Hello, my name is Simon Kemp.

I'm the Director of Admissions

for the Modern Languages Faculty

and I'm here to tell you about the Modern

Languages Admissions Test or MLAT.

So you'll be asked to take either two, one

or sometimes no sections at
all of our MLAT test,

depending on which degree combination
you're applying to study.

The MLAT consists
of a menu of ten different tests,

eight tests for languages

you might be studying at A-level:

French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech,

Portuguese and Modern Greek;

and then two further tests:

The Language Aptitude Test or LAT,
which is just for

people applying to study courses
with single honors Russian,

Beginners' Russian or courses with Polish

and the Philosophy Test,

which is just for people applying
to study Philosophy and Modern Languages.

So you can see on our admissions pages,

the particular degree course
that you're applying to study,

which sections of the MLAT
we’ll be asking you to take.

Briefly, if you're studying
something in the sixth form

we’ll be asking you to take a test in it.

If you're applying to study

something as a beginners' language,

we won't be asking you
to take a test in it.

The test itself you can find
on our admissions pages.

We have a mock up of the Pearson test

that you can play with
to get a good sense of what the format is.

When you have a go at it,
you will be asked to choose

which test or tests
you would like to take.

When you do the real thing, 
the Pearson system will know

which degree course you've applied for
and which tests are appropriate

and will just serve you up
the correct tests for your course.

When you start the test
you'll see it's in two sections.

In the first section, there are
twenty multiple choice questions.

You'll be given a target language
sentence with a gap in it,

and you'll be asked to choose the correct

one out of four options, 
to fill the gap in the sentence.

The second part of the test,
has ten questions where you'll be asked

to translate sentences
from the target language into English.

The first set of questions are marked,
two marks each

right or wrong.

The second set of questions are given
six marks each.

In those cases,
they're marked by a human marker

who can see the various alternatives
that will be correct,

and also how many marks to give
for answers that are partially correct.

The one test that works
a little differently is the Language

Aptitude Test, which as I said, is
only for people applying to study

Russian single honors, Beginners'
Russian courses and courses with Polish

and everyone else
does not need to worry about it.

When you have a look at that test,
you'll see

that it's asking questions
about a made up language.

So somebody has invented
a language for it,

they've given you a set of sentences
in that language

and their English translation

and then using that,
they're asking you to try

to code break the language
to decipher how it works

and to translate further sentences
from the language

into English and also to create sentences
in the made up language.

So, for example, the test might give you
the made up languages

version of ‘the dogs chase a cat’,

‘the cat chases the mice’
and then ask you to work out from that

how to say ‘a mouse chases the dog’

by working out how the
various grammatical forms of

‘a’ and ‘the’ and singular
and plural work in that language.

The best way to get your head around it is to
have a go, play around with it

and you'll see, it's actually
rather more straightforward than it

maybe sounds to describe it.

And lastly my top tips

for taking the Modern Languages
Admissions Test.

You'll see from the practice tests

online that quite
a lot of the questions are grammar based.

So the way to do
well is to make sure that you really know

the grammar of your target language
very well.

Know how the verbs
in the language change

as they move between different persons
and different tenses.

If you have adjectives
that need to decline and agree with nouns,

make sure you know how that works.

These kind of things, pronouns,
prepositions, all that sort of thing

are the things that are likely
to be asked about.

So you'll see the questions that get asked
through the archive of past papers.

Revise those topics

and that will stand you in good
stead for taking the test.

Also, there is no penalty for

getting a question wrong.

If you in the multiple choice
and in the translation questions

a wrong question will get the same score
as a question left blank,

which means you've got no reason
not to do any of the questions,

even if it just comes down to a guess,
it's always better to have a go

than to leave it blank.

And lastly, the very best preparation
you can make is to explore

on our admissions
pages the mock up Pearson test,

which will let you know exactly
how the test is going to work on the day,

but also the archive of tests
from past years,

which have a slightly different
format (they're not based in multiple choice) -

they ask you to do some extra things,

that the Pearson test
doesn't ask you to do, but everything

that's in the Pearson test
is also in those archive tests

which also come with answers for you
to check your work.

So working your way through those

would be the very best preparation
for doing the test on the day.

And that's all that I have to tell you.

I hope that was helpful.

Thank you for listening, and good luck.