Think FCE

The greatest weakness of this book is that none of the ‘exam tasks’ at the end of each unit are actually realistic examples of what students will see in the exam. One such silly slip up is including 3 vocabulary words in the open cloze exercise, whereas this is almost entirely a test of grammar in the exam. This is a shame, because having all this exam practice stuff at the end of the unit means that it does free up the writers to exploit the topics of the units for general interest and language development more than is usually the case in FCE books. I found the only way to get through this was to use the exam examples in the book in a ‘how many mistakes did they put in this exercise/ what’s different in the real exam version I’m giving you now’ kind of a way in class, and then get all the students to buy a book of real past exam papers for homework.