A sea of toothpaste

And only another couple of kilometres to go.

It’s been a slow business escaping from the choking tendrils of unwarranted censorship today. After working so well, my little helper has been choking badly today, and if I can post this entry, I’ll be very lucky. The connection to reality keeps coming and going, which makes me wonder whether the hysterical reactionaries are fighting back in their ongoing campaign to keep the benighted populace of the inGlorious Motherland in witless ignorance.

I finished marking the PAL tests at the weekend and have started on AS, which is always painful. The PAL classes did quite well for the level at which they were being assessed, but that tells me that they’re good at this level and would, on average, get a C, which is the maximum mark they can attain in the Core exam. As I noted on my WordPress blog, their writing was boringly identical, and the range of marks was typically 7 to 9 with a few 10s. But it’s also worth noting that if their writing had been marked according to the criteria for the Extended exam, most of them would still only be getting 7 to 9 with some of the 10s possibly deserving higher marks.

In other words, students have no real idea just how proficient they are in English because both classes averaged the equivalent of an A in absolute terms. In fact, most of the PAL students are no more than Cs. I must also keep this in mind in later exams so that if I do give them an Extended exam, I’m not artificially inflating their marks by giving them 6 or more for Content and Language because that seems about right.

Where the PAL students almost all produced the same informal letter and mere variations on the same formal letter, the AS students are capable of producing a wider range of academically mediocre responses to IELTS writing task 2. They are academically better than this year’s PAL students, and their English is more sophisticated grammatically (excluding semantics, which often takes a bit of a beating), but the actual content goes from being reasonably well structured to a muddle of space-filling tangents and disparate ideas. Conclusions often agree and disagree with the topic (an aspect of consumerism).

This sort of writing is a pain because the reader has to struggle to see a clear line of thought. The better ones try, but sooner or later, they manage to make a mess of things somewhere. The worse ones have an appallingly bad grasp of the topic and I wonder how many references to the iPhone 4S I’m going to be seeing.

I’ve decided, though, that I don’t do enough about planning. I sort of let students get away with things at IGCSE level because even they don’t really need to have a formal plan for writing 100-150 words. In fact, it would help with the exam if they had to show their planning just as they have to show their working in maths and other subjects. Unfortunately, when I do remind them to plan, they hear me say, “Now write your paragraph”; and once they’ve done, they hear themselves say, “Perfect. I don’t need to check it or revise it or anything.”

I’m having an idea for future classes, partly to make them plan and partly to try and prevent them from all writing exactly the same response to the writing task. (Though watch that fail miserably.)