Now I am safe. However, I tried to stop teaching exam classes many times for several reasons. Why?
Firstly, while this might be true that all students share a common goal and it strengthens the motivation, learners might be discouraged from learning when they lose energy or become burnt out because of repetitive exam-like tasks, possibly accompanied by results not meeting their expectations.
Secondly, many preparation courses are short, so involve more testing and pressure. The exam coursebooks assume that they have already ‘covered’ the key language areas; therefore, more time is spent on developing strategies. The problem may arise from learners not mastering the points up to the level at which they can use language items in production freely.
It took me some time to learn to use coaching techniques to cope with motivation throughout the course, to balance teaching and testing, to share the responsibility for test results with the learner and develop learners’ autonomy.
Are you teaching for exams or have you passed a language exam? What difficulties have you come across? How have you overcome them?