When you’re preparing students for a high-stakes exam like PTE Academic, it’s important to give them the strategies they need to succeed. But teaching exam techniques can be challenging as there’s often a lot to cover in a short space of time.
A good lesson plan will help you to give your students all the information they need while making sure you are using your class time as effectively as possible.
So, let’s take a look at some of the free lesson plans available on the PTE website, and see how they can help you save time planning your PTE Academic classes.
1. Reading & writing: Fill in the blanks
The Reading & writing: Fill in the blanks task type requires students to use their knowledge of collocation and grammar to help them predict which word best fits in each blank. There are several strategies which students can employ to help them narrow down their choices.
In the lesson plan, there is an example task for students to practice, pair work activities, and finally a test item for students to use the strategies they have learned.
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2. Reading: Fill in the blanks
In the Reading: Fill in the blanks task, test takers will need to use contextual and grammatical cues to choose the correct answer.
This lesson plan covers a few of the different techniques that students need to learn to answer correctly; reading for gist, word prediction, and analyzing optional answers. There are also two examples for students to practice these techniques and see which ones are the most helpful.
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3. Read aloud
The Read aloud task in PTE Academic integrates speaking and reading skills, requiring students to read a short text with the correct pronunciation and intonation. There are three distinct strategies which students need to use to ensure success. They’ll have to decode word meaning from context, and use phonemic awareness to pronounce unfamiliar words. They’ll also need to link words together when speaking to appear fluent.
In the lesson plan, you’ll see how to teach your students these strategies, step by step, and then use them to answer an example question.
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4. Highlight correct summary
The Highlight correct summary task type requires students to listen and read at the same time. They’ll have to understand and analyze information from a recording in order to identify the most accurate summary of this information.
So, what strategies can they use? This lesson will show you how to help your students develop effective note-taking skills, which are essential for this task. They’ll also need to skim the text, identify the topic sentence and the main ideas, and connect the information they’ve read with the recording.
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5. Describe image
Test takers often find the Describe image task to be one of the most challenging questions in PTE Academic. However, when you break it down into logical steps, as suggested in this lesson plan, your students will find it a lot easier.
Your class will need to study the image and identify the most important features of the graph, then use the appropriate statistical vocabulary to talk about pie charts, bar graphs, and trends in line graphs in a well-structured and simple description.
If you find these resources useful, you might also like to read our PTE Teacher profiles and get insider tips from PTE professionals.
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6. Answer short question
The Answer short question exam task is fairly straightforward and doesn’t require a particular strategy to answer. However, students will need to do a lot of reading to increase their general knowledge, boost their vocabulary and develop their word skills.
The lesson plan offers suggestions for helping your students to build their academic vocabulary knowledge and details a few strategies which can help students when they are listening to the question, such as listening for direction words.
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7. Summarize written text
In the Summarize written text task, your students will need to use two different reading skills. They’ll have to skim the text for gist, then scan it for keywords. They’ll also need to make notes, and then condense them into one sentence between 5 and 75 words long which summarizes the text.
In this lesson, your students will practice each step, learning how to identify keywords, making notes, and sharing them with the class. They will then work in pairs to create summarizing sentences.
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8. Re-order paragraphs
The Re-order paragraphs reading task requires your students to be familiar with the organization and cohesion, or academic texts. In this lesson, you’ll teach your students how to recognize a topic or opening sentence, and then use that information to identify a flow within the passage. In groups of four, students will swap work and read their reordered paragraphs aloud, then get feedback from their peers.
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9. Reading: Multiple-choice, choose multiple answers
In the Reading: Multiple-choice, choose multiple answers task, students will need to use a variety of reading skills. Sometimes, they’ll be able to use their own background knowledge of a topic to help them answer the question - but at other times, this won’t be appropriate.
You’ll teach them how to choose which approach to use by identifying the focus of the question. Then, they will share their ideas on the type of text they are reading, learn how to find specific information, and work in pairs to rule out inappropriate answers.
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10. Listening: Fill in the blanks
When it comes to Listening: Fill in the blanks, your students will need to use both listening and writing skills to answer this question type successfully. They will need to listen for missing words in a recording, and then type the missing words into a transcript of the recording.
In this lesson, you will explain and practice the strategies to succeed in this question. Timing is of the essence. That makes it important for your students to get lots of practice in listening to long words and taking note of the word roots.
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What’s included in your lesson plan pack?
There are twenty lesson plans available to download in total; one for each question type in PTE Academic.
Download the full lesson plan pack and get a PDF of each lesson plan and the audio files you’ll need to use for sample tasks which require them. Also included are model answers, so your students can see what they are working towards.
Discover more PTE Academic preparation resources
For more preparation resources, head to the PTE Academic website, where there are lots more PTE Academic resources for teachers who are helping students to prepare for their tests.
And finally, sign up for our monthly PTE Teacher newsletter, where you’ll get advice, resources, and inspiration.
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