Well, hello there and welcome to the Speak English Fearlessly podcast. This is the podcast for motivated English learners who want to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam. I also love to feature encouraging interviews with regular people, people just like you, who are working towards becoming fluent in English, so we can learn from their experiences together.
Who am I? Well, my name is Aaron Nelson, and I've been an English teacher for over 16 years, and I now help students prepare for the CELPIP exam through online classes.
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Welcome to today's mini episode. I'm trying a new format here. It's mini. It's supposed to be mini because I know that many of you have a very busy life and very busy schedule and making and finding time to be practicing your CELPIP skills is sometimes a real challenge. So I want to try out a new format of providing tips and strategies in a small, compressed sort of way, just to see if it will help you if you don't have a lot of time to be listening. So getting stuck in the middle. of what you're trying to say in order to answer a speaking task for the CELPIP exam is one of the most common challenges that test takers say they face.
And not fitting what you want to say in the time provided leads to a penalty. You lose points. You can lose points because you're not able to completely answer the question or you're not able to completely finish saying what you want to say before the time ends and you're moved on to the next question.
question. Both things happen very frequently. These past two weeks, I've been helping my boss, my administrator, as she is working through a lot of files associated with some of the residents that live in one of our facilities where I work, and my job has been to sort through Files that have years of documentation in it. What makes this job challenging is that over the years, we've had several different people in the role of administrator, which means each person has been using to the best of their ability, their own system of organizing the information inside of those folders.
So as you can imagine, over the years, with different people doing it in a different way, There is a whole hodgepodge of documents in there, in random order, and oftentimes not even in the right order. Or at least in the order that my administrator, that she needs it to be in.
So we've been working together to reorganize that hot mess. At first, when she gave me these big boxes. to organize. I sat there and I thought to myself, how are we going to make any order out of this chaos? So we worked together on coming up with a plan. And what we did was we organized five, uh, we, we set up five different categories that she needed to have the information listed, or she needed to have five different sets of information, five different documents.
In a certain order from the bottom to the top. And so we wrote down our map, our document map, if you will, or our, our filing map on a piece of paper. And we said, we need this document first, this document, second, this document, third and fourth and fifth and so on. So instead of us trying to just make heads or tails of it and try to come up with yet another system of organization, we decided to do something completely different.
We set a system. That list that I was just mentioning, we wrote it down. We made it into a document that we would follow every single time we had to organize a new file. And every single time we had to kind of go through our previous files to put them into the correct order. We wrote it down so that we, it would help us, but so that future administrators would be able to benefit from following a path.
, what does this have to do with you and having trouble getting everything out that you need to get out in the speaking section of the CELPIP exam or on the writing section of the CELPIP exam? If you struggle with getting that information out. or having enough information to work with when the actual question begins, then this tip is meant to help you.
So, if you struggle to fit what you're trying to say into the small spaces that the exam gives you, it might be because you're not following a structure that you set up. When you're brainstorming, hint, hint, brainstorming is the place where you build that structure map.
Like, at the beginning when my, when my administrator and I were working together to develop our system of how we're going to organize our files, we created a map. We created a list of things that needed to be in a certain order. And we followed that order all the way through for each file that we had to work through.
And so far, we've probably worked through at least 60 files. And it made the process of organizing each of those files so much easier. And the same principle will work for you as you are working to prepare for your speaking section on the CELPIP exam, instead of just diving into trying to answer the question, That the exam is asking you take some time to build your map.
That's what brainstorming can do for you. So, what you need to do in order to move from disorder into order is to begin practicing brainstorming effectively. How can you do that? Well, this is where we get practical. This is where I leave you with some homework. The first way is to just start practicing.
And the thing that I highly recommend that you do is something that is a part of your life to begin with something that you're already doing. Make it work for you instead of trying to add something else to your life. Here's one of the things that I have been thinking about. If you commute to work, you have space to practice.
What are you listening to? As you are on your way to work, lots of people turn on the radio and you're listening to that. If you're driving in your car, . And if you're listening to the radio, chances are you're going to get a newscast where they will go through really quickly in like a two to five minute space of time.
They'll just run through the day's headlines. Here's one challenge that you could do.
If you hear a story, That really calls your attention. As soon as that story is over, turn off the radio. And what I challenge you to do as you're driving, I want you to try to kind of organize out loud, start talking to yourself. If you're in your car or by yourself, start talking to yourself about what you believe are the most important points.
of what was being talked about in that newscast as if you were going to share your opinion about that newscast with somebody else. What would be the top three or four points that meant something to you and why?
What would I like to share with somebody to explain what I think? What my opinion is, do this repeatedly. I mean, you have to commute to work probably Monday to Friday, or if you work on the weekends, I mean, you have all of these days available to you. to be practicing. I know you've, you probably think to yourself, I don't have a lot of free time to practice and you probably don't.
I know of people who work two and three shifts of work. So they're, they really don't have enough time. So what you need to be looking for is how can you take advantage of kind of like dead time, you know, commuting is one of those great spaces where you can use what's happening around you. Like listening to a news story, Or listening to a song, and as soon as that is over, or as soon as you hear a story that is interesting to you, you can shut it off, and then Like I said before, begin practicing brainstorming.
What is the most important thing that I pulled from this article? What if I, what would I need to say if I needed to explain it to somebody else and share my opinion? Thank you for listening to today's mini episode. I hope it was helpful for you and it gave you something practical that you could be doing to practice your brainstorming skills for the CELPIP exam.
Bye bye.
