English
What is tested
Two strands run together: your own command of English (grammar, vocabulary, comprehension, composition) and, where pedagogy appears, your knowledge of how English is taught. Keep them separate mentally - a question about the direct method is not a question about grammar.
Concepts to command
- Tense and aspect, and the sequence of tenses in reported speech.
- Subject–verb agreement, including awkward cases: "one of the + plural noun + singular verb"; each/every/either + singular; collective nouns; "the number of" (singular) vs "a number of" (plural).
- Articles, prepositions and their fixed collocations.
- Voice, narration, conditionals and modals.
- Sentence errors: run-ons, fragments, faulty parallelism, dangling and misplaced modifiers.
- Punctuation, especially comma splices and apostrophe use.
- Vocabulary: synonyms and antonyms, one-word substitutions, idioms, phrasal verbs.
- Comprehension: main idea, inference, tone, pronoun reference.
- Teaching of English: LSRW order, communicative approach, direct method, audio-lingual and structural approaches, and the difference between testing grammar and testing usage.
Traps
- "One of the boys ___" where the plural verb tempts you.
- Reported speech with a universal truth - the tense does not backshift.
- Options that are grammatical but change the meaning; the instruction says "best", not merely "correct".
- Idioms answered literally.
- Comprehension options that are true in general but unsupported by the passage.
Worked example
"He is one of those students who ___ hard." The relative pronoun refers to "students", so the verb is plural: "work", not "works". Rule: locate the antecedent of who/which/that before choosing the verb.
Rule of thumb
In error-spotting, read the sentence from the last word backwards. The break in rhythm exposes agreement and preposition errors that normal reading hides.