French Exam help

[garrc90]

Hey..
Im just wondering if anyone can give me some good advice for the French written..
I'm really scared.. and I failed my Practise one
for example any techniques?? Things to do in my exam??
How should I study/revise... For the Listening, and reading comprehension..
These areas are my weakest..
SO any help would be great..
thanks

[bubble sunglasses]

 refine your technique for the listening; try concentrating *only* on catching the features mention in the question [rather than trying to remember everything]

  meh, the sort of answers required for the reading comprehension are rather generic -study past assesors' reports to see what is required
 
 obviously spend the amount of time for each section as suggested by the marks, even if writing is your strongest area
 
 in the exam, don't be deterred if you do worse than hoped for the listening, sometimes it's really hard, even for better students

[droodles]

I'm really scared.. and I failed my Practise one
How should I study/revise... For the Listening, and reading comprehension..
These areas are my weakest..

The fact that you failed a practice exam suggests that you don't practice enough. It's either that or you just lack comprehension or exposure to french content.

I recommend you should do these things:

• Expose yourself to more french content. The more stuff you read the more you will improve your vocabulary and understanding of how the framework of french sentences are created. Well there's not much I can recommend except if your school has a library loaning french books then go for it, either that or go to liberation.fr and read articles. This will help you in the Reading+Responding section
• Same applies for listening, if you can, wake up at 9:15am during the weekdays+saturday and watch french news on SBS, even if you don't get what is happening completely, at least try and get a general gist as you are exposing yourself to the wording and the speaking which will (hopefully) increase your listening+comprehension skills. As you get the used to the way words are pronounced and the common structure of french conversations and dialogue, your listening and understanding will improve and this will help you in the Listening + Responding section
• Do many listening and reading+responding excercises that require reponses in FRENCH, you can translate the words you hear and read in french to english too easily but when it comes to responding in french, especially in FULL SENTENCES, people tend to struggle a lot - so do a lot of excercises requiring FRENCH RESPONSES. But that doesn't mean you should avoid the ones that need ENGLISH responses, just keep that at a lower priority
• WRITE, WRITE and WRITE!!! I cannot stress how important that last section of the exam is, Section C, where you have to write a 200-300 word piece on whatever topic they have on selection. This section of the exam is the section that can make the biggest difference for your score, so practice writing a lot.

Another point as well: The more words you recognise and understand, the less time you will have to spend flicking through that dictionary.

And if you notice in all the past papers that VCAA have released, they always have content based on: Environment, Technology and History. So you should recognise key phrases/vocabulary that are associated with those themes.

There's also another thing you can do which is to play this game I like to call 'Translation' where you translate the lines you hear from your teachers at school or whoever into french. It's a great way to keep your french skills in shape and also excercises your sentence structuring skills which can be applied all over the exam. And write a lot.

So in summarising, the more you read; the more you will understand passages without having to read them like four times over just to find an answer to a question worth 1 mark and the more you hear; the more you will understand without having to go "FUCK I NEED THIRD LISTENING" because in the exam the text only gets played twice.

Hope this helps. This can apply to everyone else as well who is struggling with French.

[bturville]

• Expose yourself to more french content. The more stuff you read the more you will improve your vocabulary and understanding of how the framework of french sentences are created. Well there's not much I can recommend except if your school has a library loaning french books then go for it, either that or go to liberation.fr and read articles. This will help you in the Reading+Responding section

There's also another thing you can do which is to play this game I like to call 'Translation' where you translate the lines you hear from your teachers at school or whoever into french. It's a great way to keep your french skills in shape and also excercises your sentence structuring skills which can be applied all over the exam. And write a lot.

droodles knows his shit here. the two points above are really helpful imo. read french blogs and news sites, so that you can see the language in use and how everything mashes together. best way too pick up new vocab and allow grammatical structures to sink in.