Modern Languages @ Balliol, Oxford in 2015

Interview format

3x 20-25 min interviews, over 2 days

Interview content

Interview 1: personal statement, one question in French; Interview 2: poems given beforehand (with dictionary), written work, general discussion

Best preparation

Annotated unseen French poetry

Advice in hindsight

-

Final thoughts

They will help you get to the right answer.

Remember this advice isn't official. There is no guarantee it will reflect your experience because university applications can change between years. Check the official Cambridge and Oxford websites for more accurate information on this year's application format and the required tests.

Also, someone else's experience may not reflect your own. Most interviews are more like conversations than tests and like, any conversation, they are quite interactive.

Interview Format

Test taken: MLAT

Number of interviews: 3

Skype interview: No

Interview spread: 2 on one day, 1 the next day at different college

Length of interviews: 20-25 minutes each

What happened in your interview? How did you feel?

My first interview was with my language tutor and was personal statement focused; we spoke in English but she did ask me a fairly simple question in French to gage my level. It was very tense at first but she made a joke at one point and after we both laughed the atmosphere relaxed a lot.

The second one was with my literature tutors and they gave me two poems to annotate in 10 minutes before the interview (one in each language). There was a dictionary provided but no author or contextual information. We spent half the interview discussing my thoughts on it and I was very unsure, but they were very encouraging and asked me questions that would help me expand my ideas further to see how I reacted to new suggestions. The second half was spent discussing the novel I wrote one of my essay submissions on -these questions were fairly nerve wracking and I felt a bit out of my depth here. They then asked me a couple of friendly questions about my application choices.

How did you prepare?

To prepare for the test, I did practice papers and revised grammar in a French book.

I prepared for the interview by reading statements online about previous interviews (from legit sources! some of them can be fake and can instigate a lot of fear mongering) and read as widely as possible around the novels and authors I had talked about in my personal statement/essays.

I also bought a book of 19th Century french poems (Hugo, etc) and practised annotating them in 20 mins and discussing them with a teacher. I would say these were both fairly useful, especially for confidence. I would definitely recommend staying abreast of any political situations in your target language countries.

What advice do you have for future applicants?

Looking back, what advice would you give to your past self?

My expectations were pretty much correct but I didn’t realise how friendly or helpful they would be- they genuinely try to help you get to the right answer and don’t expect you to get there immediately by yourself.

They are testing how well and quickly you respond to corrections and suggestions, and if they think they will get on with you in a tutorial. In my experience this has meant that a lot of the more arrogant candidates didn’t make it past this stage.