Tokushima Public High School Entrance Examination - English

It mixes listening tasks, reading passages, discrete grammar and vocabulary items, short dialogue completions and a guided writing task. Multiple-choice items sit alongside one-line written answers, so you need both recognition speed and accurate spelling. The number of questions and the time allowed are revised from year to year, and the Tokushima Prefectural Board of Education publishes the current outline on its official site.

The individual grammar points are ordinary junior high school material; the difficulty comes from pace, volume and the writing task. School tests usually give you the topic in advance and test one unit at a time. This paper asks you to switch between listening, reading and producing English within a single sitting, so timed practice matters more than studying harder grammar.

Prefectural admissions systems normally include a later recruitment for schools that still have places, but which schools take part, who is eligible and when it happens change every year, so never plan around it. Confirm the current rules with your junior high school guidance teacher and with the Tokushima Prefectural Board of Education's official announcements.

Start with one full past paper, untimed, to find where you actually lose marks. Then run a daily block of textbook vocabulary and basic grammar, a short daily listening block, and one writing task per week that you rewrite after feedback. Keep reading practice in longer sittings so you build stamina, and retest your error log every week.

Blank answers left on the page, spelling errors in short written responses, misreading the Japanese instructions and giving two answers where one is asked for, and running out of time on the final long passage. Writing something plausible is almost always better than leaving a blank. Practise under real time pressure so you learn how long each section takes you.

You are given a situation and a topic in Japanese, with conditions such as the number of sentences or the points to include. Plan for a minute, then write short, clear, correct sentences rather than long complicated ones. Answer the question that was asked, use the tense the situation requires, and leave time to check spelling, capital letters and full stops.

Little and often beats one long weekly session. Use short dialogues or announcements of a similar length to exam items, listen once for the gist, once for detail, then read the script and check what you missed. Repeat the same audio a few days later. Train yourself to catch question words, numbers, times and negation, which is where listening items usually turn.

A lot. Most of the words come from approved junior high school textbooks, so cover those before anything else, including spelling - you may have to write the word, not just recognise it. In reading, you can often infer an unknown word from the sentence around it, but only if the rest of the sentence is solid.

Past papers and the official examination outline are released by the Tokushima Prefectural Board of Education, and your junior high school usually holds copies as well. Use the board's official site as the authoritative source for format, timing and any changes to the current year's selection, rather than summaries on study sites like this one.