M26 exams: final tips
With the May 2026 examination session upon us, two years of hard work from students (and teachers!) is about to be tested across the reading, writing and listening exams. Here at InThinking, we want to wish your students all the best and offer some last-minute Paper 1 advice.
In preparation for the Paper 1 writing exam, it’s worth considering the text types that have made the most appearances as either appropriate or generally appropriate options. This page details the options up to May 2024, giving us a pretty accurate picture of the text types the paper setters tend to go for more than others. From this analysis, we saw that the following text types have been seen the most:
Honourable mentions go to social media postings and opinion columns.
What does this mean for our students? Well, without wanting to predict the content of this year’s exams (there are three time zones now, of course, each with different prompts and text types), we can encourage our students to pay extra special attention to these text types in their revision.
One text type that caused mild consternation and confusion among teachers and students last year was the presentation. In many of the conversations in the aftermath, distinctions were made between a speech and a presentation, with the former deemed more persuasive and the latter more informative. However, if you look at the wording of the prompts on past papers where speeches and presentations have been viable options, something quite telling emerges.
The dominant verbs for the purpose in the prompts are:
- share (experience, thoughts)
- inform (about an issue, organisation, investigation)
- raise awareness
- review
- help others prepare
None of these suggests the dramatic rhetoric of the types of speeches teachers tend to look at as part of the course. I’ve personally used Greta Thunberg and Emma Watson’s UN speeches for the current cohort, both of which are steeped in such persuasive language. If the Paper 1 prompts asked students to urge, demand, inspire or convince, perhaps a wider range of persuasive rhetorical devices would be needed. But this isn’t what we’ve seen in the exams.
Ultimately, in English B Paper 1, a successful speech is not defined by dramatic rhetoric, but by how effectively it connects with its intended audience. Encourage your students to bear this in mind not only when choosing the most appropriate text type, but also when executing it.
Your students can revise for Paper 1 using our text type expectations pages. Each one has a sample prompt and a written task they can submit for you to provide feedback.
There's a walkthrough video here that shows your students how to unpack prompts, generate ideas, and outline a response.
For Paper 2, the mantra ‘practice makes progress’ is especially apt. At this stage, students should be fine-tuning their reading skills through extensive practice. We have a wide range of reading tasks dotted about the site, many of which include smart quizzes or written tasks, allowing students to submit their work for your feedback or have the answers revealed upon submission. Our most recent unit on Trevor Noah's memoir Born a Crime has several literary and non-literary texts your students can use for this purpose.
Your students may also find it helpful to review the different question types on this exam. You can find those pages here, with a video walkthrough for the dreaded true/false justification questions here.
It's vital that students read the questions carefully to identify what they're being asked to do. I always urge my students to highlight/underline command terms and keywords to ensure they don't miss those details.
For the listening, you can also find brand new listening exercises in the Born a Crime unit. These pages feature all five question types that students will face on the exam. You can also point your students to these listening practice pages, which cover a range of topics and questions.
Students should try to take notes while they listen. Even if they just write bits of words, this might be enough to help them identify the answer on the second listen.
There are often a lot of negative vibes around exam season, with students understandably stressing out. Our role as teachers is to be that calming influence, to steady their nerves. I recommend being around on the day of the exam, not necessarily to impart last-minute advice, but simply to tell students they’ve got this! Oh, and maybe to remind them to proofread their writing!