A four-week CCL practice plan

Four weeks is enough time to make a real difference, if the practice is regular and you review it honestly. This plan assumes about 45 minutes a day, five or six days a week. Adjust it to your own starting point.

Week 1: find your baseline

• Do two full dialogues under test conditions: one go at each segment, start within five seconds, at most one repeat per dialogue.
• Record both. Compare with the model answers and write down every omission, every wrong number and every long pause.
• Sort your errors. Most people find one category dominates — usually vocabulary or numbers.

By the end of the week you should know your weakest area. That’s where weeks two and three go.

Week 2: fix the biggest gap

• Spend half of each session on your weakest area. If it’s vocabulary, work through one CCL domain a day. If it’s numbers, do the ten-minute number drill.
• Spend the other half on single segments, not whole dialogues. Interpret, play back, re-do the segment until nothing is missing.
• Set up your note-taking layout and use it every time.

Week 3: build stamina

• Move back to full dialogues, two a day, from domains you haven’t practised yet.
• Pay attention to register in your playback.
• Time yourself. Keep the whole recording under 20 minutes for two dialogues; long pauses add up.

Week 4: rehearse the real thing

• Do at least three full mock tests (two dialogues each) on different days.
• Practise on the same computer, headset and room you’ll use for the test.
• Ease off in the last two days. Light vocabulary review is fine; marathon sessions aren’t.

How to tell you’re ready

You’re in good shape when, across several mock dialogues, your playback shows no missed facts, no wrong numbers and no pauses long enough to notice. Language polish matters, but completeness comes first.

If you want an outside view, NAATI runs its own CCL practice test with examiner feedback.