Designing and delivering an OET Bootcamp intensive course

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OET Bootcamp

As part of my new role, I am preparing healthcare professionals for the OET exam, which allows them to become registered and practise in English-speaking countries. The OET exam is accepted, along with IELTS, as the first step in their journey to become registered with GMC. After that, they must sit PLAB 1 and PLAB 2.

The OET course is very much in demand but there is a great lack of provision, and ours is one of the very few courses available. One of the attractions of the OET is that, although it has the same papers as IELTS (Listening, Reading, Writing, and Listening) all the topics in all parts of the exam are connected to the medical profession and this can help them in their future work in this country as well as be more reassuring in the exam situation itself. The OET exam includes 12 healthcare
professions altogether, and the Listening and Reading papers are taken by all candidates. The Speaking and Writing papers are profession specific.

I find this a really rewarding part of my work, as all the candidates are very highly motivated and focused on passing this exam as quickly as possible. The college term actually finished at the end of June and will not restart until the very end of August, but due to the urgency for the students to sit the exam, which takes place in the Glasgow test centre every month, it was decided that I would run an intensive summer course in addition to the usual college classes that we provide.

This is the first time that anything like this has been attempted and so far it has been a great success. We are now just about to start week five out of six.

After consultation with the students in my class, to determine their exact wants and needs for this course, I planned and designed the six-week intensive course I am now delivering.

In my usual OET classes during the college term, the students are all of Upper Intermediate or Advanced level, however, in terms of knowledge and expertise of the exam, they are very mixed. Some students have attempted the exam already and are trying to upgrade one or more of their skills.
Others are new to the UK and to the format of the exam and the required skills and strategies necessary to get the score they need. 

One of the conditions for attending the intensive course was that they should be familiar with the exam and be ready, or nearly ready to sit the exam at the end of the course or shortly after this. This is due to the fast pace of the course and the assumption that we will not need to continually have to revise the exam format and criteria.

The course runs three times per week – one session is online via Zoom and the other two sessions are face-to-face on campus. The Monday online session is for grammar revision and remedial work on the areas of grammar that are crucial to master for the Writing and Speaking parts of the exam. These include the use of articles, pronouns, relative clauses, the passive, and the correct use of tenses when writing professional referral and discharge letters.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are devoted to the four skills and are structured so that the students have the opportunity to do a practice test of one skill per week in exam conditions and corrected with reference to the exam criteria.

The first session of the course was a full timed test under exam conditions, and the students were all given detailed and personal feedback. This allowed them to get an idea of their level at the beginning of the course. The final session will be a second full test, and they will be able to assess their progress in the six weeks, and we will then make a decision as to when they will be ready to sit the exam.

Each week follows the same format, and this ensures that there is a good balance and that the students will have practiced the strategies for each part extensively and that each skill will be focussed on in detail. By the end of the six weeks we will have covered every part of every paper in detail

The students were provided with the course outline on the first day and also a list of extra tasks that they complete for homework between the sessions. This is a task sheet that I devised with a useful list of websites, podcasts, and journals that they have to read and then discuss.

A typical week would be, Monday: Zoom grammar tutorials on the passive, Tuesday: Reading test then Writing skills, and Thursday: Listening skills and strategies for Part B and Speaking focus on Clinical Communication criteria and practice with role cards.

As this is the first such course I am very keen to get as much feedback from the students as possible. Of course, the students are letting me know as we go along how they think it is going and maybe giving suggestions about what they would prefer and what they like. However, I am also designing a Google Forms questionnaire to send them on the last day for more formal feedback and this will be used to revise and improve the course for the next time I run it.