I was preparing a student for his CAE (C1 Advanced) in a fortnight.
In Reading (Part 7), candidates are given an article and have to complete gapped paragraphs.
This particular student was struggling a bit in the last lesson, so I came up with two different strategies which he subsequently applied to his homework. EUREKA! When we checked homework earlier today, he got all answers correct. What's more - he had done it under exam conditions!
I'd like to share my two strategies here:
- developing an overall structure of the text - thinking about the main idea of each paragraph (with the aid of topic sentences)
N.B. There's a logical progression of such 'main ideas' in the text, so that candidates can deduce what goes in each gap. - lexical references - using them to verify answers, focusing on the cohesion between the previous and the subsequent paragraphs