Don’t forget the aural

Plenty of students forget to properly prepare for the listening comprehension, which takes up the first 40 minutes of the French exam. Familiarising yourself with French speakers in the final few hours can really boost your ability to pick out keywords and phrases in the exam. Check out the aural revision tool on Studyclix which will allow you to listen to the audio while you view the questions and answers. If you practice a few years’ worth of questions you will see the same vocabulary comes up over and over again as well as tuning yourself into the French accent.

Maximise your comprehension marks

The first questions are in French so make sure you know what the question terms commonly used mean. For example, know the meaning of the words like ‘relevez’, ‘trouvez’ ‘pourquoi’, ‘oú’ ‘citez’, etc.

The last question in the comprehensions is one which you must answer in English or Irish and usually you must give your opinion of the character/topic/text or whether the topic/character was good/bad/clever/etc.

These are easy marks to get once you understand the text and know what they’re looking for. The marking scheme is usually quite broad for this question and almost any answer is corrected, so long as it makes some sense and relates to the text. So even if you’re unsure of the answer, be sure to attempt this question. Make sure you reference the text too in your answer, to show you understood it. Quoting the text can also help you back-up your points.

Don’t limit yourself in section two

Try to have a wide range of vocabulary that could suit different topics so that if something comes up that you haven’t really studied for, you can still write a good essay. Try to avoid hedging your bets too much on predicted essays with very specific sets of vocabulary.

Instead, you should also try to have general phrases learned off and prepared that could suit almost any essay.

Many students have different sentences like ‘il ne se passe pas une journée sans que..’ (‘A day doesn’t go by that..’) and ‘il va sans dire que’ (‘It goes without saying that..’) learned to fill any essay. This way no matter what essay comes up, you have phrases to add a bit of flair to your French.

A lot of your essays may need to start with you agreeing or disagreeing with a statement given, so it’s recommended you learn off different ways of saying that you agree/disagree, such as: ‘Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec cette déclaration’ (‘I am in total agreement with this statement’) or ‘On ne peut pas nier que..’ (‘One cannot deny that..’), etc.

The above advice is courtesy of study website Studyclix. Irish Country Living has teamed up with studyclix.ie to offer last-minute help to Leaving Cert students the night before their exams