All about Communication
While most tests of English for Academic Purposes focus on the skills of critical reading and essay writing, Euroexam Academic takes a global view of successful communication in an educational context.
- communication as part of the learning process, such as seminar presentations, making lecture notes or writing a home assignment;
- communication that supports the learning process, such as a meeting to design a conference poster or writing an email to a tutor about assessment requirements of a course;
- communication in a genuine university context, enabling test takers to demonstrate indispensable academic skills through real-life tasks across the four main communication skills.
Academic Skills in Focus
Each test focuses on one of the four main communication skills independently and assesses candidates’ ability to process information and to perform real-life communicative tasks in a higher education context.
Candidates demonstrate their ability to understand complex texts and appreciate distinctions in style, opinion and implied meaning. The paper assesses understanding of intra- and intertextual links and references, and awareness of features of text organisation.
Reading – Time: 50 minutes
Task 1 – Paragraph Headings
This task tests the ability to understand the overall message of each paragraph within a longer text.
Candidates receive a descriptive, narrative or argumentative text adapted from academic sources, consisting of seven paragraphs (one is used as an example). The task is to match each heading to the appropriate paragraph (while two headings will not be needed).
Task 2 – Text Completion
The task tests the ability to find the place of specific text chunks to complete a text by identifying content and dicourse markers.
The candidate receives a longer text with 8 blank spaces, all of which must be completed with a 1-2-sentence text fragment so that the whole text is meaningful and coherent. There are 8 gaps for which the candidate must find the most appropriate 1-2-sentence excerpt from a choice of 11. Three excerpts are not needed.
Task 3 – Multiple-Choice Reading
This task tests detailed comprehension, scanning, inference or judging the writer’s attitude.
The candidate reads two texts which have a shared theme, then answers 6 multiple-choice questions (with A-D options). Some of the questions test the understanding of information located in one of the texts only, whereas others test information located in both texts.
Candidates demonstrate their ability to write in a formal / semi-formal context. The two tasks require candidates to produce their responses in different genres, addressing different audiences and applying different communicative functions.
Writing – Time: 60 minutes
Task 1 – Transactional Writing: An Email
The task tests writing abilities in the genre of a purposeful, formal email.
The candidate is asked to write an appr. 200-word transactional email in order to achieve a specific purpose. The situation is always related to an academic context and the task focuses on written communication between university students and their tutors.
Task 2 – Discursive Writing: Argumentative Essays
The task tests the candidate's ability to present in a formal essay a number of logically connected arguments, opinions about the given topic.
Although the candidate has a choice of three when it comes to the topic, the genre never changes, it is invariably an essay. The three topics are always taken from the following three academic disciplines.
- Humanities and Social Sciences
- Natural Sciences
- Business and Economics
The candidate can choose a topic according to their chosen field of studies and must write a ca. 200-word text.
Candidates demonstrate their ability to understand extended speech where information and relationships are sometimes only implied by the speakers. Tasks involve a variety of standard English accents and use a range of sources, such as excerpts from university lectures, discussions by academic staff and student-tutor interactions.
Listening – Time: ca. 40 minutes
Task 1 – Short Conversations
The task tests the ability to identify overall message implied in a short dialogue, as well as hidden, less explicit, inferred intentions, motivations.
The candidate listens twice to four short conversations taking place in higher education settings. They match each dialogue with an item from List A and an item from List B. List A tests understanding objective aspects (e.g. location, context) whereas List B focuses on the attitude, intentions or psychological state of one of the speakers. Each list has 6 items, and each has 2 items which are not needed.
Task 2 – Lecture Notes
The task tests note-taking and note-making skills, as well as the ability to listen for and select specific pieces of information in an academic text.
The candidate listens to an extended lecture or lecture-like monologue only once and provides 1-2-sentence answers to 5 questions printed on the Answer sheet. A total of 9 pieces of information is required. While listening to the text, the candidate will make notes and formulate answers on the basis of their notes.
Task 3 – Academic Meeting
This task tests detailed comprehension, inference, judging the speakers' attitude.
The candidate listens twice to an extended excerpt from a university discussion or debate involving 2-3 participants. The candidate answers eight multiple-choice questions with three options each (A-C).
Candidates demonstrate their ability to deliver an individual long turn as well as engage in collaborative, interactive tasks where they can negotiate, argue for or against a proposition, offer alternatives, and refute or justify an argument.
Speaking – Time: 20 minutes
Out of the following three speaking tasks, tasks 2 and 3 cover topics related to an academic context and/or a general topic which is related to a broad academic discipline and which does not require specialist knowledge.
Task 1 – Interview
The task tests the ability to ask and answer meaningful questions to trigger quick, sophisticated responses.
This is a warm-up task before the more complex ones. Each candidate has time and space to ask their partner 1 or max. 2 questions to stimulate a response in 2-3 connected sentences. Their job is to show the examiners their range and their communicative skills at an advanced level right from the beginning.
Task 2 – Presentation & Discussion (+ 10-min preparation)
The task tests presentation, arguing and debating skills about a controversial, thought-provoking topic.
In the preparation room, the candidate chooses one of three statements provided to prepare a 2-minute formal, academic presentation. The goal of the preparation time is to prepare notes that the candidate may consult during their two-minute presentation. While one candidate is delivering the presentation, the other candidate is taking notes. After the presentation, the listener initiates a 2-minute discussion by asking a question or making a comment on what the presenter has said. The same procedure is repeated vice versa for the other candidate.
Task 3 – Discussion
The task tests problem-solving communication skills, arguing, debating, as well as the ability to respond to each other's point, views, utterances.
During the 3-minute discussion – without any preparation time – the pair of candidates receives a tasksheet with four thematically linked photographs, related to adademic topics and/or life in Academia. These images are possible illustrations for the cover of a book, a poster, a journal article etc. on a given theme. First, they discuss which aspect of the topic each picture portrays then debate and try to agree which one could be the most suitable for the purpose.
Topics, situations that may occur in the Speaking test
As we measure spontaneous communication in every task of the Speaking part – which is still the case even though every candidate gets 10 minutes for preparation before the presentation task – the candidate has no chance during the test to put forward preliminarily memorised monologues on a topic or otherwise. Instead, the candidate will succeed in this exam part if they can demonstrate the following communication skills: sharing individual experience and opinion during academic conversations, presentation skills as well as argumentative and debating skills.