Oral Exam Hack: Don’t Get Cooked With These 6 Coping Methods!

By WR!TERS@WORK

Preparing for the oral examinations can be nerve wracking enough as it is, whether you are tackling PSLE or O Level English. But what if all this pressure becomes detrimental to your performance? Imagine the vexing frustration of having prepared weeks ahead, only to find yourself dumbfounded from stagefright and the jitters! Not to worry, for WRITERS AT WORK is here to help keep your wits together! WRITERS AT WORK is a tuition centre offering some of the best English enrichment courses for Primary 1 – 6 and Secondary 1 – 4 school students in our 8 branches across Singapore!

Preparing for your school oral examinations requires proper stress management  and speaking with clarity. Not only will WRITERS AT WORK students stand to benefit from creative writing classes, our educators can help train them to become better prepared for the oral examinations! To ensure success, WRITERS AT WORK would like to share seven techniques that can help ease nerves and boost confidence.

1. Connect With Your Audience

When preparing for the school oral examinations, remember to shift your focus away from yourself, whether it may be your nerves or that breakfast burrito you are now having regrets over. That cold sweat trickling down your temple is a dead giveaway to the examiner that something might be off. Appear confident, chin up and keep in mind that the main goal is to effectively communicate with your audience. By redirecting your energy towards connecting with the examiners, you can create a more engaging and impactful presentation.

Sure, that breakfast burrito may be causing a riot down there, but try not to get too caught up in your own headspace or worry too much. That catharsis will arrive once the examination is over. Remember that making a genuine connection with the listener will help engage them better as you articulate your thoughts and observations.

2. Focus on Mindful Breathing

While breathing may seem like an instinctual mechanism, regulating diaphragmatic action or belly breathing can be crucial. Speech anxiety triggers shallow and rapid breathing, hindering cognitive function due to insufficient oxygen supply to the brain!

So, take a deep breath, stay focused on the task at hand, and approach the oral examination with a mindset of serving your audience through clear communication. If you’re breathing at a regular, controlled rate, you’ll find it much easier to project your voice across the table and articulate your message with clarity to the examiner without involuntary panicked squeals. We don’t want those now, do we?

3. Share Your Joy

A lack of enthusiasm or confidence shows easily in our tones and rate of speaking. Imagine speaking about your favourite streaming series or computer game and sharing your thoughts and opinions unabashedly. That spark that comes from talking about something that interests you can be infectious. When preparing for the school oral examinations, find something relatable or personable to you that you can share with the examiner in your observations. It is important to speak clearly and confidently to engage with the listeners effectively.

Tapping into the value of your personal, lived experiences or relevant interest leaves no room for self-doubt or hesitation. By speaking clearly and with enthusiasm, you can captivate the attention of your audience and convey your message effectively! Just remember to stay on topic and don’t get too carried away!

4. Embrace the Opportunity

While the thought of sitting through an oral examination might be a baneful prospect for some, a shift in one’s perspective might help alleviate anxiety and prove to become more constructive. Approach the school oral examinations as a chance to be performative, not just to demonstrate your knowledge, but also your perspectives on the question topic or visuals shown.

Identifying the core themes and subject matter, be it social matters or environmental issues, then tailoring your presentation to meet the needs of the exam question can demonstrate professionalism and confidence. Your examiner is keen to listen to any insights you may glean from the material presented, and being able to share your thought process and observations will help serve your audience well.

How often do you get to speak openly and earnestly when asked for your opinions? Imagine you are hanging out with a trusted friend. This is your chance to open up!

5. Show Your Talent

Have you ever considered the power of your voice in captivating an audience? Rather than just giving a speech, view it as a chance to present your ideas with clarity and confidence. Each presentation is an opportunity to showcase your unique abilities and make a lasting impact. If you’ve ever watched a Twitch stream or TikTok Live, you know you just have to let that personality shine.

Speaking with clarity and passion can leave a lasting impression with the examiner. Be comfortable with your own voice and embrace this moment and demonstrate your talent. Maybe one day, you too, can become an online influencer!

6. Move That Body

Sometimes anxiety can manifest in the form of physical restlessness like shaking your legs or having heart palpitations. Even the best performers may sometimes experience stage fright before a major performance. To help release all that pent up energy, start by limbering up such as doing some light stretching exercises.

Doing so helps allow blood to better circulate around your body, coupled with regulated breathing, you’ll be able to divert much needed oxygen to your mind to stay sharp when reading the oral passages and answering any questions that may come your way.

Remember to keep the exercises light, after all, you don’t want to find yourself winded even before the oral exam starts! The only person that should be left breathless would be the invigilator by how amazing you are!

WRITERS AT WORK seeks to make students better learners through organisation skills, reflection, and understanding of how we process information. Are the PSLE or O Level English exams on the horizon? Let us take care of your child’s English results! Join us at our tuition centres to be a part of the best English enrichment courses for primary and secondary school students in Singapore.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ):

1. Is Creative Writing Good for Kids?

In primary school, creative writing starts from using pictures to develop a coherent storyline. Students will learn how to use key phrases to build tension and develop a satisfying conclusion. The plots of the stories crafted at the primary school level are usually simple and have a central conflict which is usually resolved at the end of the story. Students will need to use good grammar and appropriate vocabulary to describe the things they see in the pictures when writing.

2. What are Good Creative Writing Topics?

A good start is to write about what you know. Students can start by writing about things that are familiar to them, such as school or family. Then, students can move on to more complex topics, requiring them to use their imagination about events which would be unlikely to happen in real life, such as a fairytale or an adventure story. Older students can write descriptive essays about being in a situation or about more abstract concepts, such as regret.

3. How to Begin a Story?

A good story should have just the right amount of exposition to illuminate the setting and the characters for the reader without giving away the entire plot. The story should begin where it is relevant, and the general gist of the situation should be outlined. The writer should know how to move the plot along from where they start easily, and the story should flow logically.

4. What are the Basic Steps in Creative Writing?

A good first step would be to plan out the story – it is important that the story follows a Plot Curve which has a logical sequence of events and a clear conclusion. The main and supporting characters should be clear – there should not be a whole village of characters – just enough to further the plot. Moreover, the central conflict of the story should be clear.