How to use the last three days
| Day | What to practise first | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| 3 days before | Check the format and flow for your grade | Know what you will be asked |
| 2 days before | Practise listening to a question, answering briefly and adding a reason | Start answering without stalling |
| The day before | A short mock interview and recheck the official guidance | Reproduce the real flow |
First, check only the interview format for your grade
The Eiken Foundation's grade-by-grade second-stage guidance shows that the EIKEN second stage differs by grade.
Grade 3 is an individual interview of about 5 minutes, with reading aloud, questions about a passage, questions about an illustration and questions about yourself.
Pre-2 takes about 6 minutes and includes reading aloud, questions about a passage, describing or explaining the situation in an illustration, and a question where you give your own opinion.
Pre-2 Plus and Grade 2 take about 7 minutes. Both have a question asking for your opinion, but how the card and illustrations are used and the content of the questions are not the same.
So rather than thinking of EIKEN interview preparation as one pattern, first check the format for your own grade on the Foundation's official page for that grade.
The official grade pages have sample questions, and the official site also provides a virtual second-stage test where you can see the flow from entering to leaving the room.
With three days left, spend the first 30 minutes on this.
3 days before: learn the flow and find where you are likely to stall
On the first day, you do not need to suddenly practise dozens of questions.
Watch the official virtual second-stage test once to check the flow from entering to leaving the room.
Then try one set of sample questions for your grade.
What you look at here is not the score but where you stall: whether you stall in reading aloud, cannot catch the question, can start talking from an illustration, can put your own opinion into English, or stop at one sentence when asked for a reason.
From these, pick about two places where you tend to stall.
In three days it is more realistic to reduce the places you stall than to perfect everything.
In reading aloud, getting to the end matters more than reading well
Grades 3, Pre-2, Pre-2 Plus and 2 all include reading aloud in the interview.
Close to the test, some students try to make all their pronunciation clean and read stopping on every word.
But you do not need to rebuild all your pronunciation in three days.
What to check first is whether you can read to the end in a voice that carries, without stopping many times mid-sentence.
- Even if there is one word you do not know, do not stop too long on it.
- Look at punctuation and groups of meaning and break the text into short chunks.
- Record your voice once and check it is not too fast or too quiet.
Even just these three make the focus of practice clear.
2 days before: build a pattern for answering
In the second stage, stalling most often happens when you do not know what to answer.
So two days before, spend time on practice in making short answers rather than memorising long English sentences.
When asked about yourself
At Grade 3 and so on, there are questions where you answer about yourself and your daily life.
You do not need to try to speak at length from the start.
Practise answering the question directly and then adding just one sentence.
For example, after answering "Yes, I do," add one sentence of information such as "I play tennis after school." Practise first answering the question directly and then adding a short extra.
When asked for your opinion
At Pre-2, Pre-2 Plus and Grade 2, there are parts where you give your own opinion.
Here too, you do not need to use difficult expressions from the start.
"I think ..." "Because ..."
In this order, practise connecting your idea and your reason.
Once you are used to it, add one sentence with an example or extra explanation.
What matters is not forcing a memorised all-purpose answer onto the question. It is being able to make a short answer that fits the question.
For illustration questions, do not start by explaining everything
At grades with an illustration question, you tend to stall if you try to put the picture into English immediately.
Deciding in advance where to look first makes it easier to speak.
For illustration questions, check in order who is where doing what, and what is happening.
First check this order in Japanese, then say it in English one sentence at a time.
For questions that explain a development, as at Pre-2 Plus and Grade 2, be aware of how the events connect rather than describing each picture separately.
The day before: one mock interview is enough
The day before, you do not need to do many mock interviews.
After watching the official flow again, go through it once from beginning to end as if it were the real thing.
Run the whole interview as one flow: entering, receiving the card, reading aloud, answering questions, returning the card and leaving.
After going through once, redo briefly only the places where you stalled.
Learning the flow of the real thing by experience tends to bring more reassurance than adding 10 new ways of answering the day before.
Do not freeze when you cannot catch the question
In the interview, you may not catch a question the first time.
Rather than falling silent the moment you do not understand, practise asking for it again.
- Sorry?
- Could you say that again, please?
If you can use short expressions like these, it is easier to prevent your mind going blank just because you did not catch something. The grade-by-grade official guidance explains asking again in a natural flow. Practise them not as something to ask again unnaturally, but as something to use when you really did not catch it.
What not to do in the last three days
| What people tend to do | Why to avoid it | Do this instead |
|---|---|---|
| Memorise whole answers | If a question is a little different from the answer you memorised, you can suddenly be unable to speak | Rather than long answers, learn the order for building an answer: answer the question, add a reason, and if needed add one more sentence |
| Force in difficult words | Trying to use a difficult word you know can stall the whole sentence. In the interview, assessment includes not only the content of the response but pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, amount of information and attitude to communicating | Answer with words you can use reliably rather than showing off vocabulary. Do not focus too much on perfection in a single question |
| Solve past papers silently | The second stage is speaking. Even if you can form an answer in your head, you may stall when you say it aloud | In the last three days, always practise out loud |
What parents can do is more than teach correct English
Even if you are not confident in English, there are things parents can do.
In practice, read the question aloud, time 30 seconds of thinking, and check whether your child is stalling for long before starting to answer and whether their voice is too quiet.
You may not be able to correct all the grammar, but you can still be a practice partner for an interview.
In the last three days especially, rather than correcting every answer in detail, it can help more to increase how often your child listens to a question and starts speaking.
Three things Petra Tutors checks three days out
When Petra Tutors organises last-minute interview practice, we first check these three things.
In the final stretch we check whether your child understands the question format of their grade, which kinds of questions they tend to stall on, and whether they have a fixed order for building an answer.
For example, if reading aloud is fine but they stall on every opinion question, spend time on opinion questions rather than repeating reading aloud many times.
Conversely, if they can think of content to answer with but get nervous in the flow from entering the room, going through the whole interview with the virtual second-stage test comes first.
Precisely because only three days remain, you do not need to practise even the parts you are good at equally.
A practice checklist for three days before the EIKEN interview
Summary: with only three days, reduce where the interview stalls
Three days until the interview.
It feels short, but you can practise if you narrow down what to do.
With three days, an order of checking the format for your grade, finding the questions you tend to stall on, saying short answers aloud and going through the whole interview once the day before is enough.
We chose this theme because some families, after passing the first stage, panic that they had left the interview somewhat to later.
What you need in the last three days is not perfect English. It is knowing what will be asked in the real thing and being able to start answering in the moments where you tend to stall.
If you are unsure which questions to practise first, Petra Tutors can also sort out the order of last-minute practice while looking at your grade and where you are now. To start, try the official EIKEN virtual second-stage test and the sample questions for your grade.
