Occasional Tales

Do you really mean you don’t understand? PreAL α’s Learner Diaries (which I wasn’t really expecting at all) this week made several references to the listening practice which I’ve been giving students every Friday in recent weeks. The comments are either that it’s boring or they fell asleep. New flash! Listening is practical not entertaining, you idiots. I give the PreAL classes listening on a Friday partly because that’s my worst day of the week and I prefer to let someone else take the strain, and partly because they need the practice. I’m not giving them listening because I’m being capricious or lazy, but they do seem to be confused about the purpose of the classes. PreAL α seem particularly confused, but they also strike me as being a particularly arrogant group of little emperors and empresses. I’ll be returning both classes’ exams tomorrow, but with injunctions about seeing me in the office next week if they have further questions about the answers, which I know w...

Does anyone care? Some of the holiday has been spent marking exams. I haven’t done that to the exclusion of other things, but I have maintained a reasonably steady pace and finished off Pre-AL α. The first writing task is (these days) usually a letter to a friend, which is designed to test pupils’ ability to write informal English. Usually the response is full of clichés and witless drivel, and I wasn’t disappointed. But this time something else was noticeable – memorised answers. A particular group of girls, who have possibly seen this topic before (from a certain source on line), all produced very similar answers in that what they wrote suggested a level of English beyond their present capabilities. I don’t know what the official view of such answers is. Perhaps if the answer responds to the topic, then recitation is perfectly all right; if the answer makes no reference to the topic, then there are problems. Most of the letters were related to the topic even although t...

Some people shouldn’t be taught to write. It’s marking time again. PreAL did their exams on Monday and Tuesday, which means that the holiday is going to be spent marking. Here is a sample of the genius I’ve had to endure so far: When a person take bus in China, you will feel unhappy even angry because of so many people. He can’t keep his position in the bus. This is not helped by this particular nitwit’s frequently awful handwriting. The second writing task is meant to be an opinion piece about the advantages and disadvantages of cars. Even although I warn the little darlings to write on one side or the other, I can see them taking the “and” a little too literally as an injunction to consider both sides of the argument. But, Mr Looms observes, there seems to be no official issue with this approach. From experience, I’d always say that this is a Bad Thing™ because it can bugger up the cohesion quite badly. Exam prep books tend not to give clear guidance on the matter since ...