surrounding context for tense, plurality, or the preposition or particle that the sentence already supplies.
Candidates translate the blank in isolation ('I ___ to school yesterday' → 'go' feels right because the meaning is clear) and do not scan the rest of the sentence for time words or agreement cues; Japanese learners also confuse countability and article use because Japanese has no articles.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed checklist applied to every blank: (1) time expression → tense, (2) subject → verb agreement and pronoun form, (3) word before and after the blank → preposition/collocation, (4) singular/plural and a/an/the. Write the checklist on the first page of the question paper and tick each item before moving on.
In sentence-ordering items, building a sentence that sounds natural in Japanese word order or that forms a grammatical sentence but ignores the marked first word or the required clause boundary.
The item gives a starting word or a partial frame, and candidates rearrange the remaining pieces by meaning alone; Japanese-influenced ordering places the verb late and misplaces adverb phrases, producing an answer that reads plausibly but violates the given anchor.
What to do instead
Anchor the given word first, then find the verb and its object as a unit, then attach modifiers (time, place, manner) in the English order subject–verb–object–place–time. Say the assembled sentence aloud once; if it can be read two ways, re-check the anchor and any punctuation or conjunction that must end a clause.
In sentence-transformation items, changing the meaning while changing the form - for example turning a direct question into reported speech but shifting the tense or pronoun wrongly, or dropping the negation when converting to a negative question.
Candidates focus on producing the target structure (passive, indirect question, comparative) and treat meaning as automatically preserved; backshift, pronoun change, and negative polarity are the parts most often lost, and these are exactly what the item is testing.
What to do instead
After writing the transformed sentence, compare it with the original on four points: who does what, when, polarity (positive/negative), and number. For reported speech, apply the backshift and pronoun table explicitly. Rewrite the original meaning in Japanese in one short clause and check the English answer expresses the same clause.
Writing a composition that answers the prompt only generally ('I like sports. It is good.') without the required reason, example, or specified content points, and without a concluding sentence.
Under time pressure candidates write what they can say safely rather than what the task asks; Okayama guided-writing tasks specify conditions (number of sentences, must-use content, a reason), and candidates who do not count sentences or tick conditions lose marks even with correct English.
What to do instead
Spend 60 seconds planning: list the required conditions from the prompt as a checklist (topic sentence, reason, example, conclusion, minimum sentence count). Write one idea per sentence and tick each condition as it is covered. Reserve two minutes at the end to count sentences and check third-person -s, past tense, and plural -s.
On integrated read-and-write tasks, summarising or copying sentences from the source passage instead of using the source information to produce the required response in the candidate's own words.
Candidates are anxious about making errors, so they lift whole sentences from the passage; the task requires selecting and recombining information (e.g. write an e-mail recommending an activity using details from a poster), and copied text does not meet the communicative purpose or the word limit.
What to do instead
Underline only the key facts in the source (names, dates, prices, reasons), then close the source and write the response from your notes. Use fixed frames for the genre (e-mail greeting and closing, opinion plus reason) and paraphrase by changing the subject and verb rather than copying the original clause.
Misallocating time across the paper - spending too long on one reading passage or composition and then rushing the listening or the final writing task, leaving answers incomplete.
Okayama-style papers combine listening, reading, grammar, and writing in one sitting with no per-section warning beyond the invigilator's announcements; candidates who do not know their own pace discover the shortage only at the end, and unfinished writing loses the most marks per minute.
What to do instead
Before exam day, take two full timed mock papers and record the minutes used per section. Set a personal budget (for example listening as played, reading items at about one minute each, writing a fixed 12-15 minutes) and a checkpoint: if a passage is unfinished at the checkpoint, mark the remaining items with a best guess and move on. Practise the writing task last under a strict timer so the pace becomes automatic.