How I prepared for Cambridge C2 (CPE) - and scored an A!
Six months after I graduated high school, I took the Cambridge C2 exam, then called CPE. I had decided to do it myself, independently of any course or tutor, and I managed to achieve a grade A in all four exam papers: Listening, Reading and Use of English, Writing and Speaking.
If it sounds like I’m boasting, I am a little! But I also think that I did a lot right when studying for this exam, even though back then I had little training in language theory or teaching methodology… And I think you may find some of these methods useful, regardless of which English exam you are studying for.
Here are some of my notes from back when! This is, for me, exquisite handwriting. I wish I had the dexterity now to write this way...
What is Cambridge C2?
Cambridge offer a general English proficiency exam for every level. You may be more familiar with Cambridge B2 (FCE - First Certificate in English) or Cambridge C1 (CAE - Certificate in Advanced English), as these are the more popular choices for most candidates. Cambridge C2, or the Cambridge Proficiency Exam, verifies your English language skills at the highest level anyone has bothered to define: a level where you are able to use the language in a native-like fashion and are able to thrive in most language contexts, including the academia.
The exams are, overall, very similar. Each paper tests a different range of skills, including listening, reading, writing and speaking. The key difference is in the length and complexity of the texts you are presented with, as well as the range of vocabulary and structures you are expected to use.
Why take it?
If you asked me now, I would honestly say that I do not think many people actually need to take this exam. Cambridge C1 is already a very impressive certificate, and challenging to achieve! For my needs at the time, which were to prove that I could tutor children in English during my gap year, and that I would be able to follow my university course in the UK (which I would go on to do at the University of York), a Cambridge C1 certificate would have sufficed. However, I was ambitious, and I knew I could do it: I had completed a C1-level course at a language school a year before, and I had found much of the material very manageable. I only needed the extra push.
Vocabulary is everything
Estimates of how much vocabulary a speaker should know at any given level vary. The ratio, however, seems to stick: it would appear that you have to roughly double your vocabulary range to go from one level to the next. For instance, if at B2 level your vocabulary is roughly at 4,000 words, to reach C1 you must know 8,000 words, and 16,000 for C2. That is a lot of words. The sheer scale of it is one of the reasons why it might take a student several years to move up from C1 to C2.
When you’re starting out learning a language, you have to be a little choosy with the words you decide to study. Common words and words which will be useful to you specifically should take precedence. When I was studying for my exam, however, I abandoned such considerations. Instead, I studied all the new words I encountered in anything I read. As I looked them up in a dictionary, I would discover what meanings and uses each word had. The more meanings and uses there were, the more time I spent on the word. As a result, many less common words entered my passive vocabulary (I recognised them when I saw them), while more useful words with broader meanings entered my active vocabulary (I was able to actually use them in writing or speaking).
How do you learn a word, though, to use it confidently? Well, you have to investigate it at some depth. If you look again at my notes for the verb conjure at the top of the page, you’ll notice I made note not merely of the definition of the word, but also common collocations (conjuring trick / conjure up) and memorable examples that gave me a clear idea in what contexts the word is used.
Extensive reading
You may be familiar with intensive reading from English classes. This is when you are presented with a fairly short text and are expected to read it in some detail so that you may answer questions about select passages, or identify interesting words. Extensive reading, on the other hand, is what you do when you read a longer article or a full book in English, where your main purpose isn’t to learn English. You will be reading at a faster pace and you will not be paying very much attention to specific words, unless something really draws your attention. If there is a passage you don’t quite understand, you may re-read it or you may decide to simply ignore it. You don’t have a dictionary on hand, or a notebook to take notes in.
Extensive reading has been proven to be fantastic for language learning. There really isn’t very much that’s better for it. It is especially important for higher levels, because it allows you to encounter less common words, and the more you encounter them, even if you don’t look them up in a dictionary, the more likely you are to remember them.
So, I read, a lot! Here are two of the books I remember reading in the run-up to the exam:
The Colour Purple by Alice Walker (some of this book is written phonetically—as in, as the language sounds said out loud rather than according to spelling rules—which made it a fun challenge!)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (stories of civilians in World War Two London, told out of order)
Meet the thesaurus
If you’ve never used the thesaurus before, it is a writer’s (and an advanced student’s) best friend. Unlike a dictionary, a thesaurus does not show you the definition of a word, but instead lists synonyms in order of closest to most distant. When trying my hand at sample tasks for the Writing paper, I worked with the thesaurus a lot. I would type in a word I was thinking of using, such as important, and explore the synonyms: what does this one mean, exactly? What context could it be used in? Can you use it to talk about a person, or only about an event? If I wasn’t sure about the way a synonym was used, I would google [word] in a sentence to find websites filled with examples of real use.
Google now has an in-built thesaurus. I also like the Cambridge Thesaurus and Thesaurus.com.
Putting it to use
As I was preparing for the exam on my own, I did not have access to feedback on my writing or speaking. This is a key difficulty for anyone who decides to work toward a certificate like this on their own. One potential work-around, especially at high levels, is to give yourself the feedback. In order to do this, I would try immediately to use any new word or structure I found in a piece of writing, which I would wait to read back in a couple of weeks. I did the same with speaking; I recorded myself talking about things that interested me or answering common exam questions while trying to use the new words I’d learnt. It was amazing how, after just a few weeks, I could read or listen back and discover:
the words and structures I’d used, but I’d already forgotten since — an opportunity to remember!
the words and structures that had felt new then, but were already becoming familiar;
the mistakes I’d made, or sections where I’d sounded unnatural, which I could now identify;
the places where I would now use a different turn of phrase.
Exam papers are (not) everything
I used the official Cambridge website for sample exam papers. I also referred to these two books, written specifically to help candidates:
Grammar and Vocabulary for CAE and CPE,
Objective: Proficiency.
This allowed me to get a sense of any gaps in my knowledge that I needed to work on, especially with relation to grammar. It also really helped me to understand the type of tasks I could expect, and to work out my own strategies for approaching them. On their website, Cambridge also offer sample answers with examiner comments, which are particularly useful to prepare for the Writing section.
However, I have observed since then that many candidates place too much stock in solving exam-type tasks and going over past exam papers. While this is a key part of exam prep and it might train you to do better, it is never going to address the skills that actually determine your performance. If I had to estimate, I would say my work with exam-specific tasks constituted less than 25% of the time I spent preparing, and back then, I remember being worried about that… but now I think I had the balance right.
If you are preparing for an exam, ask yourself this: are you doing past papers and solving tasks in your exam prep book because you can see it is genuinely helping you, or because it is a way to feel productive? Of course, doing these tasks can be tiring, too… but it often requires less focus and drive than looking for interesting structures in a news article, researching a grammar structure, or writing an essay with the new words you’d been studying. The unfortunate truth about language learning is that the more effort an activity requires, the more effective it tends to be.
Start here
Want to use teen-me’s study methods? Start with this blog post.
In the introductory paragraph (above the photo), find a synonym to the word to brag. Then, do a bit of research in your preferred English-English dictionary and find one other way in which you can use this word.
In the section What is Cambridge C2, find a verb which means to be successful in a situation and rhymes with dive and hive. Find more example sentences online.
In the Extensive Reading section, find a phrase which can be used to describe reading quickly. What else, other than reading speed, can you describe with this phrase?
Identify one more word or phrase in the blog post that is new to you. Prepare a note about it similar to the one in the photo.
Good luck!
P.S.
I try to include some advanced words and phrases in all my blog posts, to make sure you can develop your language while reading. If you sign up to my newsletter below, you’ll get each new blog post delivered straight into your inbox!