2x interviews; 1x test
1st interview: unseen poem, focus on language; 2nd interview: personal statement, focus on literature
Practice interview, engaging with Spanish current affairs, practicing grammar
Don't overanalyse after
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.
When I arrived I was given an envelope which contained an unfamiliar Spanish poem, which I had approximately 20 minutes to look at before my interviews, to discuss in the second interview. I had two back-to-back half hour interviews, with just one interviewer in the first, and two in the second, one of whom I spoke with in Spanish for about 5-10 minutes of the interview. I completed a
The focus in both seemed to be on my motivation for choosing the particular languages, and discussion of my personal statement. In the first I was shown a poem in an unfamiliar language, and asked to decipher what I could, asked questions about word class and types of languages.
In the second, after talking briefly about the Spanish poem I had been given beforehand (style/form etc, I was not studying English Literature A level so this was not my strength), we moved on to speak in Spanish about the film I was doing at A level (María llena eres de gracia). I was asked on my thoughts on the film, my attitude towards the protagonist etc.
As I applied for Portuguese
I did a
There's absolutely no way of knowing how it's gone, you will always think 'Oh I should have said this or that' or whatever.