Foreign language instruction should begin in kindergarten

1. Start your answer/sentence strongly

When you want to stress something the first thing you say is important – it’s the first thing the examiner hears. We have several structures in English that we use to show that what we are about to say is important.

One way they can work is that we start the sentence with a short phrase saying that what follows is important. See how this “normal: statement can be change into something much stronger:

I like the peace and quiet in my neighbour hood [no emphasis]

What I  like most in my neighbourhood is the peace and quiet.

One thing that I enjoy about my neighbourhood is the peace and quiet.

Making it work – think pronunciation

If you really want to get this right, you don’t just need to use this type of structure, you also need to use your voice. Put simply, you choose a few words to stress more than others. How you do this varies, but you should see above that we often stress the first and last words in a sentence when we are being emphatic.