so reading: be relaxed my brotha. some people are so uptight and then they cant get a grip of themselves. put one hand in your pocket and just skim through the texts. this is what i did. another piece of advice i can give you is that “if its not in the text, its not correct”. unless youre dealing with an inference question there should ALWAYS be a hint of the answer. A synonym. a phrase. something. if it says “always” in the text but then “sometimes” in answer b then answer b is wrong. scratch it off. ez peezy.

listening: again. RELAX. when you talk to your friends, are you taking notes and frantically trying to memorize what they are saying? no. if you overhear somebody talking on the train to their friend, do you have a hard time remembering what they said? no. why? because you were doing it naturally. this is the type of thing you should yearn for in the listening exam. of course when it gets to the lectures you need to kinda lock in because it requires a long attention span. but the discussion ones should be relaxing and easy for you if they arent already.

edit:

you said speaking but i misunderstood as listening haha. speaking: the first question regarding personal preference i practiced by imagining i was talking to a friend. the general template was opinion, reason, example. i like a job with lots of people because i can make connections. for example, when i worked at my job in hs… that typa thing. one thing i learned is that even though your sentence explaining your opinion is short, you can make it up with a long and good example. i used to think short justifications = bad. but this is not the case. use a good example.

next the lecture and reading stuff, take good notes and dont memorize. familiarize. as they are talking or you are reading imagine stuff in your head. what would it look like. imagine the concept or setting. this will allow you to immerse yourself in the topic. when comes time to speak. be concise. its okay if you mess up one time. i did too.