Help with French SL reading paper please!

[lifehouse]

so in about a week i have my mocks, and one of the exams i'm worried the most about is french. I did well in GCSE and im doing ok in it for IB but i am struggling with the listening paper and am getting terrible marks in my practice tests. does anyone have any idea on how i can improve this grade?? im also not too sure on how to study for it so what should i do to improve my mark? thanks!

[CommeDesEnfants]

Listening paper? If you're in French B SL, you mean the reading comprehension paper, aka Paper 1, right?

All I can suggest you do is to find as many past papers as possible and do them; you can probably find 1999 and onwards if you look hard enough. However, be aware of the fact that they changed the format in 2004, and it used to be a lot harder back then. It's still good practice to do the old ones, though. If you don't know a vocabulary word or get a question completely wrong, analyze your mistakes and try to get a feel of exactly what answer to write down. Most of the time, the answer's right in the text. For all but a couple question, you're literally just supposed to copy down a specific phrase or find a synonym word that matches the needs of the question.

If you find that your vocabulary to be rather limited, you can always try reading French literature or articles, picking out the words you don't know and making a vocabulary list. By April, my vocabulary list was about 5 pages long on Microsoft Word, and since I had been studying them throughout the entire year, I found that I had managed to commit most of them to memory. Although you only have about a week left before your mocks, it's not too late to memorize a few helpful phrases and vocabulary words that might come in handy.