Students often ask me about oral test questions, so I will take this opportunity to give you a few sample questions that you might see on an oral exam.
Typically, the types of questions you will see are about work. One quick tip that you might want to know is to remember your job vocabulary. The questions are about your job, and not knowing your job vocabulary is very dangerous when it comes to doing a test.
The following oral test questions are what you would see for the PSC oral test. However, you can see these types of questions for any oral exam for English as a second language learners.
As a quick reminder there are four parts to the PSC oral exam
Part one: consists of simple questions about your job.
Part two: consists of audio conversations and audio voice mail messages. You have to listen to these messages and report what they said. Therefore, knowing reported speech is very important.
Part three: You get three options and you choose one of the options. Then you have 90 seconds to prepare an answer to the question you chose. It is important to practice your listening skills because the evaluator will read you the question and you will not see it.
Part four: not everybody gets to part four. Part four consists of long audio conversations. Again, it is important to know reported speech.
Because these questions are all related to the audio you will hear, is important that you practice your listening skills. If you want to practice your listening skills, try listening to the news. Some places that you can listen to use are places like CBC, BBC and CNN.
Check out my recommended links for places where you can practice your listening skills now.
Sample questions for part three
Describe a leadership role which you have held.
Describe a situation when you have helped someone at work.
Describe how you obtained your current position.
Describe how you resolved a problem at work.
Describe the project in which you put a great deal of effort forth.
Describe a situation in which you received feedback from someone.
Describe a unique person with whom you have worked.
Describe a good leader with whom you have worked.
What do you think of flex hours?
Compare flex hours to compressed hours?
What are three characteristics of a great manager?
What do you like about your position? And why?
Describe an occasion when you met the deadline because you had a great team and a great boss.
Sample question part four
The questions asked in part four are typically questions about opinion. They opinion will usually be about the audio file that you have heard on the computer.
What did you think about the decision that was made in the audio file?