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A New Series About Exam Tips - Know Where to Get the Right Past Papers

This may be an unnecessary post. You may know exactly where to get Past Papers for the CIE iGCSE English Language exam, but just in case, my go-to links for old papers are:

http://papers.xtremepapers.com/CIE/Cambridge%20IGCSE/English%20-%20First%20Language%20(0500)/

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BzumkDfi9230MEF4T3FSemtmNWM


Pointing you the right way


Here are three things you need to know about past papers:

1) The Cambridge Board changed its "spec" or its style of questions back in June of 2015. This means any paper before that is not in the current style.

2) That being said, there are still sections of the old papers that are useful for practice. Particularly, the Question 2 on Paper 2 -- that's the one about analysing the language of a passage. That's still there in the new spec, unchanged. In Paper 3, the descriptive and narrative tasks are unchanged as well, and you can get a huge range of practice questions that would be helpful.

3) When you're practising past papers, however, be aware that any crammer or tutorials you're taking will probably want to have students sit a mock exam before tackling the real thing, and more than likely, this will be the most recent paper. Check with the tutor before you work through all the available papers; otherwise, you may see the mock papers ahead of time and give a false impression of your predicted success.

Of course, just practising old papers is probably not enough preparation, but this will be the subject of a future exam tip!




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